The Browning Version: a review of the film

The Browning Version: a review of the film!

First, I'd like to give credit to Criterion for the excellent job they did on The Browning Version. This 1951 film directed by Anthony Asquith stars Michael Redgrave as Crocker-Harris, headmaster and literature professor at an all boys school in England. In his role as Crocker-Harris, Redgrave is as brittle as they come. None of his students like him and call him names behind his back. A student named Taplow feels sorry for the professor and gets close enough to him to learn that the mean professor is not mean at all, but actually a victim who's taken advantage of by a wife half his age who only married him for personal gain. Crocker-Harris has nothing of love in his life except his love of literature and the Browning Version of a book called Agamemnon.

The Browning version is a  sad film about the regrets most of us have about things we wish we would have done in the past. This has been one of my favorite movies for a long time because of Michael Redgrave's performance as Crocker-Harris who is reduced to playing cuckold to a young wife who only married him for his money.

This is one of the great performances ever, up there with Charles Laughton's performance as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and in a way, the roles are similar, only that in The Browning Version, the main character's disfigurement is on the inside. This is a great movie at only an hour and a half.

The 400 Blows: a review of the great Francois Truffaut film

The 400 Blows: a review of the great Francois Truffaut film!

Director Francois Truffaut's semi-autobiographical film The 400 Blows came out in 1959 as part of the French New Wave movement. This film follows the difficult life of a boy named Antoine played by Jean Pierre Leaud.

The film opens in a classroom where students are secretly passing around a picture of a pin-up girl. At the precise moment that the picture touches Antoine's hand the teacher happens to look up from his desk and catches him red-handed. The teacher punishes Antoine again when he catches the boy scribbling a poem on the chalkboard. And it gets no better at home for Antoine as his young mother played by Claire Maurier and stepfather played by Albert Remy bicker about money in front of him and complain about how much he eats. Antoine can't seem to do anything right anywhere. Like school, he finds a creative outlet by developing an interest in a famous writer named Balzac. He even builds a small shrine for the writer but makes the mistake of placing a candle in it which almost burns down the apartment. The rest of the film goes on like this, broken up by little things like him skipping school and going to the carnival to spin around inside of a giant cylinder. 

This film is about how some people are just magnets for bad luck. The ambiguous ending invites the viewer to draw his own conclusions as to Antoine's ultimate fate. This is one of my favorite movies and despite how it sounds, there are a few light moments in the film. There's a lot of ways to look at The 400 Blows. In some ways, it's inspirational in that with all the negativity Antoine deals with that he's still resilient enough to try to have a childhood such as the carnival scene, that we were all once kids before we grew up. Criterion did a great job on this film. I have the DVD and it still looks great.

'The Battle Over Citizen Kane': a review of the documentary

'The Battle Over Citizen Kane': a review of the documentary

There are some film documentaries that are so good that they stand on their own. The 1996 documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane is the rare instance where the appetizer may actually be better than the main course. Produced by Michael Epstein and Thomas Lennon, written by Richard Ben Cramer and Thomas Lennon, and powerfully narrated by Richard Cramer, The Battle Over Citizen Kane originally aired as an episode of the Public Broadcast System's The American Experience looking at the lives, the careers and the ultimate showdown between Hearst and Welles over Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane. 

Reportedly, Welles' weaved strands of his own life with that of Hearst's in making the film and the battleship-sized egos of the 2 in the documentary are compared, showing how each man in his own world seized power by the white-hot force of his personality and how each man eventually lost that power through excess and appetite. Estate photos and videos interwoven with interviews with journalists like Jimmy Breslin along with stock footage of turn of the century America add the color and humor that keeps this 2 hour documentary entertaining from the gate to the finish line. There are no lapses in this presentation but my favorite parts show Orson's Broadway career directing Depression Era Black actors to perform Shakespeare; then there’s  the legend of Orson's famous 1938 War of The Worlds radio hoax that later went on to inspire 2 films! If you see no other documentary on a film see this 1.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: a review

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: a review

Director Alfred Hitchcock's made a lot of great movies and he is far and away one of the greatest directors who ever lived. But of all of his films--and he’s directed over 70 films, at least--his artistic masterpiece is his 1958 film Vertigo starring James Stewart and Kim Novack based on Boileau-Narcejac’s 1954 book From Among the Dead.

Vertigo features Stewart as Detective John Scottie who is forced to retire due to his fear of heights which results in the death of his partner. Afterwards, he agrees to help out a friend by following the man’s beautiful wife (played by Kim Novack) The husband believes that his wife is possessed by a young woman who committed suicide a century ago. What Stewart doesn’t know is that his fear of heights makes him the perfect witness to a murder!

Everything in this film-- the cinematography, the acting, the locations (all around San Francisco), the color, the music (by Mr. Bernard Herrman)--is absolute perfection. James Stewart is one of my favorite actors and this is my 2nd favorite film of his besides Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. Kim Novack is incredible playing 2 roles, that of Gavin Elster’s blonde wife Madeleine and as a Brunette named Judy Barton from Salina, Kansas whom Scottie becomes obsessed to the point of physically transforming her into the woman of his dreams. As in most of his films, Hitch makes his trademark cameo but you can't blink or you'll miss him.

I really can't say this is THE greatest simply because there are so many great films. The film it's most compared with is Citizen Kane and seeing it for the first time in years this is a pretty fair comparison. I'd call it a toss up because I couldn't put one under the other, both are the great. If you have not seen this one yet, you’re in for a treat; if you have seen it like me you don’t mind rewatching it to admire its beauty and precision. Every time I see it I spot something I hadn’t noticed before.