My Week of Movie Watching

Annie Hall – If you were to ask me to name a film that is the antithesis of the juvenile pap that Hollywood makes now, I’d say Annie Hall. Well written, literate, and funny as Hell: There’s no way it gets made today. Of course, it’s really about Woody Allen, but so what? I loved how Allen crams all the different story-telling techniques in here: The animated sequence where Diane Keaton appears as the Wicked Witch, the split screen where Allen and Keaton are both talking to their analysts about their sex lives, and the scene where Allen is having dinner with Keatons family and shows himself as the most hilarious Jewish stereotype possible. Recommended.

Panic in the Night – Man (DeForest Kelly) wakes up from a dream in which he committed a murder, and comes to realize that it actually happened. This low-budget Noir is actually a lot better that that preposterous encapsulation promises. The movie has a nightmarish, surreal quality, as Kelly confides his fears to his detective brother-in-law (Paul Kelly). The denouement is a bit silly, but I still enjoyed this, due to the clenched-up, hallucinative feel that the film creates. Recommended.

Sapphire and Victim – A couple of marvelous films from Brit Basil Dearden. Sapphire follows the investigation into the murder of a schoolgirl, who is revealed to be a black girl living as a white and keeping a double life undercover. The film is really a meditation on British rascism, as the murdered girl created a firestorm when she admitted to her boyfriend’s family that she wasn’t really white. It is to the film’s credit that it looks at the issue from the black point of view, as well. At one point, one of Sapphires black lovers says that his father would never allow him to be with a white girl.

Victim is truly a great film. Dirk Bogarde plays a prominent lawyer who becomes embroiled in a case involving a young homosexual man who commits suicide to escape a blackmailer. The younger man is a former lover of Bogarde, and the case will destroy his career and marriage if it gets out. Bogarde is wonderful as a man struggling with the choice of losing his livelihood versus getting out from under an all-encompassing lie. There’s a scene where his wife (Sylvia Syms) pries his secret out of him, and it is just an exquisite example of acting and writing. At some point, I am going to write about this film in detail. A masterpiece.

A Scandal in Paris – Also known as Thieves Holiday. George Sanders plays a man who lies, steals, and screws around, and is rewarded for it with wealth and status. This Douglas Sirk film from 1946 is a bit of an oddity, because it is so morally screwy. Sanders plays a smooth career crook who cons his way into becoming a police captain, all the better to rob the bank of France. In order for this plot to work, a lot of the people he meets need to be complete idiots, and lo and behold, so they are. In reading about it, the Production Code forced the studio to add a proper ending whereby the crooked Sanders repents all his wrongdoing and is pardoned, but it feels tacked on and clunky. Supporting cast includes the gorgeous and tragic Carole Landis, and Akim Tamiroff, he of the most interesting resume in the movie business. (He worked for Cecil B DeMille, Preston Sturges, Orson Welles, and Jean-Luc Godard). A mild recommendation.