Lost in Criterion

We kick off 2026 with a Michelangelo Antonioni film which totally bodes well. La Notte (1961) is the second of three or four films about middle class discontents in a rapidly changing world, and the last of the four that Criterion has decided to show us. It also caps off nearly two months of Lost in Criterion episodes dealing with divorce or other marital troubles - especially if you cast that net wide enough to count the mother-in-law jokes of The Uninvited and take the title of I Married a Witch at face value. What we're saying is that it feels like someone in a decision making position within Criterion was going through some stuff, and since next week starts a boxset of 25 Samurai films, they are no beating those charges.

Anyway, we don't like Antonioni or his stated purposes in making these films, so we once gain must come up with a better interpretation of the story in order to stay interested.

Every December, during the darkest times of the year in our part of the world, we take a little break from our unending Criterion Quest to gather with friends and watch a film that takes place during the winter holidays that is not at all a holiday movie. We may have found the platonic ideal of that concept in this year's offering.

According to the intertitles, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), directed by the late William Friedkin and co-written by Freidkin and former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich adapting his own novel, takes place from December 20 to January 30. While many holidays take place during that time period each year, including the anniversary of Lost in Criterion and the birthdays of our two hosts, yet no one in this movie has any loved ones to spend their time with. Instead they are too busy being bad cops. Sure, all cops are bad, but at least in fiction some are competent, here they are morally, tactically, and investigatorially terrible.

Our old friend Donovan H. joins us to talk about this bleak midwinter tale.

Lewis Allen only gets one film in the Criterion Collection but it's a pretty fun one. The Uninvited (1944) doesn't have great special effects for a haunted house flick, or especially bad ones which can be fun in their own right, but it does have an over-complicated story about family lies, two ghosts who hate each other, a mean lesbian, and cinematography by Charles Lang Jr. And while the film is allegedly groundbreaking for approaching the haunted house genre with seriousness, it's also got some pretty great jokes (just not the ending one).

René Clair was an early favorite among the filmmakers this project introduced us to. It was a lifetime ago what we watched Le Million (Spine 72), A Nous la Liberte (Spine 160), and Under the Roofs of Paris (Spine 161) but they have stuck with us. And indeed it seems like Clair had lived a lifetime or two between those early 1930s French films and I Married a Witch (1941) just 10 years later, his second film in the US under contract with Paramount. I Married a Witch is a sexy screwball comedy that's perfectly fun to watch, but it's very much not the stories of the lower class that we were primed for from our other films. 

The third and final film in the 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman boxset is another film in a long list of looks at the class and culture of Naples, Italy across time - Rossellini's own Paisan, Rosi's Hands over the City (and his Neapolitan Diary), Garrone's Gomorrah, to name a few. While the story of Journey to Italy (1954) is about a British couple decoupling and recoupling while selling a relative's house, Rossellini says he wanted to make a film where Southern Italians were not viewed like "zoo animals", and indeed our main characters become the curiosities as they have a series of crises while interacting with the common people and tourist sites of Naples, a land that, like India in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus, is just too weird for the British mind to comprehend.

The second film in our journey through the Roberto Rossellini Directs Ingrid Bergman boxset doesn't lead either our agnostic or Christian host to denounce the story's conversion narrative like last week's film. Instead, Europe '51 is a tale of a bourgeois woman reacting to tragedy by embracing social solidarity in a pre-Liberation Theology Catholicism, so a St. Francis-like faith that still thinks it needs to be a 3rd way separate from actual socialism. Like Dostoevsky's The Idiot this is a tale of living by the earliest tenets of Christianity in the modern world, and how the modern world will still kill you for it, at least figuratively.

This week we start 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, a boxset containing three of the five films Rossellini and Bergman made together over the course of their 7 year relationship. We've already seen enough variety from Rossellini, chronologically before and after this set in his career - The War Trilogy, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, The Flowers of St. Francis, Il Generale Della Rovere - that we shouldn't be surprised that Stromboli doesn't fit neatly into Italian Neorealism, but still it takes a bit for us to settle into and understand Rossellini's more spiritual approach to filmmaking in this set. While we'll take a minute to accustom ourselves to the spirituality guiding the film, the spirituality of the main character is one we will continue to take issue with. This is definitely the most cynical we've ever been about a film with religious themes.

Sometimes Criterion shows us a single film from a director we'd never seen before and leaves us wanting for the rest of our project, so often actually that we call them "one and dones". But then sometimes Criterion shows us a movie by Edouard Molinaro and it's fine that they aren't going to show us another. La Cage aux Folles (1978) is a funny movie, and is also a film that wants to show a very normal family that happens to be LGBTQ. It even may succeed, despite the fact that nearly everyone involved in writing, directing, and performing seems to be a straight guy who holds the material in some amount of disdain, though a disdain that doesn't necessarily shine through in performance. There is heart here, despite everything, but it's mostly a "both sides" farce. Still Criterion takes the opportunity to include an interview with Laurence Senelick, author of The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, who gives a very interesting history of drag and gender-nonconformity that helps contextualize La Cage in its time, even if it doesn't quell our troubles with the film's politics.

A problem talking about the films of Ernst Lubitsch is that it's very hard not to just start listing the good gags, and To Be or Not to Be (1942) is full of great gags. It's also full of suspense - a film that seamlessly balances noir-ish intrigue with farce. Fascism deserves to be mocked. Fascism is a performance, and can be undermined with performance. To wring our hands over jokes about Hitler, or any other fascist past or present, is to suggest fascist figures are somehow sacrosanct. They aren't. They never will be. Become the frog that plagues Pharaoh, make der Fuehrer into a clown, reject their authority and reject the fear they want to use against you. And where whatever mask you need to to do so.

Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) is a masterpiece. We haven't seen a film that so exquisitely captures longing since Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) 500 Spines ago. In ten more years I suspect I will still be thinking about the visuals of Charulata - the swing, the bedroom window, that final pair of freeze frames - as much as I still think about, say, the camera following the cigarette in In the Mood. Absolute perfection.