DIRECTOR: Samuel Fuller.
PRODUCER: Samuel Fuller.
WRITER: Samuel Fuller.
GENRE: Noir, drama.
"The Crimson Kimono" opens with a caricature of womanhood, a burlesque dancer screwing her face into a mask of ecstasy. In its closing scene, a parade through LA's Little Tokyo, the camera pans marchers wearing geisha makeup and Japanese folk masks. The symmetry between the two episodes is unmistakable, both culminating in a woman being gunned down in the street.
These images help to illustrate the struggle of Detective Sgt. Joe Kojaku, a Japanese-American who falls in love with a white woman while investigating a stripper's slaying. His All-American partner, roommate and best friend Charlie Bancroft, whom he fought alongside in Korea, loves her, too, so Joe tries to suppress his feelings, which only uncorks a lifetime of pent-up racial tension. The love triangle starts to bleed into the murder investigation, the two stories casting warped reflections on each other.
Continue reading the review of "The Crimson Kimono."
DIRECTOR: Takashi Nomura.
COUNTRY: Japan.
CAST: Jo Shishido.
GENRE: Noir, action.
When Quentin Tarantino fused the samurai movie and the spaghetti western in "Kill Bill" in 2003, he was carrying on a great cinematic tradition that reached its apex with Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" in 1961, a samurai movie patterned after the western, film noir and a Dashiell Hammett detective novel and, in turn, the blueprint for the breakout spaghetti western "Fistful of Dollars." Similar cross-pollination shaped "A Colt Is My Passport," a Japanese gangster film indebted to noir, with a spaghetti-western-style soundtrack as vital to the story as Ennio Morricone's scores were to Sergio Leone's films, infusing scenes with the emotion absent from hardboiled faces.
One of those hardboiled faces belongs to Jo Shishido, whose chipmunk-cheeked mug might be as emblematic of gangster cinema as the jowls of Edward G. Robinson. Here, the actor famous for his outsider Yakuza roles plays a double-crossed killer named Kamimura, hired by a gang to assassinate a rival. It is thrilling to watch the ever-cool Shishido take on the Yakuza system, and easy to forget that Kamimura is a cold-blooded killer himself as we become invested in his struggle to reach air or sea, beyond the gang's reach. This free agent is at least preferable to the detestable, entrenched Yakuza leaders, who are relentless in their pursuit of power.
Continue reading the review of "A Colt Is My Passport."
DIRECTOR: Joseph Losey.
ANIMATOR: Charles R. Bowers.
WRITER: Joseph Losey.
GENRE: Short, animation.
The oil industry greased director Joseph Losey's palms to make this piece of petroleum propaganda years before he was blacklisted for suspected Communist activities. But today, on the heels of eight years of rule by George W. Bush, this 1939 animated short enumerating the many ways we rely on oil begs to be re-imagined as a wake-up call not heeded.
Stop-motion master Charley Bowers works his magic, in a rich Technicolor palette, on Pete-Roleum and his cousins, personified oil drops who keep the gears of civilization running smoothly. Bowers' films usually feature overly complex machines that surrealistically mash up the mechanical and the natural — one of his cinematic contraptions produces a plant that sprouts a can of peas; another makes eggs that hatch automobiles. Similarly in this film, petroleum is composed of a lovable cast of dedicated droplets, faithful servants who paint our nails, lubricate the wheels of our cars, swab the decks of our ships and kill the worms in our apples. But bubbling under the surface is the notion that we are the slaves.
Continue reading the review of "Pete-Roleum and His Cousins."
DIRECTORS: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
COUNTRY: UK.
CAST: David Farrar, Kathleen Byron.
GENRE: Drama.
Sammy Rice, a British scientist who creates the weapons his employer hawks to the military, is consumed by personal battles in the midst of World War II. The hero of this introspective war drama struggles with the pain caused by his tin leg, the bottle of whisky beckoning from his desk, a crippling dependency on his girlfriend and a crisis of conscience over the profiteering and bureaucratic aspects of his job.
This dark, unromantic film tightly focuses on Sammy's demons, and, save the whimsy of a hallucinatory sequence with the whisky bottle, hardly resembles Powell and Presserger's widely scoped World War II fantasy "Stairway to Heaven."
Three episodes of note in "The Small Back Room" mark Sammy's emotional stages. The first shows him visiting a military drill at Stonehenge, a rare sunlit scene, in which the stones loom as timepieces and burial markers. The second, in front of the hearth in Sammy's apartment, shows him waiting for his girlfriend Sue to call, expressionistically shrinking before the bottle and a wall of multiplying, mocking clocks that cruelly tick each moment of her absence.
Continue reading the review of "The Small Back Room."
DIRECTOR: Shohei Imamura.
COUNTRY: Japan.
CAST: Masumi Hurukawa.
GENRE: Drama.
Sadako is told to beware the family curse, and it's true she finds herself paying for the transgressions of one of her ancestors.
Yet if Sadako is cursed, it's by the living, not the dead. By her husband, who betrays her, beats her, belittles her, and bosses her around. By her mother-in-law and her son Masaru, who also lord over her, calling her fat and lazy. By her husband's myopic mistress, who hypocritically stalks her with a camera in the hopes of capturing an indiscretion. By the thief who breaks into her home and rapes her, then decides he loves her and shows it by forcing himself on her again and again.
Continue reading the review of "Intentions of Murder."
DIRECTOR: Chano Urueta.
PRODUCER: Abel Salazar, K. Gordon Murray.
CAST: Abel Salazar.
GENRE: Sci-fi, cult, horor.
It's Mexico, 1661. The Baron Vitelius Destera is shackled in a torch-lit cave, ringed by black-hooded Inquisitors. As a prosecutor reads the charges against him — witchcraft, womanizing, indifference to torture — the baron behaves like a schoolboy in the principal's office, barely keeping a straight face. Once he's sentenced to burn at the stake, he boasts his black magic one last time, making his shackles disappear. Having shown he could escape if he really wanted to, he dutifully goes to the pyre. As flames envelop him, a crudely drawn comet appears. The baron swears vengeance on the descendants of his enemies, and presumably hitches a celestial ride.
Flash forward to Mexico 1961. The comet reappears. A meteor is lowered from a string in a harshly lit studio filled with branches and projected, clearly fake backgrounds. The rock dissolves, and we are presented with what a stake-burning and centuries aboard a comet will do to a body. Tattered clothes, straggly hair, melted skin, tubular, pincer hands and a long, forked tongue, all the better for sucking out brains. Luckily, a well-dressed man of not much consequence to the plot happens by, and as a leopard sound effect loops, the creature licks his nape with the fatal tongue and mutates back into the baron, looking smoother than ever in his victim's modern suit.
Continue reading the review of "The Brainiac."
DIRECTOR: Edgar G. Ulmer.
CAST: Hedy Lamarr.
WRITER: Ben Ames Williams (novel).
GENRE: Noir, drama.
We meet Jenny Hager when she's a young girl, holding a playmate's head under water with her foot, mocking him as he flails and gasps and cries for help.
When one of the richest men in town runs over to investigate, Jenny jumps in the water and pulls the boy, Ephraim, to safety. Years later, he recalls her cruelty, and Jenny indignantly reminds him that she's the one who saved him from drowning.
It's possible that Jenny is trying to deceive Ephraim, but it's also possible that she's trying to delude herself, that her memory of the incident is selective and that on some level she would like to think of herself as a good person.
Because of the film's moral ambiguity, I am taking pains to avoid terming Jenny a femme fatale, in an attempt to imagine her as a complex person, capable of helping and hurting others both. Jenny uses her sex appeal to get ahead, but the men who desire her are not blameless for their actions.
Set in the first half of the 19th century in Bangor, Maine, "Strange Woman" focuses on the ambitions of Jenny, who was raised by her alcoholic father in the hardscrabble section of town called the "devil's half acre," but through her Ulmer exposes the darkness of the other, "more respectable" citizens.
Continue reading the review of "Strange Woman."
