ON THE JOB

It's solely a reflection of the kind of films that Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne usually make that the obvious first response to Two Days, One Night, their newest film of suffocating poverty and human disconnection, made in a viscerally anti-beautiful style with a cast made up almost entirely of shabby-looking unknowns, is that it's their sell-out, mainstream, "Hollyood" film. Which means, in this case, almost nothing beyond "it has a clear plot, and that plot is frequently exciting", and "one of the people in the cast is famous and pretty". Namely, Marion Cotillard, I believe only the second full-on movie star the Dardennes have ever worked with (Cecile de France co-starred in The Kid with a Bike, their last project, from 2011), and the first around whom they've built an entire film.

I should undoubtedly feel bad about this, but I think as a direct function of its relatively movie-like qualities, Two Days, One Night has instantly become my favorite of their films. Admitting that makes one feel a bit unpleasantly bourgeois in one's tastes. But the po-faced realism of all their most important mid-career work has paid, I've found, awfully few dividends, owing not least to how uninteresting the films are to look at, or in the case of Le fils and L'enfant, how actively unpleasant. Two Days is still shot in the harshly-lit, mostly handheld style of their earlier work, though the simple fact of putting someone as movie-star beautiful as Cotillard in that setting already changes the nature of how the film's visuals can function quite a bit; it has a kind of sustained, narrative-driven shape to its images that I haven't clearly seen in any of the Dardennes' films since Rosetta.

The big shift, though, comes from structuring the story not as a closely-observed slice of life with only a bit of dramatic spine, but as a full-on thriller, something that requires a complete overhaul of how the film is made and how the characteristic acting style in the film works. And this shift, I think, enormously benefits the movie, which still boasts the brothers' signature skills at finding the links between economics and personal psychology, and depicting with non-judgmental clarity the worn-down places where normal people live their lives in the everyday world, but now expresses those things in a framework that's not nearly so medicinal. It is probably not their "best" film, which I imagine still has to be Rosetta if only for the game-changing impact that film made in 1999. On the other hand, Two Days is very much their most watchable film, and it gets there without having to sacrifice much or any of the severe truthfulness that has always been the brothers' primary motivation as filmmakers.

Cotillard plays Sandra, who finds herself in the midst of a situation that is, to be fair, just a little bit movie-contrived. The company at which she has till lately worked, a manufacturer of solar panels, has been feeling a financial pinch lately, and during Sandra's leave of absence to deal with an acute depressive episode, the managers determined that it would be possible to restructure the workloads so that it would be possible to lay her off. In a sneaky bid for democracy, they couched this in the form of a vote: Sandra's position could be kept, but it means no year-end bonuses. Her 16 co-workers naturally voted to take the €1,000 bonus, leaving her and her family (she is - was, that is to say - the primary breadwinner - in a terrible position, but the managers made one mistake: they let the rumor slip that they'd influenced the vote. To avoid the appearance of chicanery, the boss man has agreed to hold a new vote on Monday morning, giving Sandra just Saturday and Sunday (or, if you will, two days and one night) to visit each of her former colleagues to convince them to vote in favor of the greater good and not having a bit of extra money, though for most of them, that extra money is itself the difference between barely scraping by and having a precious bit of financial breathing room.

There's no missing the symbolism at the film's heart: the bosses make the workers fight each other instead of unifying over shared suffering and need. There's no room for villains in the Dardennes' worldview; the workers Sandra needs to negotiate with and beg all have their own reasons for fucking her over, and none of them (except kind of one guy) are doing it for the sheer joy of being a petty dick. It's because they are all desperate, just as much as she is; the film's panoramic view of how every sort of person is thrown into the same wastebasket by the crushing tide of economic suffering makes it one of the great documents of the modern international recession, both because of its generosity towards all of its working class characters, the ones who sympathise with Sandra and those who are chilly towards her alike. The terrific ensemble cast, mostly made out of the amateurs and semi-amateurs favored by the Dardennes in all their work, brings this cavalcade of human experiences to life with a richness and depth that allows even the characters with the smallest time onscreen (and that's a lot of people to get to in not much running time) to make a fully realised impression.

For all its excellence as a fable of working class life in the 2010s - and this is the film's primary focus and its best strength - Two Days, One Night doubles as an excellent study of depression. The open secret hiding right underneath the plot is that, from their perspective, the managers are making the right decision: Sandra has revealed herself to be unsteady and unreliable, and throughout her weekend ordeal, her depression flares up multiple times, including a thwarted suicide attempt. This adds a sharp edge to the film's economic theme, since it makes the personal stakes more intense even then "how will we eat?": it's clear enough without anybody saying it that Sandra doesn't just need the money, she needs the structure and sense of personal value imparted by having a job, and being deprived that will make it harder for her to continue functioning emotionally. It also gives Cotillard a great deal more to play than simply the noble-spirited, indefatigable working class hero of social realism. Sandra is hella fatigable, in fact. And the steady march from adrenaline-driven passion towards burned-out desperation that the character goes through over the weekend gives the actor room to build a character of excellent complexity and emotional range, leaving in her wake the best performance of her career.

Alongside its character study and economic analysis, the film is surprisingly enjoyable to watch: the ticking clock scenario gives it an urgency unknown in the Dardennes' deliberately anti-sensational filmography, and the depth that the writing and acting bring to Sandra gives the film a chance to play around with emotional registers that aren't just "everything is sad and suffering". As Sandra experiences highs and lows, so does the movie; we have here, among other surprises, a Dardenne film with a musical interlude set to the 1964 rock anthem "Gloria" by Them, with Sandra singing along in a car in a rare moment of enthusiasm and freedom.

Two Days, One Night isn't "fun" - let's not be daft - but it is unexpectedly exciting to go along with how enraging and how moving it is. If it's the most mainstream film its directors have made, so be it: there's nothing wrong with being mainstream when one can be this intellectually and thematically dense in doing so. This is, readily, one of the year's best films, and a career high for everybody involved in its creation.

9/10 (increased from 8/10 in October)

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: THIS TURBULENT PRIEST

Titling one's movie Calvary, as writer-director John Michael McDonagh has done in his second feature (and also the second entry in his project to give amazing lead roles to Brendan Gleeson), boxes things in pretty well. It has to be a film with a walking, talking Christ surrogate, pretty much, and Calvary's is a doozy: Father James (Gleeson), one of two priests in a rural Irish parish, who spends the film's opening scene taking confession from one of his flock who bluntly announces an intention to kill the priest the following Sunday. And this is specifically because Father James is so totally, undeniably innocent of any wrongdoing of any kind, that the killer has chosen him to be the pure sacrificial lamb to atone for the sins of a Church that hasn't sufficiently acknowledged its sin of allowing pedophiles the protection of the cloth.

In another universe, this could serve as the opening to a crackling thriller about a targeted innocent hunting down his unknown assailant, a kind of religious-themed D.O.A.; but my oh my, that's not even slightly the film McDonagh had in mind to make. Fairly early on, Father James speaks to his bishop (David McSavage), and acknowledges that he recognised the man's voice in the confessional; so much for being a mystery. And despite having this knowledge, and being informed by the bishop that this situation doesn't fall under the sanctity protecting those in the confessional (the would-be killer not showing any desire to atone), Father James shows no interest in stopping his assailant. Instead, he spends what may very well be the last week of his life trying to do the best he can to better the lives of those in his small community, and to feel his way around the broken relationship between himself and his daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly), born prior to his entry into the priesthood upon the occasion of his wife's death.

Calvary is, if this doesn't seem like an artificial construction, an extremely lapsed-Catholic movie. It could only possibly have been made in a country dominated by Catholicism and by a native of that country; as much as it is concerned with any other topic under the sun, the film is obsessively interested in the waning authority of the Church in a place where it once was simply assumed to be the primary force guiding the lives of everyone living there. It's a film whose characters and story are so nakedly symbolic that it doesn't care even a little bit if that symbolism gets overbearing or trumps the realistic logic of the scenario, which I will confess to finding immensely rewarding. Grappling with national religious identity in the form of a character study is not a task for the squeamish or the subtle, and for all its political cartoon filing of characters into types like The Atheist, Dr. Frank Harte (Aiden Gillen), The Rich Man, Michael Fitzgerald (Dylan Moran), The Foreigner, Simon (Isaach De Bankolé), and so on, there's an organic texture to the way that Calvary assembles and cycles through its characters that keeps it from feeling forced or overly messagey.

As the center of this swirl of metaphorical approaches to the Church's role in modern times, Gleeson has to play three layers all at once, two of them wholly symbolic, and still make Father James feel like an actual, plausible human being. The film cheats its way into it: McDonagh's script unabashedly conforms itself to the actor and makes use of all his best skills, without having to necessarily tax Gleeson to do much more than stand with his mournful beardy expression in some of the quieter moments. Then again, McDonagh and Gleeson developed the character and the script together, so the work of creating a character goes deeper than just standing in front of a camera and reciting lines, in this case. However it came to be, Gleeson is absolutely devastating in the role, one of the great triumphs of commanding screen presence of the year. Evoking Father James's inner fear and resignation and willingness to assume guilt through long wordless stretches and the heavy way he carries his body, Gleeson provides the movie with all the shape and focus it needs to carry off its broad ambitions.

Not that he's the whole movie, or anything; frequently, he's put in an entirely reactive role to the splashy characters surrounding him. The film loves its supporting characters: it gives all of them big showcase moments and all the best lines of tart dialogue, adding a pitch-black hilarity that keeps the film from feeling too damn serious too often. A film about religion, religious institutions, and pessimistic faith though it is, Calvary is grounded in the messy stuff of day-to-day humanity, and its stately movement from one character to the next as each scene glides by gives all of its humans a chance to shine.

Larry Smith's grey-washed cinematography lends a sense of terrible Romantic grandeur to the Irish landscapes (an easy thing to do, in fairness) and aging interiors alike reinforcing and deepening the shifting emotions of the story, while Chris Gill's editing provides a crisp momentum that draws us unto scenes, and carefully shapes our relationship to James. So for for all that it's driven by ideas and screenwriterly conceits, it doesn't drop the ball on being a well-built piece of cinema. The ideas are what count most, though: they're a bit bleak at times and willing to let theme triumph over characters every so often (including, probably, the ending shots), but presented with impressive thoughtfulness and intellectual grounding, and just enough humor that it doesn't burn on the way down. It is, in more than a few ways, an Irish Catholic variant on the scorched-earth Swedish Lutheranism of Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light; not a recipe for a breezy fun time at the movies, but when you're in the mood to really grapple, I mean, just grapple with religion and sociology and dense character acting, you could hardly find anything better in the contemporary cinema landscape.

8/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1998: In which Hollywood's king of populist entertainment critques wartime jingoism while also pandering to it

Knowing that I'd eventually get to write about Saving Private Ryan - to grapple with my own wildly inconsistent feelings about it over the years, as well as to challenge all of you, my readers, to do the same - has been one of the things that I've been most excited about since the very beginning of this blog's Hollywood Century project. So here we are, and here we grapple, and I have 16 years of accumulated thoughts, praise, complaints, and misgivings to get through in the next couple thousand words. Apologies in advance if it gets a little messy.

The confusion I have long felt about the film is not least because there are two films we talk about when we talk about Saving Private Ryan: one is 21 minutes long, and it maybe the best-crafted & most powerful combat film ever produced. The other is much, much longer, and it is a largely trite, generic, and in some important ways philosophically dubious story of a squad in WWII trudging through France in June, 1944, while complaining in ways that perfectly map onto the pre-established clichés for each of the eight men in that squad. Actually, there's a third movie, too: it's the opening and closing bookends set in, presumably, 1998 itself, the year of the film's release, and it is among the clumsiest, most disastrously-conceived material in the entirety of Steven Spielberg's directorial corpus.

But let's stick with the actual meat of the movie first. As virtually everybody knows, I imagine, Saving Private Ryan opens (after that 1998 scene) at the onset of the D-Day invasion of the beaches of Normandy, follows along with one tiny cluster of American soldiers for quite a while, and then continues on as those soldiers are assigned a most peculiar mission three days after the Allied forces successfully land. To wit: they are to trek deep into the French countryside, where they must find one PFC James Ryan, whose three brothers have all died recently, and whom the Army brass has decided shall be saved from the hell of war, so that his mother doesn't have to suffer the agony of losing all her children in quick succession.

Admitting out front that the movie has other priorities on its mind, the first problem we run into is structural. The movie begins three times, and each new beginning seems to have virtually nothing to do with what we've already seen. The transition out of the opening scene makes absolutely no sense once you know where the film is going, implying that the old man (Harrison Young) we're watching in the American war cemetery at Normandy is recalling his experience on that beach, staring a thousand-yard stare as the soundtrack begins to filter in the pre-invasion sounds of waves, boats, and men shuffling. I think there's really no conceivable way to read the editing and sound, even the way the man's face is held in close-up, without making that assumption; but we'll find out at the end that he was miles and miles inland during the invasion. Strike one.

Then comes the invasion itself, a three-act mini-movie unto itself, that has no connection to the ultimate attempt to find Private Ryan. We're introduced to most of our main characters, but we don't know that we're being introduced to them: the sequence ties itself to Captain Jim Miller, who we know is important because he's played by Tom Hanks, but we don't know who he is by name yet, and we don't have any notion of who the people are around him. This isn't an introduction, but a totally unrelated narrative chunk that happens to concern the same characters. It's the backstory to the actual plot of Saving Private Ryan only to the same degree that watching Don Corleone having eggs and coffee while reading the morning paper would have been a useful opening scene to The Godfather.

Now, we are not dumb, and so we know that Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat had other things on their mind in including the D-Day invasion than telling a clear, cohesive story. Saving Private Ryan is, explicitly, a film paying tribute to the men who fought and died in World War II, and that is far more important to it than telling a story or fleshing out characters. And in that regard, the Omaha Beach scene is far more important and comprehensible, since its function is to show the chaos and agony of war, so that we'll have a better sense for the rest of the movie of what kind of terrible suffering these men go through. Its value, that is to say, is entirely thematic - and I'll return to that, but now let's turn to the battle scene itself.

It is a work of genius, of course. I can't imagine how anyone but the most morbid Spielberg hater could deny that. What is remarkable to me above all things is how the invasion sequence in this film is absolutely and in every way the work of a populist filmmaker: the craftsmanship and ability to lead the audience to an emotional place he has preselected (the commonest knock against Spielberg, but also to my mind the least-convincing: all movies are emotionally manipulative, he's just unusually direct in showing he he does it) that he'd honed over years of making some of the biggest crowd-pleasers in cinema history turns out to work just as well, and in exactly the same ways, when he's trying to flatten us into terrified submission. Saving Private Ryan's combat scenes are fucking brilliant filmmaking, innovative and groundbreaking in ways that so quickly became standard procedure for war movies, and especially WWII movies, that it's difficult to quite see what makes it special. But oh, how special it is: just the way that Janusz Kamiński shot it (to my mind, this is the film that cemented him as an essential part of the Spielberg team) would be worth a paper all by itself. The short version is that he relies on excessive grain and desaturation to create a bleak, almost nauseating feeling, which is then built on by his celebrated use of a decreased shutter angle, giving the images a sharp, metallic precision and render the movements with staccato bursts that keep feeling like they're going to launch into fast-motion. And on top of that, we also find extensive use of erratic hand-held camera work, Spielberg's open attempt to copy documentary style, which extends to allowing dirt and stage blood to slop all over the lens.

All that hyper-realistic cinematography creates an immersive reality more than virtually any other combat scene I can name, and that's even without mentioning the film's amazing sound mix - an astonishingly powerful experience in theaters, one that I remember 16 years later more clearly than things I saw last week. Every single bullet feels like it was placed specifically to suggest physical space and the sheer scale of the D-Day invasion, echoing on all sides, now horribly close and now terribly far. For that is the other thing that sets this scene above so many other great combat sequences: the feeling of littleness it creates. We follow a tiny number of people through a confusingly-defined space, and we never get a sense of what's going on all throughout the rest of the beach except in the flashes that Miller is able to spot out of the corner of his eye. But that roaring sound mix tells all: it describes with all its layers a battleground stretching out into infinity, bodies dying invisibly - and sometimes quite visibly, right before our eyes, in blunt scenes of carnage - in which the one man we're following barely registers as an individual.

There are no moments of Spielbergian sentiment, and yet the whole thing is finely tuned and orchestrated using his very particular skills: an awareness of how to use brief, iconic gestures to thrust us into a state of high emotion. Panic, in this case, something not found in such protracted form anywhere else in the director's career. The exact things that make this work are what make it the work of a mainstream entertainer: things are communicated simply, directly, and without a trace of subtlety, and our gaze is directed exactly where the filmmakers want it to be directed, so that we can be walloped by whatever they're going to show us next.

It's tremendously powerful and crushing, and then it ends, and Saving Private Ryan actually, finally starts. You can tell exactly where it happens, because the John Williams score that has been silent for 21 minutes asserts itself, and in the blink of an eye this harsh, sober experience turns gloppy and dumb. For this particular Williams score is offensively sentimental and pushy and omnipresent beyond even the caricature of his work; I wouldn't hesitate a moment to call it the worst score he composed for any Spielberg film. At any rate, it's the only one of his scores for the director that actively makes the film worse, cutting into Kamiński's sober, bleached-out images and the uncharacteristic hardness of Spielberg's camera and direction to his actors with weepy, patriotic horns and militaristic elegy.

That being said, the A-plot of Saving Private Ryan is so beset by trouble spots that singling out the music is a bit unfair. To begin with, Miller's squad reveals itself to be populated exclusively by clichés who are precisely described the first time we see them, and never break out of our immediate preconception as to what they're going to do. Besides our taciturn captain, we have the Hothead (Edward Burns), the Tough GI (Tom Sizemore) the Bible-Thumping Southerner (Barry Pepper), the Sarcastic Jew (Adam Goldberg), the Pleasant Medic (Giovanni Ribisi), the Warmhearted Rough Italian (Vin Diesel), and most importantly of all, the Untrained Newbie and Audience/Director Surrogate (Jeremy Davies), the one with a sturdy moral sense but also no survival instinct at all. I suspect, if pressed, Spielberg and Rodat would defend their pack of unimaginative stereotypes as a tribute to the WWII films of yore, all the way back to the '40s when those stereotypes started to congeal. Except that Saving Private Ryan absolutely, transparently wants to be more complex than that: to present battle as a horrible experience, not an ennobling one, and to present the trauma of warfare as serving more to flatten soldiers' humanity rather than to make them Manly American Men. Relying on musty old stock characters gets in the way of that.

And anyway, the direction of the plot over the next two hours is so all-over-the-map that no consistent theme emerges anyway; the only clear message that has emerged by the end is the conviction that, well, Our Boys sure did see some terrible things over there. Critically, the film never quite makes up its mind whether all the killing and seeing the enemy as a faceless Other is ultimately soul-damaging or not; the arc of Davies's character famously muddies all of this, since it's structured largely to show how he comes to realise that killing prisoners is okay - and yet, the way that Spielberg and Kamiński film his ultimate act of killing, with the camera trained on Davies's face and never showing the German body fall, doesn't permit the viewer a sense of celebration and suggests that we're watching him fall into the dark side. But that kind of moral ambiguity fits not at all with the many other scenes.

Running down everything that works beautifully (a scene where a little girl assaults her dad for putting her in harm's way in the act of trying to save her; Hanks's cold-blooded recitation of the big Norman Rockwell speech about his homelife) and everything that doesn't (the bafflingly over-written scene with General Marshall, played by Harve Presnell, concocting the plot to save Private Ryan; pretty much every single beat focused on Pepper's sniper, who prays for guidance from God before killing his enemies, a potentially rich irony that Spielberg is palpably frightened to grapple with) would take too long, so suffice it to say that the film suffers from aimlessness and bloat, perked up frequently by individually piercing moments of character truth. And the film always, always looks perfect, capturing both painterly beauty and a sense of devastated coldness simultaneously. To be honest, winning the Best Director Oscar but losing Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love seems almost exactly right to me: Saving Private Ryan succeeds at the creation of stable tone and texture, but is messy and wandering as a drama (of course, exactly exactly right would have been The Thin Red Line making a clean sweep of everything but Kamiński's win, but it does nobody any good to pretend that was ever an option).

The film does eventually find focus and purpose again - and drops the damn Williams music - in another long combat scene, this time after the squad has found Private Ryan (Matt Damon - and Jesus, but the number of future famous people in this movie is impressive; Bryan Cranston and Nathan Fillion also pop up). It's a terrific piece of filmmaking, if not quite as radical in its technique. But unlike Omaha Beach, this climax isn't quite so much about the punishing brutality of war; it's more of a conventional action movie, rousing and saddening in equal measure. François Truffaut legendarily observed that no war film can truly argue against war, since they always make combat look exciting; this is not true at all of the grotesque opening sequence, but it is at least partially true of the finale. And that's without dragging in the cloying final scene, which looks at all the ambiguity threaded throughout even the weaker moments of the main feature, and says "well, fuck that", with a stirring coda in which it is clarified that to die in combat serving one's country is a Glorious Sacrifice, and those who fought but did not die are always going to be haunted by the conviction that they're not as morally good as the fallen. It's jingoistic pap, made worse by the film's only truly uninteresting cinematography, and Williams slobbering aural war memorial.

Saving Private Ryan achieved something that, even after a decade and a half, I still can't quite believe: this very long, depressing, unsparingly violent movie was the highest-grossing film of 1998 (domestically - worldwide, it was easily bested by Michael Bay's shrill Armageddon, which makes much more sense even though it's much sadder). It was, in fact, the last Steven Spielberg film to top the year's box office, and the last R-rated film as well. Much as he had done when getting in right at the first stages of a major new revival in dinosaur fandom with Jurassic Park, the director somehow managed to predict the Zeitgeist in some unfathomable way: 1998 also saw the release of Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation, and between the two projects, they triggered a wave of nostalgia for and interest in the culture surrounding World War II that I honestly have never figured out.

Whatever the case, something about this unremittingly bleak film, whose sops towards uplift and finding something purposeful in war feel messily splashed onto its overriding sense of desolation, struck an enormous chord with audiences. I can't argue that's not deserved, even though it's weird: Spielberg-the-sentimentalist transforming into Spielberg-the-unsmiling-chronicler leaves us with quite a sturdy array of well-built, emotionally transfixing moments. Much of it is foggy, and a small amount of it is actively objectionable, but so much of Saving Private Ryan works so well, and so undeniably, that even if I think it can only be regarded as one of Spielberg's most difficult "problem" films, it's absolutely the work of a supremely talented film director with an irreproachable, top-notch crew.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1998
-Terry Gilliam's final film that gets made without the world burning down around it, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is released
-Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol predict, then indict reality TV with The Truman Show
-Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner just wave their dicks right out there for everyone to see, pitting DreamWorks Animation's Antz and Pixar's A Bug's Life against each other

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1998
-Still the best movie ever built on video game narrative logic, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run bows in Germany
-Nakata Hideo's Ringu inaugurates the modern era of J-horror
-Show Me Love - known more bluntly as Fucking Åmål in its native Sweden - introduces the world to the social realism of Lukas Moodysson

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SPACE IS BIG. REALLY BIG. YOU JUST WON'T BELIEVE HOW VASTLY, HUGELY, MINDBOGGLINGLY BIG IT IS.

There is nothing small about Christopher Nolan's newest, longest film, the epic space drama Interstellar. Its strengths are as gargantuan and overpowering as its mighty flaws, and just as impossible to miss. I have absolutely no idea whether I liked it as a work of cinema, but I know this much for a dead certainty: it is worth seeing, and it is worth seeing on the biggest screen available, even with the known problem in the IMAX sound mix where Hans Zimmer's overly Philip Glassy score smothers the dialogue in a blanket of rampaging strings. Not since Avatar (a film whose dopey script looks like Chayefsky next to the structural disaster written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan) has there been a VFX-driven movie whose value is so clearly a function of letting it wash over you as a sensory event rather than trying to appreciate on the level of narrative.

It's easy to see how that could play as a criticism, but in fact, when a film's sensual elements are as rich and robust and emphatic as they are in the case of Interstellar, it's really not. Nolan has surrounded himself with a crack team of craftspeople, some of them new to his fold, and together they've built one of the most dumbfoundingly physical space movies in a generation: practical effects and sets whenever possible (courtesy of production designer Nathan Crowley), based on real-world observation of actual space programs and technology. When practical effects weren't possible, they were completed in advance of the shoot, so they could be projected behind the actors during the shoot, giving them something to play against that wasn't a green screen. And even here, there was much in the way of motion control model work. The results are not flawlessly realistic (the effects seen through the windows of the main spaceship tend to be a little overexposed, for one), but they are weighty in a way that only the very, very best CGI has ever been - if we weren't just a year away from Gravity, I'd be fairly well inclined to say that no effects-heavy film since The Lord of the Rings closed up shop has had a greater sense of its own physical reality. Paul Franklin, receiving his very own title card for supervising the visual effects, fully earns that odd crediting rarity; the film is his brainchild as much as it is anybody's.

It's a pridefully old-school approach to making a pridefully old-school movie: Interstellar is indebted, rather openly, to the hard science fiction of the mid-20th Century, focusing on science as a problem solving tool and technology as an extension of current thought rather than a magical fantasy element. And human characters are stripped-down and spare, functional objects that exist mostly to do the science and wield the technology. Sometimes. Mostly. It's where the film starts to get itself into trouble a bit.

Here's the deal: Interstellar is, like, five movies, playing out mostly in order. First, there's the "we used up the future, and Earth is dying" opening, in which we meet former fighter pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), and his children Tom (Timothée Chalamet), a teenager, and Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), a 10-year-old. But not his wife. She's dead. This is a Nolan picture. Then there's Cooper's discovery that, in secret, the U.S. government has kept the space program alive to work on developing a "get the hell off the Earth" program, under the guidance of wizened Dr. Brand (Michael Caine). Then there's the actual mission, with Cooper, Brand's daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), physicist Romily (David Gyasi), and geologist Doyle (Wes Bentley) all trekking through a mysteriously convenient wormhole to explore a trio of potential Earth-2s. And there are between two and three more movies after that, but I can't go farther without hitting spoiler territory.

Anyway, the film occupies a billion different tonal registers, veering from the mercilessly austere hard science of the second and third chunks, all the way the the weepy sentimentality of... also the third chunk, since that's when the effects of relativity cause Murphy to grow up into a resentful adult played by Jessica Chastain, working with Dr. Brand as a way of focusing her rage at her dad into something useful. And there are rare communications between them, and really fucking amazing cross-cutting, courtesy of Lee Smith, Nolan's usual editor. And here the characters feel deep, passionate feelings, and Zimmer's Glass impression shifts gears to be far more weepy and romantic. Sometimes it works - Cooper's discovery of a whole package of video messages charting his family's growth over years while he was being time dilated is one of the best moments in the film, boasting a wordless, heartbreaking performance by McConaughey that's unequivocally the best acting anywhere in the movie. Sometimes it doesn't work, like in the agonising, endless first half hour, when the Nolans laboriously set up their family dynamic in long scenes that have heard of narrative efficiency only as something for puny mortal directors who have budgetary restrictions.

The whole script is a car wreck, heavily over-emphasising some details and skipping madly over others, building a world that is excruciatingly spelled out with details that make no sense - like a scene that plays out for minutes and minutes, establishing that the government has declared the moon landing of the ancient past to be a hoax, although what conceivable reason they'd have for doing this is unclear, and what reason Interstellar has for making us watch characters who theoretically know this already to carefully, leadenly hash it out is even less clear (for that matter, given the world the movie depicts - the economy has collapsed, agriculture is collapsing, and people have apparently retrenched into semi-anarchic rural enclaves - why is there still a U.S. government at all?). But then, painfully stretched-out delivery of expository dialogue between two people who both know all the things they're describing happens a lot in Interstellar, and it's never natural, but sometimes it is useful. Even if you walk in a complete neophyte on the worlds of quantum physics and general relativity, you surely will know a lot about them when you walk out. Or, at least, the reductive version the Nolans need to make their plot go.

But even as the story wanders in tiny circles for ages, stopping with gobsmacked amazement for draggy scenes of little value, for every one annoyance, Interstellar offers up two moments of pure visceral movie magic. It is, for the most part, not a film where Nolan's sometimes-notorious difficult in organically stitching two shots together has resolved itself; their are difficulties in figuring out the layout of certain key spaces that pervade the whole movie. But the individual images themselves are so dauntingly huge - and I can't over-stress that this movie begs and craves to be seen in IMAX - and so impressively captured by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (stepping in for absent Nolan regular Wally Pfister), and Franklin, that the relationship between shots is simply never as important as the impact shots make themselves. There are moments of genius - generally, cross-cutting between Cooper on the spaceship and Murphy on Earth is done with a fluidity and sensibility that creates more human meaning than the script ever does, though the final action scene, cross-cutting madly, is kind of ridiculously over-the-top.

But that's the thing: Interstellar moves from brilliance to absolute ineptitude and back regularly and freely. Just about the only thing that's not true of is the acting: with the script bathed in the traditions of hard sci-fi, hardly any of the characters have room for more than the impression of inner life, which means that such gifted people as McConaughey, Chastain, Hathaway, Lithgow, and others whose parts are so small I didn't even get to them are largely there to add gravitas to undernourished roles, but not to do very much real capital-A acting. It's easy for Interstellar to forget its human elements; they are not what it finds interesting, and when it focuses on them, it's usually embarrassingly ripe. But at least the top-shelf cast inhabits their thin stock types with presence and solidity that give the film just enough of an anchor that when it tries to be an emotionally resonant character drama, it kind of feels like it might work, even if it never quite makes it. Anyway, it's not as befuddlingly confused about what makes for plausible human behavior as The Dark Knight Rises, so, I don't know, progress?

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: THE LOOK OF SILENCE (JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER, DENMARK / INDONESIA / NORWAY / FINLAND / UK)

Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20
World premiere: 28 August, 2014, Venice International Film Festival

The Look of Silence is unmistakably a great film, though it is not a singular one. For one thing, it isn't an object totally complete unto itself, like director Joshua Oppenheimer's previous work, The Act of Killing: it is a sequel to that film, or perhaps we might call it a follow-up, a companion piece, or an addendum (yes, addendum, I think that's the one I like the best), and it's absolutely aware of that fact. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer and the camera were able to vanish, recording the men whose testimonies and self-directed re-enactments made up the film from an invisible vantage point, and this was key to what the thing was: a chance for unrepentant murderers - why should they repent, their government and countrymen regard them as heroes for their role in the mass killings of over one million people in Indonesia in 1965, on the grounds that they were (or were accused of being) Communists - to comfortably and freely indict themselves on the full, limitless horror of what they did, expressed with braggadocio and zeal. But with The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer can't disappear; here is a film in which the subjects are aware of the first movie, and one of the key repeated images used to anchor the progression of the story is the sight of one man, Adi, watching footage of the men responsible for killing his elder brother Ramli, before he was ever born. Far from standing as a blank slate to receive their self-aggrandising, self-damning narratives, the old killers in this film have begun to figure out that the European with the camera isn't actually on their side: many interviews start to crumble with someone's agitated declaration that they're not interested in talking about this with "Josh" anymore.

It's also certainly true that The Look of Silence is more conventional in its goals and its construction, the almost inevitable side-effect of its re-focused attention. The Act of Killing was a film about the minds of people who had committed violence on an enormous scale, and it is appropriately florid and grotesque. The Look of Silence is instead about one single family of victims, and it is necessarily more subdued and intimate: it is not, after all, being filtered through the imagination of madmen. It has no chance to be as expressive and unprecedented. That's certainly no slight against the film, for it is still extraordinarily powerful and potent; maybe even more so, given that it can engage with sorrow and loss more directly. Certainly, I haven't seen a film in 2014 that left me feeling so hollowed-out and anguished - I mean, how many films are there that actually leave you feeling anguished? - and it seems unlikely that this shall not remain the case.

The concept is straightforward and feels distinctly like something executive producer Werner Herzog might do in one of his own films: in 2012, Oppenheimer showed Adi, a 44-year-old ophthalmologist, footage that was shot in 2003, of the people who perpetrated the Snake River massacre, an event at which Ramli was killed in a distinctive and disturbing manner even by the standards of the 1965 mass killings, which were marked perhaps especially by the prevalence of excessively cruel and brutal violence. And then, Oppenheimer took Adi to interview those same men, in the hopes of finding some spark of regret or guilt or just apology from these people (the possibly belabored "the eye doctor hopes to make these people 'see' the effects of their actions" metaphor is thankfully only trotted out once).

What results from all this is harrowing, soul-aching footage. What emerges is less the sense of killers realising that they need to atone for their crimes than killers being confronted, in no small amount of confusion, with the idea that decent people might actually think they did something horrible. What happens, time and time again (and even described in words close to this), is the ripping off of ancient scabs, leaving history raw and fresh and oozing. Indonesia, we find, is not a country that has taken ownership of its sins of made peace with them, but simply stuffed them down at the bottom of the drawer to fester, and in The Look of Silence, we see what happens when that is questioned, and when one person forces another person to reckon with the past.

It is ugly and painful, of course. The film contains an exceptional number of scenes that aren't just depressing, but are acutely uncomfortable to watch on top of it. One woman sitting next to her doddering father for what she plainly expects to be just a game of "let's reminisce" is shattered to learn that he, like many of the killers, drank the blood of his victims to stave off feelings of insanity from the knowledge of his actions (and really, isn't "if we don't drink this human blood, we might go crazy!" just the most perfectly horrifying window into how the minds of these killers?). In something like real-time, we get to watch as she begins reconstructing her worldview to decide that this information is something to be rejected or diminished. And that's not nearly the most cringe-inducing moment in a film where Adi learns that his mother's brother was involved in the system of killings, thinking himself free from guilt since he didn't, personally, take any lives; or a meeting with the family of a man who died sometime after Oppenheimer's 2003 interviews, furiously and passionately and repeatedly trying to deny that the things the director has immediate, firsthand proof of being true could possibly have ever happened.

None of this is, as such, "surprising". While The Act of Killing was a peek in to the minds of the insane, The Look of Silence is about the sane, and it's easier for us to follow along, and suppose, "well yes, that is how I would expect that person to feel about what's going on right now". But simply the lack of being revelatory isn't sufficient to cheapen what The Look of Silence is or what it does. It's no less powerful or important than the first film, using the particular case of one man's death in one period of chaos as a prism through which we can view and ponder the whole business of humans being cruel to other humans and not repenting, and yet never losing sight of the very specific true story being recorded for future historians. The film's consistent rerun to Adi and Ramli's parents, centenarians whose lifetime of suffering is worn visibly on their body (and here, my one big caveat: Adi's 109-year-old father is both mostly blind and mostly deaf, and just on the film's own terms, it's not clear that he could have given his informed consent to be involved in a film that obsessively shows him to be a desiccated man-skeleton being washed and tended for by his patient, loving family), is its best tool in making sure that, whatever universal meaning is easily plucked from the film, we never get to separate it from the specific history that has been almost totally scrubbed from history. Oppenheimer's project - which is probably done now, as he's indicated in interviews that he doesn't think it will be safe for him to return to Indonesia moving forward - is as important historically as cinematically, and if The Look of Silence feels like it needs that justification just a slight touch more than The Act of Killing, the fact remains that we now, in 2014, have a grand total of two important films about the Indonesia mass killings, and it would be irresponsible to pretend that their historical importance isn't a significant part of their legacy. It's wonderful indeed that they are both so powerful, intelligent, and beautifully made on top of it: this is painful and devastating stuff to watch, but so emphatically and movingly human that it's not possible to regret the experience

10/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1960: In which contemporary history gets the epic treatment

The signal characteristic of Otto Preminger's Exodus from 1960, a story of the founding of the modern state of Israel, has nothing to do with the film's sensitive political content; nothing to do with the iconic, stirring Romantic main theme of Eric Gold's deservedly Oscar-winning score; nothing to with the fact that this is the only movie to pair Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, two of the most beautiful people in midcentury American cinema. The signal characteristic of Exodus is its length - at 208 minutes, it is not the longest movie ever made, or even close to it, but those 208 minutes take their goddamn sweet time in expressing themselves. After Gold's music, probably the best-known thing about the movie is a story too perfect too be true and too good not to repeat, that comedian Mort Sahl stood up a few hours into the film's premiere to loudly proclaim "Otto, let my people go!", and while perhaps impolite, it's hard not to sympathise with the sentiment. I find myself irresistibly drawn to compare the film to Lawrence of Arabia, made two years later, in broadly the same part of the world and running to a slightly longer length; while that film is beautiful, and full of driving incident, it has that bit towards the end where it starts to grind and get bogged down in talking and politics and even the main character seems impatient for the thing to end. Exodus is like that draggy 20 minutes of Lawrence of Arabia stretched over the entirety of three and a half hours, instead of just coming at the wrong time near the end of three and a half hours.

In this regard, Exodus is a fine representative of what had just about started to become a trend at the beginning of the '60s and would turn into a full-fledged addiction by the decade's end: exhausting, pointless bloat. For all that it's fun to bitch and moan about how, in the 2010s, we can't have a movie about superheroes or giant robots that can find its way to a genre-appropriate running time, contemporary cinema doesn't have anything on the heaving immensity of a real good Indulgent Monstrosity from the 1960s. Some of these movies were good, or even great: Lawrence of Arabia, for one. Many more of them are just enervating, endurance tests which make the cardinal sin of assuming that a broad sense of capital-H History and enough widescreen panoramas justifies plodding through a narrative with far too much attention to detail in every last tiny way: Doctor Zhivago jumps to mind, David Lean's very next film post-Lawrence.

Exodus is damn near the patron saint of this latter group. Carved out of Leon Uris's 1958 Zeitgeist-dominating novel by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo - allegedly leaving a great deal of plot and depth of backstory behind, which makes one gawk to think how jam-packed the book must have been - it follows a handful of key people during a specific chain of events in 1947 and '48, all of which contribute to the partition of Palestine and the formation of a new country to serve as save haven for the world's Jewish population, reeling from the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust. And it follows this people with extremely close attention, though not necessarily historical precision (the event it portrays as being the key event in the events of those years plays out in literally the exact opposite of how it did historically). And this focus is more invested in minutiae than dramatic momentum: even if you read a scene-by-scene description of the film's plot, I don't think you could rightly fathom how it could cross the two-hour mark, let alone three.

But I'll stop bitching about that before this review becomes as long as Exodus itself. The film opens in Cyprus, in 1947, with American widow Kitty Fremont (Saint), a nurse whose photojournalist husband died recently covering a story about the Jewish agitation to be permitted entry into the British-controlled Palestine. She is given a tour by General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson), commander of the British forces on Cyprus and a sympathetic figure for the Jews; he convinces her to volunteer as nurse for the internment camp where displaced Jewish refugees are kept while the British government flails around trying to figure out what to do with them. This puts her in a perfect position to see firsthand the act of rebellion by which Ari Ben Canaan (Newman), formerly of the British Army and now of the revolutionary group Hagannah captures a ship which is renamed the SS Exodus, and peopled with over 600 refugees. Ari plans to take these people to Palestine, and stages a hunger strike and also threatens to blow up the ship if the British try to interfere; eventually, the Brits cave in and allow the Exodus to go on its way. In Palestine, the plot blossoms into a kaleidoscopic view of the radical attempt to form an independent Jewish state: Ari's father Barak (Lee J. Cobb) is the leader of a diplomatic group working for that goal, while his brother, Ari's uncle Akiva (David Opatoshu) is a high-ranking member of Irgun, a group preferring more violent means. This makes it greatly appealing to Dov Landau (Sal Mineo), a refugee from the Exodus and survivor of Auschwitz, who has meanwhile struck up a close relationship with Karen (Jill Haworth), a Danish-Jewish refugee who has been unofficially adopted by Kitty, hoping to take the girl back to America and a better life. And Kitty, in the meantime, has begun to fall in love with Ari.

Confusing and convoluted, but not enough for three and a half hours which are not, anyway, mostly taken up with character material, but with scene after scene after scene of talking. Talking about the hunger strike, talking about the negotiating with the British government, talking about dealing with the UN, talking about performing acts of terrorism, talking about the encroaching hostility of the Arab populations surrounding and inhabiting Palestine. There is, probably, no other way to dramatise the events of this scenario than to show people talking, but there's not a whole lot that's less interesting in cinema, unless the filmmakers are keen, aggressive stylists, and this is not something that is typically true of Preminger. He was a talented director, and a phenomenal journeyman when making something like Laura; as he began to grow in stature as a producer-director, he demonstrated fine instincts for picking controversial projects that would allow him to grip Modern Society by the balls and twist and tug and force it under his unforgiving microscope. Sometimes this worked out brilliantly, and we get Anatomy of a Murder or Advise & Consent (the films he made on either side of Exodus). Sometimes, this resulted in the idiotic frippery of The Moon Is Blue. While Exodus is undoubtedly better than that film, it's on the same side of the Preminger Scale, where the desire to do important, edgy, groundbreaking things in his storytelling (which included hiring Trumbo, whose script for Spartacus in '60 was the first time a blacklisted artist had received onscreen credit) outweighs such trivial things as entertainment or human interest.

Exodus is appallingly boring. That's a subjective word, but I can't think of a better one. And the main reason why is its central pair of Newman and Saint, neither of whom works in the film's interests whatsoever, and whose portrayal of Ari and Kitty, protagonists and the source of all the alleged emotional involvement in the human-sized drama playing out amidst all the Important History, is completely without warmth or interest. Newman, the WASPiest half-Jew on the books in all the history of Hollywood filmmaking, played every moment of his performance as a cold, angry rageaholic, admitting nothing but glowering contempt for anyone and everything, even the people who agree with his goals and his methods, and it's both tedious and unenlightening to have him as our primary guide to the human story of Israel. But at least his simmering anger is an emotion - Saint's performance is so devoid of affect or inflection that it would be hilarious, if it were in the context of a movie that wasn't so goddamn long that every little thing that makes it feel more stilted adds hours to the subjective experience of watching it. If it's not her mechanical depiction of physical attraction to Newman, its her false smiles of warmth towards Karen, or worse things still - the film opens with a scene in which, among other things, she discusses her past miscarriage without altering her tone of voice or facial expression even slightly. It's all so contrary to anything that the movie or the character needs at any moment that I'd almost guesss that Saint was a rabid anti-Zionist hoping to single-handedly ruin the film by torpedoing its emotional throughline with her wooden non-acting.

There are, thankfully, some stronger performances around the edges, with Richardson standing out heads and shoulders above everybody, though Mineo's gaunt expressions of pain and resentment, which are likely what earned him his Oscar nomination for the role, are moving and vulnerable like nothing else in the movie is. But it's always pretty clear that Preminger wasn't chiefly interested in telling the story of Ari and Kitty and Barak and Dov and Karen and whoever the hell else, he was making an advertisement for Israel's moral right to exist. I'm not getting into the argument over whether or not that was a worthy goal in and of itself; for one thing, I have absolutely no idea what kind of opinion most of the world had about the state of Israel in the late '50s, a full decade before the Six-Day War changed everything about Israel's place in global politics. My only claim is that it makes for rough cinema, especially in the bluntly detached, observational style that Preminger always favored. A spoonful of sugar helps the propaganda go down, if you will, but Exodus lacks any visual flair or clever structure to sweeten its reeling off of scene upon scene of social studies lessons and recapping what was then recent enough history that the film allows itself to skimp on some details that would be awfully nice to have available nearly 70 years after the events the film depicts.

It's not exactly ill-made, though sometimes it's awfully sloppy - the lighting is sloppy, the sound is often tinny, and the refugees on hunger strike look awfully hale and well-kept. But even if Preminger and his collaborators - cinematographer Sam Leavitt, editor Louis R. Loeffler - weren't in a particularly inventive mood when it came to making and combining their images, this was still a movie made with obvious talent and resources, with handsome location photography of Israel giving the film a sense of place that suits it well. When it allows itself to loosen up, as happens somewhat regularly in the last 90 minutes, after the intermission, there's even some genuinely great filmmaking. The chaos in the aftermath of Irgun's bombing of the King David Hotel (which is pushed back by a year to fit into the dramatic chronology) is captured with tense momentum, and later on, there's a prison break sequence that's a triumph across the board: well-choreographed, scored with bellicose impact, sharply cut.

More moments like that, and the living history of Exodus could have been genuinely involving, its retelling of Israel's dramatic, contentious founding turned into something rich and moving and exciting. But it's such a lecture in its current form, and a particularly dry and inhumane one to boot. I understand having motivations that have nothing to do with entertainment, and the urgency of Exodus is apparent throughout - oh my, is it ever an urgent, urging movie - but there has to be something compelling to watch or all that impassioned political argument adds up to nothing but a bunch of noise, playing out for what feels like an eternity and never adding up to anything.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1960

-Director-star John Wayne makes the tiresome, bullying epic The Alamo, which he then humiliates the Academy into nominating for a Best Picture Oscar
-MGM's The Last Voyage births the modern disaster picture
-Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho changes everything

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1960
-Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura also changes everything
-Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless changes everything that hadn't been changed yet
-Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid changes nothing, but it is one of the essential masterworks of South Korean cinema nonetheless

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1953: In which new technologies and ancient storytelling forms are uncertainly wed

The thing about the Bible epics of the 1950s is... I don't even know what the thing is, other than that they're one of the most curious, weird genres that ever existed, in no small part because of how aggressively they eschew being weird in any minute way, shape, or form. It's as square as any genre ever has been, which is of course the point: so square, so rigidly traditionalist and old-fashioned, that even in the better-made examples of the form, we seem to have pushed beyond mere aesthetic conservatism into something more akin to accidental primitivism, like the tradition of medieval religious plays had evolved separately into its own medium that just happened to function like the movies do. The stiff, declamatory dialogue and stiff, declamatory performances that serve as the bigot's idea of what these movies look like is based entirely on reality, and the effect isn't that of watching poor cinema, but of watching non-cinema.

Bible epics came in two flavors: Jewish stories and early Christian stories. The former are almost invariably better, having as they do more zesty narratives (issues of theology and faith aside, who can honestly deny that the Old Testament makes for more enjoyable reading than the New?), and they frequently subscribe to a trick as old as movies, in which filmmakers use Serious Intent ("we're making an adaptation of the Bible! It's faith-driven!") as a blind, while the usual spectacle and naughtiness are smuggled in ("Well, of course the Queen of Sheba has to be played by an internationally famous Italian sexpot, that just makes sense"). Movies about the travails of early Christians, though, are joyless trudges of glum-looking people glumly eschewing anything that might accidentally give them pleasure. When these films accidentally manage to be openly good for a scene or two it's almost exclusively because of the salacious, earthy, immoral Romans, who look more interesting, do more interesting things, and boast more layered performances - as for example in 1951's Quo Vadis, where Peter Ustinov's slimy Emperor Nero manages to be the single best thing in the entire subgenre.

The whole mess of Bible epics, on the whole, are so yawningly respectable, so brutally committed to a calculated non-aesthetic, so urgently denuded of humanity, they play at times - most times, in fact - like they were made by artists whose knowledge of Christianity began and ended with Jacobean Puritanism, with the assumption that this whole "audience of faith" thing consisted of people who only ever smiled or felt anything other than burning shame when they were considering the most arcane points of theology. They are the least fun things ever, really, no matter how much money was spent to make them as lavish in their pageantry as all the powers of Hollywood (and later, Italian) film studios could manage.

This combination of lavish production value and extreme sobriety gives the whole genre a peculiar dual identity that never manages to resolve itself, and oh, I should just start fucking talking about The Robe already. It is the essential Early Christian Times movie: not because it is best, nor the campiest, for it is far from being either. But it is, of all the ones I've seen, the most representative in almost every imaginable way. But that's not its chief point of historical interest, and if it was, I am sure that I wouldn't have caused myself to watch a second time in order to write this review. No, on top of everything else, The Robe was the very first movie released in 20th Century Fox's new format, CinemaScope, making it one of the key movies in the history of modern widescreen. It was not, bear in mind, the first film made in CinemaScope; that would be How to Marry a Millionaire, a light comedy that was finished well in advance of The Robe, but not premiered till November, 1953, nearly two months later. And for this we can likely credit studio president Spyros Skouras, for knowing that the way to best show off his new toy was with a grand historical epic full of giant sets and crowd scenes, and not a New York-set movie whose biggest innovation with the format was to find that you could use it to put three people in the frame at once.

We'll stow the technical discussion of CinemaScope, except to point out that in '53, its advantages were obvious: unlike Cinerama, which debuted the year prior, it required only converting a single projector, instead of Cinerama's three projectors and custom curved screen; unlike 3-D, it didn't require the viewer to wear glasses; unlike the more straightforward method of matting a film frame to a widescreen ratio (a technique introduced earlier in '53, with Paramount's Shane), it still added a sense of scale and depth to movies. That's a whole lot of gimmicks all coming out at one time, you might observe; the reason why, as has been acknowledged for years, was the dreaded television, a peculiar new device that people purchased and installed in their homes, allowing them to watch moving images in the distracted, overlit privacy of a room which they only shared with their family, or perhaps friends, instead of having the remarkable experience of sharing emotions and sensations with many other people in a shared moment of artistic transport.

Despite the seemingly obvious limitations of television compared to the cinema, it took an immediate and obvious bite out of the audience, one that has never reversed itself in more than six decades of filmmakers doing their god-damnedest to make one of a kind experiences that demand to be seen on the big screen. The film industry threw everything it could at movies to try and win those audiences back: hence the technological gimmicks, hence the opulence and spectacle of things like the Bible epics, providing a panoply of grandeur that you simply couldn't get at home, not in the '50s anyway.

So The Robe, anyway, was the vanguard of that movement: it is a movie that sums up everything the mainstream film industry was going through and trying to become in 1953 about as perfectly as any one film has ever summed up any one year, and accordingly, it was one of the year's most giant hits, behind only Disney's Peter Pan. Which is pretty impressive for something such an unendurable slog. I should mention that The Robe was actually filmed twice: on the same sets and with the same script, the entire movie was made both with the anamorphic lenses that created its characteristic 2.55:1 aspect ration, and with standard spherical lenses that produced a 1.37:1 print. These were not different versions of one movie; they were, effectively, two different movies, shot in tandem but not in the same order, with different blocking and different choices made by the actors. By virtually all accounts, the 1.37:1 incarnation of The Robe, the one more familiar to an audience that grew up with its Easter Sunday screenings in the '60s and '70s, is absolutely better: the acting is improved, the directing is tighter and clearer.

I believe it. The CinemaScope version of The Robe is a dog, about which the best thing I can say is that compared to other early anamorphic widescreen filmmakers, director Henry Koster and cinematographer Leon Shamroy only infrequently left conspicuous, hanging dead space in the humongous frame. Though it's still the case that most of the important action has a tendency to bunch up in a squarish window. As far as the acting goes, the 'Scope film - and I'll henceforth stop bothering to identify it as such, I've only ever seen this one and as long as it has the same script, I don't think historical curiosity will ever send me out to find the 1.37:1 version - boasts a lead performance from Richard Burton that is really and truly shockingly bad. I'm not the actor's biggest fan, but there's still a level of British stage-trained competence that's easy to expect from him. He's painfully wooden here, only coming alive in moments where he can shout things angrily, and even that he does without altering the pissy glare that he wears like a kind of shield. It wasn't a project that the recent import to the U.S. was terribly fond of, and in after years he would describe it as one of the worst things he'd worked on; but it's rare to see an actor telegraph their inner disgust with the movie they're making so openly. Frankly, at times he's working at such askew angles to anything that would serve the character and the drama that it's easy to suppose he was trying to ruin the film from within.

On the other hand, much of The Robe is the story of a man who deals with a situation he desperately hates by remaining constantly drunk. And viewed in that respect, Burton was the most perfect casting choice in the world.

Burton plays Marcellus Gallio, a Roman military tribune in the 30s who, on one of his strolls through the capital, bumps into the beautiful Diana (Jean Simmons), a childhood friend he has not seen for many years, since they play-acted at being in love. It's no longer play-acting now, though, but it also puts Marcellus on the wrong side of Caligula (Jay Robinson), Diana's unofficial fiancé, and also the adoptive grandson and regent of the reigning emperor, Tiberius (Ernest Thesiger). The potential for a conflict between the men doesn't take long to erupt: at a slave auction, reacting to a deliberate slight from Caligula, Marcellus angrily outbids his rival for a Greek slave named Demetrius (Victor Mature), in whom Caligula is far more openly interested than we ever see him being towards Diana. This is enough to send the regent into a fit, and he arranges for Marcellus to be transferred to the worst hole in the empire, a rebellious backwater east of the Mediterranean called Jerusalem. Through Diana's intervention, Marcellus doesn't remain very long; he's really only in the region long enough to help crucify a rabble-rousing Jewish prophet, and win the dying man's robe as he and some centurions play games of chance at the foot of the cross.

Up to this point, The Robe is a competent if not particularly enjoyable tour of Roman politics and backstabbing, brought down by its dismal acting: Burton is checked out, Robinson goes to some astonishingly tacky lengths to play Caligula as the gayest gay man that '50s moral codes would allow for, Simmons is as checked out as Burton, but only because she wasn't a terribly good actress, and there's none of the weird anger he has to compensate for it. Only Mature actually puts across any real depth of character and interesting motivations (he ends up entranced with the Christians from the moment Jesus enters Jerusalem), and when Victor Mature is giving the best performance in a movie, that movie has problems. And the film is likewise hampered by generally shabby costumes that look like they came from a high school production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, or would if that show had existed yet; the gulf between the costumes and the elaborate, wonderful sets is certainly striking, at any rate. And the sound mix - CinemaScope was also accompanied by some of the first stereophonic sound in the movies, you see - is all the hell over the place, with two people facing each other from a distance of three or four feet sounding like they recorded their lines several days and cities apart from each other.

So maybe not "competent" and not particularly enjoyable, but it gets the job across. Once Jesus's robe enters the picture, though, things just get absurd, with Marcellus finding himself going insane with guilt, and suffering apparently physical pain every time he touches the robe; when Demetrius steals it before the tribune returns to Rome, this sets us up for a very lengthy story arc in which Marcellus journeys the length and breadth of Palestine, encountering the new Christians and their leader, Simon Peter (Michael Rennie, who at least has the presence of mind to play Peter as a kind man, and not a saint-in-the-making), and eventually being converted to their religion, not through conviction that it is true and beautiful and moral - indeed, the more evidence he sees that Christianity is charitable and kind, the more it repels him - but because the robe essentially magics him into faith, during a scene where a bug-eyed, screaming Burton outright decides that he's going to play things in the campiest way possible, before camp was even a thing.

It's hard to actively hate anything as deeply earnest as The Robe, but it is a long, tough sit, with a 135-minute running time that's not even particularly notable by the genre's standards dragging itself out through scene after scene of Burton and Mature and Dean Jagger (as the leader of a local Christian community) and eventually Simmons intoning Philip Dunne and (uncredited blacklist victim) Albert Maltz's surface-level dialogue about religious philosophy. There's not even really a story behind this - something to do, vaguely, with the new Emperor Caligula punishing every Christian he can get his hands on, but that doesn't really drive much besides the final ten minutes - just depicting early Christians going about their business, which apparently involved doing virtually nothing else besides talking about being early Christians.

As dramatically inert as it is, at least it does manage to be fairly effective at spectacle. The costumes, I've said, kind of suck, but the sets are frequently amazing, and Koster has enough sense of the new format he's using to show them off in all their scope. The compositions are all functional, at best, but the simple act of looking at stuff is, by itself, enough to keep the movie afloat, visually. Because the stuff is awfully lovely.

Beyond that, there's a pretty fantastic score by Alfred Newman that basically wrote the book on how all future epics would be scored (and not just epics: John Williams pretty clearly had The Robe somewhere in the back of his mind when the time came to score the Indiana Jones pictures, at least), and combined with the generally extravagant visuals, that's enough to give us the sense that we're watching something Mighty and Impressive. Which, I suppose, it is - there's no question that this was a major production, Fox's big prestige release of '53, with all the seriousness of purpose and moral gravity that you could ever hope to stuff into a prestige picture. That it doesn't work is practically incidental.

Listless as it is, The Robe still impressed the hell out of people, kicking off a sequel built around Mature, Demetrius and the Gladiators, that was in production before the original was already released (as it was and ever shall be). That film is at least energetic enough to be fun, though it's still pretty lumbering, as all of these behemoths were lumbering. But profitable. Between grandiose historical epics, and the huge war movies and mega-musicals that succeeded them, Hollywood was quickly learning the economic appeal of throwing a lot of resources into huge productions that appealed above all on the level of spectacle; that spectacle would, over the next 15 years, grow more and more bloated and alien until the only thing that saved the industry was burning it down to the ground and starting fresh. It's not the last we'll be revisiting that story as we go along, but it sure is something to think about.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1953
-Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr have sexy surf sex in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity for Columbia
-Ward Kimball and Charles A. Nichols oversee the CinemaScope short Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the most aesthetically audacious thing ever made at the Disney studios to that point
-Warner Bros. introduces the world to giant monsters from the ocean depths, and the peerless work of effects wizard Ray Harryhausen, with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1953
-Ozu Yasujiro creates the greatest depiction of family dynamics ever put to film, Tokyo Story
-Henri-Georges Clouzot's Franco-Italian The Wages of Fear raises the bar for all thrillers ever since
-Luis García Berlanga, and Spanish cinema generally, explode into international prominence with ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1948: In which post-war existence is the subject of much concern and soul-wearyness

The caveat first: throughout this Hollywood Century project, I've been using a definition of "Hollywood' that limits us to films produced solely on money contributed by Los Angeles-based movie sturdios, or by independents working in the shadow of Hollywood. I'm now making a big exception for the first time, to accommodate 1948's The Search, a co-production between MGM (the most Hollywoodish of all Hollywood companies), and Praesens-Film of Zurich. A Swiss-American co-production shot mostly in Germany might be a dubious inclusion at best in a series like this, but I think it's justified on the grounds of what the film represents in a broader sense: how the American film industry sought to cope with the much smaller globe that had come out on the back side of World War II, and America's position as a newly-minted political and military leader, with a population of citizens who had in the recent past been unflaggingly isolationist (not to mention that, as time wore on, it became ever more clear that those citizens were much happier thinking about U.S. power and influence than in giving a damn about the people who lived in all those other countries for whom the U.S. claimed to be a leader).

It's one of the earliest attempts by any American film production company to work alongside a foreign studio, to take part in the great flowering of international cinema that was beginning to make itself felt in the post-war years, and to present to American audiences perspectives and stories that are explicitly European - not the Europeans who'd come to the States and absorbed themselves into the national culture there, retaining just enough of their native personalities for future film scholars to have fun teasing out the French and German and Hungarian and other influences on the films they made in a full naturalised idiom; the Europeans who'd stayed, to continue developing the cinema of Europe. And this consciousness of America's and American film's position within the world at large is reflected in the story of The Search itself, which is all about how the torn-apart slurry of Europe had to be redeemed by an international effort, with Americans throwing in with many other countries to under the damage of seven years of brutal fighting.

It is, in short, a film that finds the most lavish, indulgent company in Hollywood seeking for meaning somewhere in the ruins of the post-war world; Hollywood humbling itself in order to explore the role that America and Hollywood might play as time went by. And indeed, European-U.S. collaborations would become a great deal more common in the years to come, though typically in the form of U.S. film crews touristing their way through the photogenic places that continent made available, rather than following The Search and financing a predominantly native production looking to fuse the styles and impulses of American and continental movies.

For this is exactly what happens in The Search, from a script largely by Swiss writers Richard Schweizer and David Wechsler, with a largely Swiss crew, but with direction by Fred Zinnemann, who'd been in Hollywood for a decade at that point and was about to explode in prominence in the '50s. Though of Viennese extraction, Zinnemann was a fully assimilated filmmaker even by '48; while The Search possesses nowhere near volume of the sinewy, masculine sentimentality that marks virtually all of Zinnemann's prominent later films (including High Noon, From Here to Eternity, The Day of the Jackal, and the misbegotten film version of the musical Oklahoma!), it prefigures his impulse for giving the audience what we want, telegraphing emotional arcs maybe a little too bluntly and making it too clear that we are going to Feel Feelings. But it also prefigures the best of Zinnemann's visual sensibility; his keen sense of where to end the frame and how much distance at any moment to keep between the viewer and the character. And it showcases a skill with young actors exercised nowhere else in the director's career, but that puts us back on the European side of the equation; films about kids being generally a lot more important (and better) on the east side of the Atlantic than on the west.

The kid in question is Czechoslovakian Karel Malik (Ivan Jandl), who was separated from his family at Auschwitz, and was, as a result, thrown into a state of shock, able to remember nothing about himself including his name (we only know his identity thanks to a flashback). At the film's opening, he's one of many unaccompanied children dumped into the lap of Mrs. Murray (Aline MacMahon), a worker at a Germany UNRRA facilty - United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration - with some dim hope that at least some of them might be sorted into the right pile to be reconnected whatever survivors might be looking for them. The children, not understanding English, are terrified to be shuttled around one more large bureaucratic compound by people speaking in clipped, official tones, and the American workers aren't equipped to convince them that things are better now; eventually, Karel flees across country, picking his way through the ruins of Germany and eventually ending up in the company of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recruit "Steve" Stevenson (Montgomery Clift), who takes a shine to the boy, christens him "Jim", and starts to teach him English. While this is going on, Karel's mother (Jarmila Novotná) floats from one UNRRA site to another, never finding a trace of her boy, slowly giving up hope, till chance throws her into the arms of Murray, who encourages her to process her grief (Murrary inaccurately thinks she has proof that Karel died) by working to help the children who still remain displaced and hopeless.

The Search is trying to serve three masters: it wants to be documentary, tragedy, and crowd-pleaser all at once. It wishes to depict the fallen-down state of Europe and demonstrate the way that Americans could contribute to its resurrection; and it wants to do this through the story of a psychologically broken little boy suffering, until he very abruptly isn't thanks to his new buddy Steve. That it manages to do all of this is something of a minor miracle, and it would be unthinkable without Jandl in the central role of Karel. It is one of the great child performances in film, simply put: in a role upon which every other aspect of the film is based (Clift ended up jumping into stardom off the back of his performance here, but he'd be nothing without Jandl as the prism through which we see him), to a degree that the film wouldn't merely be ineffective, but completely dysfunctional without him, Jandl navigates the turn from his empty-eyed soullessness in the beginning to the cheery, but occasionally haunted way he plays things later on, without ever letting it seem too fast or too unmotivated - a critical triumph, since the screenplay hustles us through that transition awfully quickly and arbitrarily.

I suppose credit should get spread around a little: Clift in particular is absolutely fantastic, solid and happily free of the neurosis that would be his calling card as an actor in almost all of his other performances (and let's not mince words: I adore Clift and think he was one of the best, maybe the best young American actor of the '50s; but this role called upon a vastly different skill set than all his later triumphs, and it's too easy to read backwards and be amazed by how bright and pleasant and warm he is here). Most importantly, he makes the relationship between man and boy seem sweet and mutually necessary, selling what is ultimately a kind of dubious writerly conceit (I gather than the '40s were a different time, but how many twentysomething men do you know that would jump at the chance to be a surrogate father to a foundling?) so well that it never even seems to come up that we might question it.

But it's Jandl's film, with Zinnemann always gravely privileging his perspective, even when we already know more than he does; the young actor gets more than his share of close-ups and there are many angled shots that stress his smallness and inability to do much to protect himself in this damaged, dangerous world. Staging all the visuals of Germany in decay through the eyes and mind of a confused boy without a past was a masterstroke for all concerned; it underscores the total inscrutability and horror of the environment in a way that only a guileless protagonist could appreciate, divorced from any knowledge of how things got that way, only appalled that they did (this is not a movie that leaves much of an opening for any late-'40s viewer to silently grouse that the Germans got what they deserved, after all; the Germans are nowhere to be seen in The Search, only collateral damage perpetrated by both the Axis and the Allies). Zinnemann and cinematographer Emil Berna do fantastic work of capturing the physical spaces of the ruined cities and situating Jandl within those spaces to seem especially helpless and terrified; it's a stark contrast with the studio-bound interiors, which are more comforting and closer and lit much softer.

For ultimately, The Search isn't a desperately depressing movie (its most American touch): it is a hopeful one, in which good people doing there best can make things better and more comfortable for the displaced persons unable to fight for themselves. It's not propaganda, really, but it fixedly presents only the tenderest kind of behavior from the American saviors it scatters throughout the adventure, even those whose tenderness is completely misunderstood by Karel. In one moment, Karel is learning English words, and is convinced that the word for "deer" is "Bambi" - a sweet but also surprisingly clever and insightful example of how American pop culture presents itself to the world as harmless, light, loving fun. And that's what The Search wants to be as well: a depiction of America that says to Americans "this is who we can be, true do-gooders in a world badly in need of good", and says to world at large, "we want to help; let us do it", and in both cases acknowledging that it's a matter of hard work and will to actually serve as a protector and world leader, not a right. As themes built around American exceptionalism go, they really don't get any more sincere and humble than that, and constructed on top of such a sensitive, haunting character study, The Search proves to be humane and earnest without sacrificing a certain hardness and grim realism that keeps it from ever being sentimental or idiotically gooey. Two-thirds of a century after the moment it was addressing has passed, it's still a rich, rewarding movie of a sort that they don't make any more, because they never really did in the the first place.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1948
-Bud Abbott and Lou Costello only meet Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man in Universal's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
-The independent docudrama/noir hybrid He Walked by Night helps to invent the police procedural as we now think of it
-Orson Welles makes Macbeth with Republic, his last American film before a decade of artistic exile in Europe

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1948
-Italian neorealism explodes into an international significance with Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves
-Release the year before the Communist revolution buried it for nearly a half-decade, Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town is one of the most highly regarded Chinese films ever made
-Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes is the British duo's masterpiece and among the most indescribably beautiful films in the history of Technicolor

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

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

-Tom Lehrer, "National Brotherhood Week"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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