Lost in Criterion

As the US government was hounding him for various "anti-American"isms, Charlie Chaplin made his first movie since before the war: a black comedy where in lieu of the lovable Tramp (or the Tramp-esque Barber) Chaplin plays a polygamist serial killer. Monsieur Verdoux (1947) isn't so much a change of form for Chaplin, though, as the movie goes through great pains (of misogyny) to make Verdoux sympathetic and gives him a third act monologue that's nearly as great as The Great Dictator's.

Terrence Malick's debut film is a story of America, of wanton violence driving across the great plains. Badlands (1973) isn't just Manifest Destiny marching over the continent; the film's from 1973, it's Vietnam, it's a murderous young man saying "Not that I deserve a medal." Malick hits the ground running with the spiritual lyricism he's known for, and kudos to the Criterion Collection for showing us our new favorite Malick right after showing us our new favorite Bresson.

Robert Bresson makes a prison escape film is the sort of premise that we cannot help but fall for, particularly as A Man Escaped (1956) is also our favorite sub-genre of crime film: the criminal procedural. While we really fell in love (sort of) with the "full Bresson" of Au hasard Balthazar or Mouchette, both a decade later, A Man Escaped takes Bresson's style into a genre we weren't expecting, and it is perfect.

Our hopes were so high for Ministry of Fear (1944). Sure, Carol Reed is the best at adapting Graham Greene novels, but Fritz Lang? He's just one of the best European directors there is. Lang adapting Greene? Making a movie called Ministry of Fear in 1944? We didn't think anything could go wrong. Enter Seton I. Miller, executive producer and screenwriter, a dangerous combination in normal circumstances, but when dealing with a director who famously had little regard for the script, the end result is...not great?

Sociologist Edgar Morin and anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch join forces for the Québécois filmmaker Michel Brault to turn their ethnographic lens on the empirical core and create the foundational text of cinéma vérité. It may be that this is the most truthful a French (or any) documentary had been up to this point, but the film's subjects often seem to be holding back, with many speaking in abstractions about the current political situations. The lack of honesty is further underscored by Criterion including Un été + 50 (2001), a 50-years-later followup where everyone can be a lot more upfront about their political associations, associations that probably would have landed them in jail or worse if mentioned in the original film. And while perfectly understandable -- we also would not like to be in French prison -- it still leaves us wanting for much of the film.

Probably the best acted, best scored, best directed, most beautiful, self-serving justification of being a traitorous jerk ever put to film, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) could have been better if it was more true to the real life events that inspired it and less a justification for naming names to the House Unamerican Activities Committtee. Thank the unions and enjoy your May Day weekend by watching the best movie with the worst politics, or watch Salt of the Earth instead, a film that came out the same year but from people who were named instead of the people doing the naming of names. But we already talked about Salt of the Earth on our Patreon, so now we gotta talk about On the Waterfront.

Similar to the ways that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) reminded us of a modern day version of Breson's Mouchette, their film The Kid with a Bike (2011) feels like an updated The 400 Blows. Of course, the Dardenne's bring their unique style to the story of Cyril and Samantha, once again ending not with an established community, but a shaky hope of one, if we want it.

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama is a film about enforced austerity, about capitulating to the fascist power structures, about how we can be conditioned into killing ourselves even without a boot directly on our neck because that's the status quo. It's about what we do to others and to ourselves not because we have to but because we've been conditioned to think we have to. "Its power seems inescapable."

Also it's an atmospheric fairy tale telling of a of a folkloric practice, a forced abandonment of our most vulnerable, even when they're not really that vulnerable. 

Wim Wenders had planned for years with German Neo-expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch to make a film of her work, but Wenders didn't know how he could do it justice. Then he saw U2 3D (2008) and knew that digital 3D was the technology he needed. Unfortunately, as technology caught up to Wenders' vision, Bausch passed away, and Pina (2011) morphed from just a document of her work into a tribute from Wenders and Bausch's dance troupe. What they create together is an overwhelming piece of art.

In the first 140 Spines of the Criterion Collection there were five Alfred Hitchcock films, leading us to believe we'd be seeing a lot more from him over the years, but it turns out The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is the first Hitchcock we've watched for the podcast in just shy of a decade.

This is the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, one of Alfred's first big breaks before moving to Hollywood and the movie that introduced Peter Lorre to English speaking audiences. It's a tight little thriller that may also involve a dog turning into a man and getting arrested.