Lost in Criterion

Ronald Neames says that after This Happy Breed he and the rest of Cineguild were tired of making war-time films, and were pretty sure audiences were tired of propaganda. But they weren't tired of working with Noel Coward, despite the fact that with each movie in Criterion's David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset we get new stories of Coward disagreeing with their choices in filming his work.

Blithe Spirit is the final film we'll be covering in the boxset - Brief Encounter, the Lean and Coward masterpiece, is in here too, but we talked about it 11 years ago. A delightful romp about murdering your loved ones, accidentally murdering your loved ones' loved ones, hating your dead wives, and not being too fond of your living wives, Coward told Lean to "just shoot the play" and thankfully Lean didn't totally listen. The film gets worse the more faithful it is to the original, but thankfully Lean and company still have some flourishes to add (that Coward reportedly hated). The most bewildering part of Blithe Spirit is that they still came back together to make another movie afterward.

The second film in the David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset, This Happy Breed is the story of a British Middle Class TM family between the wars. Acting as a sort of "remember when" for British of a certain class, it's also an examination of the rigid structure and code of ethics of this particular pocket of social class which while not the Upper Crust still seems to considers itself above the working people.

This "story of a ship" kicks off the David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset. Lean was an in-demand film editor (and had previously done some uncredited co-direction), and Noel Coward wanted to make a war propaganda film based on his friend Lord Mountbatten's naval exploits. Thus we get In Which We Serve (1942), a biography of the crew of a doomed destroyer told in flashback after the ship sinks in the Battle of Crete. Ronald Neame acts as cinematographer and the film is produced by Anthony Havelock-Allan, who would stick with Lean to form the powerhouse Cineguild Productions by the time they made next week's film This Happy Breed.

Every time we watch a documentary, we end up talking a lot about the nature of documentary. With Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room (1993), much of that end of the conversation is focused on how Direct Cinema is not a journalistic endeavor, and how the material covered - Bill Clinton's 1992 US Presidential campaign - could have used a journalistic approach. Instead what we get is a collection of some of the worst people in US politics for the last 30 years given free reign to lie to the camera. America: it may not be a perfect system, but it sure is bad.

Mikhail Kalatozov makes some beautiful films, particularly in his work with Sergey Urusevsky, who may just be our favorite cinematographer. Many, many years ago (Spine 146!) we watched their film The Cranes are Flying (1957), and images from that film still grace my dreams. Many, many years from now (Spine 1214!) we will watch I am Cuba (1964), their final collaboration, and we can't wait.

But thankfully between these two masterpieces we get Letter Never Sent (1960), a tale of Soviet vs Nature, a story of love, lust, science, sacrifice, and lots of fire. Raising not only the normal "how did they shoot this?!" questions associated with Urusevsky's work, but new and adjacent "how did they shoot this?!" questions about the special effects.

Otto Preminger's ripped-from-the-headlines courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) stars a delightful mix of young and old Hollywood, is a big middle finger to the Production Code, and is an ode to manipulating the US legal system. And if that weren't enough, we've got a soundtrack by Duke Ellington and titles by Saul Bass.

Louis Malle reunites with the stars of My Dinner with Andre, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, for a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in a an abandoned theater just off Time Square. Not just a delightful production of Uncle Vanya, but also a look at theater for the sake of theater, squatting and otherwise unmoored from financial obligations.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's only sci-fi work, World on a Wire asks the important questions: what if we asked an AI to simulate the Matrix as a 1970s German television miniseries, and then scrapped that garbage and just had a great screenwriter, fantastic cinematographer, and masterful director make it instead. While dealing with the same questions of humanity and existentialism that many tales of virtual prisons do, World on a Wire also gives us a jumping off point to talk about tech innovation, forced consumer trend, treating algorithms like gods, and how cars are bad. It's a pretty amazing production, which is unsurprising from Fassbinder and his phenomenal team behind and in front of the camera.

Lena Dunham has a tendency to say dumb things, and she's garnered quite a backlash during her short career. Because of that the inclusion of her 2010 film Tiny Furniture in the Criterion Collection appears to be often mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Bay's Armageddon and Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: that is, with Criterion aficionados asking "why is this here?"

But Lost in Criterion has long held that the Collection seems to have had a particular interest in festival darling interpersonal family dramas in the early 2000s -- of a wide variety! like Lee's bleakly hopeful Secret Sunshine or Assayas' bourgeoisie Summer Hours -- and I'm not convinced Tiny Furniture doesn't fit into that mold.

In any case, this story of a young woman our age graduating college when we did and attempting to feel like an adult and an artist during the Great Recession hits home, and gives us a lot to talk about.

Our friend and samurai-film-fiend Donovan joins us to talk about Hideo Gosha's Three Outlaw Samurai (1964). This origin story for a long-running tv show that seems like it was Gosha's version of the A-Team plays like a more cynical version of a Kurosawa tale. It's also got some fantastic camera work thanks to Tadashi Sakai.