Cocodrilo Nit-Pics Flics

Wilder, 1950 A blurb on the IMDB claims that this film is a “hard look at Hollywood when Hollywood was bullied by an absurd censorship.” Hard though the look may be, it can scarcely be as hard as looking at the film itself. Shadows are prototype Adam’s family, the cheese-jeeby electro-lin is verbed into schmalz, Max’s fingers are just that shade of ghoulish white, and Norma’s torso is forever billowing. Ultimately a sad, creepy, unpleasant film, mitigated by the following: Joe Gillis plays a womanizing, opportunistic schmuck whom we find perfectly congenial; the story is related by a corpse; and Gillis’ gives the high hat to both love and fortune, thereby converting the standard Hollywood either/or into a much more delicious neither/nor.

Wilder, 1959 At first glance it is hard to grasp how the psychology responsible for such dark films as “The Lost Weekend” and “Sunset Boulevard” could have also spawned “Some Like It Hot”, a wacky rollick through the ganster-studded turf of hooch, cross-dress, and twenties swing. Yet a closer look at the structural dimensions of the early work reveals an affinity for feel-good: for all his suffering and brutishness, Don Bernam is a loveable cad who looks and charm engender sympathy, while Joe Gillis is a wry and humorous voice who’s vantage as a corpse strips the squalor from isolation and madness. These films seem content to frame and display human suffering, preserving always a slight comic disengagement and letting congenial quirks of personality displace the pathos of true failure. In many ways the same themes are played out in this film. Superficially, the characters are perverse and twisted: Sugar a besotted floozy strung along by streams of saxophonists, Joe and Jerr...

Wilder, 1945 It is interesting to observe how the role of the alcoholic has evolved from amusing chump at the beginning of this century to sick derelict at present. If ‘Chaplin’ is to be believed, Charlie secured his first critical film gig on the strength of his drunk act, and if one might extrapolate from such vintage jewels as The Thin Man, life in the twenties was a series of evanescent cocktails slurped hastily between romantic highjinks. Surely a modern film on alcoholism would wallow in relational dysfunction, physiological attrition, inhumanity and brutishness, ending with a wan smile, if the film were American, or perhaps merely a bloated corpse or two, if the film issued from the Vaterland. Wilder seems to have been ahead of his time, or at least on the vanguard of the shift. ‘The Lost Weekend’ recounts the story of a talented man venting his failure on drink, shattering himself, his talent, and his family in the process. It is a sketch, however benign, of...

Robert Bresson, 1959 Robert Bresson is a small, quietly expressive man with a vaguely rodent-like face and the floppy coiffure of a French genius. In a clip included at the end of the Pickpocket , Bresson articulates and defends his uniquely minimalist sense of cinema with clarity, humility, and a controlled passion that bubbles into his smile and gestures. One senses that Bresson has thought his world through. That he has grappled with the dark currents of vice and failure, cruelty and cosmic indifference, and that slowly, deliberately, courageously, he has made his peace with these things. What strikes is how well he has come through the peace process: how for all its sinister silence, its perversion and its suffering, Pickpocket remains a film of redemption. The Pickpocket is Bresson's version of Crime and Punishment . From the avuncular cop to a misguided theory of supermen, the allusions and parallels to the Russian novel of transfiguration follow one ...

Robert Bresson, 1966 In style, tone, and technique, Au Hasard Balthazar is very similar to Pickpocket, a film Bresson completed seven years earlier. Yet there is a depth and reach in the later film that vastly outstrip those of its predecessor. If we insist on identifying Bresson as a Catholic director and link his Pickpocket to Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment , it will be difficult to resist the temptation to call Balthazar his Brothers Karamazov . This linkage would be a mistake. As an artist Bresson is many things: acute, engaged, profoundly human, deeply concerned with the darker side of the psyche. To focus on the formal, ethical aspects of his oeuvre, however, is to miss an essential dimension of his work: the dimension of detachment. Though his principle concern may indeed center on morality and his object may be transcendence, he proceeds with such meticulous remove that, if we insist on giving him a label, it should be Buddhist, not Catholic. As in P...