Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss

Although it was made in 1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss looks like a product of 1955, the time that it depicts. Like Sunset Boulevard, it chronicles the last days of an aging former film starlet and the young man who is drawn into her strange world. Filmed in the style of a black and white Hollywood melodrama, Veronika Voss tells a compelling story on its own, but what really impresses is the way that Fassbinder uses these trappings to dress up a distressing critique of Germany’s place in the world.

When humble newspaper man Robert Krohn first befriends Veronika, he does not recognize her, but she either doesn’t notice or just chooses not to. She seduces him like a predator desperate for one last meal, and Krohn is easy prey. But as he becomes curious about her life, and the more he realizes that Veronika has fallen far from the peak of her stardom.

Veronika spends most of her time in an odd little psychiatric clinic. The lobby looks normal enough at first, but the further the film delves into the clinic the weirder it seems. Room are connected to each other by indoor windows and twisty hallways, and everything is decorated in white. Fassbinder creates the impression of a whitewashed maze that circles in on itself, and echoing up from deep in the centre of the maze comes the sound of a radio that’s always tuned to American hillbilly music. It’s never clear where exactly the music is coming from, but it’s always loudest in Veronika’s small room at the clinic, especially during her most desperate moments.

In a film that so ably apes 1950s melodramas, the bizarre American music stands out as the only really avant-garde element, and it is striking. There is also an African American GI who rather inexplicably seems to work at the clinic, or at least is always hanging around there. Fassbinder seems to be trying to draw a connection between the United States and the psychiatric clinic, and I think ultimately he’s making a statement about Germany’s dependence on American foreign aide after World War II.

The clinic primarily works as an underground morphine dispensary. Patients become addicts in order to numb their pain, and become dependent not just on morphine, but on the clinic itself. The clinic assumes control over their lives and assets, until the patient has nothing left to give.

Both of the patients that Fassbinder introduces us to have been nearly destroyed by World War II – Veronika’s fortunes and film career have been in decline ever since the end of the war, and the other patient is a wealthy and elderly Holocaust survivor. The clinic gives them comfort, but at the price of their freedom and identity.

By equating the morphine clinic to American intervention in German affairs, Fassbinder offers a critique of his country’s reliance on outside assistance, and it must have struck a chord with the German psyche, because Veronika Voss won best film at the Berlin International Film Festival upon its release.

Because I had to miss the first three films in the Fassbinder series, I can’t compare this film to the others that were shown, which is a shame! This was the first Fassbinder film I have seen, but I hope it will not be the last.

1970s Conspiracy Films: Winter Kills

When director William Richert first walked onto the set of his film Winter Kills, he wasn’t sure how a 35mm camera worked because he had never seen one up close. He was almost a complete novice, untested except for a few short documentaries, but he somehow managed to assemble a rather extraordinary cast a crew. The supporting roles went to actors like Elizabeth Taylor, Toshiro Mifune and Anthony Perkins, with Jeff Daniels and John Huston as the leads. For cinematography Richert had the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, who had just won an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and for production design he had the equally great Robert F. Boyle, a personal favorite of Alfred Hitchcock.

Working from his own script, a comic adaptation of the novel by James Condon, Richert intended to make Winter Kills into a sort of conspiracy theory Alice in Wonderland, the Kennedy Assassination seen through the rabbit hole. Daniels plays the sheltered half-brother of a president who was gunned down nineteen years ago and when clues about the murder begin to come to light, he is drawn into a bizarre world of conspiracies and paranoia where clues lead back on each other like a Gordian knot.

Winter Kills is deliberately confusing and often just plain weird, but it the tone is somewhere between satirical slapstick and bleak absurdity. It often feels like a half-decent shot at making Coen Brothers movie, although it predates the Coens’ first film by half a decade. Come to think, it might make a decent double bill with The Big Lebowski, another offbeat piece of Americana with Jeff Daniels haplessly trying to decipher a mystery. Daniels turns in a solid performance in Winter Kills, but it’s John Huston as the cheerfully corrupt Joe Kennedy-type patriarch who really steals the show. His character is an unrepentant crook of the worst kind, but Huston plays him with such exuberance that he almost becomes lovable, though always detestable.

The film is very funny and imaginative, but it stumbles in places and frequently feels flat and uneven. Perhaps this is Richert’s inexperience as a director showing, although the production problems faced by the film are also a likely culprit.

Financed by a couple of gangsters who had gotten tired of producing soft-core porn movies and were ready for the big time (which explains some of the movie’s gratuitous nudity), Winter Kills was probably on shaky ground from the beginning. There are reports of people being paid in cash by dubious means, and then eventually they stopped being paid at all. The union closed down production on the film at least twice, one producer was executed gangland style and another ended up behind bars. Amazingly, there was a two–year gap in filming, during which Richert gathered up the available Winter Kills cast and crew and made another film in Germany called The American Success Company that somehow made enough money for Richert to finish Winter Kills.

Considering the circumstances, it’s a miracle that the film was made at all. But despite good reviews, Winter Kills was pulled from theaters after just two weeks in release, and it virtually disappeared after that. It was never screened on television and has had a spotty history on home video and DVD. It could be that audiences in 1979 simply didn’t respond to this peculiar little film. Or perhaps, as Condon has suggested, it was pulled from release because the distributor had ties with the Kennedy dynasty, who demanded that they bury the movie.

Who know? In the film, conspiracies only fall away to hide further conspiracies, so perhaps this is a case of life imitating art … or is it the other way around.

1970s Conspiracy Films: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Although several scenes seemed to be lifted straight from my childhood nightmares, I wasn’t scared by the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers while watching it in the theatre. After I went to sleep that night though, that’s when it got to me. Scenes from the movie invaded my dreams, and when I woke up in the middle of the night I was almost afraid to go back to sleep, lest I be replaced by an alien vegetable doppelganger.

Unlike a lot of horror movies, there aren’t a lot of shocks or “gotchas” in this incarnation of Body Snatchers. Instead, it relies on those creeping feelings of dread and paranoia that I’m sure many children have felt while lying awake in bed – “What if the people I love suddenly stop loving me?” “What if I go to sleep and won’t ever wake up?” “What if evil takes over my whole town?” “What if I have to escape but there’s no where to run?”

Unlike this season’s other great horror film, Eraserhead, which took place in an abstract, dreamlike reality, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feels grounded in a specific time and place. Through a style that mixes German expressionism with New Hollywood grittiness, director Philip Kaufman places the invasion very clearly in late ‘70s San Francisco. This, combined with the way his characters feel like real people with jobs and dreams and not just fodder for the aliens, makes the film feel much more serious than its premise would indicate.

The three leads all face struggles that are related to the theme of being surrounded by imposters. Donald Sutherland plays a health inspector whose job it is to find the phonies in the restaurant world – early in the film he finds what a chef is claiming is a caper is actually a rat turd. His co-worker, played by Brooke Adams, is living with a boyfriend in a stale and emotionless relationship, a pale imitation of the genuine love she could have with Sutherland. And Jeff Goldblum is a writer who is distressed by how easily the public is swayed by books that have no heart to them while dismissing the work that he pours his soul into. W. D. Richter’s script highlights just how easily fake things can infiltrate and corrupt our reality.

When it moves out of the realm of social commentary into the nitty-gritty alien invasion stuff, the script doesn’t hold up quite as well. Aside from recurring shots of mysterious grey material being disposed of, the way the aliens work seems a bit illogical and inconsistent. In a lot of horror films it might not be as much of an issue, but the leaps of logic required to buy some of the mechanics of pod people don’t always mesh with Invasion’s general level of verisimilitude.

Fortunately, the special effects work is so outstanding, not to mention extremely disgusting, that it’s easy to forgive how outlandish the whole thing is. The scenes of pod people being born don’t make a lot of sense, but they are so stomach-churning nightmarish that it doesn’t matter. Ultimately though it’s the ideas behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers that make it disturbing. The damning final shot includes no visual effects at all, but it will stick with audiences long after they’ve managed to repress the memories of the more graphic and gory scenes.

1970s Conspiracy Films: The Parallax View

Filmed during a time when it still seemed like America's best and brightest could, at any moment, wind up dead from an assassin's bullet, The Parallax View is a thriller that asks just where all those assassins might be coming from. A lot of people get assassinated in this movie, to an extent that nearly borders on absurd. Just about every major character, and many minor ones, end up assassinated, often for unknown reasons.

But The Parallax View isn't a movie that's concerned about whether its plot makes a whole lot of sense. What's important here is the idea that society is being systematically manipulated by shadowy forces behind the scenes, and shadowy forces have a way of making plot holes just disappear. Fortunately, this is a very well made film, so if the story seems to be missing a few components, everything else is firing on all cylinders. Warren Beatty stars as a shaggy-haired, small fry reporter who discovers a trace of the conspiracy and decides to see just how much of it he can unravel. Beatty has a great screen presence, but the real star here is genius cinematographer Gordon Willis, working in a 2:35 widescreen format that looks fantastic. Between thrilling long shots where actors are dwarfed by their surroundings and close-ups where big blocks of colour threaten to push them from the frame, Willis creates a world where everyone is on the verge of drowning or being swallowed up by the oppressive space around them. This is a film that truly benefits from being up on the big screen.

As a whole, the film feels a bit disjointed, drawn out some times and rushed at others, but its individual sequences are little masterpieces. Structurally it kind of weirdly reminds me of the rock opera "concept albums" from the same era, complete with a prologue and a reprise, and great individual parts that don't quite gel together into a coherent way.

There's the short and smartly edited opening sequence on Seattle's Space Needle, the gleefully offbeat action romp in a Northwest country town, the taunt, the sublimely Hitchcock suspense of the airplane scene, and the operatic final showdown, but what stands out the most is an unsuspected piece of avant garde cinema spliced into the middle of the film.

Beatty's character, having successfully infiltrated an organisation that trains assassins, is taken into a darkened theatre and shown a film intended to brainwash him. It's a propaganda created like Soviet montage but with a distinctly Americana flavour, and it completely fills the screen, as we watch it along with Beatty's reporter. Images and words flash on the screen that are initially comforting, but become more threatening and confusing as they are repeated faster in different sequences. It's a powerful example of just how easily people, and that includes the audience watching The Parallax View, can be manipulated by the media, especially film.

The montage is constructed to make the viewer believe that the world has descended into chaos and that only the viewer can set things right again by becoming a hero, as symbolised by the repeated image of Marvel Comics' Thor. It's interesting that this is also the journey that most feature films take us on, as well. How often after watching a great adventure movie where the protagonist triumphs, do we leave the theatre feeling like we too can take on the world?

The Parallax View subverts this to some extent, although it doesn't go as far as it might have. After all, Beatty's character is a lone hero who believes that he's the only one who can rescue the world from encroaching chaos, even before he views the propaganda film. He acts above the law and solves problems through violence. He's scrappy and nearly unbeatable as a James Bond character, and the audience is meant to identify with him. He plays the same part as Thor does during the propaganda montage, and the film's downbeat ending doesn't really defray that effect.

What the montage scene does do is alert the audience to the fact that they are being manipulated, even after that scene is over. It may be the ultimate paranoia film, in that it asks "Is society being controlled by unseen forces?" and then answers "Yes, and you are being controlled just by watching this movie."

1970s Conspiracy Films: Night Moves

The first thing we see in Night Moves, the scene that plays under the opening credits, is private detective Harry Moseby, played by Gene Hackman, receiving a telephone message about a case involving a missing girl. The audience immediately knows what kind of movie they’re going to be watching, who the protagonist is, and what he’s going to try and do.

Except, it doesn’t really all work out that way. In most detective movies the gumshoe is the least intriguing character, but in Mosley’s case the audience is brought to ponder his past history, his psychology and his motives just as much as Moseby ponders those involved in the cases he investigates. Unlike Sam Spade, being a detective isn’t what he is, it’s what he does… or at least tries to do.

The thing is that Mosley isn’t a very great detective. The second big way that Night Moves subverts the detective genre is that people only start dying after he’s solved his case, and the harder he tries to solve the murders, the more of them there are.

Mosley is never shown to make truly ignorant mistakes or blunders; he’s no real intellectual, but he isn’t portrayed as a lummox either. When he can’t solve the mystery at the end of the film, in spite of great determination, and even courage, the film leaves us with a sinking feeling of confusion and despair, and more questions than answers.

Night Moves feels very much like a product of the mid-seventies, from Moseby’s moustache to his wife’s crocheted blouses, from long scenes involving reel-to-reel answering machines to the ruminations on the deaths of the Kennedys, and especially to the feeling that the “free love” ideals of the ‘60s have turned to decay. I felt like audiences in 1975 would have felt an intimate connection with this movie, and its weary cynicism still has bite today.

There are bits that have not aged well, though. This movie includes The Most Seventies Scene Ever, in which Gene Hackman is lying in bed with his wife, caressing her gratuitously bare breasts with his foot as he eats cheese fondue out of a little home fondue pot. I am not making that up. The soundtrack is made up almost exclusively of watery synths, and it is very, very bad.

In the closing moments, however, I had a glimpse of what Night Moves might have been life if the sound cues were chosen by Martin Scorsese. Someone’s cell phone went off behind me, the only time in movie history when a cell phone has improved a movie, and the ring tone was Bob Marley’s version of All Across the Watchtower. As Mosley helplessly watches a man drown, a man he trusted until this very moment, and as he sees all the meaning he had built up around this case washed violently away, I thought the song fit the film and the tenor of the times it was conveying perfectly.

“There’s too much confusion here, and I can’t get no relief.”

Imagining Interiors: Black Sunday

When shown in American cinemas, the 1960 Italian horror film Las Maschera del Demonio, ran with a disclaimer that the film would shock audience like no other and should not be seen by children under twelve. This was after three minutes of gore had been edited out of the film, and some of the satanic references had been removed, including the translated title “The Mask of Satan.” The film was released as Black Sunday.

In the following half a century, Black Sunday has lost some of its power to shock, so I tried to imagine watching it through the eyes of my eleven-year old self, perhaps having caught it on TV late at night. There are images here, of witches being tortured, people burning alive, corpses rising from the earth and maggots crawling around in the eye socket of a formerly beautiful women, that would have made for feverish talk on the playground the next day at school. All the talk of Satan would have certainly deeply unsettled me as a child and kept me awake for reasons I would have been unable to explain.

Watching this movie about a week after Eraserhead I couldn’t help but compare the two films. Both of them derive their power from strange, disturbing images that relate to each other more like in a dream than in a story bound by logic. Black Sunday has most of the trappings of a traditional narrative film, but none of it really holds together in the clear light of day. It throws around potent images and symbols too quickly for the audience to really be able to make sense of it all, but the feeling you’re left with, provided you can turn off your 21^st century brain, is dread rather than confusion. Like in Eraserhead, there are enough things here that connect subconsciously and emotionally that “making sense” doesn’t seem to matter.

Black Sunday boasts some great, grisly special effects and inspired production design, though perhaps its biggest visual treat is the face of Barbara Steele, which is at once alluring and somehow unnerving, beautiful but slightly askew. She is instantly recognizable, which makes a few plot points more plausible and also made for some awesome movie posters.

Steele gives quite a good performance as well, a bit schlocky perhaps, but well beyond what most of the other actors deliver. Of course, the fact that everyone’s voice has been obviously overdubbed, mostly with anachronistic American accents, doesn’t do the film a lot of favors. Ultimately, there are too many places where the seams of this movie shows, from a few dodgy makeup and costuming jobs, to obviously rubber effects, to a score that distracts more than it connects.

The cumulative effect is too many reminders that you’re watching a film, and one that was probably made with not enough time or enough money, which is one of the reasons that Black Sunday isn’t as immersive as Eraserhead.

Few films hit as hard as Eraserhead, though, and Black Sunday still has plenty of creepy scenes of horror that can’t easily be forgotten … especially for those under twelve.

Imagining Interiors: Kontroll

Instead of the scheduled Australian film The Well, which was unavailable tonight, we were treated to Kontroll, a Hungarian film made by American-born Nimrod Antal in 2003. After gaining acclaim with this film Antal has gone on to have a career in Hollywood, most recently directing Predators for Robert Rodriguez. I am glad I didn’t know that going into this movie, though, and was able to watch it with an open mind.

The film takes place entirely in the Budapest subway system and initially follows a group of misfit ticket collectors as they try to perform their jobs with some semblance of dignity in the seediest part of the subway line where train patrons are more likely to physically threaten them, offer them the services of a prostitute or play deaf rather than simply show their rail pass. Filming in the actual subway, Antal makes this world feel real and alive, and does an excellent job setting up his main actors as a band of likeable losers who try to do their best in spite of a hostile environment and their own limitations. If the passengers themselves weren’t bad enough, there’s also an unseen murderer lurking somewhere in the bowels of the subway system who has developed a habit of pushing complete strangers in front of moving trains.

After the first twenty minutes I was impressed with this movie, which I thought had created the perfect set-up: our small group of weary and unwitting workers would cross paths with this murderer, and the results would be disastrous, but in the end we would learn just what these misfits were made of.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the movie that Antal decided to make. Instead, as the movie goes on most of the crew of losers drop to the background as he focuses on their most adept member, a mysterious loner named Bulcsú who dropped out of a “normal” society and now sleeps in the subway like a homeless person because … well, we never really find out. Eventually the movie turns into long stretches of watching Bulcsú sort of wander around the subway with no clear goal or motivation.

It’s still stylishly done, but the promise of the first half hour is badly squandered as the movie becomes more psychological and symbolic without really giving us a reason to care about Bulcsú or his psychology.

In the end the murderer subplot does resurface for a showdown with Bulcsú which is well staged and shows off the skills Antal would eventually get hired for in Hollywood, but ultimately has no real dramatic weight.

To be charitable to the last half of the film, I would assume that Antal, who was working from his own script, intended for his movie to have some of the dreamlike qualities that Eraserhead does, where the literal meaning takes backseat to whatever symbolic meaning the audience takes from the film. But Eraserhead works because it is a tightly controlled film, and Kontroll feels a bit like Atal threw in everything he could get to stick. The result is an interesting film that ultimately feels like a wasted opportunity to make something truly terrific. But I suppose it got the director a job!

Imagining Interiors: Eraserhead

All the films that I’ve seen at Adelaide Cinematheque have benefited from being shown on the big screen, but none more than Eraserhead. David Lynch’s debut feature is one of the strangest movies I’ve seen, and as seen in a theatre as it was intended it simply envelopes the audience, drawing us into a bizarre, terrifying and hilarious shared dream.

Eraserhead is a wholly unique film -- the special effects are unlike anything else seen on film and likewise the sound design truly sensational. The movie full of strange and disturbing images and sounds that are deployed with precision, never used only just to shock or disgust the audience, but to draw us deeper into the film.

Lynch has wisely refrained from explaining what the movie is supposed to be about, except to say that it does have a specific meaning to him and that no reviewer has ever gotten it right.

To me Eraserhead seemed like an expedition into a young man’s fears and anxieties about childbirth, reproduction and parenting. The first truly unsettling thing we see in the movie is a horde of puppies nursing on their mother, creating a sickening sound that disturbs long before its source is revealed, and the images of fertility, birth and parasitism don’t stop for the rest of the movie.

The strange baby that our protagonist suddenly finds himself having to take care of is an ugly, alien-looking thing that he never asked for, but which still manages to take over his entire life.

I wasn’t surprised to learn after watching Eraserhead that David Lynch had indeed been a young father and was forced to marry his girlfriend when she got pregnant. All of this transpired while he was living in Philadelphia and he has called Eraserhead his “Philadelphia Story.”

I’ve read a lot of theories about what this movie is supposed to be about, which is actually quite a lot of fun, but I think the meaning is not that far from the surface. To me it seems clear that this movie is a nightmare about trying to raise a child that you never wanted in the first place.

Marylin Monroe: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

There aren’t many cinematic confections more fluffy or sugary than Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which stars Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe as American showgirls on a cruise ship bound for Paris. Monroe plays Lorelei who is beautiful, ditzy and unrepentant about using her looks to persuade wealthy gentlemen to part with their riches. Russell is the more street smart and down-to-earth Dorothy who couldn’t care less about money and would prefer to find love, although she doesn’t have a lot of time for love with all the effort it takes to keep Lorelei out of trouble.

Monroe arguably plays the more interesting character, and certainly the one that the film revolves around, but I thought Russell was the real star of the film, adding a mischievous sparkle to all her scenes and making the whole production just look like a darn lot of fun.

The film’s signature song, “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” is more remembered for Monroe’s performance, but Russell has the last word when she reprises the number in a platinum blond wing while imitating Lorelei in a raucous courtroom scene. It succeeds as a brilliant send-up as well as a great performance in its own right.

From beginning to end, this isn’t a movie that takes itself seriously, but Lorelei’s cynical scheming lends it a sardonic edge. Her point, that wealth outlasts beauty, is hard to argue with, and in the end she emerges victorious, through little effort of her own. But Russell gives a performance that tempers what could have been a crassly materialistic message by suggesting that a sense of fun can trump both beauty and wealth.

Marylin Monroe: Clash by Night

The legendary Fritz Lang directed screen goddesses Barbara Stanwyck and Marilyn Monroe in the 1952 film Clash by Night, and the result unfortunately does not add up to the sum of its pedigreed parts.

The film starts off strongly, with documentary shots gulls, seals and fishermen off the coast of Monterey, California. The sequence is edited so that we are introduced to mechanical workings of the local industry and how the film’s characters fit in with it. Amongst shots of dripping loads of fish being unloaded at the docks, we see Marilyn Monroe rolling out of bed in a tiny apartment to simply pull on a pair of jeans and head to her job in the cannery. It’s the best and most memorable scene in the film, despite lasting only a few seconds. The whole sequence emphasizes the way the community is built around industry and recalls scenes from Lang’s earlier masterpiece Metropolis.

But once Lang gets around to tackling the film’s story, it feels like none of the material really engages him as a filmmaker. It’s obvious that the script was based off of a Broadway play from the way the scenes are staged to the actors’ mostly melodramatic performances. There are some entertaining moments, especially from the supporting cast, but for the most part the film tends to plod ponderously along without much really happening.

This film gets classified on wikipedia as a “drama with some film noir aspects,” but there’s simply not enough noir here to make it interesting. Stanwyck’s character is fond of glumly declaring how she’s damaged and will bring no good to anyone, although we never really find out what happened to make her so morose. I suppose she’s something of a femme fatal, seeing how the men she attracts inevitably end up worse off than they started, but Stanwyck hardly exudes sex appeal in this role and it’s hard to see just what attracts these men to her in the first place. Perhaps their little fishing village is bereft of eligible women? Whatever the case, she makes for one of the dullest femme fatales in cinema.

I suspect it’s Lang’s association with film noir that is responsible for the movie being painted with that brush, and it’s interesting to note that there are multiple mentions of children being lost or kidnapped throughout the film, almost like an echo of Lang’s classic film M. The fact that these disappearances have no bearing on the story or plot of the film only makes them more unsettling. They contribute to a feeling of dread that sort of percolates under the whole movie without ever coming to a boil.

I spent most of the film waiting for something, anything exciting to happen, but the eventual betrayal feels small, petty and, worst of all, anticlimactic considering the long-simmering build up. Even then the plot never really kicks into high gear, and as a result I felt like this film was something of a missed opportunity.

Marylin Monroe: Some Like it Hot

I love the shared experience of watching a movie in the cinema, especially comedies. I think laughing along with other people is so much more enjoyable than laughing by yourself in your living room. Great movies are better if you can share them, and funny movies become funnier.

Some Like it Hot is one of my favorite movies and getting to watch it on the big screen with a decent crowd is simply a treat. The script is razor-sharp, the actors all in fine form, and Marilyn Monroe is simply indelible. There’s so much to like about this movie that it nearly feels perfect.

One aspect of the film that was pointed out to me at this screening was the way that, for all the cross-dressing and pervasive sexuality, Some Like it Hot feels like it comes from a world where homosexuality seems unthinkable. Not morally unthinkable, just not worth consciously thinking about. The famous final line is side-splitting in its absurdity because up until that point no one in the film, none of the characters had dreamed to consider gender as something that could be overlooked. Disguised, yes, but never outwardly dismissed, especially not when it comes to love!

Of course, homosexuality is neither out of sight nor out of mind in a movie like this, but the script eschews those easy gags and innuendos with remarkable restraint. Imagine a modern sex comedy like The Hangover avoiding gay jokes for even twenty minutes! Just like Marilyn Monroe was famously able to do, Some Like it Hot projects both unabashed sexuality while retaining a veneer of innocence. Part of this is because the script is smart enough to disguise its sex jokes (which makes them all the funnier), and part of it is because that because of it’s a period piece shot in black and white, which makes the movie seem older than it actually is. And an undeniable part of it is Marilyn herself, pouting and shimmying without a hint of deceit or pretense, unaware of her effect on men.

It’s all an illusion, of course. Marilyn knew exactly what she was hired for, and it wasn’t because she was a gem to work with – stories of her forgetting even the simplest of lines on the set of Some Like it Hot have become legendary. But as illusions go, it’s a wonderful one, and even more so when shared at the cinema.

Woody Allen: Husbands and Wives

After watching three Woody Allen movies in eight days, I approached this one expecting to see some of the same quirks and tics of the others. I knew to expect the typical Woody Allen character and a story about the romantic entanglements of rich New Yorkers, but I decided to pick three much smaller things to look for that had shown up in Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters:

- A scene where Woody Allen finds deep significance in the work of Groucho Marx

- A scene where Woody Allen rants about the stupidity of rock music

- A male costar playing a character who is more corrupt and compromised than Allen’s character

I was both disappointed and relieved that there were no references to the greatness of Groucho or the depravity of rock music but on the third point the issue seemed a bit muddier. In Annie Hall, Tony Roberts’ character represents the slick soullessness of California and contrasts Allen’s more culturally righteous, true blue New Yorker. At the beginning of Manhattan Allen’s character may be dating a high schooler, but at least he has a firm moral code, unlike his friend played by Michael Murphy who first cheats on his wife and then steals Allen’s girlfriend after he has encouraged him to go out with her. In Hannah, Michael Caine plays sleeps with his wife Hannah’s sister behind her back, while Allen’s eventually marries Hannah’s other sister.

In Husbands and Wives it is Sydney Pollack who plays the role of Allen’s foil, and the contrast between the two male leads is much more central than it was in any of the earlier films. Pollack’s character starts the movie by announcing he and his wife are separating, much to the surprise of Allen and his wife. As the film goes on, both men become involved with younger, attractive women, but Pollack and his wife ultimately reconcile and get back together, while Allen and his wife split up in the end. Their journeys look almost like mirror images, except that both men start the film relatively content with their lives and end it feeling quite worse.

After I left the movie I felt that both characters had been equally compromised, but thinking about it now, it seems like Allen has indeed written his character as somewhat more heroic, if still deeply flawed. The young college student he develops a crush on is smart and interesting, while Pollack’s girlfriend is not much more than a bimbo, a symptom of a midlife crisis. Pollack returns to an unhappy situation for a sense of security while Allen reluctantly embraces his situation as newly single, deciding that he won’t try to date anyone for a while. Although both men are left in depressing circumstances, Allen’s has more of a chance of improving. The distinction is a slight one, and I don’t think the film condemns Pollack’s character.

Instead, his situation is presented as one side of the coin in the dilemma that the characters in Allen’s movies struggle with incessantly: when it comes to relationships, you’re damned if you’re in one, and you’re damned if you’re alone. Husbands and Wives makes this point more bitterly than any previous Allen film. Which means Groucho Marx was missed more than ever.

Woody Allen: Hannah and Her Sisters

I was surprised by this 1986 Woody Allen comedy because it feels so much warmer than most of his other films that I’ve seen. The sardonic humor is still there, as are the romantic double-crosses, the persistent neurosis and the overriding fear of death, but in spite of all that this manages to be a relatively upbeat movie, with relatively being the operative word. I think a large part of that is due to the beginning and end of the film both being set at big family Thanksgiving gatherings that feel like happy, joyous occasions. It’s almost like the reverse of the ploddingly dour Interiors. In Hannah’s Thanksgiving scenes Allen shows us, to my great surprise, his vision of “family” as a really wonderful, positive thing.

Of course, family can’t be that great all the time, or in an Allen film even most of the time. The rest of the film shows relationships falling apart, occasionally coming together only to splitter off again. Hannah’s husband finds himself attracted to one of her sisters, while the other tries desperately to find a man, a career or any measure of success. The film’s best scene is probably when all three sisters meet for a lunch date only to end up tearfully fighting with one another. Because how Allen has shown us glimpses into the life of each sister, it’s easy to understand where they’re each coming from and how deeply they are hurting each other without realizing or intending to. It’s a masterfully written and acted scene and probably one of the dramatic highlights of Allen’s career.

Surprisingly, it’s Allen’s character as Hannah’s hypochondriac ex-husband who is the weak part of the film. Sure, his performance is as well done and as funny as usual, but his scenes in the first half seem disconnected from the rest of the movie, almost like skits spliced in from another movie to provide some comic relief. But Allen’s character ultimately does reconnect with the wider plot of the film, and in the process reconnects with that great big Thanksgiving family. I suppose it’s something of a redemption arc for his character, and maybe the idea is that he had the right family but the wrong sister? It feels a bit contrived, really, like he was trying to make a film that didn’t end on a downbeat for once. But the film’s ending revelation does line up with what was going on in Allen’s life at the time, the impending birth of his first child. So maybe this movie just caught him in an unnaturally optimistic mood.

This is a fine film in its own right, but in the context of the other Woody Allen films being shown this fortnight it has the distinction of being the only one with a “happy” ending, and the only one where Woody gets (and keeps!) the girl. It also has the ending that left me feeling the most dissatisfied, but it might feel more right if seen on its own.

Woody Allen: Manhattan

Famously, this is the Woody Allen film that everyone loves which he desperately hated and tried to stop being released. It’s hard to see what he hated so much about it. It’s a very funny movie that also manages to be moving and swooningly romantic. It feels like the movie that best encapsulates Allen’s work as a filmmaker. There’s Woody himself cast in his usual anxious, wisecracking persona; there’s Diane Keaton, his best and funniest costar; there’s the spotlight on New York City which served as the backdrop for most of his films for over 30 years; there’s the romantic entanglements, the razor wit of the script co-written by Marshall Brickman, and the tension between comedy and arthouse. Finally, there’s the love affair between a middle aged man and an underage girl, something that played out not just in Allen’s films, but in tabloid and media discussions of his life to such an extent that my generation knows him less as a comedian or filmmaker and more as “That Creep Who Married His Step-Daughter.”

Was it this aspect of the film that made him frantically backpedal on the film? Did Woody Allen think he had been perhaps too emotionally candid? By most accounts, he did have a relationship with a teenager prior to making Manhattan, and his character’s fictional relationship with a minor in Manhattan is presented in an unflinchingly earnest way. We may never know one way or another, but the fact is that many of Allen’s films feel highly personal, and the fact that he returned to the same subject in later films suggests that he either changed his mind about depicting May-October romances, or he never really cared in the first place and this wasn’t the reason for his dislike of the film.

Frankly, I think the cheesy opening monologue about how indelible New York City is comes off as more embarrassing than Allen trading sexual come-ons with 18-year-old Mariel Hemmingway. Hemmingway’s performance is nicely done, both tough and naive, fresh-faced and world-weary. Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton also turn in sharp, funny performances as the other romantic entanglements for Allen’s character, with Keaton playing a more worldly and cynical variation of Annie Hall.

The whole movie, in fact, seems more “mature” than Annie Hall. It feels like there is more at stake for the characters, and that there are more repercussions for a failed relationship than just loneliness. From the black and white photography to the George Gershwin soundtrack, the whole movie feels nostalgic, and it’s hard not to see Allen’s longing for Hemmingway as an impossible attempt to reclaim his own youth and innocence.

Woody Allen: Annie Hall

When I was about around seventeen I checked out Annie Hall from the library because I wanted to find out what film could possibly have outclassed Star Wars to take home the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1977. I was stupefied. As far as I could tell, the whole movie was based around some middle-aged nebbish jerk monologuing about how sex was complicated and no one was as smart as he was. How could that be a great film? Where were the wookies?

I’ve re-watched Annie Hall twice in the interceding decade, and it’s grown tremendously in my estimation since then. It’s a terrifically funny, insightful and inventive film that proves the Academy isn’t comprised entirely of seventeen-year old boys, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it more as I get older.

The one thing I admired about Annie Hall when I was a kid was its nonlinear narrative structure, which makes me sound like a pretty nerdy kid I guess, but I had never before seen a film which played so fast and loose with the conventions of cinema. It strikes me now that the film isn’t so much nonlinear as it is conversational, making digressions and doubling back occasionally to explain and clarify things.

In this way I suppose it might be the Woody Allen film that works most like an extended stand-up comedy routine. Hell, it even opens and closes with him talking directly to the camera.

However, to describe it that way really does a disservice to just how well Annie Hall works as a film. Woody Allen has made a lot of good movies, but I think this is his greatest – it’s constantly funny, cinematically inventive and authentically heartfelt. Since Annie Hall he’s made roughly one film a year, and I can’t help but think that this was the movie that really set him up to be able to do that.

Allen deserves a lot of credit for Annie Hall, but for my money the film would not shine like it does without his muse, Diane Keaton. As Annie she is captivating, complex and often simply hysterical. Woody Allen made this a great film, but Diane Keaton is what makes it unforgettable.

Indigenous Road Movies: Stone Bros.

I missed the other three films in this series of “Indigenous Road Movies,” but as I understand it Stone Bros. is a unique film in that it frames the aboriginal experience as not just a road movie, but as a raunchy stoner buddy-comedy, Cheech and Chong by way of Judd Apatow. It’s not a perfect film, but it succeeds brilliantly on its own terms as a piece of poppy, funny feel-good entertainment fit for the mainstream.

So it was surprising to me to learn that Stone Bros. did not really succeed at the box office, where it made back less than 3% of its relatively modest $3.4 million budget. This was clearly a film that was made with a large audience in mind, so it’s disheartening to learn it never found that audience. It’s been said that Australians don’t go to see Australian films, but even the dour Aussie arthouse drama Beautiful Kate managed to pull in over $1.6 million during its run at the box office. Beautiful Kate probably did not make back its production budget, either, but it attracted a larger audience than Stone Bros. on a scale of fifteen to one. Charlie & Boots, another Australian road comedy, released in the same month as Stone Bros but about white dudes, made $2.6 million. On the other hand, the critically acclaimed Aboriginal drama Samson and Delilah made $8.8 million.

So it’s not that Australians won’t see Australian movies, or even that they won’t see Aboriginal movies, it’s just that they didn’t see this one. Whatever the reason, I think that’s a shame. Stone Bros. has a lot of heart, and some pretty great performances at its centre. The laughs maybe don’t come as frequently as they should, and there are times when slapstick threatens to overwhelm the proceedings, but this is a likeable little movie, and it sheds some light on the difficulties faced by young Aboriginal men without ever encouraging the audience to pity or feel sorry for them.