HOPELESS, BUT NOT SERIOUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE WEED WITH ROOTS IN HELL

A second review requested by K. Rice, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The 1936 propaganda film Tell Your Children, known far better under its re-release title Reefer Madness, is almost too easy to take cheap shots at. It's the most infamous of the peculiarly robust cycle of anti-drug films in the '30s, and its exaggerated horror at all of the nightmarish things that happen to people who smoke marijuana cigarettes - they become cannibals, they sell their babies, they have premarital sex - is so hysterical and divorced from reality that the end result is among the ripest camp films in history. It's also deeply cynical, playing the trick that was also peculiarly robust in those days, of looking up with a martyred, aggrieved face at the Right-Thinking People to simper about how it's an important public service announcement that simply must go beyond the pale in depicting the wretchedness of the ruined lives it takes as its topic. And heck, if that means showcasing sex and violence and in some cases nudity (not this one) to levels that were 100% not okay by the standards of the day, well that's what had to happen in favor of telling the truth. And of course you had to market it as an extreme showcase for sex and violence - the audience might get too freaked otherwise. But it's certainly not a crass exploitation film, no sir. Come on, don't you want to stop the spread of the demon weed?

On top of which, it's pretty shabbily made, so the film has enjoyed a reputation for decades as one the most overwrought, hilariously awful movies out there (I don't have the data to back this up, but it's always been my sense that it was in fact the first movie to be widely appreciated on a "so bad it's good" basis). All of which brings me back to my point: this movie is much, much too easy a target. And yet, when writers Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney took dead aim at the film with their 1998 play Reefer Madness: The Musical, they managed to make those cheap jokes land with flair and energy, enough to make their tossed-off gag of a show into a huge hit that eventually went to New York where its off-Broadway run in 1991 was another hit, and paved the way for a movie adaptation. Revised by Murphy and Studney, sharing director Andy Fickman with the original two productions, and featuring several of the established stage performers in the cast, Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical debuted on Showtime in April, 2005, capturing the latest version of the show (with a new song) for all posterity, and nailing down a terrific cast to do it with.

It's compulsively charming, making a good argument for the spry appeal of the stage show (which I have not seen) but also putting in enough irreducibly cinematic touches that doesn't come across as a filmed play. It has some jarring problems, and I'll get to those in due course, but mainly, it's a breezy lark: the leering, heavy-handed parody is lightened significantly by the sugary confection of the songs, which come by often: 16 numbers in the 101 minutes that the film runs without credits. It is, all things considered, a pretty close remake of Tell Your Children: a traveling lecturer (Alan Cumming arrives in a small Everytown in the U.S. of A., where he invites parents and teachers to watch the film's bringing along to demonstrate how wicked dope fiends could become, no matter how innocent where were to start. With frequent cutaways to show the audience's repulsed responses, or the bafflement of one less-than-concerned adult who's certain that the lecturer is trying to put one on ever everybody, this movie-in-the-movie is the great majority of Reefer Madness: The Musical Movie, and it's basically the same dread tale as the movie-in-the-movie in '36.

Somewhere in another Everytown (in '36, it was the same one as the city where the frame narrative takes place), there lives a swell kid named Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell), fresh-faced and 16, and just about ready to ask his best girl Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) to wear his class ring. The trouble starts when they and all the other kids head to the five and dime to dance swing and drink soda fountain drinks made by the bubbly Miss Poppy (Neve Campbell, Christian's sister; though of course she's a hell of a lot more of a name than he is). This is already a touch sinful, we are assured, but Jimmy's so clean-cut and square that he doesn't even know how to swing. Along comes local dope pusher Jack Stone (Steven Weber) to seduce the boy with promises of dancing lessons; what Jack actually has in mind, once he gets Jimmy back to his wretched flophouse, where he lives in sin with Mae Coleman (Ana Gasteyer), and the crazed junkies Sally DeBains (Amy Spanger) and Ralph Wiley (John Kassir) are always hanging around being wretches is to force the boy to smoke a joint. And thus having hooked the boy with the most addictive and dangerous of all illicit drugs, Jack can sit back and gloat as his new customer ruins his life and, increasingly, the lives of all around him.

There are two general problems with the film. Three, perhaps, if we count the lame direction, in which Fickman simply props up the camera and points it at stuff, recording the action with the same clabberhanded grace that he'd later show off in timeless classics like You Again and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. Thank God for Mary Ann Kellogg's choreography, is what I'm saying, because that's just about the only time that the onscreen action is meaningfully interesting to look at. But this is a broad parody of a shitty quickie from the '30s, and even as I doubt it's intentional, the argument is easy to make that the primitive visual style works to the film's advantage. So let's not count it, and go back to just the two problems.

One of these is that that film is simply too damn proud of itself; for every moment that's a lacerating dart of satiric wisdom about panic-mongering and ultra-reactionary impulses, there's another that plays like a loudmouthed drunk screaming at you in what he thinks is a conspiratorial tone: isn't it fucking wonderful how much more sophisticated we are than 1930s conservatives? And more often than not, this boastful self-satisfaction is accompanied by Cumming's unusually off-key mugging for the back rows in TV-scale close-ups. That's all the film's prerogative, of course, and I agree with the greater points it's making, but that much sardonic winking starts to suck the wit out of the jokes.

The other problem, which actually bothers me more, is that the material is a stewpot of anachronisms: most of the time, it hits the '30s pretty closely, particularly with the music. The nauseatingly cute romantic duet "Romeo and Juliet", Mary's earnest prayer of double entendres "Lonely Pew", and the rousing folksy showstopper "Tell 'Em the Truth" are all 100% on-point, and most of the other numbers are close enough to fake the odd bar or harmony that's not quite right. Some of the time, though, it seems like the filmmakers were only gunning to get something that fits the general 1933-1959 window: oftener in Maya Mani's costume designs than anything else, but the dialogue is ribboned with lines whose particular anti-Communist rhetoric certainly feels more like the post-WWII Red Scare than the more muted wariness of the Soviet Union in America in the '30s. And while nearly all of the humor in the film comes in the form of exaggeration of the "gee whiz!" ethos and inadvertent filthiness, a few incidental moments are jarringly modern in their sarcasm and irony.

Both of these problems, I would point out, are matters of individual moments that are a little clamorous and off-putting; they stand out only because the film in general is such giddy fun. The songs are maddeningly catchy, with line after line of showy wordplay; it's not one of the great masterworks of musical theater or anything like that, but it's intoxicating as a collection of well worked-out verbal and musical gags. And it's all delivered with unyielding commitment by a terrific cast: everybody is playing a pretty broad concept, but they're all doing it without hesitation or shame. Much of the film is wild absurdity, more and more as it goes on, and the tether to some kind of character reality that the actors provide keeps it funny and not just ludicrous.

Deliberate camp is a hard game to play well, and Reefer Madness makes it look easy: no, it's not consistent, but it's never more than a couple of minutes from some inspired piece of snarky idiocy that brings it back up, and at the very least, Bell and Gasteyer don't put a single foot wrong at any point. It's energetic, it mixes silliness and meanness well, and it threads the impossible needle of being deliberately bad in a way that's appealing and funny instead of just shrill. Nothing can top the manic ineptitude of the original, of course, but this succeeds in being distinctive enough that its strengths are its own without any reflected glory from a legendary forebear.

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WHEN IT RAINS, THE RAIN FALLS DOWN

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

The title of the magnificent 1975 Warner Bros. release Dog Day Afternoon gives the game away: whatever else it's about, and there's a lot of things we could say it's specifically about, it's about how fucking hot it gets. 22 August, 1972, the day the true-crime story that screenwriter Frank Pierson turned into a screenplay (and which director Sidney Lumet and his cast then extensively revised through improvisation, though Pierson is the one who ended up with the film's solitary Oscar), was 81° F (~27° C) with a dewpoint of 59° F (~15° C), which is to say it was actually a rather pleasant day by late-August standards in New York City. But Dog Day Afternoon does not dick around with weather reports: it knows that the best version of its story comes from presenting a city torn against itself at a thousand fissure points, baking in the merciless sun that beats down on the asphalt and doesn't let up even when it drops below the horizon: the characters are even sweatier and more ragged at night than they were during the day. It forms one of the smallest subgenres ever with 1989's Do the Right Thing: movies in which the atmospheric oppression of summertime in the city can magnify everybody's impatience and readiness to blow up at exactly those fissures between the people keeping society propped up and the dispossessed. Spike Lee's film called upon Public Enemy to chant "Fight the Power", Lumet's finds Al Pacino nervously and angrily sputtering "Attica! Attica!" at retreating police to the delight of a crowd of bored onlookers, and it's all just another way of saying "fuck this bullshit". Or as Lumet's next film potently frames it, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore".

At its core, the story (massaged away from reality and with the main character undergoing a name change) is a good old-fashioned slice of Americana: the chestnut about criminals who make every possible mistake while regarding themselves as cool, smart operators. On that August day, Sonny Wortzik (Pacino), Sal Naturale (John Cazale), and Stevie (Gary Springer) plan to hold up a bank in Brooklyn, in and out in just minutes. The first problem is that the bank has no money - the criminals just barely missed the daily cash pickup. The second is that Sonny's impromptu backup plan involves setting the bank register on fire, and the smoke catches the attention of the cops, who quickly surround the bank. With little else to do, Sonny and Sal simply claim all the bank employees as their hostages (Stevie having jumped ship almost immediately), leaving the slightly baffled Sgt. Moretti (Charles Durning) to negotiate in the face of Sonny's increasingly colorful behavior and weird demands, all catching the attention of the media, who turn the fraught situation into a gaudy circus, dragging in Sonny's devasted mother (Judith Malina), his ex-wife Angie (Susan Peretz), and his new wife Leon (Chris Sarandon), a trans woman whose costly gender reassignment surgery, it turns out, was the motivating factor in Sonny looking to rob a bank in the first place.

With that last detail, we plunge headlong into the film's defining trait, its interest in the lives and needs of the kind of people typically left of the mass cultural narrative, but it's become clear long before that plot thread shows up (it is, in fact, presented as something of a twist, though not in the least bit prurient about it) that Dog Day Afternoon either possesses its own streak of anti-establishment energy, or it finds those who do to be thoroughly fascinating, with no moral judgment supplied. The famous "Attica!" scene doesn't come from the clear blue sky; that's not even the first reference in dialogue to the 1971 Attica State Prison riots, one of the great flashpoints for the early-'70s left-wing intelligentsia. But even more than in its specifics, the whole film brims with characters who are fed up and know that things aren't going right for them. Sonny, in his many squawks of petulant outrage, shows off his knowledge of a full list of cultural touchstones, some more absurdly wielded than others, all of which reinforce the sense that he's as much a symptom of urban helplessness as a person in his own right; this is certainly why he so quickly becomes so fascinating to the news media that latch onto the crime like lampreys, and to the crowd of people outside.

Dog Day Afternoon holds back from actually serving as a left-wing polemic; its satire aims in all directions, against Sonny's enthusiastic dimness as well as in tandem with his outrage. And its anti-police sentiments were tempered considerably by casting Durning in the role of the police representive whom we see the most of; in contrast to the spitfire Pacino and the wary, wired Cazale, Durning's calming tone of voice and relaxed features make him instantly likeable, even if he is the film's main emblem of The Man.

The main thrust instead is twofold: first , the film provides a comprehensive snapshot of a segment of the underclasses of New York at a certain moment, more of an act of gonzo journalism than a message film about social ills. Many of the best films in Lumet's career (and this is very much one of the best - among the handful of films I'd say jostle for the #2 spot in his filmography, behind his exemplary theatrical debut, 12 Angry Men) are holistic descriptions of some broad aspect of that city filtered through one colorful individual, and Dog Day Afternoon is more overt about it than most: before we meet any named character, we've been treated to a montage of the city's working class in all their aspects, set somewhat incongruously to Elton John's "Amoreena".

The other thing it does is, simply, to present a remarkable collection of human beings behaving under stress. Pacino certainly dominates the film and its subsequent decades of appreciation, and he earns that: its one of his best performances, from the moment he explodes the film's quiet, whispering opening scenes with his prattling, to the extraordinary scene where he recites his will, dripping with sweat and wearing a flat, distant look. Bbut Durning and Cazale aren't far behind him in terms of how much depth they weave into there characters with just expressions and body language - in Cazale's case, frequently doing so when he's not even in focus within the frame. The miracle of it, and where Lumet's impossibly giving direction most clearly manifests itself, is in the full sense of we get of the characters who aren't even "supposed" to matter - the bank employees, who emerge one by one out of an amorphous mass of victims to be unique personalities, worrying about their loved ones, giggling and chatting as they try to stay cool while the night marches on.

Insofar as the film is a tribute to messy, vital society, it's the way that it gives all of the hostages fully-realised personalities, leaving us with the sense that any of them could just as easily be the focal point of this exact scenario as Sonny is, that most insists on that tribute: there are no "side characters" here, just a bunch of human beings all mixed up and trying to muscle through an awful situation: awful because they're all beat down by The Man in their own way; awful because of the hard, flat sun that cinematographer Victor J. Kemper allows to blow out the windows in so many shots, and the glossy sheen of perspiration they're all wearing by the end of the movie. For all its "down with everybody" rhetoric and its willingness to caustically mock the behavior that happens within it, Dog Day Afternoon is tremendously interested in its humans, and almost generous towards them, given a very curious definition of generosity.

I have more thoughts on this one that I'm particularly proud of, in this 2012 entry in Hit Me with Your Best Shot.

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MINNESOTA NASTY

A second review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The hook of the dark comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous is that contestants at a small-town beauty pageant are being killed off, which isn't quite what it's about, actually. Some contestants are killed; more are not. I concede that this disappointed me a bit more than was reasonably fair, for what we're left with is still an effectively black-hearted satire from the last great era of sharp-tongued nasty comedy, around the end of the '90s and beginning of the '00s (Drop Dead Gorgeous was released in 1999). There are problems within the film, undoubtedly, but pulling its punches isn't one of them.

The blunt viciousness of the film's sarcasm is almost immediately obvious: it starts by trumping up the impending Sarah Rose Cosmetics American Teen Princess Pageant, a name that's just sufficiently awful to believe that somebody would absolutely cram all those nouns into one string. From here, writer Lona Williams and director Michael Patrick Jann (who'd cut his comedy teeth with the legendary '90s TV sketch comedy The State and has since returned to television's bosom - Drop Dead Gorgeous is his only feature film) shape their material into a mockumentary, a choice that would seem cloying and obvious just a few years later, but was still quite a crafty way to go in '99. And beauty pageants are the exact kind of subject matter for which the mockumentary form is best-suited.

This particular beauty pageant is the branch of the American Teen Princess Pageant that takes place in Mount Rose, Minnesota, under the guiding hand of 1978 winner Gladys Leeman (Kirstie Alley), the wife of the richest man in town. In 1995, Leeman's own daughter Becky (Denise Richards) is exactly the right age to compete herself, but she's one of several contestants the film watches: some of the others include sexed-up Leslie Miller (Amy Adams, in her first film), deaf advocate Jenelle Betz (Sarah Stewart), and other bubbly, goofy figures, but the one who clearly matters the most is Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst), who dreams of using a pageant victory as a launchpad for a career in broadcast journalism. Living in a trailer with her alcoholic mother Annette (Ellen Barkin, under-used) and even more alcoholic family friend Loretta (Allison Janney), the upbeat, earnest Amber is the polar opposite of the languid, spoiled Becky, and the film is structured largely around their unspoken but increasingly hostile rivalry, while a grand total of two of their fellow contestants are killed during the course of pageant season. But even just two is enough to thoroughly rattle Amber, who figures out that she was, in fact, the target of the second attack.

I have generally mixed feelings towards the film on the whole, but there is one aspect of it that I adore with all my heart: Dunst is fucking wonderful in the third-billed role that's nevertheless clearly the lead. Everybody in the movie other than Richards has trotted out their most colorful Upper Midwestern accent - it wouldn't be exaggerating an inch to suggest that Drop Dead Gorgeous is a deliberate Fargo knock-off (and I believe, the only one that exists), right down to Kristin Rudrüd, Jean Lundegaard herself, in a small but greatly memorable absurd cameo - and this is mostly comes from a place of broad, snarky comedy, not against Minnesotans themselves, necessarily, but against the vindictive politicking of small American rural towns that the Minnesota accent so vividly evokes. Dunst is the solitary exception: her performance, at odds to everything else in the film, is sincere and humane, finding the guileless enthusiasm and striving ambition that comes from being smart and poor in a small community, and choosing to combat that with optimism rather than resentment. And she funnels all that through the lilting singsong of her accent, transforming it from a joke into a source of inner steel and hope. A film as savage in its outlook as Drop Dead Gorgeous constantly runs the risk of being too sour for its own good; there are filmmakers throughout history (Billy Wilder races to mind) who could make great art from smug cynicism and acidic satire, but it takes a very deft touch to make that funny and not rancid, and Jann doesn't always prove that he has that touch. The central presence of Dunst as a completely likable, sympathetic, aspirational figure is thus vital for the film to stay above water.

Which isn't to say she stays above the film's cruelty (she doesn't: she has a few cutting, self-centered lines, and a scene where she literally dances around a corpse), nor that there's nobody else in the movie who is mostly or completely enjoyable: Adams is excellent, bring such a lack of shame or frailty to her "town whore" role that she completely knocks that stock type on its side, and Janney goes so far beyond merely redeeming a one-joke character into the bizarre hero of her own very different film that it no longer feels like a supporting comic performance, it's more like watching reality warp a little bit around her.

Which is to say: there's a lot of greatness within the film, and its deeply hostile critical reception in 1999 is thoroughly unearned. At the same time, there's a lot of flatness and misjudged humor in the film, also, and that reception is completely understandable. Drop Dead Gorgeous is an extraordinarily mean film, sometimes to its definite benefit, given the sense of dangerous, unpredictable comedy that emerges. More often, it's not so much to the film's benefit at all: more often, the meanness isn't shocking and bracing and hilarious, it's just, well, mean. The two clear points at which the film simply goes too far for even fun bad taste to excuse it are its depiction of the Japanese adoptive parents of contestant Molly Howard (Tara Redepenning), a sudden and swift injection of cringe-inducing Engrish minstrelsy, and the treatment of Mary Johanson (Alexandra Holden), the previous year's winner, suffering from anorexia. There's a line between "making fun of the poisonous culture of negative body imagery inherent to beauty pageants" and "making fun of the dangerously ill", and the film's depiction of Mary shoots past that line without even noticing it was there.

Those are extreme examples, but it's not uncommon at all for the film to commit so hard to its sardonic mockery that it flattens: not into something acutely unpleasant, necessarily, but frequently into something where the jokes are being stomped to the curb. Alley's performance, for example, is technically great and psychologically acute; but it's not really funny except in patches. One running gag about a pageant judge who's also a chickenhawk sputters no matter how hard the poor actor saddled with the role, Matt Malloy, tries to give it some pep. Another running gag about people who think they're on the show Cops is justified solely because it has a great payoff, and not because the initial set-up is anything other than musty and desperate.

As will happen to films with really distinctive personalities that were shamed by critics and ignored by audiences the first time around, Drop Dead Gorgeous has acquired for itself quite a sturdy cult in the years since it premiered, and I can absolutely see why. The acting is generally sharp, there are a good number of quotable lines and unexpected moments, and its manipulation of mockumentary aesthetics is more thoughtful and persuasive than anything done by Christopher Guest and his coterie in the same form (that said, Guest's films are more lively and funny, which makes up for it). I simply can't join them in their appreciation. It's simply too caustic to be as funny as it easily should be with this scenario and in some cases these exact lines of dialogue; it's too angry at its characters to be fully incisive. But the highlights, even granting that, are terrific; Drop Dead Gorgeous is a hard film to love, but it deserved better than being tossed out with the garbage.

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OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

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

The body of work created by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (credited equally as writers, directors, and producers, though it's generally understood that Powell was more the director, while Pressburger was more the writer and producer) is arguably the high water mark of all British cinema, and their 1943 collaboration The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is maybe the most essentially, urgently British of the 21 films they made together. It is probably the most epic and ambitious in scale and intention: it's a World War II propaganda film with a real message on its mind other than the usual "We can do it if we stick together!" cheerleading typical of its generic bedfellows, that bases its analysis of what the people of the British isles could and should do to stave off the Nazi threat in a long-form study of military history spanning nearly half of a century. It does this in the body of one immaculately conservative soldier named Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey, flawlessly playing a brash youth and a puffed-up old man so distinctly that it's almost difficult to believe that they were both a 37-year-old actor), inspired in his personality and appearance by Colonel Blimp, the star of a satirical comic strip by David Low, but infinitely more expansive in personality; and it does this in the form of what must absolutely be the most excitingly shot British production I can personally name up to that point in history, the moment that Powell's directorial style snapped into focus and provided a visual means of expression that's neither exactly Hollywood nor exactly European. It would not, for my taste, remain the best production released under the banner of the Archers (Powell & Pressburger's independent company, through which they'd make all of their films until 1957), with their post-war efforts A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes eclipsing it in stylistic and structural complexity, and overall excellence, respectively. But it's more radical than they are, inventing out of thin air what they (and the rest of the Archers' output) would thereupon refine and build from.

The movie begins and ends in 1942, where Wynne-Candy is an old and slightly ridiculous ex-Army figure, spending his retirement advising and training the Home Guard. He's introduced as the butt of something halfway between a prank and a political demonstration: the evening afternoon before a war game is meant to start at midnight, brash young lieutenant "Spud" Wilson (James McKechnie) breaks into the Turkish bath where Wynne-Candy and many other old Army outcasts spend their hours, capturing the old man and winning the war game before it begins. This triggers a spirited argument between the two warriors, Wilson insisting that old, traditional conservative men like Wynne-Candy aren't merely out of touch, but acutely dangerous in this new sort of warfare. Chastened and annoyed, the old man finds himself drifting into an extended flashback that rewinds to that same Turkish bath, 41 years prior, when he was just Lieutenant Clive Candy, on leave from the Second Boer War - the flawlessly-executed trick by which a youthful body double substitutes for Livesey in his old age makeup while the camera manages to get slightly too far ahead of the character is the first of many coups du cinéma in the film, seamlessly blurring past and present into one discontinuous chronology that doubles as the first leg in the filmmakers' argument about the way that the past informs the present.

The remainder of the film is largely concerned with three movements, one during the Boer War, one in the days immediately following the First World War, and one in the early years of the Second World War, bringing us finally back to the morning of the day on which we met Candy. In each of these segments, we also see Candy's developing relationship with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), a German officer with whom Candy duels in 1901, while he's in Berlin on an unofficial mission to defuse an anti-British propaganda effort. And we see as well his encounters with three young women who all look exactly alike, for the good reason that they're all played by Deborah Kerr: Edith Hunter, an idealist who obviously loves Candy but ends up marrying Kretschmar-Schldorff; Barbara Wynne, a pragmatic nurse who marries Candy despite his being much older; and Angela "Johnny" Cannon, who serves as his sharp-tongued assistant and driver as he works with the Home Guard, and ends up helping to bridge the gulf between the honorably conservative Brit and the honorably conservative German while their countries prepare to go to war.

While each sequence is hung on a single driving narrative spine, the overall impression is of a movie that meanders its way through history over the course of two hours and 43 minutes (the film was cut twice before being restored to its full length in 1983; a more thorough clean-up job restoring the vivid colors was completed in 2011), and yet never feels like there's a single sagging moment or unnecessary layover. The script is thoughtful and decisive, crisply marking down character beats for the actors to later flesh in, and presenting symbolic conflicts which feel so personal in their execution that the degree to which this is all a metaphorical satire of British military etiquette hardly gets in the way of what a perfect study of individual lives it is as well. And I will give it this above even A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes and all the rest: it is very possible that this is the best-written of the Archers' film, structurally, psychologically, and thematically. As it cycles back into 1942 and presents its message that men of Candy's era, for all their dignity and experience and intelligence, aren't equipped to fight a war against the systemic evil represented by Nazi Germany, the film generates a fierce passion about its topic mixed with affection, deep and rich and abiding affection, for the characters it's consigning to history. For something with such a serious subject, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp moves forward with enormous generosity and a great deal of fresh, bubbly humor - indeed, it is as much a comedy as otherwise, growing gradually darker towards the end.

The beautiful writing goes hand in hand with exemplary filmmaking technique that draws it out and works it into the visual bones of the movie. It is supremely well made, and not always because it draws attention to itself: one of the most perfect sequences in the movie consists of a camera staring at Walbrook's face as he quietly delivers a deep, probing monologue, pushing into a close-up, and then backing away again. It's so simple as to be virtually anti-cinematic, but it's exactly what the movie needs, both for the integrity of the monologue, and the place it occupies near the very beginning of the 1939 sequence; it promises the seriousness and mournful intimacy that the rest of the film will largely concern itself with, in opposition to the more bright material of the first two-thirds.

Frequently, though, the style is so great precisely because it makes itself felt. There is the comic audacity of the first transition from the Boer War to the First World War, a montage of mounted animal heads representing Candy's somewhat bloodthirsty approach to leisure time until he can get back to business (ending with the nihilistic joke of a Germany army helmet with the descriptive plaque "Hun - Flanders, 1918"); there is the bleak poetry of the second transition from the First World War to the Second, with the Wynne-Candy family album skipping through blank page after blank page following the newspaper clipping of Barbara's death. And there is the richness and moral complexity of the individual images, shot in glowing Technicolor to accentuate the vibrancy of military uniforms and upper class splendor in sharp contrast to default setting of drab earth tones, suggesting throughout (but especially in the Boer War sequence) that the pageantry of the British military and the pride of men like Candy, however handsome and captivating, is also chintzy and surface-level, all glamor without soul. Or consider the way that Powell presents the duel that takes up a huge portion of the first act: the opening preparations are contained within a hollow wide shot of a gymnasium, like a dead cathedral of Continental honor; the actual duel starts during a high-angle crane shot that backs away as Allan Gray's jaunty score kicks in, suggesting a perverse ballet, all part of the theatricality of the lives it presents, before dissolving into a snowstorm.

The visuals are, throughout, sardonic and witty, detached with just enough ghostliness that they feel appropriately out of time and yet anchored by the superbly expressive faces of Livesey and Walbrook that the immediate feeling of the characters' lives is always front and center. The images are satiric while the script is utterly sincere, and the structure is moody and weary while the energy of each scene and each performance is fiery and urgent, communicating with an intensity that could only driven by enthusiastic and greatly concerned patriots in a time of war. Of course the film hasn't aged well: this is carbon-stamped to 1943 as firmly as a movie could possibly be. And yet its insights into how history moves and what role people occupy in it are utterly timeless. As a time capsule and as pure cinema, this is as as essential, enjoyable, and challenging as the movies can get.

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TAKE A BIIIIIIITE!!!!!

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

I'm greatly pleased that, when the time inevitably came for me to write about The Apple, it would be in the context of a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. There's a deep connection between this film and my own period of sickness back in 2005. It was at that year's B-Fest in Evanston, IL that I first saw The Apple, where it stood out for especially personal reasons - of course, it pretty obviously stood out for everybody in that auditorium. But I knew that I was going to get a call on that Saturday from my oncologist, telling me whether my cancer had metastasised or not. I was barely able to focus on the parade of bad movies in front of me; only The Apple was so manic and stupefyingly incomprehensible that I was truly distracted from my health worries. As I started receiving chemotherapy the next month, I had a portable DVD player to while away the five-hour days stuck in a room, tethered to machines; the "get well soon" present I request from my parents was a copy of The Apple, and it became the first movie I watched during treatment.* Many years later, I've seen The Apple more times than is decent, and I always hear just the slightest echo of those bleak days, in its clamorous musical numbers. It is and will always be my cancer movie.

It's also so toxic in its badness that I wouldn't be surprised at all to know that watching it causes brain tumors. So that's the other reason it's a good fit for this fundraiser.

The 1980 film takes place in the far-flung world of 1994, where a record label impresario named Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal) plans to use a hybrid pop-disco sound to establish a musical dictatorship over at least North America, if not the whole world. At which point I should confess that a plot recap of The Apple is doomed to failure: it is simply not possible to express using the clumsy, limited matrix of English to communicate how fucked up this movie is. No, not even when the Devil wants to use disco to take over the world in 1994. Oh, right, because I skipped over that bit: Boogalow is symbolically equated with Satan, right up until he turns out to actually be the actual Satan. So let's skip back to the 1994 Worldvision Song Contest, which is like the Eurovision Song Contest only trashier. Here, Boogalow and his lackey Shake (Ray Shell) sit in the show's control room and gleefully cackle with triumph as Boogalow's top act, the duo Pandi (Grace Kennedy) and Dandi (Alan Love) hit record-setting levels on the biometric scanners they're all using to test audience response to the duo's new single, "BIM". Which stands for "Boogalow International Music", and will eventually be, more or less, the name of the future one-world government. Which makes it even more threatening when the singers lead the crowd in the chant "Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way!" As if it wasn't already threatening enough when they start off by reciting that in the world of BIM, "There ain't no good / There ain't no bad / There ain't no happiness / There ain't no tears". And you have to hand it to George S. Clinton, adapting the lyrics from Iris Recht's Hebrew originals (Iris and husband Coby, who composes all the music had originally planned a Hebrew-language stage musical before meeting the film's producers... but we'll get to the producers): it takes some truly, relentlessly appalling songwriting when you can legitimately declare that "There ain't no sad" would have been a much better line than the one they went with.

Pandi and Dandi are followed by Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), a folk duo from Moose Jaw. They immediately launch into a syrupy love ballad that manages to sound even worse than "BIM", but somehow, this tribute to the most essential of human emotions - BIM, we find, has been hellbent on eradicating love songs - gets the audience so worked up that there biometrics go all the way up to 151. Whereas Pandi and Dandi topped out at 150. I mean, they're a whole 1 better!!! Boogalow knows a threat when he sees one, so he immediately invites Alphie and Bibi to BIM headquarters the following day to sign a contract. Alphie is far more untrusting than his partner and girlfriend, and when the contract is presented to him, he has a vision of thunder and storms. It gets even worse when Boogalow and his crew try to force Alphie to sign - from out of nowhere, he suddenly finds himself inside a smoke-filled cavern, with Boogalow suddenly dressed in long black cloak with a tiny gold horn on his left temple, and the rest of BIM's hangers-on dressed (or undressed) as trolls, snakes, zombies, and all number of hell denizens. And an oiled-up Dandi urges Alphie and Bibi, dressed in the chaste fig leaves of Adam and Eve, to taste the BIM apple, and seal their fate. Bibi doesn't see this vision, and signs herself over to Boogalow the Devil, but Alphie flees, and spends the next period of time hiding out and trying to avoid BIM's takeover of all society, identifying the BIM faithful with the metallic triangular stickers all citizens are required to show - the mark of BIM.

You guys, I think The Apple might be a religious allegory.

The film was made by producers Menahem Golan (who also wrote and directed) and Yoram Globus, Israeli cousins and masterminds behind Cannon Films. Now, this was early in Cannon's existence, so it's probably not fair to be as baffled by its place in the company as we must be: for Golan and Globus were the most savagely, mercilessly market-driven filmmakers of the 1980s. And The Apple is not remotely market-driven. It's a disco musical made at the ass end of the disco era whose message is that disco is the literal devil's music; it is a stunningly incoherent spiritual odyssey that ends with God showing up in a gilded Rolls Royce to Rapture up all the hippies who'd been able to hide out from BIM. It's a work of futurism that attempts to show a modestly dystopian world by throwing some banners up around concrete hyper-modern West German buildings and putting fins on cars. It has some of the most shitty original songs in the history of movie musicals. It feels for all the world like a mad auteur's highly personal vision gone wildly far off the rails, not like an attempt by two savvy producers to make a popular disco cash-in. But that's absolutely what it was, the last of 1980's three Hail Mary attempts to keep disco alive long enough for one more hit movie, following Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu. All three tanked and all three are awful, though The Apple is surely the most thoroughly demented and incompetent, and I am quite inclined to suggest that it's by far the most entertaining for those reasons. But not the kind of entertaining that Golan and Globus would have preferred.

No indeed, this is the entertainment that comes of pure unbridled madness. It's easy enough to latch onto the songs, and talk with baffled amazement about the inane lyrics which don't rhyme, don't scan, and don't make even the slightest narrative sense. Like, to name a conspicuous example, the film's most notorious line, "It's a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire", upon which a vampire (Francesca Poston) does indeed pop up and then just stand there, doing the gaping mouth "vampire snarl" face for, like, 15 seconds. It's not worth going through all of the dizzyingly horrible lines - the review is long enough already. Anyway, the deficiencies of the songwriting has nothing on the savage insanity of Golan's staging of the songs, all of them drifting headlong into big group numbers with virtually identical choreography, and inexplicable choices like the one where the bad guys ride on exercise bikes while Boogalow talks about how great it is to be a manipulative creep, right in front of of the woman he's manipulating, or the one with all the clowns and then the people twirling batons with streamers on the ends. Or the number I have fondly referred to, since 2005, as the Quaalude Tango (the actual name is "Made for Me", and it's a romantic ballad song by a date rapist), which in addition to its comatose dancers features the most deadeningly literal editing, crisply bouncing around precisely on the beats of the music and always showing us exactly what the lyrics are referring. Though painful lyrical literalism is pretty much found in every moment of every song. I mean, there's that vampire moment.

But focusing entirely on the songs, however tempting and easy to do, means missing out on much of the joy The Apple has in supply. It could be totally absent any songs at all, and be no meaningfully better, though it would be a hell of a lot shorter, and that could only help. But the godawful production design and erratic acting - Sheybal is the only person who comes even close to giving a functional performance; even Miriam Margolyes, who I generally love, is out-of-control terrible as oy gevalt, the most outrageous kind of Jewish landlady - and dogged commitment to its opportunistically New Agey message of how everybody but the hippies is in the grip of pure evil, and the totally incomprehensible closing moments with the gaudiest deus ex machina on record, all of this would make The Apple a transcendent bad movie experience even without the unclear satire of the "America loves drugs" song "Speed", the unacceptability of a song that tries to set the words "Life is nothing but show business in 1994" to music, or the outlandishly smutty double-entendres in a song whose subtlest couch is that it's title is "Coming".

Put it all together, and it's a completely unadulterated bundle of the worst of cinema all spun up into one ball of madness. It cannot be described, and it can barely be experienced; I assume that this is what a bad acid trip feels like, right down to the chintzy rendition of Hell. With all the sincerity I can muster, this is one of my very favorite bad movies, and not even with the "I kind of think I like it unironically" relationship I have with Xanadu. The Apple is utter, irredeemable trash, and it is a privilege to be part of the same species that could cook up something so totally imaginative and divorced from anything resembling rules, logic, good taste, or basic decency.

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I AM JACK'S MOVIE REVIEW

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

More than a decade and a half after its underwhelming theatrical performance that sneakily begot one of the most omnipresent movie cults of the early '00s (I was in college in those days; the film was inescapable), I have to admit that I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It would be an insane thing to deny that the film is consummately well-made, and it's impossible to overlook how much it starts to overreach in its second half and especially its final quarter, as it begins to lose sight of whatever the hell it was trying to do in a flurry of super-clever twists that are very similar to, but importantly distinct from the twists in Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, adapted by Jim Uhls.

It is, I think, the platonic ideal of A Film By David Fincher; not because it uses his skills to best effect, by any means (I am quite sure that honor belongs to Zodiac, and even by the time Fight Club came out in '99, the director already had Se7en behind him), but because it best typifies the thing that he always does, whether it works well (as in those two serial killer films), or whether it sets the movie on fire (most flamboyantly in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button): he always puts a lot of energy and investment into working out the mechanics of how he wants to make this film, attending to the craft of cinema with an almost holy focus. And he always does this at the expense of the connection between that craft and anything else. That's resulted in films that are, in the aggregate, worse than Fight Club, but I don't believe he's made anything as split between its intentions and its effect.

We'll circle back to that. Meanwhile, I do not, truly, know how much this film's cult remains robust and important in the daily lives of cinephiles, so I shouldn't talk about Fight Club like we all know what I mean. The film's unnamed protagonist, played by Edward Norton, is an insomniac office drone whose soul-crushing job involves, very specifically, trying to help his company determine how much money human lives are worth. He's found one unconventional and rather shady, if ultimately harmless way of releasing his stress and angst at the world not working out properly: he attends support groups for various grave illnesses, and lets himself be carried away on a wave of crying and intimacy (feigned intimacy, but it's the best he's got). The first serpent in his paradise comes in the form of Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, in the role that inaugurated the "Crazy Wigs and Too Much Kohl" era of her career), who's also lying her way through the support group circuit, more out of boredom than anything else, and who naps his bubble of protection. The second, who at first seems like a divine guiding light, is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a homemade soap manufacturer and salesman that our boy meets on a plane.

They end up living together in the ancient, falling-down mansion in the city's warehouse district where Tyler has planted his flag of late, after the narrator's posh-appointed apartment explodes in a freak accident. It's from this pre-modern base of operation that Tyler begins to craft his philosophy of anti-consumerism, seeking to replace the lost self-reliance of modern masculinity that has been bred out by too many white-collar jobs and bourgie junk shops like IKEA and Starbucks. Seized by a random inspiration on their first night, Tyler asks the narrator to punch him outside of a bar, and in hardly any time, they - and an ever-increasing circle of like-minded lost souls - have formed Fight Club, a basement athletic club of sorts in which men fight, one pair at a time, in unrestrained bare-knuckle brawls, just for the sake of feeling anything. And this seems to make everybody's life better, right up until the narrator starts to figure out that Tyler is actually planning a most destructive form of anarchy that goes far deeper than convincing middle-class men that they don't need so much stuff. And there's absolutely no point to talking about Fight Club 16 years later without letting spoilers happen, so if you haven't seen the film and think you might want to - even though I frankly don't like it very much, I still believe that it's an essential piece of American cinema that needs to be studied and grappled with for plenty of reasons - here's your place to bail out.

The issue with Fight Club that transcends all other issues is not a mysterious one; those of us who don't love it have been identifying it for years now (I, personally, first made a version of this argument in 2002, and I was already parroting someone else, long-forgotten). Basically, Fight Club is David Fincher being too good at his job in the wrong way. This is, pretty clearly, a satire of the kind of wannabe superhero American masculinity that felt weakened and feminised by the economic boom and attendant emotional introspection of the 1990s - this is such a Clinton-era movie, above and beyond the fact that it's final scene would be unthinkable just two years after its premiere, in the wake of 9/11/01 - that does exactly what satire is supposed to do: it starts out with perfectly simple precepts that anybody ought to be able to agree with (IKEA overcharges you for dubiously "stylish" particleboard crap with ludicrous names), starts nudging that towards a heightened level (which is why you should feel totally excited if your apartment and all your possessions blow up), and eventually races full-out towards the kind of clearly unacceptable claims that are meant to show the basic intellectual instability of a position that might not seem at all weird if you only encounter it one bite at a time. In this case, the idea that males can only defend their maledom through increasingly militarised acts of violence.

So what happens is that Fincher, with his methodical, surgical approach to building cinema, looks at the situation that must be devised: the narrator must be seduced by Tyler. So he very flashily visualises the choking ennui of a consumption-driven lifestyle - the film's IKEA catalogue montage is legitimately one of the finest sequences in the director's career at the level of technique - and he glorifies the DIY lifestyle that Tyler lives, treating it with a certain level of irony that's nevertheless clearly enthusiastic and friendly and funny, and he stages Fight Club with the intensity and dazzlement of '90s action cinema at its fleetest. Which was not too fleet, for the most part (not in America), and so it's easy for the fight sequences to feel absolutely stunning and exciting compared to almost everything else that shared its historical moment. And he has done such a great job of building all that up, he can't back out of it. The problem at the core of Fight Club is that it's appealing because of its style, and then it tries to walk back from that at an entirely intellectual level, and it's a mishmash of energies that makes absolutely no sense. The movie says that it's horrified at Tyler's excesses, but it feels jazzed up by them, and that's before the filmmakers make the absolutely unforgivable choice to let the destruction of skycrapers at the end play as the visual punchline for the narrator and Marla to end up together, the explosions filling almost exactly the same role as the fireworks in To Catch a Thief. Movies are a visual medium; if you show us explosions in a romantic, exciting way, that matters more than telling us that they are amoral at best, and by that point in the screenplay, Fight Club really isn't concerned with even telling us that. The result is a film that's irreconcilably broken between its thoughts and its guts, and there was no way the guts were going to lost. Not with such extraordinarily visceral work being done by cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (whose offensively good capturing of the chilly shine of nighttime made him a great Fincher collaborator, making it dumbfounding and annoying they'd wait a whole decade before teaming up again for The Social Network), editor James Haygood (funneling with slurry abandon between moments, channeling music video technique with a keen sense of the needs of a feature), and electronic/hip hop producers Dust Brothers to provide the jarring, frequently toneless and always intensifying score.

The Big Ol' Twist really doesn't help matters. If this was a film about the narrator trying to stop his secretly insane buddy Tyler Durden, it would have been a great deal easier to sell the idea that the film's last forty minutes are there to disprove the first ninety; if this was a film about a man finding that he's secretly insane, and unpacking all the things that he's done as "Tyler Durden", it could have been a great psychological thriller. Doing both of those things gets muddy as hell. But I do have to hand it to Fincher and Uhls: having only finally seen the movie for a second time, knowing the twist on your way through is a marvelous experience. The way that dialogue and blocking very casually state outright things that we're simply not interested in learning yet is brazen in the best way; the weird one-frame insert shots of Pitt before he appears as a character go from being a punkish in-joke to crafty foreshadowing, especially since it's also much easier to see how much of the film is being presented from the narrator's sleep-deprived POV without actually flagging it as such. Take out the social commentary, and Fight Club, and the rather mean jokes at the expense of people trying to muddle through sickness with emotional support groups, and there's a fucking wonderful depiction of psychological unreliability that even makes Pitt's oddly uni-dimensional performance turn out to be a strength instead of a weakness. But that's taking a hell of a lot of things out.

So back to where we started: I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It's all technically gorgeous, and along with The Matrix, I'm inclined to call it one of the first American films of the 21st Century, for all its accelerated continuity and don't-stop-to-think aesthetic. But it's such a wreck of tone and intellect, and it's so inhuman in ways that all Fincher films ultimately turn out to be; but no other Fincher film takes place so necessarily inside one person's head for 100% of its running time. It's electrifying, stylish cinema, of course, and I honestly do get why people love it - whether they love its cool or its satire of the same cool. That right there, I think, is why I can't pretend to come even close to loving it myself.

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UNSPEAKABLE FILTH

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

L'âge d'or, an hour-long 1930 feature, is the second of the two collaborations between France-based Spanish surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and it is certainly less jam-packed with iconic "every film buff alive knows this shot" shots than their 1929 short Un chien andalou. But it also better - oh, fuck me. "Better" is a word that has no place in this conversation at all. Buñuel and Dalí were, quite specifically, not looking to do things that would get them praise for being "good". Using "better" is exactly missing the point. L'âge d'or is, let us say, the more complex of the two, and the more thematically probing, which is probably inevitable given that it's four times as long. It is absolutely the more naked political film - Dalí was an iconoclast who just wanted to up-end people's expectations, Buñuel a committed radical who wanted to tear down the Catholic Church and and the right-wing European governments of that period with all the force and rage he could muster. In its combination of rabid left-wing politics and vigorous surrealism, L'âge d'or is the first truly "Buñuelian" film, then, and it is not surprising to learn that the relationship between the two artists had deteriorated to the point that Dalí had virtually nothing to do with the film's production once the screenplay was completed - according to a deliciously tawdry but hard-to-verify legend, Buñuel chased Dalí off the set on the first day with a hammer.

The film has a scenario that starts to reveal itself more and more explicitly as it moves along, but for a healthy span of the beginning, it doesn't seem that way. Instead, L'âge d'or picks up right where Un chien andalou left off, as a series of seemingly disconnected visual gags, though "gag" is in the eye of the beholder. Violent shocks of aggressive absurdity is probably closer to the mark. The first of these is a series of images of scorpions, taken from a nature documentary, stitched together with large blocks of intertitles - the movie is a sound/silent hybrid, but more on that later - which pretty neatly sets up the mood of the film as a series of lashing, defensive attacks by venomous arthropods. Which is about as nice a sentiment as anything Buñuel and Dalí have to spare for the twin targets of their ensuing satiric broadside, the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church.

The nature of that attack is two-fold: first in the accumulation of random startling and blasphemous imagery, second in the details of its story - perhaps surprisingly, given how cozily L'âge d'or fits into even the most proscriptive definition of Surrealism. But for as madcap and what-the-almighty-fuck-is-going-on the film's barrage of visual non sequiturs no doubt is, L'âge d'or actually tells a rather clear, straightforward story: they want to have sex (they are played by Gaston Modot and Lya Lys), and circumstances keep preventing. At first they can't because the city of Rome is founded on the exact muddy patch where they were trysting. Afterwards, they can't because of the censoriousness of Rome's most noteworthy export, Catholic morality. Finally, they can't because of psychological symbolism. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ (Lionel Salem) is raping young girls in a monastery. Only it's possible he's just a man who look as and acts uncannily like Christ. It's also probably not the case that Rome was founded in 1930. But that is when it was foundered, anyway.

So, fair is fair, it gets less clear the closer you look at it, but at the broadest possible respect, the film is first and above all about the importance of openly and honestly engaging with one's libido, and the way that all of Polite Western Upper-Middle Class society is structured to make that engagement specifically impossible. It's a randy film, with seductive blow-jobs delivered to the toes of statues, and the man feverishly imagining that advertisements are depicting abstract, disembodied vaginas, and all that good stuff; and while it presents sex as the stuff of loopy comedy, it also presents it with good-natured humor. The rest of the film, though, is pure, rage-filled mockery of the stifling rules of society, opening with a bleak joke against a quartet of bishops, ending with a nasty attack on Christ as a hero-villain out of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and middling with a stuffy bourgeois party that's pelted by absurdities and anti-social provocations like something from a more sexually-charged Marx brothers movie. For anti-social behavior is presented in L'âge d'or as an aphrodisiac; both in a nod to the erotic nature of the taboo, and a clear implication that everything about this society is worth being anti.

The film is confusing and densely packed, but one thing it's surely not is subtle: there's no way to watch it without being repeatedly hit in the face by the filmmakers' disgust with the puritanical conformist urges that are linked through bizarre staging, crafty editing, and ironic sound cues with cruel exploitation of a working class that the wealthy ignore completely, with sublimated violence, with feces - much like the then eight-year-old Ulysses, another work of art to fearlessly confound social satire with pornographic depictions, L'âge d'or wants us to see and hear and think about shit, the great unifying element of all humanity and animals, that Nice People Never Talk About, and can be made to look ridiculous simply by placing them in its metaphorical proximity.

Is it all a bit puerile? Aye, undoubtedly - the 26-year-old Dalí and 30-year-old Buñuel weren't kids but they were close enough anyway to have the enraged snottiness of youth, and that's the clear animating force underneath L'âge d'or: the young person's snarl of contempt to an older generation that has massively ruined everything, "fuck you for this, and fuck you for that, and just fuck you". By drifting from boldly authoritative documentary footage and narration to cheap visual and audio gags to startling, often upsetting weirdness that seems to come from no place but a chaotic dream, the film connects the real, tangible world (the documentary) to a frolicking hell of random nonsense (the rest), and it does this with the unchecked, self-confident gusto of untried, undisciplined youth. I freely admit that it's largely for this reason that, as easily as I find myself whipped along in the film's frenzies, I can't find it in me to regard it as top-level Buñuel; most of his career later, the director would revisit much of the same ideas (the need for sexual openness, the totalitarian hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, parodic religious iconography) in Viridiana, a film as controlled and clear as L'âge d'or is freewheeling, and directly because of its greater maturity and more precise presentation, it's a far nastier and more piercing satiric assault.

But by no conceivable means does the existence of that later film mean that L'âge d'or is redundant: it has a vitality and insane level of visual creativity that are all the justification it could possibly require. As a document of capricious madness turning the world into a pile of steaming shit and then declaring things a Golden Age, the films' unpredictable shifts in tone and content, and the inexplicable content of its various jokes, could not have been bettered. It was the film that 1930 needed, and decades upon decades later, it still has potency to shock the squares like almost nothing else out of entire generations of the avant-garde.

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MISAPPLIED SCIENCE

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

Anthology films are always a shaky prospect, but they don't come more clear-cut and solid in conception than Memories, a 1995 animated film in three parts. It is nothing more complex than an adaptation of three short stories from manga artist Otomo Katushiro, unquestionably known best in the English-speaking world as the author and director of 1988 Akira, the film with which anime broke out in the West. He was on board to oversee Memories as executive producer and director of the last of its segments, but otherwise there's no obvious attempt to unify the three stories, each of which offer a different tone and completely different style. They are linked only by the theme that it's easy for humans to over-use technology without thinking about what we're doing; but that would likely have been the theme of any Otomo-derived anthology.

The result of filtering one man's thoughts through three different filmmaking sensibilities paid off well: unlike a great many anthology films, Memories doesn't have a weak link, though it feels that way while you're watching it, kind of. For it's terrifically imbalanced: the segment that is, far and away, the most stylistically inventive is also, far and away, the most shoddily constructed as a narrative, and the film commits the gaping structural error of leading off with its best segment by such a totally unfair margin that it tends to make the other segments feel a great deal more disappointing in comparison than they deserve.

It's also, quite incidentally, the only one of the three to meaningfully earn the title Memories; and not incidentally, the one that feels least of a piece with the attitude of the other two. Which I wish to believe, largely out of auteur loyalty and not for any real reason, is because it was written by Kon Satoshi, not yet a major director in his own right (his debut feature, Perfect Blue, was two years in the future) - the director in this case was Morimoto Koji, an animator of some note (he served as animation director on of the marvelous 2004 Mind Game), but who hadn't prior to this film had much chance to show off his directorial talents.

This opening movement, "Magnetic Rose", is the most conventional science-fiction piece in the film, taking place in deep space, where the crew of a salvage ship responds to a distress call from what appears to be a derelict station. That whole song and dance. The crewmembers who head onto the station to investigate that we need to be most concerned with are Heinz (Isobe Tsutomu) and Miguel (Yamadera Koichi), and what they find beggars belief: the inside of the station exactly resembles a plush European mansion of centuries earlier, right down to a simulation of the gardens outside. And it's haunted, apparently, by the presence of Eva (Takashima Gara), an opera singer with a tragic life that led directly to the psychologically fracturing mysteries of the place: Miguel begins to lose his grasp on reality and his own identity, while Heinz is tormented by visions of his dead daughter and promised that he can reside in his memories of his family forever.

There's nothing here that reinvents the wheel, either as a sci-fi fable or a work of animation, but as a mood piece about people being consumed by their pasts, it's hard to imagine "Magnetic Rose" being any better. The sagging, ancient sense of rotted opulence in the backgrounds is staggering, and perfectly matched to Maria Callas's performance of the iconic aria "Un bel dì vedremo" from Madama Butterfly, a song that sounds beautifully mournful in all the right ways, and which itself expresses similar themes of obsession with the lost past as the sequence containing it. "Magnetic Rose" is explicitly about the way that too much time stuck in memory can make it impossible to distinguish between what is true and right and what's merely illusion; the sci-fi trappings literalise that in the form of robots and holograms, but the emotional resonance of the piece is contained more in its faded old world settings and the heaving operatic music. It's old fashioned with crackling generic elements, tremendously accessible and deeply resonant, and it sets the bar for the rest of the film extravagantly high.

And, well, the rest of the film smacks into that bar. The second segment, "Stink Bomb", written by Otomo and directed by Okamura Tensai (who, unlike his co-directors, has worked almost exclusively in television, outside of this film, coming early in his career), is a strong black comedy in its own right, but frankly a bit goofy and one-note compared to "Magnetic Rose". It centers on Nobuo (Hori Hideyuki), a somewhat dim lab technician at a medical research firm, who get pushed into trying some experimental pills for fever when he comes to work sick. Except that he takes the wrong pills, and ingests a bio-warfare concoction instead, and once it enters its system, it reacts terribly with his body, causing him to emit a noxious, toxic gas that kills all animal life and triggers massive plant growth. The clouds of stench emanating from his body pervade the city so effectively that it becomes a national crisis almost immediately, and then an international one, as the U.S. military intercedes to capture Nobuo for their own ends.

The satire is blunt but not thus ineffective; casting secret weapons research as a badly safeguarded game played by blustering politicians and easily fucked up by a workaday dope is rather more biting and cynical and effective than putting it in the realm of shadowy melodrama. The bigger problem "Stink Bomb" has is that it's full of missed potential to be something even more interesting - the story's best and most haunting moments, of which there are several, all hinge on the sense of confusion, loneliness, and terror Nobuo feels at being plunged into a world where everything around him is dying, and heavily suited soldiers are hellbent on capturing him for reasons he doesn't understand. There's a sense of desolation that feels like something out of George A. Romero, the genre film as metaphor for social loss and isolation; crisply captured in the visuals and wonderfully acted out in the rich, heavily expressive animation of Nobuo's singularly well-designed face, it's quite a beautiful and touching thing, when it happens. And then it shifts back to the sardonic, bleak satire, and it feels like something goes out of it when that happens, a little bit every time.

It also starts to get wearisome before the segment's 40 minutes are up (it's just a bit shorter than "Magnetic Rose", and quite a bit longer than the finale) that Nobuo is such an utter dimwit. All of the strongest moments would be even stronger with a more knowing, self-aware person of largely average intelligence in the center; the plot mechanics work the same either way. By putting such a comic schlub in the central role, "Stink Bomb" scores some laughs, but at the expense of depth.

The last segment, Otomo's "Cannon Fodder", goes even deeper into overt satiric commentary than "Stink Bomb", while almost totally eschewing story. It's set in a nameless city state whose entire culture seems to be based around its series of building-sized cannons, fired multiple times every day at the neighboring enemy city, never seen by any of the cannon city's residents. Our tour guide for this militaristic world is a boy (Hayashi Isamu) whose father (Yamada Keaton) is a loader on Cannon 17, a necessary job but one that lacks the glamor or prestige of the cannon-firer, and is accompanied by no end of shitty working conditions.

Nothing "happens" - it's just a single day slice of life - but Otomo stuffs a great deal into the twenty-some minutes of his segment, managing to present a complete portrait of a 1984-style society in a constant state of war against an enemy that very possibly doesn't exist, and has been in even the smallest details of dress and decoration built around the idea of admiring its military, while also throwing out ideas about the oppression and exploitation of the working class that get far less screen time but still feel quite well fleshed-out. It's idea driven, and those ideas are important and urgently presented, though there's an inevitable dryness that comes from having only concepts, no drama.

Instead, all the dynamism in "Cannon Fodder" comes from its aesthetic, which is absolutely magnificent: the first two segments both use relatively straightforward anime style, but this one starts off with rough lines and smudgy coloring that feels exactly like pencil sketches, only done using cels. It's beautiful and striking, and that's only the least unique aspect of the style. The character design is even more idiosyncratic, primitive and almost inhuman in its presentation of the toothy humanoids with their lumpy builds and necrotic colors, all the better to stress the bedraggled, sickly lives of the workers, and the puffy inauthenticity of the military-approved heroes. But the most impressive thing of all, beyond doubt, is the gonzo ambition of the "camera movement", using what I suppose has to be CGI in concert with elaborate, difficult drawings to flow images together in a steady stream of sinuous shots in and around the film's world and all its trappings. It's involving and hypnotic, beautifully executed and astonishingly daunting in conception, and it's excellently suited to drawing us into the setting that is the primary reason "Cannon Fodder" exists at all.

Sure, it's a bit academic and detached, but it's smart as hell. That's true of everything in Memories: it is a most thoughtful collection of sci-fi notions, lovely to look at and troubling to contemplate. Like any anthology, it can't help but feel misshapen, but even its weakest moments are still awfully successful and worthwhile, and if the overall effect feels a bit less than the sum of its parts, that doesn't take away from how outstanding those parts are individually.

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HITLER? I HARDLY KNOW 'ER!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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