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Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

review | Vicky Cristina Barcelona

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Diving into late-period Woody Allen is always a gamble but this lively Johansson/Bardem/Cruz vehicle remains a pretty sure bet

by Michael Gaughn
September 26, 2022

It’s not exactly news that the quality of Woody Allen’s work became incredibly uneven once he emerged from his succession of mid-period classics like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. For every Purple Rose of Cairo or Zelig there was a Shadows and Fog; for every Husbands and Wives, an Alice. And it only got more erratic as time went on, having to slog through films like Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, and Whatever Works to be able to pluck a Blue Jasmine from the heap.

Not having seen Vicky Cristina Barcelona in a while and not sure what my impression was of it at the time, I was surprised by how strong it is—much more so than expected. More uneven than it needs to be, it’s still consistently engaging. It’s probably Allen’s loosest, most fluid and energetic film. And it still serves as viewer bait for Scarlett Johansson fans, dating from the era when she was allowed to do legitimate roles, before she succumbed to just being a prepackaged marketing commodity.

VCB is Allen’s second-best late-period work after Blue Jasmine. (This will seem incredible to some but I’d put Café Society at No. 3.) Allen was so confident in his skill as a filmmaker by this point that he could just resonate with his material, knowing he’d find some deft and distinctive way to express it. Even at the early peak of his powers he was utterly incapable of making a film like this one, which makes his mid-period triumphs feel constipated by comparison. (To be fair, though, films like Vicky Cristina and Blue Jasmine just don’t have the repeat appeal of those earlier efforts.)

Allen takes a novelistic—or at least short-storyish—approach to the film—something he’s also done in movies like Manhattan and Café Society. But with Vicky Cristina he was so sure of himself that he could be far more improvisational without fear it would unravel in the editing, taking the literary and playing it off the cinematic and somehow getting them to coexist without having it feel like a forced marriage.

The dabs and strokes and feints of the opening, where he sets the action in motion by making a series of suggestions—snatches of dialogue, telling images, evocative sounds, avoiding traditional linearity because he knows films always move forward so a story will arise no matter what—is bravura but completely on point and without being showy. As the film proceeds and Allen further plays around with these ideas, it’s as if the cinematic knows the literary is just there to lay the foundation for moments that are purely about an image, a movement, a sound, a dissolve, a cut, sometimes highlighting just one element, sometimes mixing and matching the emphases. The point, I suspect, is to keep any one character from being dominant and instead keep the focus on the shifting relationships between the characters and on the tentativeness of fleeting emotions.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is what Sweet and Lowdown should have been but Allen hadn’t yet broken far enough free of his mid-period technique to pull something like that off. It’s a serious mistake—one often committed—to try to attribute what’s best about Allen’s work to his cinematographer of the moment—here, Javier Aguirresarobe, whose images are undeniably both striking and restrained without indulging in romantic clichés—in other words, apt. Instead of taking the obvious approach, VCB makes place—the location, the geographic-cum-cultural-cum-psychological locus—the spring of the romance, and the mise en scène and montage are just extensions—expressions—of it. No further emphasis is needed.

But this all arose from the efforts of both Allen and Aguirresarobe, not because Allen gave his DP free rein. Yes, he’s worked with masters like Willis, DiPalma, Nykvist, and (unfortunately) Storaro, but you’d have to be blind not to see that, no matter how strong the cinematographer’s style or big his personality, Allen has always been able to put it in the service of his material and that there’s a consistent look and feel to his movies no matter who’s manning the camera.

The material here is so fertile that it’s not seriously hampered by the mixed bag of the acting. Strongest is Javier Bardem. I’ve never been a fan, but Allen gives him a lot of room to run with his character, and Bardem takes advantage of every inch of it. Rebecca Hall’s mannered kvetching, and resemblance to a Modigliani, can get annoying, especially early on, but isn’t a dealbreaker and actually helps bolster the film’s payoff. Penelope Cruz comes across as a tad overwrought, sometimes hitting the mark, often flailing to define her character. Johansson is more a presence than an actor, of course, a walking encyclopedia of knowing looks who knows how to smolder her way through a scene but rarely helps to elevate the ensemble.

But, again, VCB is less about individuals than the treacherously unstable ground of relationships, territory Allen captures incisively, and with surprisingly little sentiment. He doesn’t get enough credit for being the first American filmmaker to figure out how to show sex on screen in a natural, convincing, non-gratuitous way. His renderings of carnal encounters are so effortless we don’t realize how brilliant they are, even with more than a century of awkward, overweening, giggly, grotesque counterexamples to draw on.

Because of the whole evanescence of emotion thing, this film really didn’t need a traditional plot, and things get messy and awkward whenever one decides to rear its head. Needing something resembling an ending, Allen introduces some small-arms fire into the proceedings—but he’s always sucked at gunplay. The shotgun dispatching of Johansson in Match Point is one of the most inept, implausible, and unconvincing murders in all of cinema. Here, Cruz firing off rounds in the general direction of Bardem and Hall is a huge false note, a contrivance that sticks out as egregiously as it does because so much of what precedes it is so well done. Somehow, this misstep doesn’t damage the overall impact of the film, partly because Allen redeems himself a few moments later with a lingering silent closeup of Hall who—again, subtly—looks convincingly like a changed person.

I can’t abide lazy, unimaginative reviewers who write the same review over and over, just plugging in some new nouns each time (without varying the adjectives) as if every movie is just like every other and reviewing them is a robotic form of Mad Libs. That said, there’s not a lot new to say about Amazon’s presentation of relatively recent films, which tends to range from acceptable to occasionally extraordinary. This one falls somewhere in the middle, not harming Aguirresarobe’s work but not fully honoring it either. That will take a 4K transfer—but because this is an Allen film and there’s no justice in this world, I’m not holding my breath.

The warmth of almost every frame is almost there. The subtly muted tones—a look digital has yet to achieve—are pleasing but not as beguiling as they should be. On the other hand, the soft-focus tracking shot of massive sparklers going off in front of a church—the kind of thing streaming consistently bungled just a couple of years ago—is surprisingly solid and clean.

The phrase “a Woody Allen movie for people who don’t like Woody Allen movies” has always made me cringe—for a lot of reasons, but mainly because the two films most often mentioned in association with it—Midnight in Paris and Match Point—are among his worst. I guess it could be applied fruitfully, though, to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which definitely stands on its own. But to not have the context of the best of the rest of Allen’s body of work and to not know how it both syncs up with and veers away from all that is to be deprived of one of the richest parts of the experience.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Not quite capturing the film’s overall warmth or subtly muted tones, Amazon’s presentation doesn’t harm Javier Aguirresarobe’s work but doesn’t fully honor it either

SOUND | It’s a Woody Allen movie, for chrissakes. You can clearly hear people talking and the music cues sound fine—in stereo.

What Have You Done with His Movie?

What Have You Done With His Movie?

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Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Brazil was hugely influential at the time of its release, changing movies forever, but nobody talks about it anymore. Why?

by Michael Gaughn
September 19, 2022

I approached revisiting Brazil with extreme trepidation. About a year ago, wanting to write something about my admiration for Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, I was horrified to find that it hasn’t held up at all, that it’s just an exercise in stylistic indulgence, as dull and thin and lifeless as tissue paper, and that the studio was right to be furious with Gilliam for pissing all its money away.

Certain things immediately set Brazil apart, though—all related to its reputation and influence and not the film itself but that still lend it some stature. It was the movie, thanks to Gilliam’s long and bloody battle with Universal, that established the modern conception of the director’s cut. And, thanks to the exhaustive and gorgeously presented Criterion boxed-set laserdisc edition, it set the standard for home video releases going forward, laying the groundwork for DVDs and Blu-rays, with their alternate cuts, extensive bonus features, and so on.

But all of that is obviously secondary to reapproaching Brazil as a movie. Adding to my concern was that, while all kinds of films from the mid ’80s are being buffed, repackaged, and remade because they appealed on a preconscious level to the uncritical child and teen audiences of the time, Brazil has faded from view. It didn’t make sense that something that had once had a seismic influence on moviemaking didn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar anymore.

Having now watched it again, I can affirm that it remains a masterpiece—a flawed one, more deeply so than most films of its rank, but still something that stands many tiers above almost anything else that was made during that mostly dismal decade. The irony is that it appears to be the things that make it great—specifically its very deliberate and trenchant reaction to the carefully calibrated vacuousness of popcorn cinema—that have led to its repression. But I’ll get to that.

Brazil is so labyrinthine and rich it’s hard to zero in on a best point of entry. It could be its style—so influential its presence can be felt in almost every movie made since, even if the filmmakers have no idea where that influence came from—but I think the best place to begin, oddly, is with Tom Stoppard’s screenplay. Gilliam and Charles McKeown get a screen credit for it too, but given that they’re the ones who made an unholy mess of Munchausen you have to assume Stoppard had something—or everything—to do with Brazil holding together as well as it does. (Sorry to be quoting Thoreau for the zillionth time, but there is something in his maxim that there’s no reason you can’t have your dream castle as long as you build a foundation beneath it as well.)

The casting is flawless—with one exception that comes dangerously close to sinking the whole enterprise. I didn’t fully appreciate until now how extraordinary Johnathan Pryce’s performance is, even when he’s doing material for Gilliam he doesn’t seem to be fully on board with. Pryce immediately establishes the contrast between the real and fantasy Sam through his presence alone, and he fully embodies both, even to the slightest details of their gestures.

Ian Holm’s Kurtzmann is similarly pitch perfect, as is Jim Broadbent as the obsequious plastic surgeon. (The precision of British acting can often feel affected but when it’s in a groove with the material, like here, it can be pure pleasure to experience.) De Niro is in full Rupert Pupkin mode, right down to the mustache, obviously enjoying not having to play De Niro for a change—and it’s sad that this was probably the last time he was able to get away with that.

Sheila Reid’s Mrs. Buttle is stunning—I never realized just how good until this time around. Everything pivots on the scene where Pryce brings her the refund check for her husband. If Gilliam hadn’t risen to the potential of the material here, if he had played it too light, the entire film would have foundered. But it remains powerful—with a lot of the credit going to Reid for bringing a tremendous depth and breadth of emotion to the character, the scene, and the movie, every ounce of which is needed to counter the more arch and glib material elsewhere.

(And any movie that includes a cameo by Raymond Chandler’s Orange Queen—“‘It’s the wall,’ she said. ‘It talks. The voices of the dead men who have passed through on the way to hell.’”—can’t be all bad.)

The one massive mistake is Kim Greist as the object of Lowry’s obsession. What was Gilliam thinking? She clearly isn’t comfortable with anything about the role, making her scenes just unpleasant to watch. The only explanation that makes sense is that she’s part of his savaging of the giggly adolescent conventions put in place by movie brats like Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis, and Ridley Scott, who clearly weren’t comfortable with women (and still aren’t) and instead leaned on tomboys for the traditional female roles. But you can get all that and still feel like Greist doesn’t belong in this film at all.

There’s so much to savor here, though, that you can even look past a bungled female lead. The intricacy of the staging is dazzling, with Gilliam exhibiting masterful control, never letting it become gratuitous or indulgent. And the fantasy sequences, surprisingly, still work—mainly because they’re actually about character and story and theme and not just an excuse to goose the audience awake every 15 minutes with some artificially generated excitement.

There are a few moments where Gilliam gets overly ambitious—which in itself isn’t a bad thing but does lead to some sloppiness in the execution. And he hits some rough spots at around the two-thirds point—like most movies do, usually because the director has come up with amazingly fertile and provocative base material but, not fully realizing its implications, begins to let it get away from him. Gilliam doesn’t completely lose control but his grip on the film, which was iron tight until that point, does start to weaken. And although the ending remains powerful, it becomes so inchoate that it veers damn close to becoming the kind of sound and fury cinema he was trying to skewer—partly because he severs the bond between plausible cause and effect too soon, seriously diluting the impact of Sam’s descent into madness.

But let’s get to why Brazil has come to be shunned like a black-sheep uncle. Almost all dystopian films undercut themselves by fetishizing technology, which results in conveying the idea of, “Well, yeah, people suck, but aren’t their machines wonderful?” which in turn ends up feeding the whole capitalist/positivist impulse dystopian fiction is putatively meant to counter. In other words, by misplacing the emphasis, it ultimately gets us to take comfort in our own annihilation.

But Gilliam, very much like Godard in Alphaville, deliberately downplays the tech—here, making it decidedly analog and archaic—so Brazil doesn’t slip into the superficially dystopian but actually boosterish technocratic hoohah most sci-fi films embrace. Both he and Godard wanted to keep their movies about people, not their things—even if those things are meant to replace them.

Brazil has been swept under the rug because we now stand on the other side of our utter capitulation to both technology and bureaucracy. Having abdicated individual responsibility and placed our faith in a world of invisible hands, we would rather get lost in fantasy than be reminded that it doesn’t have to be this way, that there were and are alternatives. We’ve come to see not just controlling but defining bureaucracy as inevitable and rationalize its dominance through our indulgence in franchises, in all their various forms.

And we’ve completely bought into one of Gilliam’s sharpest barbs—that if you tell somebody convincingly enough that crap is caviar, they’ll accept it blindly and devour it with zeal. If we didn’t passively embrace that core tenet, our franchise-driven society would quickly shrivel up and die.

Most importantly, though, Brazil is about the death of romanticism and the limits and costs of fantasy, with how getting swept up in fantasy worlds is a far from free ride—something Woody Allen was examining, just as incisively, at that same moment in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Both Gilliam and Allen must have felt the same tremor because it was right after that the massive eruption of fantasy occurred that has since engulfed cinema, thriving on the beyond dangerous notion that this is all somehow healthy and benign.

Simply put, we’ve so completely become Gilliam’s creatures—and worse—that we don’t want to be reminded of how far we’ve fallen. Having come to believe it’s OK to exist suspended in a perpetual adolescence in a world of perpetual play, we want to purge anything that would suggest it could be any other way. Which is why watching Brazil is a better investment of your time than any movie released in the past 40 years.

Brazil on Prime

That Brazil wasn’t one of the first titles out when 4K became available shows just how irrational the release patterns have been. That we’re now this far into the format without a release is an even stronger indictment. While Brazil deserves to be seen in 4K, I’m not so sure HDR is the best way to go. Being such a brash, stylistically extravagant film, it would take a very deft touch to bring anything meaningful to its look. Go too far and it would become all artificial highlights, whereas a constant murk is essential to its effect, or it could become cartoonish, in the pejorative sense.

In HD on Amazon Prime, it ranges from acceptable to surprisingly vivid—which is to say that it gives you an accurate sense of the brilliance of Roger Pratt’s groundbreaking cinematography but all feels just a tad flat. I suspect, without having any way of knowing, that a new transfer in 4K that hews as closely to the original material as possible without wandering into the netherworld of restoration would be a significant step up.

The stereo mix—apparently the original—is unexpectedly engaging, even exhilarating. I hadn’t realized how much Gilliam leaned on sound to compensate for his insufficient budget, drawing deeply on his animation background—how he used sound to significantly up the impact of the primitive cutouts in his Python vignettes—to make his visuals work.

Not a big fan of Michael Kamen, I’ve always liked his score here. It’s all basically just one big Mahler pastiche but it works because it underlines both the grandiosity of Sam’s fantasies and desires and the key theme of romanticism’s demise.

Thankfully, no one’s gotten around to enhancing the titles, which look, as they should, like type on film not a cold, distracting digital reinterpretation of the originals.

—M.G.

Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Why This Isn’t a Review

I ultimately decided to not review this release of Strangelove because 4K HDR takes away as much as it brings to the experience, so while there’s no great harm in watching it that way, there’s no real benefit either.

One of the biggest problems is one common to many 4K upgrades of older films. Nobody has figured out how to accurately translate backdrops and matte paintings that looked convincing when run through a projector and shown on a big screen. Here, the opening painting of Burpleson Air Force Base and the later one of the Pentagon are so obvious that they pull you out of the film. Similarly, the model shots of the B-52, which were only borderline successful on film, look too clean and sterile and model-y now.

While someone could argue that the HDR increases the impact of the nuclear bomb blasts, I would have to counter that this isn’t an action or war film and that, since Kubrick relied on archival footage rather than effects shots, that’s not what he was after. Pumping the shots up that way is akin to adding cannon blasts to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—which I’m sure has been done, but not by anybody who deserved to live afterward. A more accurate example might be someone deciding to improve the impact of the Scherzo in the Ninth by doubling all the orchestral lines with synthesizers. I suspect that would make the work more compelling for those listeners with duller nerve endings but it would be an egregious violation of Beethoven’s original intent and a travesty of his work. Sure, anyone’s free to reinterpret Beethoven—or Bach or Stravinsky or Mahler—but don’t pretend you’re presenting the original work. Leaning too heavily on HDR is like deciding the original compositions need an injection of testosterone.

And then there’s the kerfuffle over the aspect ratios. The best I can determine, Kubrick decided it would enhance the home video release of Strangelove by showing the frame ratios of the original footage, alternating between various ratios for the War Room, the Burpleson interiors, the bomber interior, and the documentary footage of the attack on Burpleson. Yes, this was him allowing for the Academy ratio of pre-HDTV home video and, yes, his similar tack with the release of The Shining was a disaster. But the point is that, with Strangelove, it worked, and I don’t get why this current release reverts back to 1:66:1.

But, again, this isn’t a review. It’s just an explanation of why I didn’t want to do a review.

—M.G.

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Who Killed Film Noir?

Strangelove is considered a classic comedy and an unequaled satire, but a recent re-viewing revealed that comedy and satire might not have been Kubrick’s ultimate aim here

by Michael Gaughn
December 25, 2020

I wasn’t going to review the latest release of Dr. Strangelove. After having basked in the 4K HDR editions of 2001 and The Shining, it didn’t feel right to underline that this newest upgrade isn’t all it could or should be. Reviews of older films should focus on the ones worth watching, not the ones to avoid. But, on a whim, I watched Strangelove again a few nights ago and experienced it in ways I never have before, and ultimately decided that, transfer quality be damned, it’s well worth encouraging others to go check it out.

Keep in mind, before we dive into this, that I’ve seen this movie countless times. I’ve studied various drafts of the screenplay and pored over every relevant comment from the cast and crew. I’ve even watched an archive print on a Moviola at the Library of Congress. But this last time around, the film, for whatever reason, revealed things that had always been hidden to me before.

The biggest revelation—and what will be the crux of my comments here—is that Strangelove is only superficially a comedy. At its heart, it’s a film noir—and, at the end of the day, might even represent the pinnacle of that genre.

For that conclusion to make sense, you have to be willing to roll with my definition of noir in “Who Killed Film Noir?”—that the crime element is just a pretext and that these movies are instead always about chumps—more specifically, male chumps—guys who think they know the score only to find they really don’t have a clue, only to then have everyone and everything conspire against them, usually with fatal results. If you accept that definition, then noir fits Strangelove as snugly as the mad doctor’s Rotwang glove.

Yes, the film is heavy on noir atmospherics—dark recesses, menacing shadows, closeups that make it look like the subject is being interrogated under hot lights, etc.—but dwelling on that kind of misses the point, because Strangelove pulls just as many stylistic elements from crime dramas, war films, horror films, psychological thrillers, documentaries, and newsreels. The one genre it doesn’t look anything like is comedy, and that is central to what I’m positing here.

Strangelove is really comedy by other means. Its laughs—which are many and legitimate—spring almost solely from the extreme gruesomeness of the situation, from a kind of squeamishness and disbelief that ultimately reinforces the dominance of the Death Drive over the Pleasure Principle, and that people will blindly follow through on the inherent logic of their institutions and devices—all the while believing they’re exercising intelligence and will—even if it will result in their own annihilation.

This movie is satire first and comedy second. And it’s stunning, on reflection, what a serious film it is, that it trumps all of the more sophomoric stuff that considers itself satire by diving down deep into the same disturbing roots and unblinking take on humanity that motivated Swift. This is satire with some real meat, with more than a little gristle, on its bones—definitely not for the SNL crowd.

It’s also stunning to realize what a leap it is beyond the mess of Lolita. You can sense Kubrick trying to recover his creative integrity after the rout of his previous film, where the material, the censors, and, most importantly, the narrative tradition all got the better of him. Knowing that the story is always the least interesting thing about a movie and something filmmakers tend to lean on as a crutch, he had tried to subvert the conventions by notoriously moving Humbert’s murder of Quilty to the beginning of the film—a huge miscalculation that only served to deflate the whole enterprise. He was way bolder with Strangelove, exposing the sheer contrivance of narrative by taking a clockwork-type suspense plot and twisting it around to serve ends no one would have thought it could ever possibly serve, and along the way exposing storytelling for what it mainly is: A manipulative mechanical device for efficiently getting you from Point A to Point Z, which in this case is the end of the world.

With Strangelove, Kubrick hit on the formula that would serve him well for the rest of his career of mimicking just enough genre conventions to entice and enthrall the groundlings and ensure the studio’s ROI, while having the movies actually function at levels that ultimately made hash of their seeming reasons to be. So Strangelove has just enough silly comedy and thriller elements to keep the masses in their seats but continuously moves up a creative chain, subsuming the more rudimentary elements along the way, until it ultimately arrives at noir—but noir in a way no one had ever seen it before.

To put it another way: Having been too conservative with Lolita, Kubrick decided to completely trust his gut with Strangelove, and his gut told him to make a suspense thriller that was, incongruously, a comedy, but was actually, ultimately, a film noir. But that’s not the genius part. The genius part is that he made all three dovetail so seamlessly that the transitions from the cheap seats on up don’t feel so much perverse as inevitable.

Watch Strangelove through the lens of noir—noir stripped of most of its genre clichés in order to expose its white-hot core—and it becomes a different, much more nuanced and brilliant film. Noir wasn’t new to Kubrick. Killer’s Kiss and The Killing are both overt takes on the genre, the latter unapologetically feeding from John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. (Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre was another Kubrick favorite.)

But there’s another dimension to this that also deepens the experience of the film and that hadn’t been obvious to me until this most recent viewing, when I realized how heavily Kubrick tapped into his photo-journalistic beginnings. Fresh out of high school, he had been the youngest staff photographer ever at Look magazine, and it was his experiences there that supplied the subject matter for his early documentary shorts and for Killer’s Kiss, which look like photo essays come to life.

He returns to those formative experiences and that style in Strangelove, with much of the film resembling his magazine work, most obviously in the faux documentary attack on Burpleson Air Force Base, but far more subtly and strikingly in the War Room. He went there mainly to underline that no matter how surreal, irrational, and immature a lot of the behaviors and actions are in the film, they have very real consequences.

(But there are more layers to it than that, because Kubrick hired the controversial tabloid photographer Weegee—whose body of work essentially transformed sordid reality into noir—as his on-set photographer. That led to Peter Sellers, fascinated by Weegee’s edgy hardboiled patois, using his voice as the inspiration for Strangelove.

(And to complete my digression, It should be mentioned that Kubrick got to know fashion-turned-art photographer Diane Arbus well during his Look years, and later referenced her work explicitly in The Shining—which raises the point that his films are far more autobiographical and personal than the cliché take on him as cold, detached, clinical would allow.)

Rather than give a complete recitation of all the ways noir permeates and defines the film, I’ll just highlight a couple of key moments and you can work backward from there. Just before Sterling Hayden’s General Ripper trudges off to the bathroom to commit suicide, Kubrick holds on an uncomfortably close shot of his face, rimmed so tightly with shadows that it already resembles a death mask. As Sellers’ Group Captain Mandrake sits next to Ripper, prattling on about the recall code, Kubrick just stays on the general. And although there are no obvious changes in Ripper’s expression, you can tell he’s realizing the full enormity of what he’s done right before disappearing completely into madness. But this is done with amazing restraint, with Kubrick resisting the temptation to go to the kind of crazy stare he would later cultivate with Jack in The Shining and Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. You just sense the descent happening—almost imperceptibly, but undeniably. It might be the ultimate film noir moment.

This shot could have been Hayden as Johnny Clay in The Killing or as Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle—it wouldn’t have looked out of place cut into either of those films. And Kubrick uses that commonality to create a through-line that traverses all of noir, pointing inevitably to Strangelove as its culmination.

Comedies usually rely on master shots instead of closeups, but Kubrick comes in similarly close on Strangelove to emphasize how much he’s caught up in, and boxed in by, his own calculations and obsessions, his own form of culturally sanctioned insanity. You’re placed just inches from a madman, and it’s as frightening as it is funny.

The most outrageous noir before Strangelove was Robert Aldrich’s beyond cheeky Kiss Me Deadly, which took the hugely popular Mike Hammer character and exposed him for the clueless goon he was. This isn’t the place to go into it, but Strangelove seems to riff on Deadly, seems to devour and digest and regurgitate it, taking the cocksure bumbling of an L.A. detective and projecting it onto the whole world, making chumps of us all.

Watching Strangelove today is hardly just an exercise in either nostalgia or film appreciation, something only tangentially relevant to our present. The basics of human nature haven’t changed since 1964—if anything, the blind, primal aspects have only become emboldened as the machines have taken over and we’ve become free to play. It’s not like the methods of the West have changed all that much either—except that they’ve been so successfully exploited that a YouTube video from Melbourne looks identical to a YouTube video from Bhopal looks identical to one from Des Moines. And it’s not like the world doesn’t continue to bristle with nuclear arms. And it’s not like it’s become impossible for a madman to ascend to the highest levels of power.

Noir is who we are when we have the guts to face ourselves squarely in the mirror. And it says a lot that it’s been more than five decades since the last time any one’s bothered to take a good look.

Where in Hell is Major Kong?

Another thing that jumped out at me watching Strangelove this time around was the missile attack on the B-52, which is for the most part an extremely believable documentary-style scene (especially for 1964) with nothing remotely funny about it. Of course, I’ve noticed this scene before—it’s so compelling it’s hard to ignore—but I realized this time how unique it is, since the list of comedies that can afford to go full-bore dramatic for this amount of screen time without losing their momentum or completely throwing the audience is so short it probably doesn’t exist. One of Kubrick’s most brilliant set pieces, it convincingly places you inside the plane with the crew as they fight for their lives, so you identify with their efforts and then root for them to complete their mission—which has to create extremely conflicted emotions in all but the most jaded. The crew’s ability to overcome is the thing seals the fate of the world. The scene is also worth savoring for the way its chaotic handheld camera goes from documentary to abstract, turning it into a mini art film. Most movie scenes are too stage-bound or veer too close to radio—even today. This one is pure cinema.

—M.G.

Dix Handley

Who Killed Film Noir?

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The most powerful, nuanced, and incisive film genre America has ever created has been hounded into an early grave

by Michael Gaughn
November 27, 2020

From the World Monitor, November 23, 2020:

Film Noir, 76, died this past Saturday writhing on a traffic median in Bel Air, California, his final throes noted with amusement by motorists passing by. No one came to Mr. Noir’s aid, although a couple of prominent film directors did stop long enough to pick his pockets clean. At the same time, on the opposite coast, Mr. Noir could be seen lying on a sidewalk, bleeding profusely, outside a warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He died surrounded by a crowd of people in their mid twenties to mid thirties. Oddly, all of them were dressed identically to the victim, and while they all bore large knives, none showed any evidence of blood. Again, not a single onlooker came to Mr. Noir’s assistance, although each member of the throng did take a little slice of him with them after he expired.

Film noir is dead. We, in our addiction to re-iteration and our blind political zeal, have managed to kill off what was probably the greatest—or at least arguably the most influential—American art form. But, before getting into all that, let me first define my terms.

Let’s start with what film noir isn’t. While many people confuse crime movies with noir, very few fit under that umbrella. In fact, most crime films, as exuberant celebrations of unbridled strength and will, are the antithesis of noir.

The definition of noir can perhaps be summed up most succinctly via the title of a quintessential serie noire: You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up. Translated: Film noir is always and without exception a celebration—and a lament—of the chump. Its heroes always think they know the score, only to find that virtually everything around them is actively or blindly conspiring to do them in.

Noir is about total paranoia. It’s also about emasculation—more specifically, about the emasculation of white males. And, as such, it’s the antithesis of the myth of the American Dream. And, as such, it’s the thing that keeps us honest—real.

Or at least it did until the same regressive, Puritanical forces that have recently gutted so many other vital aspects of American culture got their hands on it. The rabid reactionaries, in their bratty petulance, seem to have an unerring instinct for taking down the things we all need to remain balanced, (relatively) sane, and whole. Of all the things we’ve lost over the past few years, the demise of noir may prove to be the thing we most greatly come to regret.

Noir could not be allowed to live, you see, because it was deemed irredeemably misogynistic. But let’s pause for a second to define misogyny. If misogyny hinges on always seeing women as inferior, servile, on denigrating them in an effort to assert the superiority of the male, then that tag can never be hung on film noir. The female characters in noir tend to be sharper—certainly more dominant—than the males—to a degree that tends to put the male protagonists literally to shame.

And it also needs to be said that the characters in noir, both male and female, tend to display far more shades of gender identity than the characters in any other film genre, past or present. That this isn’t done within the narrow, sterile lanes of the current rulebook makes noir’s take on gender more relevant, not less.

But what about that great bugaboo the femme fatale? The whole point of noir is that everything is trying to do in the male protagonist—close relations, colleagues, strangers, institutions, objects, environments—everything. So why would the female the lead feels most strongly drawn to be excluded? Wouldn’t it be logical that, given his desire to feel whole, but fearing the ferocious power of sexuality unbound, he would come to see her as his greatest threat? Again, to watch noir you have to understand that everything is a paranoid perception. There are no exceptions.

Given all that, explain to me how noir isn’t an evisceration of traditional notions of white male power, how it somehow empowers and emboldens the oppressor. And just so this whole exercise doesn’t come across as an expression of my own paranoia, let’s talk some specifics. Who perpetrated this crime? Who has noir’s blood on their hands?

The list is long but I think the most telling example is the freshly recruited World War II bomber crew of hosts over at Turner Classic Movies. Carefully selected to address faddish ethnic and gender stereotypes but apparently not for their understanding of film, they espouse dogma, smile, then wait for someone off camera to throw them a treat rather than offer any unbiased insights into the movies they’re presenting.

Essentially, TCM has become a school for political re-education, looking to so rigidly rewrite history that it becomes impossible to see older films on their own terms but only by the current, borderline meaningless, standards. And given that film noir remains the most subversive of genres, it should come as no surprise that it’s the body of films they have most firmly fixed in their sights.

TCM guts noir by turning it into propaganda. The mannequin-like hosts will tell you all that really matters about noir is its female leads, who are all wonderfully strong, independent, and assertive—in other words, role models. The day anybody goes to noir for positive life lessons is the day the trumpet sounds, the moon turns to blood, and we break the Seventh Seal.

But it’s hard to say who are the guiltier criminals here—the commentators or the so-called creators, the latter largely a herd of film-school replicants safely skating atop genres they don’t understand because they’re too damned scared to look beneath the surface, cranking out bright, nasty objects without life or soul.

I would posit that the labyrinthine and woefully misguided rules about what can and can’t be presented, how what can be presented has to be presented, and who’s deemed acceptable to represent and present have made it impossible to create anything resembling true noir. (I originally wore “honest” noir, but what value would the genre have if it wasn’t inherently dishonest, the shabby, disreputable home of iconoclasts, tricksters, and other miscreants who no longer have a place in the contemporary world?) The only form that could possibly survive the current puerile gauntlet is faux noir—and who needs that?

We seem fated to a near future—and likely further—of makers and their Pavlovian subjects who believe embracing “dark” somehow wards off true darkness, little ornamental rituals of pain somehow inoculate them against true pain, and rigidly codifying and policing behavior can protect them from any and all transgressions—i.e., reality. Self-pitying masochism offers no basis for legitimate expression. Noir has nothing to offer a tribe that silly and shallow.

At a time when the paucity of new releases has led to more and more people being exposed to older films for the first time, it’s never been more important to approach classic movies with due respect for the way they were originally created and perceived. How anybody could look around at the fine mess we’ve made of current society and think we’ve advanced in any meaningful way, let alone in a way that would allow us to damn the past, would be laughable if it wan’t so grisly. No other film genre is as challenging or insightful as noir. Considering it with an open mind can provide a new, healthier perspective on the present. Approach it with blinkers on and you might as well watch a Teletubbies marathon instead.

“The rabid reactionaries, in their bratty petulance, seem to have an unerring instinct for taking down the things we all need to remain balanced, (relatively) sane, and whole.”

“TCM has become a school for political
re-education, looking to so rigidly rewrite history that it becomes impossible to see older films on their own terms but only by the current, borderline meaningless, standards.”

The Last Days of the Man Cave

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They were a necessary step in the evolution of private cinemas, but the time has come to leave these primitive ancestors behind

by Michael Gaughn
September 13, 2022

I once consulted on a theater room for a well-known actor. (I can’t give you his name but can tell you his initials were JD, he was known far more for his looks than his acting ability, and he was married to a famous singer.) He had the usual sprawling, status-dripping gleaming-white home far up in the Hollywood Hills, and many decorators had spent many hours making it all look very much up to date and expensive.

He couldn’t wait to show me his existing home theater, which he had put together himself after watching a bunch of YouTube videos and reading a bunch of articles online. The room itself was plenty big enough for a theater, but the projector was a tiny piece of cheap plastic better suited for boardroom presentations sitting on a bare piece of plywood supported by a couple of $5 Home Depot brackets. The opposite wall was indiscriminately slathered in Screen Goo. In between sat three rows of cheap, uncomfortable recliners. He grinned proudly as he fired up the projector but the picture was so dim it was the ghost of anything resembling a real image. I felt ill imagining him eagerly ushering in the Hollywood elite for evenings of butt-twitching washed-out cinema.

Here’s my point: He built that room, and was proud of it, because that’s what the media had shown him was a legitimate space for watching movies at home. And now the world’s most powerful influencers were filing through there and then going forth, like seed pods dispersed, to reinforce the notion that something that dismal was somehow OK—worse, as good as it gets.

We’ve got the man cave to blame for all that. But thankfully its days are numbered and it’s about to disappear over the horizon like an exiled dictator forced to drift the seas on a makeshift raft.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the emergence of the cave, but most of it rests on the polo-shirted shoulders of the integrator crowd—although they were, maybe more appropriately, called installers back when this all started. This is an industry built on alarm salesmen, stereo fanatics, and early adopters of surround sound, and they tended to cobble together rooms based on a rudimentary technical knowledge of audio and video but with little sense of the aesthetics of picture and sound. As for the design of the room itself, you could pretty much forget about any tact or taste and would likely end up with the equivalent of Michael Scott’s St. Pauli Girl sign—which is why architects and interior designers tended to shudder whenever the AV guy showed up.

But in a sense the cave served us well. It showed people it was possible to watch movies at home, and eventually showed them they could have an experience that topped anything their local mall cinema could deliver. The problem is that, design-wise, the whole thing ossified early on so that even the highest-end theaters were often little better than glorified rec rooms and rarely kept up with either the technology or the changing ways people live their lives.

So many of these theaters were shoebox-shaped rooms with a bunch of posters on the wall and filled with unsightly furniture that a whole cottage industry emerged for handing out awards to anybody who could come up with something that didn’t look like that. And the systems within them tended to be crafted and tuned for watching demo scenes, not movies, which tended to make them assaultive rather than enticing and has now come to have a pernicious influence on moviemaking itself.

The man cave was aptly named—it’s always been less a space than an attitude born of testosterone. Inevitably, it was the dominant male of the home who lusted for and lorded it over the theater and it was the inevitably male installers who created systems only the male of the home could figure out how to use (if he was lucky). And the fare tended to be stuff only the male of the home would ever want to watch—not because they were great movies but because they gave him a chance to show off.

The result? The other family members would drift away over time, frustrated and minimized, feeling like extras in somebody else’s production, and the room would fall into disuse, eventually sealed off from the rest of the home like an EPA Superfund site.

These rooms still exist of course, with new ones popping up every day—mainly because the personality type that led to their creation is still very much with us. And, it has to be said, because the media has done a piss-poor job of letting people know there are better alternatives. But shifts in both social and family dynamics and some astonishing technological evolution that’s led to the possibility of truly responsive and accommodating systems and spaces are quickly pushing the man cave as far into the past as possible, ushering in a new era of theaters that address the interests and needs of all members of the family, and a wide variety of guests, in rooms that feel organically part of the home—while still providing a chance to step into a realm well beyond the pressures of the world.

So, goodbye man cave. We owe you a modicum of thanks—and a huge good riddance.

“In a sense, the man cave served us well. It showed people it was possible to watch movies at home, and eventually showed them they could have an experience that topped anything their local mall cinema could deliver.”

“Inevitably, it was the dominant male of the home who lusted for and lorded it over the theater and it was the inevitably male installers who created systems only the male of the home could figure out how to use.”

Secret Cinema

SECRET CINEMA

tucked away within a manor house nestled in the lush English countryside, this high-performance private theater proves to be something very much more than just an intriguing novelty

BY MICHAEL GAUGHN

photos | Ryan Wicks Photography

You’d expect an article entitled “Secret Cinema” to be all about how cleverly this room is hidden away. It’s not. Putting all the emphasis there would be doing the room, the home, the homeowners, and the team that whipped up this cool, gleaming gem of a theater a huge disservice because, while the whole “hidden away” thing is definitely intriguing, leaning on it too hard would obscure that this is as much a serious cinema as a secret one.

Hidden theaters aren’t a new idea. But they’re too often little more than a gimmick or a novelty in homes where they just don’t belong. And because they’re a wedged-in fit, the graft rarely takes and they quickly go the way of most man caves, with their secluded status making it that much more easy for them to fall into neglect. But there’s a romance to the idea of a concealed room in an old English manor house that makes secreting away a theater feel perfectly apt, even inevitable, as expected as the climbing ivy, supercilious felines, and moldering aristocrats.

an old English manor house that makes secreting away a theater feel perfectly apt, even inevitable, as expected as the climbing ivy, supercilious felines, and moldering aristocrats.

The cinema here is the work of Equippd, the Surrey-based firm founded in 2013 by brothers Charlie and Matthew McCourt. The McCourts are representative

Equippd’s Matthew McCourt

of a new breed of custom integrator, as aware of architecture and design and the overall domestic environment as they are of picture and sound. Unlike their predecessors, whose roots as alarm installers and AV guys too obviously and often showed, they think beyond creating drab, intimidating spaces optimized for playing demo scenes to how they can put tech, design, and structure at the service of the entertainment experience, paying just as much attention to the look and feel of the space as to the gear.

Because they get it—and get it with flair—Equippd was perfectly positioned to create this ambitious melding of old and new worlds.

The cinema here is the work of Equippd, the Surrey-based firm founded in 2013 by brothers Charlie and Matthew McCourt. The McCourts are representative of a new breed of custom integrator, as aware of architecture and design and the overall domestic environment as they are of picture and sound. Unlike their predecessors, whose roots as alarm installers and AV guys too obviously and often showed, they think beyond creating drab, intimidating spaces optimized for playing demo scenes to how they can put tech, design, and structure at the service of the entertainment experience, paying just as much attention to the look and feel of the space as to the gear.

Because they get it—and get it with flair—Equippd was perfectly positioned to create this ambitious melding of old and new worlds.

Room to Dream

The hidden-room thing wasn’t even part of the original plan. The homeowner had converted a stuffy and unloved Edwardian ballroom into a children’s playroom but the space was so big it felt more oppressive than playful. Having encountered one of Equippd’s other cinemas in a home in

the very contemporary cinema is secreted within a very traditional country manor house located in Rodborough Common in Glousterschire

That description doesn’t do her reaction justice, though. As Matthew McCourt relates the Wimbledon encounter, “She walked in, saw the room, and said, ‘I want this—exactly this—at my house.’”

Equippd’s solution was to bisect the ballroom, retaining the play space in one half and conjuring up a theater in the other, using a prominent structural beam as a natural line of demarcation. While planning the partition wall, the unavoidable issue arose of what to do about the door. Doors are the bane of any theater designer’s existence. They’re an obvious necessity but there’s rarely a great way to integrate them. It was tackling that problem, though, that brought the whole concept for the theater into focus. As McCourt remembers, “Suddenly it was like, ‘How do we incorporate a door into the partition so you can access your cinema? Well, let’s hide it.’” The result was a flush-mounted entrance in the theater covered in the same fabric as the walls, allowing it to blend into the decor, and, in the playroom, a hinged faux bookcase, devised by designer Nadira Van de Grift.

But the impact of entering the hidden realm rests less on the theatrical touch of the prop bookcase and more on the dramatic contrast between the environments on either side of the wall—a play space with unmistakable traces of its Edwardian roots on one and a very much contemporary entertainment hideaway on the other. “Hiding the cinema,” says McCourt, “creates the experience of transitioning from a traditional house to a completely different dimension.”

Wimbledon, she approached the company about somehow incorporating something similar into her albatross of a room.

a great way to integrate them. It was tackling that problem, though, that brought the whole concept for the theater into focus. As McCourt remembers, “Suddenly it was like, ‘How do we incorporate a door into the partition so you can access your cinema? Well, let’s hide it.’” The result was a flush-mounted entrance in the theater covered in the same fabric as the walls, allowing it to blend into the decor, and, in the playroom, a hinged faux bookcase, devised by designer Nadira Van de Grift.

the work of designer Nadira Van de Grift, this faux bookcase offers an appropriately theatrical way to enter the private cinema

PROJECT TEAM

Matthew McCourt
Equippd

Nadira Van de Grift
NV Design

James Morton
JPM Carpentry

The theater’s striking yet understated look is all the doing of Equippd, which was given free rein over not just the entertainment system but the room itself. The textured wall material is a variation on the covering from the Wimbledon theater, with the recessed LED accent lights lining the ceiling, window ledges, and riser carried over from that theater as well. The result is a space that feels like a private retreat, separate from the rest of the home, but without looking like it dropped from the moon.

unmistakable traces of its Edwardian roots on one and a very much contemporary entertainment hideaway on the other. “Hiding the cinema,” says McCourt, “creates the experience of transitioning from a traditional house to a completely different dimension.”

The Proper Respect

In a literal sense, though, the secret cinema isn’t even part of the home at all. Since this is a historic residence, Equippd had to make every effort to preserve the original room, exhibiting a surgeon’s care when executing the theater.

The answer—which actually solved a number of problems—was to a create a completely independent structure within the existing space. The theater is basically a stud-wall box that rests inside the ballroom, only anchored to the walls, floor, and ceiling where absolutely necessary. As McCourt relates, “It could actually be dismantled and the room returned to its original form without too much trouble.”

the theater is essentially a completely independent box resting within the confines of an Edwardian ballroom

Taking this tack allowed Equippd to create a self-contained modern theater with the ideal acoustics already built in. To keep sound from traveling to other parts of the home, the subwoofers are suspended within the walls, and the ceiling sits decoupled from the room’s actual ceiling to prevent any bleed into the children’s bedrooms just above.

The theater also comes with its own infrastructure. “Because this room is essentially sealed off, air handling was quite important,” explains McCourt. “So we created a fresh-air input, which gently comes through the fabric on the front wall, to give you a nice flow of air through the cinema. We also have a very quiet extraction system at the back, which then pulls out the old air.”

The knocks against having windows in a theater are many. They can be distracting, allow in unwanted sunlight, make it harder to control the climate in the space, and reflect audio from the speakers, muddying the sound. The usual recourse is to just cover them over or remove them completely. But the views of the Gloucestershire countryside are so spectacular it would have significantly diminished the impact of the theater to conceal them. Plus, the windows help keep the smallish space from feeling claustrophobic.

But, very much of their period, they could have been a jarring note in the otherwise contemporary design. Equippd’s solution was to employ a Lutron automated shading system, wedding the textured wall covering to a standard set of blackout shades so the windows all but disappear at movie time.

Another Dimension

Because the home sits in the middle of an intensely scenic area with a dearth of commercial cinemas nearby, the private theater gets heavy use. And because the family is hardcore about their movie watching, it needed to be high-performance. The 4K projector beams onto a screen that can be adjusted to accommodate both standard and widescreen viewing. A Dolby Atmos system provides the sound, while the room-within-a-room construction offers optimal acoustics and the shading system seals out any extraneous light.

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the cinema features a screen that can accommodate both standard and widescreen aspect ratios, textured wall covering that’s also incorporated into the door and shades, and variable-colored LED accent lighting

But high-performance systems are almost invariably complex. And it’s tempting, with all that technology on hand, to attempt to automate every aspect of their operation. But that can often result in leading users down rabbit holes they then can’t easily emerge from. Equippd’s approach was to take basic functions like selecting the aspect ratio or the sound format and make them simple “this or that” choices so there’s no possible confusion and an evening’s entertainment isn’t ruined by rigid automated routines that have other ideas about how things should go.

One of the theater’s most intriguing features is fully automated, though, with a series of triggers and sensors synced up to provide ease of use and help create the appropriate mood. A contact switch in the door lets the system know when someone has first entered, causing it to bring down the shades, bring up the lights, turn on the projector, and so on. Occupancy sensors then monitor if the room is in use so it doesn’t go into its startup routine every time somebody comes through the door. When the last person has left, everything returns to standby mode after 15 minutes, ready to kick in again for the next movie night.

The line between gimmickry and legitimacy really isn’t that thin. Neither is the line between a theater that’s imposed on a home—and the homeowners—and one that’s respectful of the residence and responsive to how people actually live their lives. Home cinemas are, finally, after all these decades, evolving beyond their man cave ancestors, being higher performance, more flexible, and in every way more sophisticated. And that doesn’t just pertain to more radical open-floorplan entertainment spaces but has seriously upped the game for traditional private theaters as well.

Yes, this British cinema is hidden—but Equippd’s mastery of modern trends and responsiveness to the clients’ needs and desires allowed McCourt and company to transcend what could have been little more than a parlor trick and deliver both a solid, up-to-date theater and a captivating room that successfully checks off all the boxes.

Inside the Secret Cinema

The Automation

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The 4K release of Billy Wilder’s 1960 comedy/drama proves to be both a revelation and a bit of a mystery

by Michael Gaughn
September 5, 2022

After watching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment on Amazon Prime back in May, I wrote:

The Apartment looks . . . great. And this is in lowly 1080p. Apparently a 4K digital intermediate was created just this year, and I’m keen to revisit the film if it gets a high-res re-release. But, for now, this version gets just about everything right.

A higher-res version has recently appeared, which I checked out a few days ago on Kaleidescape—and it turned out to be another one of those elaborate puzzles, like The Godfather and Citizen Kane (and Chinatown and Psycho . . .), that shows just how adventurous it can be bringing older films into the 4K realm.

Let me first make it clear that, if you’re anything ranging from a casual to rabid fan of this movie (I sit somewhere on the more tepid end of that scale), you should make a beeline to this release. What it gets right it gets right so well that it overshadows any problems.

But there are problems, all subtle, in a sense, and likely to bother some people more than others. It kind of comes down to, do you watch it in 1080p off a streaming service where the experience is consistent but just good enough or do you go 4K and run the risk of occasionally being pulled out of the film?

This is a straight 4K transfer and yet it feels like an HDR grade was applied. The whites are frequently pumped up, resulting in scenes, like the first one in Jack Lemmon’s apartment, that feel very video-like, almost like what you’d expect from some early TV show like Playhouse 90.

I’ve calibrated—and recalibrated—my system to rid it of any artificial enhancements and to ensure that film looks like film. And just to make sure my perceptions weren’t distorted, I went back and spotchecked HDR titles like Shadow of a Doubt and Citizen Kane and the recent UHD release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all of which looked as I remembered—like film.

The wide shot of the office floor two minutes into The Apartment was pleasant, encouraging, and the first shot of Lemmon at his desk was startling, whetting my appetite for a whole film that looked that good. And there are long stretches where, even if everything doesn’t look exceptional, the transfer can in no way be said to be bad. But those overly emphatic highlights pop up randomly like gophers throughout, usually in scenes with bright accents, like the tinsel and lights on the Christmas tree in Lemmon’s apartment.

This has become a cliché, but some of the wide shots have so much depth you feel like you could reach into them, an effect that seems to come from a combination of sharpness and dynamic range, but something I’ve, until now, only seen happen with HDR titles, not UHD—which is why I’ve got to wonder what’s up here.

The whites are so hot in some places that parts of the image get blown out. The Kleenex that gets away from Lemmon as he stands outside the Majestic Theater becomes a featureless blob, a drifting ectoplasm, and Shirley McClaine’s face gets so blown out during parts of her Christmas Eve scene with Fred McMurray that it looks like she’s doing kabuki. (There’s evidence in the Amazon transfer that these same shots could get blown out, but they’re far better balanced there.)

That the transfer is derived from various elements is more evident here than in lower-res releases, which is what you would expect. The blacks, for instance, are pretty consistent up until the first scene in the Chinese restaurant where the image becomes flatter and grayish, almost brownish. While the first scene in Lemmon’s apartment has that early-TV look, it’s also sharp with a decent tonal range. But the Christmas Eve scene with McMurray and MacLaine in the same space is contrasty, grainy, and not so much soft as gritty. At other times, blacks can look smudgy, in a way that’s not at all filmlike.

But, again—quibbles, gripes, nits, not dealbreakers. Seeing this in the original 2.35:1 is so crucial to conveying not just the massiveness of the office space but also the stage-like blocking in Lemmon’s apartment that it becomes almost impossible to conceive ever again watching this movie cropped. And one advantage of the 4K was that I could finally confirm that that’s Ella Fitzgerald’s The First Lady of Song sitting in the pole position in Lemmon’s record rack.

Watching a movie in 4K on a well-calibrated reference-quality display can be a lot like putting it under a microscope. Recent films tend to fare well because they’re mostly digital releases and the flaws, aside from a tendency toward a certain clinical sterility, tend to be in their execution, not their presentation. Older films—classic and otherwise—are at the mercy of the guys at the knobs, who may or may have the sophistication to know how a film from a certain era should look or to know how to compensate for the inevitable flaws in negatives and prints. And there’s always the risk of being exposed to someone caught up in the current zeal to make everything look shiny and new, which without exception results in travesty.

The Apartment hasn’t been brutalized or sullied, just curiously handled. This release is less an assault than a mystery. And you can’t call the harm done inconsequential, but you can call it excusable.

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The film that birthed a genre and put a serious dent in the Hays Code, this Wilder/Chandler masterpiece still holds up—but could use a major restoration

by Michael Gaughn
August 30, 2022

The definition of film noir is really simple and unambiguous—and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Noir is always about a schnook—a guy who’s full of himself and thinks he has the world by the tail only to find out, the hard way, that the world has got him firmly by the balls instead. There are no exceptions to this rule. People like to muddy the waters by conflating noir with stuff like crime dramas, psychological thrillers, horror films, and—Lord help us—goth, but if it doesn’t adhere to the above stated formula, it’s just not noir.

And noir, indisputably, began with Double Indemnity. And while Indemnity is as much the effort of Billy Wilder and, by supplying the source text, James M. Cain, it is best seen as an expression of the spirit of Wilder’s collaborator on the screenplay, Raymond Chandler. What’s best about Indemnity is all about Chandler and his preoccupations and his worldview. So it follows that Chandler, with an able assist from Wilder and Cain, created noir. I don’t see any good reason to believe otherwise.

Indemnity still works, at this late date, because the film is as lean and focused and witty and ingeniously crafted as Chandler’s printed prose. It’s a sordid drama, full of truly unappealing characters doing unspeakable things, but everyone expresses themselves with such verve and the wryly sardonic undercurrents are so constant and strong that you leave the experience feeling giddy instead of soiled.

It’s audacious from beginning to end but never gloats or otherwise shows off, instead taking that carefully honed script—which some consider, not without cause, the best ever written—and using it as not just a guide or a foundation but a bible. Wilder would almost match Indemnity six years later with Sunset Boulevard, but the latter just doesn’t have the redeeming grace Chandler brought to Indemnity. And Wilder’s career would be, from that point on, nothing but a slow slide down from the pinnacle of those two dramas—which really aren’t dramas, in the traditional sense, at all.

Wilder was able to break almost all the rules here—similar to the unthinkable transgressions Preston Sturges got away with the year before in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. The two leads—Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck—are fiendishly duplicitous from the second they set eyes on each other, Stanwyck’s husband is a growling, boozing bear, her step daughter is pinch-faced and shrill, the step daughter’s boyfriend just a gigolo. Even the bit players—like the toad of a woman who bitches about having to reach up to the top shelf for baby food—are consistently unpleasant. The only character to display any integrity and meaningful intelligence is Edward G. Robinson as the scowling, grousing claims manager Keyes. An unabashed proto nerd, Keyes is clearly Chandler’s favorite character and in many ways like Chandler himself—far more so than Chandler’s idealized alter ego Marlowe.

It’s no accident McMurray and Stanwyck just aren’t that pleasant to look at, he, with his prominent brow ridge and vaguely simian muzzle, looming over the not just petite but tiny Stanwyck, she, with that intentionally silly blonde wig and a look on her face like somebody’s holding a heavily soiled diaper under her nose, exuding all the sexual charisma of live bait. It would be pretentious to call the effect Brechtian, but the upshot is the same—to keep us from identifying with the leads and instead see them clearly for who they are—two endlessly devious schemers ultimately just too dumb to rise above their fates.

That’s not to say there aren’t false notes—Richard Gaines as the pompous insurance company president feels like he wandered in from an early talkie, and Porter Hall just can’t seem to shake his screwball comedy roots, doing a couple of takes that would have been perfect in Sullivan’s Travels but feel like they dropped from the moon here.

It’s impossible to say enough good things about John Seitz’s cinematography. Not only does he perfectly express the gist and the nuances of Wilder/Chandler’s screenplay but he summons up an entire genre whole within a single film, creating all the iconography—rooms sliced by the light through Venetian blinds, shadows that are less shadows than doppelgängers, the constant imminence and threat of night, and so on—without ever once lapsing into mannerism, channeling German Expressionism while making it natural, inevitable instead of showy like it would be in a Hitchcock—or Tim Burton—film. There’s a shot two minutes in, as Neff’s car pulls up in front of the Pacific Building, with streetlights piercing fog and a web of interurban cables crisscrossing the frame, that’s so redolent of Stieglitz that you want to cry. But it’s not lingered on, instead kept up just long enough to establish a mood before the film breathlessly moves on. But that shot subtly sets the tone for everything to come and continues to resonate clear through to the final fadeout, and beyond.

Whatever transfer Amazon is leaning on isn’t great but good enough, apparently derived from a somewhat damaged print so that there’s some tonal fluctuation to the image throughout but nothing too distracting, and clean enough that you can appreciate Seitz’s cinematography—the same tepid recommendation I had to give the presentation of his work in Morgan’s Creek. Would I like to see a 4K restoration? Sure. Something that matches the resolution of the original would of course be a step up and judiciously tempering the flaws in the print is nothing anyone could argue with. But I’m not interested if it ends up looking sanitized, digitized, “improved.” If the result ultimately doesn’t feel like it came from 1944, why bother?

Anointing “greatest films” has always been something of a squeaky wheel phenomenon—driven more by hype and box office and fads than quality—a situation that’s only gotten worse as more and more holdouts succumb, like pod people, to Rotten Tomatoes’ statistically driven groupthink. Individual discernment and taste are on the verge of being pummeled into submission and dumped by the wayside, victims of the human weakness for cheap guarantees and the marketing-driven zeal for consensus. Double Indemnity isn’t mega-budget, isn’t littered with stars, doesn’t have any big action scenes, can only claim one poorly executed matte shot for a special effect, and thankfully didn’t spawn any sequels, let alone franchises. It exists about as far from the land of the blockbuster as it’s possible to be. It’s just a solid piece of filmmaking, as strong an effort as Hollywood has ever made or likely ever will make, a work that’s unlikely to ever date because it rests above social trends, changing fashions, and political agendas. It’s an escape without being escapist, artful without being arty, brutally honest without being preachy—something to be savored, not gulped or munched. By any meaningful standard, it’s one of the great American films. Maybe the greatest.

PICTURE | Whatever transfer Amazon is leaning on isn’t great but good enough, apparently derived from a somewhat damaged print so that there’s some tonal fluctuation to the image throughout but nothing too distracting, and clean enough that you can appreciate John Seitz’s genre-defining cinematography

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Review: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

review | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Calling this roguish Sergio Leone romp a classic western kind of misses the point—it’s something so much bigger and better than that

by Michael Gaughn
August 18, 2022

Most movies, especially contemporary ones, are first and foremost about genre, about making the audience feel snug within a certain set of expectations and conditions and never too radically disrupting the womb-like sense of security that induces. Sergio Leone is, of course, the guy who created the spaghetti western but by the time of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he had moved well beyond the genre into a realm that can best be described as, for want of a better term, pure film.

While GBU has elements of the American western and its Italian offshoot, it’s just as much a war movie, an epic, and an action film; but it subsumes all of that into a much greater whole. It never stops to do a set piece and then smugly nudge the audience with a, “Hey, look what I just did.” Instead, Leone shows throughout an incredible, seemingly naive, love for making movies in that place beyond genre—and, like all the best films, beyond time. And it all just seems to pour out of him like a rustic but still elegant wine.

This movie is undeniably part epic but it’s an intimate one. Like Lawrence of Arabia, it’s about, first, the individual and the consequences of individual action and, second, about the larger stage those actions play out on. It doesn’t rise or fall based on its battle scenes or creating a sense of grandeur but on the crafting of the three principals. But there’s far less of a one-to-one relation between the individual and that larger stage here than in Lawrence. GBU is far looser, more picaresque, roguish, puckish. (It’s like a Cormac McCarthy novel—if McCarthy had a sense of humor, didn’t have an adolescent fixation on depravity, and allowed even a smidge of humanity into his work.)

Like all of Leone, this is 100% a director’s movie. The actors are basically marionettes to be positioned and manipulated, no more or less important than the settings, the score, and the endlessly inventive, often sinuous camera moves. His ability to so carefully and completely devise the action underlines just how little most actors’ performances have to do with their abilities and far more with how they’re shot, cut, and above all, directed.

Find me a great Lee Van Cleef performance anywhere outside this film—it can’t be done because he never worked with another director this good. Clint Eastwood has the acting range of a doorknob but he was savvy enough to surrender completely to Leone, who created the terse, snarling persona Eastwood was able to exploit throughout a long and lucrative career. The only real actor here is Eli Wallach—which explains why he gets almost all the lines and all the big scenes. Peer beyond the Eastwood aura and you realize this is really Wallach’s film.

Because GBU is more than anything an exceptionally pure projection of Leone’s imaginative world and not just an excuse for actors to strut in front of the camera, every aspect of the film carries equal weight. But first among those equals is probably atmosphere. The depiction of the fringes of the Civil War might not be authentic but, as far as creating the most evocative stage possible for the action, it feels authentic—in the same way John Ford’s vision of the west in My Darling Clementine and Fort Apache and (although there’s probably some kind of law against my saying this) D.W. Griffith’s portrayal of Civil War battles in The Birth of a Nation may or may not be accurate but are so compelling they become how we want that period to feel and be.

That ability to make atmosphere enthralling helps explain why this film was such a huge influence on Full Metal Jacket—in particular the odd commingling of silence and menace in the sequence in the abandoned town still being hit with cannon fire. Both Leone and Kubrick were masters of summoning up a palpable mood, so it’s not surprising they stole from each other shamelessly.

This is essentially a silent film—you could watch it with the sound off and still know everything that’s going on and, more importantly, feel the emotion. It’s also a deliberately paced film—surprisingly so for a western—and while Leone makes that work for the most part, the material is just too thin for those kinds of larghetto beats to be sustained throughout the extended cut here. With most films that would be a dealbreaker; here it’s just a quibble.

The transfer is astonishingly, seductively good. This is the way older films should look in 4K. The images are alive with grain, which is so essential to Leone’s style that it’s scary to think anyone would ever think of scrubbing any of it away—let alone all of it, à la The Godfather. This release is sans HDR but it’s hard to see where going there would do much to enhance its impact. It would likely result in the usual tradeoff of grit for polish, and if The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is about anything, it’s grit.

(I have to harp on this string again: If the main titles are any indication of what HDR would yield, then we should all pray that day never comes. There’s the usual attempt to enhance the title cards and turn them into a slideshow instead of doing the obvious and right thing of having them feel like they’re being run through a film gate—in other words, make them feel like they’re part of the movie. Fortunately, so much of the sequence depends on animation that some of the analog feel is still there, but it just makes the cleanup look that much more alien. And someone deserves to be eviscerated for ruining the film’s last, lingering shot by making “The End” look like something out of an iMovie project.)

There’s nothing wrong with the stereo and 5.1 mixes; they’re just not appropriate. And it continues to be a bone of contention that the original mono tends to get kicked to the curb with 4K releases of older movies that supposedly represent the filmmakers’ intent.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is, of course, a classic film, but not a perfect one—but its rough edges have a lot to do with its power. For as long and epic as Once Upon a Time in the West is—and that film doesn’t waste a single second of screen time—GBU actually has a more drawn-out pace, which sometimes drags, but more often than not is languorous in the most generous sense of that word. And there are moments when style lapses into affectation, like during the final showdown, where Leone cuts about five times too often to extreme closeups of shifting eyes and twitching eyebrows, to the point where it starts to feel like a Monty Python sketch. But you forgive him because of his Rabelaisian drollery and because he made it clear from the moment Eli Wallach crashes through the window at the beginning of the film that this was going to be a very tall tale indeed.

PICTURE | The 4K transfer is astonishingly, seductively good, with the images alive with the grain that is so essential to Leone’s style

SOUND | There’s nothing wrong with the DTS-HD stereo and 5.1 mixes but where’s the original mono?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)

Review: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

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A brilliant and still hilarious translation of the stage hit—that is, until you get to the second half

by Michael Gaughn
August 8, 2022

This is going to be a tough one. Anyone who loves comedy and is openminded enough to check out efforts beyond the current flavor of the month and has never come across A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum owes it to himself to make a beeline for this film. But, be warned that while the first half is a pitch-perfect farce, the second half eventually collapses under its own weight—unless you’re into madcap ‘60s chase scenes. I’m not.

You can also approach this as an important historical document, as the last real manifestation of schtick, adroitly and vigorously performed by Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford, and, of course, the larger-than-life Zero Mostel, and lovingly captured by the seemingly ill-suited Richard Lester. Most of the jokes are on the level of “My dog has no nose,” but the verve and punch are in the timing—not just the individual delivery but the breathtaking synchronization between the three principals and how they manage to bring the almost entirely British supporting cast up to their level and into their world.

All that scenery-chewing causes some collateral damage, but they’re acceptable losses—up to a point. For instance, Michael Hordern’s droll turn as the henpecked husband with a keen eye on the courtesans next door would have stood out in a traditional British comedy but is unfairly drowned out by all the American hamming here. And putting almost all his eggs in the Mostel/Gilford/Silvers basket backfires on Lester when he has to bring the pompous Miles Gloriosus onto the stage. Actor Leon Greene just can’t generate a fraction of the energy summoned up by the three tummlers and his hunky wooden presence manages to suck almost all the life out of the production.

Richard Lester was a curious case. He’ll likely always be best known for his first major film, A Hard Day’s Night, which gave him a bit of a free ride on the Beatles’ coattails but which he took full advantage of, translating Nouvelle Vague filmmaking techniques into the mainstream, changing the look and feel of movies forever. But he proved to be wildly inconsistent, doing intriguing surrealist comedies like How I Won the War and the now ignored but well worth reviving Julie Christie drama Petulia—works that garnered some praise but didn’t draw audiences. He didn’t have another big hit after Hard Day’s Night until he did the Musketeers films for the Salkinds, which led to them enlisting him to reshoot Richard Donner’s Superman II, which then led to the truly dismal Superman III.

Just off the Beatles’ Help!, Lester was a hot director—maybe the hottest—when he took on A Funny Thing, and while the things he does well he does brilliantly, you can sense his reach exceeding his grasp. It would have been easy to completely bungle translating a frantic stage farce to the screen—a dubious honor he managed to earn 10 years later, making a train wreck out of The Ritz—but here he gets almost all of it right, freely mixing up and reinventing the conventions while showing them a deep respect. That is, until those massive miscalculations in the third act. (To be fair, some of the blame for that lies in flaws in the Broadway source material, but the producers never should have allowed Lester to indulge his weakness for silly chase scenes.)

It’s astonishing he was able to maintain the stage-friendly pacing of the lines and bits of business—in other words, didn’t screw up his core ensemble’s inimitable timing—while doing all his experiments with composition, blocking, and cutting. And while he takes the obvious path of turning the production numbers into music videos, he does it playfully and without running roughshod over the source material—like, say, Ken Russell with Tommy. The standout is “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” which he treats as the throwaway it is, using it to unleash a cascade of gags that often break the fourth wall.

He was also wise to align himself with DP Nicholas Roeg (Doctor Zhivago, Fahrenheit 451), who documents the squalor of the action’s “less fashionable” quarter of ancient Rome without having it become a drag on the comic mood, conjures up some striking compositions without making the film feel affected, and manages to keep up with, and is sometimes one step ahead of, Lester’s freewheeling approach to the material.

Before mentioning the picture quality, I have to digress for a moment and point out that A Funny Thing was, when I previously saw it about six months ago, one of the films that showed me Amazon had seriously upped its game with HD delivery. It was literally unwatchable a year ago on Prime. Some of the scenes with elaborate action broke up so badly they looked like ravenous paramecia darting under a microscope. All of that is in the past now and the streaming quality has become consistently first-rate. Of course, the quality of Amazon’s transfers is still all over the map (I only made it about 30 seconds into Hangmen Also Die before I had to bail), and it remains about a 50/50 crapshoot whether whatever title you pick will look acceptable in HD. But, all told, a huge leap forward for what was once a joke of a service.

This transfer falls toward the middle of the gamut. It’s relatively faithful to the original film but looks like it could use a little cleanup and color correction. The source seems to have suffered from benign neglect, but a few of the sequences are vibrant enough to suggest what some judicious and respectful attention could yield, likely significantly upping the film’s impact.

The audio is another instance of that phenomena I’ve been coming across lately in films from the ‘60s and early ‘70s—pristine stereo music tracks with decent dynamic range sounding all out of proportion to relatively flat all-but-monophonic dialogue tracks. Since this movie was originally mixed in stereo, it’s possible this is faithful to the initial release, but the disparity is a little jarring.

Comedy has gotten so jaded and brutal that it’s become fashionable to dismiss anything older as sentimental and naive. That’s a mistake in general, but a serious mistake here. A Funny Thing’s roots stretch all the way back to Plautus, traveling, among other places, through the French farceurs and the often hardknock worlds of vaudeville and early TV to arrive at Broadway and then the movies. It’s a hell of a genealogy and tradition—which this film both honors and aggressively mucks around with without once acting like it feels superior to its heritage or its material. In the current stifling climate, just being exposed to something that uncynical can be bracing.

PICTURE | The transfer is relatively faithful to the original film but looks like it could use a little cleanup and color correction, which would likely significantly up its impact

SOUND | The pristine stereo music tracks exhibit decent dynamic range but sound out of proportion to the relatively flat all-but-monophonic dialogue tracks

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Michael Gaughn

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Michael Gaughn

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