Lost in Criterion

We kick off a duo of Kon Ichikawa anti-war films this week, though the two films could not be more different. We start of with Fires on the Plane, a sort of Heart of Darkness trek through the aftermath of the Americans recapturing the Philippines during World War 2, doing its best to undercut any idea of a nobility of war.

It is with great joy that we get to talk about the first Mikio Naruse film in the Collection this week, and with great sadness that we acknowledge that it is also the last Mikio Naruse film in the Collection at this time. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs from 1960 is one of the best movies we’ve seen, particularly for one trying to deal with the inner lives of women in the mid-20th century. Someday when we have free time we’ll have to check out more of Naruse’s work.

Powell and Pressburger decided to make a movie that would convince America to enter WW2.

Sidney Gilliat’s Green for Danger is a cozy little whodunit where everyone has something to hide and the main victim is a mailman. It also takes place in England against the backdrop of the Germany’s doodlebug bombing campaign and came out barely a year after the setting. It’s lighthearted. It’s dark. It’s delightfully weird. We spend a lot of time discussing why we think Criterion might want us to see it.

This week we watch one of the classics of world cinema, a tale of desperation in destitution, and continue our streak of not needing to leave the text very much at all in order to show the Marxist reading of a movie. Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves tells the story of a man who just wants to make an honest living in a society that is either indifferent or actively working against him.

We finish out our Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist boxset with Citizen of the World containing two films that began life as hard-hitting pro-labor pieces and were both neutered to varying degrees by the outbreak of World War II. Pen Tennyson’s Proud Valley (1940) takes the heavier hit, with the ending being changed from miners seizing the means of production to “management plays an important guiding role” argument à la Metropolis. Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand’s documentary Native Land (1942), based on the finding’s of the Senate’s La Follette Committee investigating violence against labor organizers and organizations, pulls slightly fewer punches, with its release ending being a tacked on message from narrator Robeson about Nazis being the greater threat to freedom than bosses and the US government, but it was still suppressed for years afterward.

This week we talk about two British films starring Paul Robeson as we continue the Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist boxset. Zoltan Korda’s Sanders of the River (1935) was a project Robeson was very excited about until he saw the final cut wherein what he’d hoped would be a testament to African culture was gutted into a paean to British colonialism. As such Robeson demanded more creative control over his role in Thornton Freeland’s Jericho (1937), even completely changing the ending.

We continue the Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist with two silent films: Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925) and Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson, 1925). Micheaux’s work is a “race film” made independently in the US, and is one of only a handful of the director’s works to survive. Likewise, the wildly experimental Borderline is the only surviving work of Macpherson and his Pool Group of British and American outsider artists working in Switzerland. Both are fascinating in their own light, but Borderline in particular exhibits film technique that are rather mind-blowing to see in the silent era.

We have another boxset for October, but a marked change from our September Monsters and Madmen set. Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist is an exploration of singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson’s career from his start in the 20’s to his essential house arrest in the early 50’s when the US Government revoked his passport and refused to let him leave the country over his politics.

Criterion delivers the films to us in themed pairs on each Spine number, so we’ll be dealing with them in that division. First up is Paul Robeson: Icon containing Dudley Murphy’s 1933 adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, which Robeson had been starring in on stage since 1925, and Saul J. Turell’s 1979 retrospective documentary Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist.

The fact that Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee are in Corridors for Blood may be the best thing about it, but also while Corridors of Blood fails at almost everything it thinks its doing as a horror movie or documentary about the creation of anesthesia — both of which are what the creators were trying to do —. it still succeeds in being the most ridiculous movie we’ve watched on the main podcast in years. Sure we’ve watched some weirder stuff on the Patreon Bonus episodes, but even in a boxset of the notoriously silly genre of late 50’s Sci-Fi/Horror, Corridors stands out as silly and last week’s movie had a amnesiac murderer and a bar called The Judas Hole.