Hôtel du Nord-1938

The Thirties saw two films with hotel as a metaphor for a
world, where tangled destinies of disparate characters were  unraveled as events,- hyperinflation in Germany or the Munich crisis, were deciding the fate of Europe. Destinies of minorities, gypsies, Jews were affected from many chains of events as we look back, but the world goes on as though none  the wiser. In a way as Lewis Stone rightly observed in Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel(1932),‘People come and go. Nothing ever happens”. … Vicky Baum’s book dealt with a world coming to grips with post World War-I, economic chaos and its corrosive toll on moral values. The characters of Preysing (Wallace Beery), the textile magnate, and Flaemmchen(Joan Crawford), the stenographer were drawn from real life. The Grand Hotel is where for the magnate money brought pleasure whereas for Flaemmachen had no choice since she had no money or prospects. The second film was made close to another world war and was set in a hotel that had none of the pretensions of the Berlin Hotel.
Marcel Carnés film Hôtel du Nord derives its power partly from the events that broiled from across the border. The story is simple enough.  A pair of lovers Renée (Annabella) and Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont ), checks in a seedy hotel and their destinies are tangled literally with the lives of a pimp  Monsieur Edmond (Louis Jouvet) and his protégé Raymonde (Arletty) . Edmond has cheated some on a previous deal and he is there under an assumed name. Unknown to him two of his former accomplices are waiting to come in. Considering the timing of this film these two are allegorical of the Nazis who were to burst into the French national life. They also had some perceived grudge for the loss of the previous war.
Carné films, his style
‘The film of Hôtel du Nord was inspired by a book written in 1928 by Eugène Dabit, a gifted young writer who died in 1936 in tragic and mysterious circumstances. Dabit’s L’Hôtel du Nord is a collection of anecdotes about a hotel’s motley collection of working-class residents and its neighbourhood, and a tribute to Dabit’s parents who owned the real Hôtel du Nord. Awarded the Prix populiste in 1929, it records and celebrates the ‘little people’ of this north-eastern Parisian area. Carné kept both the location and the characters (using some of their names)’ (Ginette Vincendeau /bfi sight &sound) .
This is second in the trilogy of Carne’s films of which the last Le Jour Se Lève (1939) embodied his characteristic style to perfection. The other film is Le Quai des Brumes (1938).
His themes invariably set in a situation where ‘characters can only escape through death – their entrapment is emphasised by the narrow rooms they occupy, the walls and the frames that hold them isolated from the flow of life that goes on in their humdrum ways. As in Le Jour Se Lève for Gabin the window that looks out is only a slice of sky from which sunset and sunrise are only mournful chimes of time with a reminder of approaching death.  In such a doomladen set, music adds to the feeling of isolation. As a counterpoint dialogue must serve the viewer to catch on the cadences and poetry of spoken lines lest he cave under the incubus of  hopelessness. It was on this aspect we feel the absence of  Jacques Prévert whose script always made the film get under your skin (Le Jour Se Lève, Les Enfants du Paradis).
‘All of his great virtues are here: the cramped interiors broken up by gliding, complex, delicious camera movements; a melancholy deployment of light and shade; remarkable, wistful sets by Alexander Trauner, which are so evocative that they, as the title suggests, take on a shaping personality of their own; the quietly mournful music of Maurice Jaubert; a seemingly casual plot about romance, tragedy and fatalism that casts a noose over its characters; extraordinary performances by some of the greatest players of all time, in this case Louis Jouvet and Arletty’(Darragh O’ Donoghue –imdb user comment)

The film was studio bound since the traffic on the St Martin canal could not be stopped for several weeks.  A visual motif makes the film’s fixed in the mind by use of water – the credits float and dissolve, the hotel stands by a waterway. St. Martin Canal is thus connected to the film, which must explain why Hotel Du Nord has been declared as a national monument.
The set is plainly artificial, yet still a microcosm of Paris which we enter with the young couple, the camera following them down the side of the bridge. A reverse of this movement takes us out at the end of the film. The film begins as it ends, and the setting never changes, except for one brief interlude where Edmond and Pierre are out, one is sent to gaol and another wants to make a new beginning.

Synopsis
‘Quai de Jemmapes, on the banks of Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, 1938. As the residents of the family-run Hôtel du Nord celebrate a first-communion lunch, a young couple named Renée and Pierre arrive, planning a double suicide. Pierre wounds Renée. Unable to kill himself, he escapes into the night and gives himself up.

Local pimp Edmond finds and keeps Pierre’s gun. To Edmond’s delight, the benevolent hotel managers the Lecouvreurs take Renée in as a maid although his partner, the prostitute Raymonde, is not pleased. Other residents include Prosper, whose wife Ginette is having an affair with Kenel. Renée visits Pierre in prison, but he rejects her.

Two crooks come looking for Edmond, who betrayed them when he was their accomplice. Raymonde covers up for him. Renée and Edmond elope to Marseilles en route to Port-Saïd, but Renée runs back to the hotel. Raymonde is now with Prosper. When the crooks return, she betrays Edmond. During the celebrations on Bastille Day, Edmond reappears…’ (Ginette Vincendeau /bfi sight &sound).
‘The film’s sardonic ending is probably the best of any of Carné’s films.  Maurice Jaubert’s music for the open-air ball heightens the tension to an almost unbearable pitch as fate takes its cruel, unavoidable course.  Unlike in many of Carné’s subsequent films, the tragic conclusion of the Hôtel du Nord does not feel contrived or laboured – if anything, it is understated.  Yet its impact is immediate and shocking, like a bullet straight through the heart’ (filmsdefrance,James Travers-2001).

Memorable quote: Raymonde: Atmosphere, atmosphere, est-ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphere?(loosely translated,’Nobody is perfect.’
Credits

* Director: Marcel Carné
* Script: Jacques Prévert, Jean Aurenche, Henri Jeanson, based on the novel by Eugène Dabit
* Photo: Armand Thirard
* Music: Maurice Jaubert
* Cast: Annabella (Renée), Jean-Pierre Aumont (Pierre), Louis Jouvet (Monsieur Edmond), Arletty (Raymonde), Paulette Dubost (Ginette), Andrex (Kenel), André Brunot (Émile Lecouvreur), Henri Bosc (Nazarède), Marcel André (Le chirurgien), Bernard Blier (Prosper), François Périer
* Country: France
* Language: French
* Runtime: 92 min, B&W

benny

The Lower Depths-1936

aka. Les Bas-Fonds

It is one of the curiosities in the history of cinema that Jean Renoir who has been busy making Une Partie de Campagne left it for directing a film, theme of which was apparently against his grain. Une Partie is like a painting of his father come to life where nature takes hand in determining the life of a nubile girl in the flush of her adolescence and her first love. The lovers surrender to nature and to their emotions, and go on to live naturally miserable lives apart. If we look at his father’s paintings we see similar tableaux of lovers with certain poses, foliage, sun and shade.  But he left it for filming The Lower Depths in 1936.
Whereas The Lower Depths is a closed- in world bearing the superscription as in Dante’s Hell. (Despair is the key that is etched on the souls of its denizens.) What had the Gorky’s gutter play to wean him from the Maupassant story?
In 1936 the rise of Hitler in Germany and the Popular Front in France created within the French Left a new sense of solidarity with the Soviet Union. In that context the Russian immigrant producer Alexander Kamenka asked Jean Renoir to direct a film of Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. Renoir accepted the offer and before agreeing to take on the project, Renoir insisted that the film be set in France (not Russia), and that some drastic changes be made to the plot.  The most significant change was the ending; the tragic denouement in Gorki’s play was replaced with a happier ending, in keeping with the mood of the time.
Trivia: Renoir was obliged to write to Gorki to receive permission for these alterations to the story, which was duly given (although Gorki died a few months before the film was released).
Plot
The story revolves around two characters that represent two ends of the society. One is titled and the other a common thief. The baron (Jouvet ) has stolen 30,000 rubles from the ministry and lost it gambling. Pépel (Gabin) has come to rob the baron’s luxurious house and finds nothing worth stealing there. The baron, returning home in a suicidal mood, interrupts Pépel’s theft. Here in their first encounter, each opens the eyes of the other to the possibility of change. Each glimpses a new possibility, the baron, a life without things; Pépel a life without thefts.

Soon the baron appears at the flophouse. The baron soon finds himself in the swim of things there. If thousand- ruble game in the casino had turned his world upside down he finds life there: he can still indulge his passion in the three-kopek game in the flophouse.  If he has lost his class he has found his life. He sheds luxury and prestige without regret. When Pépel finds life in the lower depths unbearable and proposes to leave the flophouse, he asks the baron what he will do. The baron replies without hesitation, “I’ll stay here.” He has no desire to go. Unlike Gorky’s baron, his descent from aristocracy has not been degrading but liberating.

After Pépel leaves the baron’s carrying the bronze horses he steals some apples, then gives them to a child and tells him, “And if someday someone tells you Pépel is a thief, you’ll set them straight.” The film ends with homage to Chaplin’s Modern Times as the lovers walk off down the road of life.
Acting:
The film, apart from its dark theme, is carried by the acting of the two main characters.  The Gabin-Jouvet pairing is a masterstroke, with both actors providing fine performances that are charged with conviction and humanity.  Despite their different backgrounds and approaches to their art, the two actors complement each other perfectly, the down-trodden and passionate proletarian played by Gabin making a poignant contrast with Jouvet’s ruined but nonchalant aristocrat.  The scene where the two characters meet and, realising the absurdity of the barriers which separate them, become friends is one of the enduring moments of the film, and is certainly in keeping with the ethos of the Popular Front.  The large supporting cast gives the film its richness and colour, with notable performances from Suzy Prim, Robert Le Vigan.
Junie Astor as Natasha
While Gabin and Jouvet were excellent there was much to be desired in the acting of Natasha. Dramatically she plays a prominent role in the film, necessary for both the death of Kostylyov and Pépel’s escape from the lower depths. But her performance destroys almost every scene she is in. Renoir said of this, “She’s terrible, isn’t she? She was a friend of the producer. He asked me as a special favor to give her the part. I worked hard with her but it didn’t do much good.
“Some faces are beautiful, made for the camera. Some faces are not beautiful but interesting. But Junie Astor had a face that showed nothing to the camera. It is empty.”Renoir
“…the wonderful opening shot of the film: Jouvet stands upright, the only figure on screen, in the centre of the frame, silent but with an occasional superior smirk escaping him as his unseen superior rebukes him for embezzling ministry funds to pay off his gambling debts; and the camera swings round him first to the left and then further and further to the right finally to reveal his superior reflected in a mirror.

This single opening shot keys us to all the important features of the film: the priority given to star persona and performance; the degree to which the narrative differs from (adds to, opens out) Gorky’s original play; and the significance of Renoir’s camera style of this time, characterised by deep-focus depth-of-field, the moving camera, and the revelation of off-screen space, the world extending beyond the limits of the frame”(brightlights films.com- Ian Johnston)

Renoir and Kurosawa
Donald Richie calls Akira Kurosawa’s film of The Lower Depths a miracle of ensemble playing. In contrast Renoir makes of the play a vehicle for two fine actors, Louis Jouvet and Jean Gabin. The action of Kurosawa’s film occurs completely within the flophouse, as does the play, but less than half of Renoir’s Lower Depths takes place there. Still the flophouse remains, visually, the most interesting locale in the film, with its chiaroscuro lighting and dramatic shadows, its rough bricks, rude stairways, and old wooden posts that often divide the screen vertically or project diagonally across the frame and its length that lends itself so well to deep focus cinematography.

When Akira Kurosawa made his version of The Lower Depths in 1957 he had seen Renoir’s film. It was perhaps that which led him to try it himself. Unlike Renoir, Kurosawa follows Gorky almost scene for scene. In a style that resembles Renoir’s in its long takes and deep focus cinematography Kurosawa creates his flophouse as the locus of a world. But by the sheer vitality of the life in his film manages to overthrow the despair and pathos that permeate the play.

Kurosawa greatly admired Jean Renoir, thought him one of the greatest masters of cinema. The two met once in the 1970s, late in Renoir’s life when Kurosawa was in Los Angeles to receive an Academy Award and was invited to have dinner with the Renoirs. Kurosawa has written that his own decision to write an autobiography was prompted by reading Renoir’s My Life and My Films “and by the terrific impression Renoir left on me when I met him—the feeling that I would like to grow old in the same way he did.”

Kurosawa’s Lower Depths shows the power that could be achieved in cinema by staying close to the text and setting of Gorky’s work. Renoir did not see Kurosawa’s film until 1977. He watched it with great interest, then remarked, “That is a much more important film than mine.”
Although overshadowed by Renoir’s subsequent masterpieces (La Grande Illusion was made straight after this film), Les Bas-fonds is an impressive work, which, through its very evident humanity, remains a surprisingly modern film.  Its wry comic touches have an ironic edge to them, a suggestion perhaps that Renoir might have preferred this to be a much darker work, in the vein of the poetic realists.  This is also hinted at by the location filming which uses an almost neo-realist style to convey the grim reality of poverty.  Noticeable also in this film is Renoir’s admiration for his two heroes of the silent era, Eric Von Stroheim and Chaplin.
A variant of the Lower Depths was made later where some of the Russian elements of the play were introduced that seems to have prevented the film from being a popular success.  The film was well received by the critics, however, and was awarded the first Prix Louis Delluc in 1937.
Cast

* Jean Gabin – Wasska Pepel
* Louis Jouvet – The Baron
* Suzy Prim – Vassilissa
* Junie Astor – Natacha
* Jany Holt – Nastia
* Vladimir Sokoloff – Kostileff

Robert Le Vigan – L’Acteur; Camille Bert – Le Comte; René Génin – Le Vieillard; Paul Temps – Satine; Robert Ozanne – Jabot; Léon Larive – Felix, le domestique; Alex Allin; Maurice Baquet – Accordeoniste; André Gabriello – Le Commissaire; Lucien Mancini – Patron de la guinguette; Sylvain
Credit
Jacques Becker – First Assistant Director, Jean Renoir – Director, Marguerite Renoir – Editor, Jean Wiener – Composer (Music Score), Jean Bachelet – Cinematographer, F. Bourgas – Cinematographer, Arthur Mayer – Producer, Eugène Lourié – Set Designer, Jacques Companeez – Screenwriter, Jean Renoir – Screenwriter, Charles Spaak – Screenwriter, Maxim Gorky – Play Author
Similar Movies
Dodes’ka-Den; Die Freudlose Gasse; Austeria; The L-Shaped Room
(Ack: James Travers,2002, Alexander Sesonske-criterion collection-30Dec,2003)

benny

Films of Bergman

One feature of Bergman films is an unconscious acknowledgment of personal influences of his world on him. Bergman was working for Svensk Filmindustri while Alf Sjöberg made The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory, hints of which we can see in The Seventh Seal. The fact that he went on to put Miss Julie, the film that established the reputation of Sjöberg on the boards after his death, cannot be coincidental. If Bergman has found relentless use of close-up of the face a technique to reinforce the existential and moral problems of his characters we may find in Carl Dreyer’s use of such close-ups as forerunner. In citing these in no way detracts the artistic excellence of this Swedish filmmaker. Another feature of Bergman’s subject matter is his introspective quality derived of course from his childhood memories, adolescence and personality. The Seventh Seal for example is his search for faith in the absence of a personal God. In a way he repudiates the faith of his fathers and in its place coalesce certain existential sureties from his own a clue of which in his film Persona (1966). “Today I feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers — I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.” If we consider this film in particular we see it as self-revelatory as to his interior life. Take for example the images of Elizabet Vogler and Alma merging as one. This shot is a follow up of the birth of Elizabet’s son and it is narrated by her nurse. It is a painful memory for the actress and she hates herself and her baby. In merging the two faces of the nurse and the patient, Bergman is merely reliving his own condition. It is the reverse of the son towards his father. What spiritual baggage that he is left holding is anathema considering circumstances of its birth. The child- parent relationship must have been traumatic that it is explored in his movies again and again like a melody that one cannot get rid of. His Autumn Sonata (1978) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) are cases in point. This rather obsessive aspect of Bergman where he would rather get rid of the world and its uses on which politics, commerce and culture gather strength (and by which nations may trade their tawdry goods across,) he would confront his viewer and also himself by deep concerns that his own countrymen found as excesses. Consider ‘Bergman’s tight use of a 1.33:1 frame which often excludes any clear glimpses of the world beyond a face which finds no up, down, left or right in which to direct its gaze’. (The radical intimacy of Bergman-Hamish Ford) I for myself cannot think Bergman could pull off a film like say Ophul’s ‘The earrings of Madame de…’ or Fassbinder’s Lola. His metaphysical make-up is too ingrained in him to let him get into a serious business of commenting on political or social concerns of his day. His first success came with Port of Call (1948). In telling the love story of Gösta a seaman who saves a girl from drowning and keeping her by his side Bergman resorts to rather straightforward narrative. Berit has a terrible past and she would rather risk telling it before she commits herself to Gösta. In resolving their differences and mutual acceptance he touches upon social themes like failed parents sending their daughters to reformatories, the reliance of working class women on back-street abortions. We see him more as a disengaged filmmaker from polemics. I mentioned this film to show Bergman, as he has himself admitted at the time, was heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism. ‘The is most apparent in the stunning location sequences of Port of Call, where the influence of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica can be seen in virtually every shot. Some of these sequences have a raw documentary-feel… that is lacking in virtually all of Bergman’s other films’. (James travers-2007) Take a film like Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) where love, marriage and infidelity angle of the film is of a different league than the lighthearted touch of Renoir (The Rules of the Game) for instance. The aging Egermann takes his young wife to the theater to see his former mistress. His directorial touch doesn’t bring out anything new in their three-way confrontation except some heavy observations. The three actresses on stage mock men, love and marriage. One of them says that a woman can do anything she wants to a man as long as she doesn’t hurt his dignity. Bergman won a jury prize at Cannes for the film (1955). His handling of the comedy of romantic entanglements was as different from his Magic Flute or the Silence. With films as disparate as the Magician or So Close to Life he showed that he was not confined to any particular style as his genius to put on what he had thematically chalked out. The subject matter determined the style. It could have come only from his intuitive understanding of various modes and viewpoints of filmmakers of his age. Critical acclaim of his films have waxed and waned. Bergman’s status in late 50’s and in the 90s are light years apart. Ingmar Bergman is not to be judged by films per se but in the way he opened us to appreciate the shared condition of life and film art beyond the fads and polemics. It is purely an internal experience. Elizabet, his character in Persona stopped speaking unable to respond effectively with ‘large catastrophes’ such as Holocaust or Vietnam War. Bergman was also confronted by catastrophes that in his case were private. Luckily for us he responded with films.(Ack: James Travers, Hamish ford, Pedro Blas Gonzalez.)

Benny

Miss Julie-1951

According  to film scholar Peter Cowie, Alf Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie inaugurated “a new cinematic language”. Alf Sjöberg one of the brightest stars in Scandinavian film scene in the ‘40s and ‘50s, is now rather overlooked for the simple reason Ingmar Bergman is far greater draw than he. (see Sjöberg, Bergman and Swedish films).  Of his oeuvres Miss Julie is a classic. Alf Sjöberg won the Grand Prix du Festival at the Cannes Film Festival twice: in 1946 for Torment (Swedish: Hets) (part of an eleven-way tie), and in 1951 for Miss Julie (Swedish: Fröken Julie)
August Strindberg owed much to Émile Zola’s “Le naturalism au théâtre” and in the works of the Goncourt brothers. This 1888 play belongs to the period of naturalism in theater begun around 1880. Their dictum was to depict life through a temperament and to maintain a strict dramatic form resting on the three unities of time, place, and action. In Miss Julie, for instance, Strindberg confines the entire action to the estate kitchen, the conflict takes place in a short time span during Midsummer’s Eve, and dramatic potential of  power play is delineated by three characters: Julie, the twenty-five-year-old countess; Jean, her father’s valet; and Jean’s fiancé, the robust cook Kristin. Naturalism also decreed that a drama demonstrate a law of nature—in this case it was the survival of the fittest: the likes of Jean will live on while Julie, the product of an effete aristocratic family, will succumb.
Two different mediums
Before I get on with the details of the film proper let me point out a few points that distinguish film treatment of a play as ground breaking as that of Strindberg.  In the manner film exploits the basic theme more trenchantly Sjöberg shows his superlative talent. He came originally from the stage and showed his genius could transcend the limits of theater by letting the camera to explore the nuances of self destructive love as essayed by willful countess and her valet.
The film opens as in the play on midsummer night of 1874 on the estate of a Count in Sweden. The film roams freely over the grounds of the count’s estate, unlike the claustrophobic mood of the theater. The evocative mood awakened by the festive atmosphere of solstice, the torpor and heat in which inhibitions are lowered, only film can bring about effectively. One may compare it with Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).
In theater the directness of actors and speech must work despite of a confined architecture and painted scenery; the all- enveloping intimacy in which the actors create reality is all that they have in order to succeed. Their stylized gestures and rhythmic speech are their props. Whether it is an Ibsen or Pinter play, speech and truth of action in stylized acting or natural, reality is in carrying the audience along till the very end. In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes cleverness of the makers of Emperor’s new clothes succeeded.  In such immediacy of a make- believe world, reality was broken by the child who shouted, ‘the emperor is naked’. In short reality of the theater doesn’t suffer audience to drift into fantasy or introspection. Not so with cinema. To quote
‘Cinema is peopled with ghosts and chimeras who weightlessly defy the boundaries of space and time. This abrogation of external laws pulls the medium into the realm of introspection, imagination, and dreams.’(Peter Matthews-criterion 21 Jan’08)
Basic themes
The film as with the play essays power play of power, class and gender. The frolic of the lower classes typified by the solstice is a counterpoint to the hidebound social mores under which Miss Julie exists. This underlying tension runs throughout in visual terms as well as in the development of two protagonists. Julie takes added delight in playing her games with Jean, seeing fit to consistently demean this servant through such acts as forcing him to shine her boots. He submits to her will since his station requires it.
Taught by her mother to hold all men in contempt, Miss Julie nonetheless gives herself to him and it is a  point where balance of power shifts. The affair with valet Jean (Ulf Palme) shows what is her future. He wants her to elope with him to Switzerland where he expects her to entice customers to the inn that he intends to set up. His victory over her can never be that of one of an equal to her either in class or in aristocratic unflappability. Only he needs hear the ring of two bells and in Pavlovian reflex he reverts to his servile upbringing.
The tension of their doomed romance is revealing in  in their dreams: Jean speaks of a recurring dream where he is ever trying to climb a tree and the countess is free falling. Such contrasts, in Sjoberg’s handling render disparity of their childhood, taking  us into the past, illustrating the events and people who came to shape both Julie and Jean’s disparate outlooks on life. Raised a servant’s son and scorned by those above him, Jean is subjected to cruel humiliations early on in life which has the dual effects of both fostering contempt for the ruling class he lives under but also shapes him into a poltroon. And with Julie, her life is genuinely shaped by the sins of the father and mother; in her case, an emotionally weak father and psychologically unbalanced mother’s own war of attrition shaped and trained the young girl to distrust all men. (Strindberg points out with painful clarity the ways in which children become the weapons through which their parents can strike hardest and deepest at each other.)

‘The chief innovation that Sjöberg brings to his Miss Julie is the seamless way in which he presents both main characters’ past and present in a unified whole; as Julie begins to reminisce over her own childhood, the camera pans away and we are taken into the past only to be brought back into the uncomfortable present in one continuous motion, which speaks to the ever-present nature of memory in our lives as we live out in real time. This seamlessness injects a dreamy surrealism into an otherwise, caustic realism as well as foreshadows Bergman’s own use of this approach in films like Wild Strawberries.

However, the film’s dramatic core is sustained by Bjork and Palme’s performances as the main characters. Powerfully open emotionally, Bjork is expert at imposing the character’s will believably in the first half as well as transitioning into the shattered psyche that exposes her vulnerability and leads her to the tale’s tragic denouement’.
Cast:
Anita Björk     …     Miss Julie
Ulf Palme    …     Jean
Märta Dorff    …     Kristin, cook
Lissi Alandh    …     Countess Berta, Julie’s mother
Anders Henrikson    …     Count Carl, Julie’s father
Inga Gill    …     Viola
Åke Fridell    …     Robert
Kurt-Olof Sundström    …     Julie’s Fiancé

Max von Sydow    …     Hand
Margaretha Krook    …     Governess (as Margareta Krook)
Åke Claesson    …     Doctor
Inger Norberg    …     Julie as a child
Jan Hagerman    …     Jean as a child
Technical
Produced by
Rune Waldekranz    ….     producer (uncredited)

Original Music and arranged by
Dag Wirén

Cinematography by
Göran Strindberg

Film Editing by
Lennart Wallén

Art Direction by
Bibi Lindström
Bergman and Sjöberg, Swedish films
Alf Sjöberg (21 June 1903 – 16 April 1980) was a Swedish theatre and film director.
Born in 1903, Sjöberg was in the thick of artistic developments of new medium of cinema. Victor Sjöström( The Outlaw and His Wife-1918) and Mauritz Stiller( Sir Arne’s Treasure-1919) were engaged in  making Swedish cinema a force to reckon with. Hollywood sensing threat bought over Sjöström and Stiller along with his protégé Greta Garbo to MGM. Into this breach stepped in Alf Sjöberg, trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and he caused a sensation with his very first work, The Strongest (1929), an intense fable of seal hunters in Greenland. But the mortal blow to the industry had been struck, and he retreated to the boards, mounting acclaimed, innovative productions of Strindberg and Shakespeare through the 1930s. Meanwhile, Swedish cinema entered a struggling, populist phase. The smash of the decade was Gustaf Molander’s glossy soap Intermezzo (1936), soon to be remade for David Selznick -( once again,this time plundering its ingenue star, Ingrid Bergman).

Ironically, Sweden’s neutrality during the Second World War turned the grim situation around. A ban on foreign imports deemed propaganda (that is, nearly everything from the Axis or the Allies) gave domestic filmmaking a sudden shot in the arm. Determined on a renaissance, the visionary head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling, symbolically enthroned a repatriated Sjöström as the company’s artistic supervisor, then wooed another indispensable auteur. Sjöberg had been tempted back to cinema for an urgent, antifascist melodrama, They Staked Their Lives (1940), and consolidated his prestige with The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory that holds more than an embryonic hint of a later folktale about a certain chess-playing knight. At the time, the author of that classic was a hustling junior in the script department of SF, and Dymling had an inspiration: why not arrange a creative marriage between this whiz kid Bergman and the veteran Sjöberg? The result was Torment (1944) The young Bergman came to represent  the youth and Sjöberg, the Establishment. In Sweden as elsewhere, the war’s trauma had propelled youth culture—and though Bergman could be profitably sold as a rebel than Sjöberg.
Whatever might be said of Bergman’s burgeoning talent it was unlike that of Sjöberg who had cut his teeth on 1920s German expressionism. His camera mobility and deep-focus framing is evident in Torment.
Bergman would absorb some aspect of his technique for Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and The Silence (1963), eventually conceding that “Alf Sjöberg . . . taught me a great deal.” If it was a case of oedipal rivalry, then momentarily the father outpaced the son. Screwed over on Torment, Sjöberg recouped with Iris and the Lieutenant (1946) and Only a Mother (1949). Despite his success with films Torment (1944) and Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg was above all, and foremost, a stage director; perhaps the greatest at Dramaten (alongside, first, Olof Molander and, later, Ingmar Bergman). He was a First Director of Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre in the years 1930-1980, where he staged a large number of remarkable and historic productions. Sjöberg was also a pioneer director for early Swedish TV theatre (his 1955 TV theatre production of Hamlet is a national milestone).
A clue to the weight of two directors one only needs to watch Torment where Bergamn’s part only called for script and some four days shooting towards the end. Yet Bergman has become saleable and his name appears more striking than that of Sjöberg.
Sjöberg died in a car accident on his way to rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
Versions of  Miss Julie
* The first, Fröken Julie by the Swedish director, Alf Sjöberg in 1951.
* Another version was produced in 1971 by Tigon British Film Productions. It starred Helen Mirren as Miss Julie.
* A version was directed by Mike Figgis with Saffron Burrows in the role of Miss Julie and Peter Mullan in the role of Jean in 1999.
(Ack: independentfilmquarterly, Brigitta Steene, Miss Julie: The Three Bergs-peter Matthews, criterion collection
answers.com, wikipedia,)
benny

Films of Ritwik Ghatak

In Nagarik (The Citizen-1952) we have the contemporary existence for Bengali refugees in post-Partition Calcutta. Ramu (Satindra Bhattacharya) is the citizen whom we see early on. On seeing the young man dutifully helping an elderly stranger cross the street one might think he is of affluent circumstances. But nothing could be more farther from the truth. His suit and shoes are borrowed for a job interview. It has been dusted and straightened out since these belong to his father (Kali Bannerjee) who has shed them long ago. He is now blind and ailing and it is a matter of extreme importance for his son to find a job.

Ramu the citizen has to support his family including his sister whose future has been long ago splintered to secure his.

In the above we have the predicament of one citizen representing the woes of a subcontinent. We shall see how pertinent is this in the sad case of his sister. She is undereducated since the scant fortunes of the school teacher has been invested on the boy than on her. Such gender discrimination is perpetuated as a matter of course in a society where Sita the wife of Lord Ram is worshiped as a sacred symbol of motherhood. Mother India or Sita may be for public consumption held up as a revered image by those who in practice humiliate her at every turn. It is what the conduct of those suitors tells us. Her parents have little hope for a better life for her except to marry her off to anyone who is able to provide for her. Ritwik Ghatak in exposing this hypocrisy must have touched a nerve of the powers that be. Herein lies a clue to the failure of a man who was second to none  as a filmmaker.

 Satyajit Ray seems to have once said of his contemprorary Ritwik Ghatak thus: Had Nagarik been released before his Pather Panchali, Nagarik would have been accepted as the first film of the alternative form of Bengali cinema. Nagarik (The Citizen), the first film Ghatak ever made, was completed in 1953 but in fact released posthumously in 1977. In this simple fact we may conclude why one got praises while the other was neglected with more than unjustified criticism. In this contrast of two, both first rate filmmakers undoubtedly we have the persona of Ritwik, whose ant-establishment attitude made him unacceptable while Ray was presentable for the powers that be. Yes he was difficult –edgy, uncouth and insulting and he made them uncomfortable. He was the product of his times and his cultural awakenings were drawn from a bruise, which he came to terms in his own way. In a film like Nagarik he narrates the slender fortunes of a Bengali family and much of it is invested on Ramu and his finding a job has a bearing on the future of his sister. Chronicling Ramu’s attempts to find a job and his family’s disillusioning may be economic necessity but a family marginalized and dislocated must fend for itself as a mongrel that has found in the territory of others. Much of Ramu’s woes owe to dislocation.  No single cause other than partition of Bengal of 1905 and of 1947  could be explained as the pulse that beat underneath his artistic vision. Dynamics of so many works derive from it but for his cinematic idiom of course we need to look elsewhere. 

The bugbear of commercial cinema Ritwick Ghatak(
b. 4 November, 1925, Jindabazar, Dhaka, East Bengal now Bangladesh) remains despite of himself an icon whose influence we see in many younger film makers of India. There is a scene in Ajantrik in which two taxi drivers sit atop their car bonnets and belting away in a contrapuntal cacophony. What has this scene to do with the narration of the film? For that I can ask what has the chatter of grave diggers before the grave of Ophelia to do with the story of Hamlet? Does it not serve as a coda to the soliloquy of the prince holding the skull of poor Yorick? Films must visually lead us  beyond the surface to put ourselves with the gusto of living which makes the two taxi drivers giving vent to their existence as the prince of Denmark must give his own life a context in terms of death confronting him at every turn. ‘Lalitha Gopalan’s book on action genres in contemporary Indian cinema, Cinema of Interruptions, I came across a reference to the influence of a group of directors… in line with this account, we could say that Ghatak’s legacy has been a kind of cinema that invites us …to contemplate “deeply of the universe” – to “focus more intently” rather than be “entertained.”(quoted from: archive.sensesofcinema.com-  Megan Carrigy, October 2003)

The last film Ghatak completed was Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974) in which Ghatak played the lead role himself. Ghatak passed away on 6 February, 1976, at the early age of fifty, leaving many unfinished projects.

Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960
[The Cloud-Capped Star]

Meghe Dhaka Tara is the first in a trilogy (the other two being Komal Ghandhar or E -flat -1961 and Subarnarekha-1965) and belongs to the genre of melodrama and has a parallel in poetic realism of the French cinema in the late 30s.  Roots of melodrama in Indian context go further and has had played a vital role in rural Indian theatre and folk dramatic forms. In Bollywood films we have drama in real life ‘sexed up’ if we were to judge the way hero and heroine cavort around trees and melodrama is almost to the point of bathos.  While Bengali filmmakers approach melodrama through the prism of their political standpoints art is an elusive element. It is true that Ritwik in Meghe Dhaka Tara had no use for such crudities found in Commercial films but in presenting the story extracts as much pathos cinematically from the predicament of Neetu the film’s protagonist. Reality of characters and of their circumstances helped to a great degree by cinematic techniques has become poetry of images. Sexed up, nevertheless, in a manner of speaking.  This film is the best example of his genius. To quote Kumar Shahani ‘The three principal women characters embody the traditional aspects of feminine power. The heroine, Neeta, has the preserving and nurturing quality; her sister, Gita, is the sensual woman; their mother represents the cruel aspect. The incapacity of Nita to combine and contain all these qualities… is the source of her tragedy. This split is also reflected in Indian society’s inability to combine responsibility with necessary violence to build for itself a real future. The middle-class is also seen in triangular formation, at the unsteady apex of the inverted form.”

Synopsis

Neeta (Supriya Chowdhury) is the breadwinner in a refugee family of five. Her elder brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) aspires to be a classical singer. Neeta postpones her marriage to the scientist Sanat (Niranjan Roy) to support the family and pay for her younger brother’s and sister’s studies. The father and younger brother both suffer accidents forcing Neeta to remain the sole breadwinner of the family in spite of her worsening tuberculosis. Her mother encourages Sanat to marry the younger sister Gita (Gita Ghatak). Finally, Shankar having realized his ambition , takes her to the hills for treatment. There terminally ill, having sacrificed her best years, Neeta cries out into the silence of the mountains ‘I want to live!’ It is a poignant and aesthetically satisfactory moment of a woman who has had such misfortunes heaped on her. Her cry to have the permanence and inner resources as much as mountains and manifestations of Nature even when given voice is emotionally appropriate.

Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960
[The Cloud-Capped Star]

Bengali, Drama, 1960, 134 min

Starring: Supriya Devi , Anil Chatterjee , Gita Ghatak , Bijan Bhattacharya , Niranjan Roy , Gyanesh Mukherjee

Produced by: Chitrakalpa

Direction,script:Ritwik Ghatak

Cinematography:Dinen GuptaJ. Moitra

Music: Joytirindra Moitra

(Ack:www.upperstall.com-the Third man; www.filmref.com)

Subarnarekha, made in 1962 but released in 1965 is the last in a trilogy examining the socio-economic implications of partition. As with his other films we can see the socio-economic consequences of Partition.

benny

Drôle de Drame-1937

In an age of anxiety leading to WWII filmmakers in France coped as best as they could. Judging from Drôle de Drame it would seem Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert looked past their everyday milieu and set in another era and clime. They set their sights across the Channel and show how silly the Edwardian London was.

A botanist who moonlights as a writer of lurid whodunits , having to cope with a nosey bishop and a psychopath on the loose, is bizarre even by today’s standards. A silly premise it may be as far as the story and ‘types’ are but it is a near classic. No mistake of that.

Carné -Prévert would go on to make a few enduring classics like le quai des brumes(1938), les visiteurs du soir(1942), and les enfants du paradis(1945). A threat of another world war is gone and age old anxiety is still around but we manage nevertheless to move on. Cinema has ceased to be as forceful or creative medium that touched our lives as before. The aforementioned films are a precious record of history of our world reinvented for celluloid.

These films are as tragic as drôle de drame is a black comedy. 

The film is strong with such fine actors like Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet and Jean-Louis Barrault. The story by minute descends into a calculated chaos and the viewer’s all attempts to predict the direction it takes are foiled by the deranged view of life each character seem to display in response to situations. We can sympathize with a bishop who denounces the prurient interest of his flock in penny novels serializing detective dramas. But if he were to suspect the worst in his cousin and ready to use an impossible subterfuge to visit his home, his sanity may be called to question. Similarly we have a respected botanist whose passion in lucid moments is for his mimosa and it is understandable if he would require an outlet for creative congestion of his brain. He has an alter ego and he is Felix Chapel, who is the subject of the Bishop of Bedford’s wrath. Dr. Molyneux merely has found a way to buy himself some peace from his wife and his neighborhood. This sedate creature who passes his life quietly in harmony with his mimosa nevertheless revels in blood and gore, albeit written by his double  Felix Chapel.

It turns out, Molyneux gets the stories from his adopted daughter Eva, who in turn gets them from the milkman, who’s madly in love with her.  If he has his wife killed off as an excuse to explain a domestic inconvenience we may say for sure there are some loose cannons around and things go from bad to worse. Eventually Scotland Yard is called in to clear things up. How these square off their combined derangement is what makes the film memorable.

Summary

England, the early 1900s.  Irvin Molyneux is a quiet botanist who secretly writes pulp fiction under the pseudonym Felix Chapel.  His books raise the ire of Archibald Soper, the Bishop of Bedford.  Soper invites himself to dinner at the Molyneux’s home one evening,  at a time most inconvenient to him. His servants have walked out on him forcing his wife to double as the cook. Molyneux’s clumsy attempt to account for the absence of his wife arouses the bishop’s suspicions.  When he sees Molyneux mysteriously leave the house that evening, he contacts Scotland Yard, convinced that his cousin has murdered his wife.   Later, when the  Molyneux couple are away from home and the scrutiny of the press, Irvin Molyneux, as Felix Chapel, is invited to write an account of the mysterious Molyneux affair on the scene of the presumed murder.  Disguised as Chapel, Molyneux returns to his house, which has been taken over by the police who are still investigating the alleged crime.  He does not realize that the psychopath William Kramps, the notorious butcher killer, is in the area, determined to kill Felix Chapel.  Meanwhile, the Bishop of Bedford realizes he must return to the houe of Molyneux in disguise…(James Travers-2001)

 The film bears affinity to the films of René Clair or Marx brothers as far as to include it as genre of comedy but it is vitriolic all through.

Cast

Michel Simon as Irwin Molyneux alias Felix Chapel

Françoise Rosay as Margaret, his wife

Louis Jouvet as Archibald Soper

Jean-Louis Barrault- William Kramps

 and Jean-Pierre Aumont as Billy

Directed by

Marcel Carné

Produced by

Edouard Corniglion-Molinier

Written by

J. Storer Clouston (novel)

Jacques Prévert (adaptation)

Music by

Maurice Jaubert

Cinematography

Eugen Schüfftan

Running time

94 min

benny

Last Holiday-1950

Last Holiday is a 1950 British film featuring Alec Guinness in his sixth starring role. An alternative title could be, beg your pardon, ‘A Man Doomed to Die’ lifted straight from the Bosley Crowther review of 1950.

Unlike his previous film Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alec Guinness plays only one part and he modestly carries it to perfection. He takes the role of George Bird an agricultural implement salesman, who as the film opens is told by his physician the awful truth: he has not much time left to live. He suffers from Lampington’s Disease, a rare form of disease for which there is no cure and the doctor who has found it in him therefore may indulge in a bit of smugness and advise him to spend all his savings on his last holiday. It is precisely what Mr. Bird intends to do. The film has much to do with his meeting certain specimens, the kind Charles Dickens had in another era made famous in print. The haberdasher who fits out the doomed man knows that his moustache is wrong for the apparel he just got at a bargain price of 65 pounds. Mild mannered that Gorge Best is we see him sans his moustache from then on and he goes to Pinebourne, a holiday resort. Checking into the hotel we have more personages that could only be bred on the British Isles on tea with cucumber sandwiches and tea cakes talking rather strange. Having read nothing beyond Debrett’s Peerage and the Times, these are for tracing the lineage of Mr. Bird who has the manners of a nob.

George Bird the one who, at the beginning,  confesses to his physician that he has no relatives or friends soon falls in love and is offered a fruitful business opportunity, but these events only serve to make him reflect on what he had not achieved in life.

Finally, Bird speaks to a hotel guest who is the namesake of the disease he was diagnosed with. The physician assures him there must be a mistake and that Bird does not have the disease. After a trip back to the city, Bird confirms the mistake, and is ready to begin life anew with his sweetheart and his business opportunity. The twist is that he never makes it back to the hotel. He ends up in a car accident on the way and is killed. The hotel guests, having learned the truth, have moved on to their humdrum pastime of ‘ counting titled heads’. Kay Walsh, in the role of an embittered housekeeper of the baronial Torquay hotel and Beatrice Campbell as the beautiful wife of a young adventurer who is helped in her distress by the doomed man carry their parts well and with ease. Sidney James, as an out-of-place tourist, and Muriel George, as a dowdy nouveau-riche, stand out among the several assorted and significant British types. Of course Alec Guinness makes the film memorable and to the ranks of  the best to come from the British studios.

Last Holiday was loosely remade in 2006, starring Queen Latifah as Georgia Byrd, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, and Alicia Witt.

Let me end this appreciation quoting from Bosley Crowther,’… it is Mr. Guinness who carries the main role in this film, which Mr. Priestley has not only written but has also helped produce. And it is Mr. Guinness’ facility at suggesting intense emotional moods through his perfect command of stoicism that lifts the poignant story to its peaks. His doomed man is pitiable in his misery, he is funny in his bourgeois attempts at fun, but, above all, he is touchingly noble in his serene and wistful despair’.(-NY times November 14, 1950)

Directed by

Henry Cass

Produced by

Stephen Mitchell, A. D. Peters, J.B. Priestley

Written by

J. B. Priestley

Starring

Alec Guinness

Beatrice Campbell

Kay Walsh

Gregoire Aslan

Jean Colin

Muriel George

Release date(s)

1950

Running time

88 minutes

benny

Ashes and Diamonds-1958

The opening scene shows a chapel with two figures lounging in the grass. In Poland the Church has always been a refuge in any crisis. Those two figures idling there are in a crisis. Nazi Germany has just surrendered. On May 8,1945 a bitter struggle to decide the kind of nation Poland should become, will be put to test there. This has been more or less decided long before by two ideologies, oddly enough outside the country in question. Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) are veteran Home Army soldiers waiting to assassinate one who represented the other ideology. He is Communist Commissar Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzezynski) representing the pro-Moscow People’s Army.

The film resolves the fate of two representatives of the ideological divides after their common enemy has been routed. The irony of it all is that each is a double for the other or one could be the surrogate father for the younger.

Based on Jerzy Andrzejewski’s 1948 novel of the same name, Ashes and Diamonds is the Wajda’s last in the war trilogy, following A Generation and Kanal.  Adapted for the screen by Andrzej Wajda and the author time and space have been condensed to less than twenty-four hours in and around a single location—the hotel Monopol. The title comes from a 19th Century poem by Cyprian Norwid ‘…Or will the ashes hold the glory of a starlike diamond/The Morning Star of everlasting triumph.

Synopsis

The film takes place in an unnamed small Polish town on the day Germany officially surrendered ending World War II. Maciek and Andrzej have been assigned to liquidate communist Commissar Szczuka but fail in their first attempt, killing instead two civilian cement plant workers. They are given a second chance in the town’s leading hotel and banquet hall, Monopol.

Meanwhile, a grand fête is being organized at the hall for a newly appointed minor minister by his assistant, Drewnowski (Bogumil Kobiela) who is in fact a double agent. Maciek manages to get an entry into a room with the desk clerk, who is also a fellow Warsaw native. They sadly reminisce about the past and over the chestnut trees in particular which were lost when the Germans destroyed most of the city in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising. While Maciek and Andrzej bide their time to strike Szczuka, Maciek becomes infatuated with the hotel’s barmaid, Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska).

Meanwhile, Szczuka is attempting to locate his long lost son, Marek who had served along with Maciek and was recently captured by the Red Army.

Maciek goes for a walk with Krystyna and ends up in a bombed-out church. Maciek realizes what he had been missing in life. He could have had an education or settle down to a regular family life every day warmed by love, awakened by his brief love-making with the barmaid. The aridity of his past, a life of the mind is brought to him with a sledge-hammer force by the two innocent victims he sees in the crypt. The result of his botched attempt. It was all he had to show for his life as a sewer rat during the aborted Warsaw uprising and the present mission. Maciek’s crush on Krystyna grows perhaps as an antidote to the awful realization of his mission: shortly he must assassinate Szczuka.

When he does and as Szczuka falls, it is a dramatic moment and the built up tension in the viewer literally explodes: fireworks celebrating the end of the war fill the sky.

The next morning, Maciek goes to where Andrzej awaits in a truck. From concealment he watches as the other accomplice Drewnowski is exposed.  Andrzej throws him to the ground and drives off. When Drewnowski sees Maciek, he calls out to him and Maciek flees only to run into a patrol of Polish soldiers. He is shot and ends up dying in a landscape strewn with trash.

No empire or old order however feeble passes away quietly but makes quiet a din. We have in our time seen in the Balkans and it was so when the Ottoman Empire came crashing at the end of WWI.

What a trash new emerging nations make of the fine ‘ideals’ of the old order!

Directed by

Andrzej Wajda

Written by

Jerzy Andrzejewski

Starring

Zbigniew Cybulski,

Ewa Krzyzewska,

Waclaw Zastrzezynski

Running time

110 min.

Language

Polish

Trivia:

The entire film takes place over two days, May 8th and 9th 1945.


One of Martin Scorsese’s favorite movies. He showed it to Leonardo DiCaprio while making The Departed (2006), as main characters of these two movies have to deal with the same dilemmas.


The title comes from a 19th century poem by Cyprian Kamil Norwid and references the manner in which diamonds are formed from heat and pressure acting upon coal.


Director ‘Andzrej Wajda’ realized that his leading man Zbigniew Cybulski would be constrained by period costume so he allowed him to wear clothes that felt more natural to him.


After the film’s release, sales of sunglasses shot up because Zbigniew Cybulski wore them consistently throughout the film.


Wajda was particularly influenced by The Asphalt Jungle (1950).


Because of the film’s nihilistic tone, the Polish authorities were not keen on it being exhibited outside of the country. Until a low-level official had a print shipped out to the Venice Film Festival where it played to great acclaim.


René Clair was a particular fan of the film.


(ack: imdb,wikipedia,criterion)

 benny

Loves of a Blonde-1965)

Is the first film that brought Miloš Forman international fame and he followed it with such classics as One flew over a cuckoo’s nest(1975) and Amadeus(1984). Forman’s early movies are still very popular among Czechs. Many of the situations and phrases made it into common use: for example, the Czech term zhasnout (to switch lights off) from The Firemen’s Ball, associated with petty theft in the movie, has been used to describe the large-scale asset stripping happening in the country during the 1990s. Having introduced the director let me now get on with my appreciation of the movie.

Loves of a Blonde (Czech: Lásky jedné plavovlásky) is a 1965 Czech film and it works at different layers. On the surface it is a simple story of  Andula, a young factory girl falling head over heels with a traveling musician for whom it is a one night stand. Whereas the girl her whole life she shas invested ,-for its emotional depth I can only cite Renoir’s une partie de campagne(1946) for comparison, and must salvage it from faling to pieces.  Unlike Henriette the Czech girl dares to follow it up.

The film begins with the general (‘my hooligan love’ a pseudo Beatle number) to the particular musically represented by  ‘Ave Maria’ at the end. The bach-gounod number in this case is meant to be a paen to the blonde working girl who in her elemental goodness stands as a modern Maria.

It is also a social satire.

The film takes place in the provincial Czech town of Zruc, which Forman sketches in a few shots: a train station, a housing block, a shoe factory that could have been lifted from any of the East European films of the communist era. Andula, the blond protagonist of the film is a worker in the shoe factory, one among some 2000 who outnumbers male population by 16 to one. The film opens with the benign manager of the factory asking army officials to place a regiment in Zruc, as a way of redressing the local imbalance of available males and yearning females. “They need what we needed when we were young,” the manager says to an avuncular Major who can well understand the manager’s predicament. ‘Sex liberates woman from their drudgery and social isolation’ seems to be the watchword and how the government tries to meet the expectations of the female workforce touches the very flaw of party manifesto as written and in practice.

Froman always had a felicity in casting the right actors for the parts. Just as he made the roles of Baron von Sweiten, Count Rosenburg and the valet in Amadeus memorable the three ‘old farts’ of army reservists who try to date the three workers are unforgettable.

In honor of the army reservists brought to the town a party is organized where girls in all sizes and expectations take part. The age old mating game played in the pub has plenty of room for comedy which the director uses to lead the viewer to the heart of the film. Andula catches the eye of the comparatively dashing young pianist, Milda (Vladimir Pucholt). The next morning, the traveling musician assures her repeatedly, “I do not have a girlfriend in Prague.” Milda leaves town, as expected, but Andula has fallen in love with him, and decides to journey to Prague to track him down. A low-key black-and-white ensemble comedy, Loves of a Blonde was cast predominantly with non-professional actors.

In Prague Andula meets the dysfunctional family of Milda and it is clear that in his parents we have the duplicate the blonde and her feckless groom on the making. Froman’s dark comedy is seen to be enjoyed. His comical sense reaches its best in the part where the parents try to cope with a strange girl who has intruded upon their private space though it is for one night. From that point the director tickles the funnybone, as it were with a scalpel, and only later we realize that whatever future happiness Andula may have with Milda shall only be a downer, an anti-climax to the trite line we are so familiar with, ‘and they lived happily everafter’.

‘Over the course of the three acts, the film’s context evolves from social satire (set in a public space) to emotional intimacy (confined to the private space of a single room and a single bed) to domestic drama (set in the awkward private-public space of a family apartment). The thematic shifts reflect the shifts in setting: the first section is centered on youth and infinite possibility; the second on young adulthood and romantic fulfillment; the third on maturity and inevitable disappointment.’ (DAVE KEHR Feb 12, 2002-criterion collection)

Similar Works
	Dolgaya Schastlivaya Zhizn (1966, Gennadiy Shpalikov)
	The Pornographers (1966, Shohei Imamura)
	Kitchen Stories (2003, Bent Hamer)
	The Firemen’s Ball (1967, Milos Forman)
	Noa at 17 (1982, Isaac Yeshurun)
	Adoption (1975, Márta Mészáros)

( ack: wikipedia,criterion collection, Allmovie)

It was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967. It is also known under an alternate title of A Blonde in Love.

Directed by

Miloš Forman

Produced by

Doro Vlado Hreljanović

Rudolf Hájek

Written by

Miloš Forman

Jaroslav Papoušek

Starring

Hana Brejchová

Vladimír Pucholt

Vladimír Menšík

Music by

Evžen Illín

Running time

90 min.

Language

Czech

benny

The Earrings of Madame de..-1953

In one of the three Guy de Maupassant–derived stories of Ophuls’s Le plaisir (1952), the rejected model jumps out of a window and winds up in a wheelchair. The artist, now forcibly married to her, and with plenty of time to work, voices the bitter aphorism, “There’s no joy in happiness.” In the present film Danielle Darrieux invites unhappiness since it is the only way she can feel the pulse of her innermost universe where the heart rules. In Ophulsian universe, men and women occupy separate but equal spheres, and if the men have more power and agency in the world, the women are the conquistadors in the more important realm of the heart. They are the ‘militarists of love’ as Stendhal would call them. For the general’s wife in the Earrings of Madame de… a piece of jewelry serves as nicely as one marries above one’s rank to be reckoned as a woman of importance.  Louise is married and she has a lover. ‘Loss’ of  her earrings presented to her by her husband  could set in motion, events of such import as a kingdom lost at the throw of a dice. Such a personal article ( a trifle in itself) could as the kerchief of Desdemona lead to death in some cases or social disgrace.  Louisa belongs to the rank and file of the militarists of love who gamble with trouble, knowing tragedy is around the corner. Why do they still do it? I recall a passage where Stendhal (Red and the Black) quotes  the case of Margaret du Valois, the wife of Henri IV. She needed such dangers in order to feel her existence. Not having anxiety was as being in a limbo, out of the pale of social respectability her station and rank commanded.

The Earrings of Madame de . . . is based on a 1951 novel by Louise de Vilmorin simply called Madame de, who, in pawning the earrings given her by her husband, sets off a chain of circumstances that, when she falls desperately in love, tightens around her and destroys her. It’s like a brooch, small in scope but filigreed and chiseled masterly as the works of Ophuls often are. The film has a special sheen brought out by incisive wit, irony and understanding. His films are all a treat to watch. It is all on the surface like light caught and the many facets of the stone keep you attentive to what goes on beneath. ”Madame de…” is one and  his  ”La Ronde” (1950) and ”Lola Montes” (1955) are similarly masterly. Take for instance the scene where he makes Baron Fabrizio Donati  writing his lover  day after day, with no letter back. Of course Louise frail in health and unable to stay in Paris tears up his letters and throw them out of her train carriage all the more despondent. She must play her part as demanded of her. In her thoughts,-her  tears and unhappiness on reading them were as good as replies to them. ‘ I’ve answered all your letters my love,”says she. She lacked the courage to reply in any other manner. Louise is married to a general. Their marriage has style but no substance. In fact as the general observes it is superficially superficial. In the same context he sententiously adds, – it is his way of serious conversation, ‘our conjugal bliss is a reflection of ourselves’.

The way she views her earrings is a clear indication of her feelings with regards to marriage. The diamonds, a gift of her husband she doesn’t mind selling since her debts that necessited it, are part of household expenses. She has run up debts in keeping her station in the society while the gift coming from Baron Donati is  from desire. She makes it clear in her tryst in his carriage that she will always keeps them by her bedside. That is what love means to her. In the end when she presents the gift to the Church its significance cannot be lost on the viewer.

The diamond earrings like RL Stevenson’s Bottle Imp turns up often to expose their shallowness as a couple and it echoes Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu: marriage as an institution in the pre WWI France meant for the privileged precious little no more than parading their good breeding and privileges. In this film also disaster follows the woman who makes a false step. Louise will lie to cover the absence of her earrings that makes her lover take offense first and then lead to a duel between two persons who mean most to her. All this will make the viewer agree with the general who quotes Napoleon,”The only victory in love is to flee”.

‘The Earrings of Madame de…,’ directed in 1953 by Max Ophuls, is one of the most mannered and contrived love movies ever filmed. It glitters and dazzles, and beneath the artifice it creates a heart, and breaks it. The film is famous for its elaborate camera movements, its graceful style, its sets, its costumes and of course its jewelry. It stars Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer and Vittorio De Sica, who effortlessly embody elegance. It could have been a mannered trifle. We sit in admiration of Ophuls’ visual display, so fluid and intricate. Then to our surprise we find ourselves caring’.( Roger Ebert-2001)
ack: Press Notes: Ophuls, A Pleasure Indeed, Criterion-Sep. 19, 2008

Cast
Comtesse Louise de    Danielle Darrieux
Générale André de    Charles Boyer
Baron Fabrizio Donati    Vittorio De Sica
Monsieur Rémy    Jean Debucourt
Monsieur de Bernac    Jean Galland
Lola    Lia Di Leo

Credits
Director    Max Ophuls
Based on the novel by    Louise de Vilmorin
Adaptation by    Marcel Achard, Max Ophuls and Annette Wademant
Cinematography:    Christian Matras
Music    : Oscar Straus and Georges van Parys
Costumes:    Georges Annenkov and Rosine Delamare
Sound    : Antoine Petitjean

Editing:    Borys Lewin
* Run Time: 105 minutes
* Filmed In: B&W
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