Lady Blue Shanghai

A few months earlier this year, David Lynch directed Marion Cotillard (La vie en rose, Inception) in a new chapter of the Lady Dior series. Lynch’s contribution, a short just over 16 minutes, followed Lady Noire (Olivier Dahan‘s spy short, which actually just plays as a long commercial) and Lady Rouge, a video for “Eyes of Mars”, sung by Cotillard and backed by Franz Ferdinand. The video was directed by Annie Leibovitz. After a black and a red bag, it was now time to promote the blue bag, hence Lady Blue Shanghai being the title of Lynch’s short.

Lady Blue Shanghai is very much Lynchian. The film opens with (the unnamed) Cotillard entering a hotel in Shanghai. The images look very much like Inland Empire, a combination of digital video and high speed cameras. Cotillard goes up to her room, but is very much surprised to hear music coming from her room. As she turns the record player off, a blue bag suddenly appears in the middle of the room. Cotillard rings the lobby and two men are sent up to her room. Not being able to find an intruder, they question what she’s been up to in Shanghai. Enter flashback.

Cotillard is at her best in this Lady chapter. Seeing her perform a song and occasionally rocking to the beat in “Rouge” was nice, but her puzzled look make her a good protagonist for a Lynchian short. As for art direction and confusion, Lady Blue Shanghai is very much like Inland Empire, but another Lynch movie that springs to my mind was the 2002 short The Darkened Room. As for the story and the art direction, the short is very much David Lynch, but I couldn’t help also thinking of Wong Kar-Wai‘s nostalgia. Combine the flow of In The Mood for Love (or 2064, if you want to stretch the hotel reference) with the visual style of Chungking Express and you sort of see what I’m referring to. In fact, WKW would’ve probably made this more interesting. The least convincing bit for me was the special effects with the bag. It’s almost as if they didn’t want to make sure the bag wouldn’t be ruined.

Truth be told, I’ve seen Lynch direct better stuff than this, but it’s only 17 minutes long and if you browse the Lady Dior site you also hear Cotillard recite a poem. The site also directs you to the two earlier Lady Dior projects. A little disappointed perhaps, we move on to the next review… (though please bear in mind that this is still 20,000 times better than that Magnum ad).

LINK

Giallo

It’s a tricky thing, to name a film after a genre. Especially if it seems like you’ll be perennially associated by the genre anyway. A handful of lucky punks may have called their short “Film Noir”, but no feature film seems daft enough to go with that title. (We’re not sure if we want to include Masahiro Kabayashi here, whose Koroshi allegedly means “film noir” in Japanese – as the international title became Killing.)

Enter Dario Argento, whose career boomed in the 70s with films like The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Suspiria and whose recent career has been so successful we’re still referring to the films he made in 1970 and 1977. One of the thrillers Argento made at the start of his career was recently released on DVD – finally, we’d like to add – and this Four Flies on Grey Velvet got a lot more buzz than Argento’s two recent films: Mother of Tears and Giallo. There, I’ve said it: the latest Argento film is called Giallo. Can you smell the problem already?

“Giallo”, you see, isn’t only the Italian word for “yellow”, but it’s also the movie genre that Argento got his fame from. Allegedly, his Bird with the Crystal Plumage was supposed to be the real start of the genre – even if there had been some giallos (or gialli) in the 60s and Mario Bava should probably get the credit for Blood and Black Lace in 1964. Anyway, even now there probably won’t be a giallo retrospective at a film festival without including at least a film by Argento or Bava. And whereas Argento’s current status may be overrated, there’s no denying the man’s gialli (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Profondo Rosso) were good movies. It’s Argento’s later work that a lot of fans have problems with: despite the odd movie that was got a more welcome reception, pretty much all of the man’s films from the 90s and 00s was met with less than lukewarm reviews.

But lately it seems Argento seems to have found a new hobby and it’s called: spitting your fans in their faces. Twenty-seven years after Suspiria and Inferno, he completed his Three Mothers trilogy with Mother of Tears, probably the worst film Argento ever made. The general consensus was not only: “Did we have to wait a quarter of a century for this?”, but also the status of the two earlier films seemed suddenly smeared. By comparison, the Star Wars prequels seemed like cinema gold. But Argento wasn’t happy just by killing off half of his legacy… no, the other half (his gialli) had to go down the drain too.

Gialli were in essence film noir movies but with more nudity and gore. Outrageous at the time, a lot of them can now only be served as an appetizer before watching a torture porn film like Saw or Hostel. And that wouldn’t be a terribly wrong way to describe Giallo: Argento does torture porn. In this film, you see, there’s a mad killer on the loose who kidnaps and tortures beautiful young women. The mad kiler goes by the name Yellow or Giallo, not because of he wants to pay homage to the genre but because a disease has made his skin go yellow. As far as motives can be stupid, this one can be par with that Japanese flick where a man tortures and kills people because his body odour has made him unpopular with the ladies.

To be fair, Argento shouldn’t be the only one to take the blame: the script was penned by Jim Agnew and Sean Keller especially for the Italian director. Keller was responsible for a couple of “original Sci-Fi channel movies”, to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here. But that neither Argento nor the other two writers came to the conclusion that giving a thriller such a title could only be considered as hybris, is beyond me.

Mainly because it ensures the film can only disappoint. In all fairness, Giallo isn’t a horrible film but you only notice this if your expectations have been crushed upfront. I couldn’t say Adrian Brody astounded me in the film and his role was quite silly indeed: because Avolfi (Brody) investigates vicious murders, his desk is in the deep dark cellar. A bit like Fox Mulder in The X-Files then, with the exception that Spooky Mulder was ridiculed by the FBI and Brody’s character genuinely investigates gruesome murders. Just imagine the man has a lead: it’ll take him ten minutes just to leave the precinct. Luckily the pizza delivery service still knows where he is. Which is how Emmanuelle Seigner‘s character Linda (whose sister was kidnapped by a man in a taxi) manages to track him down. At first, Avolfi doesn’t take her serious, but then he believes her and suddenly he has no problems talking about the gruesome murders to a civilian. As one does over a yummy slice of pizza.

Meanwhile Yellow tortures Linda’s sister by forcing her to watch how another victim is tortured to death. The torture scenes aren’t there to show how twisted the character is, it rather looks as if Argento is trying to show us he can still direct gory scenes. But Terror at the Opera this isn’t (remember those pins?) and it actually looks as if Argento is still trying to show how cool he can still be, anno 2009. In all fairness, I was able to find the screenplay of the film and Argento has genuinely improved parts of the film, including some of the torture scenes.

All in all, Giallo is a lot better than Mother of Tears (then again, so would be a testcard, so I’m not sure whether that’s saying anything) and I’m pretty sure I’d like the film better a second time round. Sadly I’m also certain I don’t want to see it again. Blame it on the hybris, kids!

4.5/10

It’s dark outside (BBC2 goes film noir)

It’s the holiday season, which means BBC2 will try and make the extra effort to make you spend these dark and allegedly fun-filled days as superb as possible. Personally, I have the fondest memories of the years they showed 50′s sci-fi movies and film noirs. There’s just nothing like watching Terror from the year 5000 or From Hell It Came at 3am. This year the Beeb will go back to this old and much loved tradition and will shown a series of noir movies during the Christmas nights.

The series kicks off tonight at 1.25am (British time) with the hour long documentary The Rules of Noir, followed by Max Ophuls‘s classic noir The Reckless Moment. And from then on, it’s one noir a night, which – in my humble opinion – will chase the doctor away as well as an apple does. Here’s the schedule:

24/12 – 01.25: The rules of noir
Bogey, Bacall and Mitchum play it tough as Matthew Sweet celebrates film noir.
24/12 – 02.25: The Reckless Moment
Classic film noir. A man blackmails a woman whose daughter accidentally killed her lover.

25/12 – 02.10: Gilda
A drifter travelling through South America embarks on a risky affair with a married woman. Charles Vidor directs Rita Hayworth in the role of her life.

27/12 – 01.50: Build My Gallows High
Classic 1940s American film noir by Jacques Tourneur which tells a grim, complex tale of love and betrayal. Private detective Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) falls for Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer), the mistress of mobster Whit Sterling, when the mobster hires him to track her down in Mexico after she shot Sterling and stole 40,000 pounds from him. When she double-crosses Bailey and returns to the gangster, the detective changes his identity and drops out of sight as a garage owner. Sterling still wants his money back, however, and he and the duplicitous Kathie plot to lure the Bailey into a vengeful scenario. This unmissable noir is also known as Out of the Past.

28/12 – 01.50: Farewell My Lovely
Film noir classic adapted from Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name. Private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by ex-con Moose Malloy to find his girlfriend, embroiling the hard-boiled gumshoe in a plot which involves blackmail, murder, drugs and double cross. Edward Dmytryk directs.

29/12 – 01.40: Dead Reckoning
John Cromwell directs Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott in this mystery thriller about an ex-paratrooper who travels with his army buddy to Washington to be decorated for valour during World War II. His friend disappears from the train and the paratrooper, trying to find him, becomes caught in a tale of duplicity, intrigue and murder.

30/12 – 01.10: The Big Combo
Stylish film noir by Joseph H. Lewis about a police lieutenant, Leonard Diamond, who comes under pressure from a gang headed by a vicious thug. He is helped by the gangster’s wife, jealous at her husband’s affair with another woman, who supplies him with information to help him close the net on his foe. (Bonus: the torture scene was considered so graphic for 1955 standards the film was almost censored.)

31/12 – 00.55: On Dangerous Ground
Nicholas Ray‘s film noir about a tough cop sent to a small town, where he meets an affecting blind woman.

01/01 – 03.25: They Live By Night
Thriller by Nicholas Ray in which a naive young criminal (Farley Granger) falls in love with the woman who nurses him back to health after he is injured in a bank raid.

02/01 – 01.40: Crossfire
Edward Dmytryk‘s stark, claustrophobic thriller about racial intolerance. A detective lays a trap for an anti-Semitic soldier who murdered a Jewish war veteran. Robert Mitchum, Robert Young and Gloria Grahame star.

P.S. More of an Orson Welles fan? Then switch over to BBC Four, for lots of films and documentaries about the famous director.

A Night To Remember

It’s Easter Monday, which means time for a movie that won’t give you any stomach aches. A Night To Remember was made in 1943 and the director was Richard Wallace. Wallace directed over 60 movies from the 20s to the 40s, but his name isn’t very familiar. BBC viewers may remember his movie The Fallen Sparrow, which adorns occasional tv afternoons.
In A Night To Remember, often confused with the Titanic movie made 15 years later, Brian Aherne stars alongside Loretta Young. Aherne is a crime writer, married to Young and about to unpack all of their stuff in the newly rented basement space somewhere in the big city. The couple want to have a drink in a local pub and overhear some gangster-ish type meeting fellow thugs in the couple’s brand new apartment. Though the night passes quietly, morning smacks the couple in the face: they discover there’s a body on the premises. The police suspect Aherne may be behind the murder (after all, a lot of his oeuvre has the word ‘murder’ in the title), but the couple is helped by the fact the house seems to be full of dark personalities.

… oh, and a tortoise. Yes, there’s a tortoise running… sorry… crawling through the house. It’s even the basis of a couple of scary moments: “I feel something touching me… eek… never mind, it’s just the tortoise.”

Anyway, that does give you some indication of how scary this film is. When I bought it, it was presented to me as a film noir. It is not. The closest resemblance is the wonderful crime slash comedy series The Thin Man. Sadly, this does not involve the wonderfulness of Myrna Loy and William Powell, which makes A Night To Remember about as strong as some of the lesser Thin Man output.

The attempts at slapstick humour (i.e. Aherne’s continuing attempts to open the apartment’s sturdy door) are not as fun as they’re meant to be, the crime factor isn’t scary or exciting at all, but the snoozing factor of this film somehow works to its benefit. There’s no real reason to superbly like the movie, but you can’t dislike it either.

The film is out on DVD in Spain, but I had trouble ordering it locally. The best way to obtain this film is still Xploited Cinema (link), as long as they’re still around…
The DVD contains the film in both English and Spanish audio, with optional Portuguese subtitles. The extras department took a day off and you’re left with only a couple of trailers.

Our verdict: 6/10

Hollow Triumph

Hollow Triumph (also known as The Scar) is a very good film noir that’s often missing from Essential Noir lists, usually only because it’s not very well known. Now whereas we could debate for hours whether this movie deserves a place in those lists or not (or debate on which noirs absolutely need to go in those lists), why don’t we just take a closer look at the film?

The story so far…
Johnny Muller is a criminal, planning to rob a casino with the help of a few friends and two cars. The robbery doesn’t go too well and only the car with Johnny and ‘Marcy’ manages to escape. They hide as it’s all too clear that the casino people will do all to get their money back.
Hiding wasn’t such a bad idea, Johnny finds out: one day the newspaper shows a picture of ‘Marcy’ shot on the streets. No points for guessing who’s behind it. Johnny is looking for a way out and finds one when a man on the streets takes the gangster for Dr. Bartok, a psychiatrist. Johnny pays a visit to the doctor’s office where even Bartok’s secretary mistakes Johnny for her boss, till she observes the one difference that can distinguish the lookalikes: Bartok has a scar on his cheek.
Johnny takes a picture of Bartok and uses all his surgical knowledge to copy the scar on his cheek. Unfortunately, due to a mix-up at the photo lab, the photo’s printed the wrong way round and Johnny finds himself with the scar on the wrong cheek. But who really pays that much attention to people’s faces?

So it’s a film noir then…
Yes, it is. We have the gangster looking for a way out, the femme fatale (the secretary) with no faith left in mankind and we get a hard-boiled vision on life: who really cares about good and bad? Who really observes other people?
Ask yourself the question: would you notice a scar moving to the other side of a person’s face? That person is still there, the scar’s still there and let’s face it: scars can’t move, can they?

Summing up…
Hollow Triumph a.k.a. The Scar is a sadly overlooked noir. While it’s not going to make it to the top 20 of Best Noirs Ever it has essential noir qualities and is quite a good film. It should definitely be part of your Essential Noir Top 100 (possible even Top 50).
The director, Steve Sekely,is best known for directing The Day of the Triffids and doesn’t have too many noir credentials, but all that is made up by the actress in this film: Joan Bennett played in a lot of noirs in the 40s (incl. The Reckless Moment, Secret Beyond The Door and Woman in the Window) and had a career that lasted many decades (her final movie performance was in Dario Argento’s Suspiria). Paul Henreid played in over 50 movies, his best-known performance is probably Victor Laszlo in Casablanca.

Hollow Triumph (a.k.a. The Scar)
(USA, 1948)
Directed by Steve Sekely
With Paul Henreid, Joan Bennett

It is currently out on Region 1 DVD, it is part of the Classic Film Noir box with 9 movies (incl. D.O.A., Detour and The Hitch-Hiker).