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Favorite Films: Pierrot le Fou (1965)

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Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou

In the late 1960s, as I was studying graduate film history and criticism at UCLA, I was completely enamored with the films of Jean-Luc Godard. I remember telling my late friend Norm Witty that I was glad that my favorite film director was so young and that he would be making great films for decades to come.

As it turns out, I was only half right. He did continue to make films, but something was gone once he divorced Anna Karina. That happened in 1965, shortly after he made Pierrot le Fou with his wife and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

After Pierrot, Godard came out with two or three films sans Karina, and then descended into a darker period with La Chinoise and Weekend (both 1967). After that, although he was still prolific, I have seen only two of his films. It was as if something was gone forever from his work.

What was gone was that almond-eyed beauty Anna Karina. Godard was clearly in love with her, as I would have been if I were him. Pierrot is a film about the deterioration of their relationship: Belmondo as Ferdinand is a bookworm spouting profundities at every turn, while Karina’s Marianne Renoir is instinctive, emotional, and mysterious.

I love the film because I am a bookworm, and I know full well how that puts me at a disadvantage in relationships. Another director—Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin (1955)—has the last word about how I feel in the matter:

The Tale of the Scorpion and the Frog in Mr. Arkadin

Poe-Pourri

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Scene from Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death (1964)

One of the most entertaining film series of the 1960s consists of the eight Edgar Allan Poe titles directed by Roger Corman and, for the most part, starring Vincent Price. In order by year, these consist of:

  • The House of Usher (1960)
  • The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
  • The Premature Burial (1962) starring Ray Milland
  • Tales of Terror (1962)
  • The Raven (1963)
  • The Haunted Palace (1963) actually based on H. P. Lovecraft
  • The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
  • The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

All the films are very loosely based on Poe originals (except for The Haunted Pa;lace, which is very Poe-like). Last Wednesday, I sat through The Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven, and Masque of the Red Death on Turner Classic Movies’ tribute to Roger Corman, who died earlier this year.

Although some regard him as the ultimate schlockmeister, Corman knew how to make an entertaining film that came in on time and under budget. So what if they were not quite faithful to Poe’s (or Lovecraft’s) originals: They were fun to watch, even if we felt superior to them.

I remember some other likeable Corman classics like Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), in which the eponymous monsters looked like a crumpled old knapsack, and Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), in which the creature looked like an overgrown stuffed animal. The first named film is one of Martine’s all-time faves, such that she obtained a signed still from Beverly Garland, the star.

And yet at least two of the titles—The Raven and Masque of the Red Death—are, to my mind, two of the best American films produced in the 1960s.

Comprachicos

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Conrad Veidt in Paul Leni’s Film The Man Who Laughs (1928)

It all started in the elevator to the Trader Joe parking lot. Two odd women first commented that I looked like the actor Wilford Brimley, and then asked me why I didn’t smile. That set me off: I don’t particularly like to go around with a smile on my face, and I don’t think much of people who do. Were these frustrated dental assistants to go around accosting strangers for not airing their teeth?

Then I thought of one reason I didn’t like being all smiley. I remembered Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs (1869), which was turned into a 1928 silent film by Paul Leni starring Conrad Veidt, better known as Major Strasser “of the Third Reich” in the film Casablanca (1942).

Well, anyway, the novel and film were about people called comprachicos who, as children, were mutilated to look pathetic so that their handlers can could use them for begging:

The Comprachicos, or Comprapequefios, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, unheard of in the 19th. They traded in children, buying and selling them, but not stealing them. They made of these children monsters. The populace must needs laugh, and kings too. The montebank is wanted in the street, the jester at the Louvre; the one is called a clown, the other a fool. By the artificial production of teratological cases the Comprachicos developed a science and practiced an art. They kneaded the features, stunted growth, and fashioned hunchbacks and dwarfs; the court fool was their specialty.

The Conrad Veidt character in the film was a child who was kidnapped and had a permanent smile carved on his face, which made him look pathetic. And that’s what comes to mind when people tell me to smile. I just don’t care to oblige them.

Wilford Brimley (1934-2020)

By the way, I look almost exactly like Wilford Brimley, except that his mustache was a little bigger than mine. Of course, I would prefer that strangers think I am a dead ringer for Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, or some other dolicocephalic heartthrob. But then, so it goes.

From Ghoulardi to Rollergirl

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Heather Graham as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights

She’s an attractive young star in the stable of go-to actresses around Burt Reynold’s porn studio in the 1970s and 1980s. Called Rollergirl because she never takes off her inline skates, even during sex, she helps to recruit Mark Wahlberg by seducing him in the nightclub where he works as a bus boy. She is an intriguing presence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights (1997).

Decades before the film was made, the director’s father, Ernie Anderson, was a big star on WJW-TV, Channel 8 in Cleveland. He played a character named Ghoulardi who hosted horror films between 1963 and 1966. In between scenes of the films he showed, he made fun of Cleveland¹s Polish population with their polkas and white socks and flamingo lawn ornaments, and particularly when they lived in the southwestern suburb of “PAHR-ma?” His catch phrases were “turn blue” and “stay sick.”

If you were a teenager in Cleveland during the 1860s, you watched Ghoulardi and adopted his mannerisms the next Monday in the school cafeteria.

One final note: If you watched reruns of the Carol Burnett Show, you may recall that in the opening scene, when Carol comes out on stage to answer questions from the audience, she occasionally gave a call-our to Ernie Anderson, who was a frequent member of the studio audience. Ernie typically smiled and gave a little wave to acknowledge. That was Ghoulardi, who had come to Los Angeles and served a number of years as announcer for the show after Lyle Waggoner had left.

It’s a long way from horror films in Cleveland in the 1960s to his son’s explicit study of the emerging L.A. porn scene filmed in 1997.

Hats Off to Eddie Muller!

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Turner Classic Movies (TCM) Host Eddie Muller

Most every Saturday around 9 PM Pacific Time, I turn on the television to watch the “Noir Alley” show on TCM hosted by the amiable Eddie Muller. He is one of the reigning experts on film noir, which he defined in an interview hosted by the World Literature Today website as:

A noir story is about people who know what they’re doing is wrong, and they do it anyway. And, typically, there’s hell to pay. We love watching them break the law; we love watching them reap the consequences.

Although in the interview, he is talking about literature, one can easily see how that translate into film. Just think of such Hollywood films as John Huston¹s The Maltese Falcon (1941); Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944); Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946); Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947); and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The genre reached its apogee during the 1940s and 1950s.

Yesterday, Eddie outdid himself. He introduced two great noir films produced in Argentina. However tired I was, I stayed up late to watch two masterpieces by Carlos Hugo Christensen (1914-1999): Never Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta) and If I Should Die Before I Wake (Si muero antes de despertar). Both films were produced in 1952.

I particularly liked If I Should Die Before I Wake, a film about a child killer which even today might run into censorship problems. A son of a Buenos Aires detective finds himself identifying and running to ground a child molester who had kidnapped a female classmate whom he had befriended. It’s even more exciting than Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931) with Peter Lorre on the same subject.

By the way, if you want to read a really good book about film noir, I highly recommend Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (New York: Running Press, 2021).

What I’m about to say may be counted as heresy, but I think these films out-Hitchcock Hitchcock. Apparently, there is more than one master of suspense, and I am grateful to Eddie Muller for screening these two subtitled films.

Goodnight Sweet Prince

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Martine’s Favorite Roger Corman Movie

This is a reprint of a blog posting from May 17, 2016. Martine and I were dismayed to hear of the passing of Roger Corman, who died in Santa Monica at the age of 98 on May 9 of this year. It never ceased to amaze me that one could produce and direct so many interesting films while working in what the film industry has called “poverty row.”

The first time I ever heard of him was when I was a student at Dartmouth. At that time (the mid 1960s) I subscribed to Films and Filming. One issue contained an article entitled “The Crown Prince of Z Films,” referring, of course, to Roger Corman. I was intrigued by what I was hearing of the cheapster director who made so many interesting films for American International Pictures. What I liked most were the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, usually starring Vincent Price.

Perhaps my favorite was The Masque of the Red Death (1964), about the attempt by a group of dissipated nobles to escape the plague. There were others in the series, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).

When I first met Martine in the late 1980s, I discovered that she was a hard-core Corman addict, liking such films as Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and the original The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which was shot in under a week on a shoestring budget. There are in all about a dozen films he directed that are worth seeing and hold up well over the years. (He also made not a few clinkers, but that’s showbiz!) After he stopped directing around 1970 he continued to produce films and was responsible for some 300+ films over his half century career.

Roger Corman (1926-2024)

Other than the Poe features, I also enjoyed I, Mobster (1958), A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Intruder (1962) starring William Shatner, Tales of Terror (1962), X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) starring Ray Milland, The Wild Angels (1966), The Trip (1967), and Bloody Mama (1970).

Corman introduced us to Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Bruce Dern, to name just a few. In his films were such stars as Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre.

Perhaps I had a misspent youth, but I sure enjoyed it—and continue to do so….

You Freud, Me Jane?

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Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964)

Sometimes it takes years, even decades, for a great film to be recognized. Such is the case with Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, which confused and rattled the critics of the period. According to the New York Times, “an inexplicably amateurish script.” The L.A. Times was no more accepting: “As a story it seems naggingly improbable and, as drama, a nightmare from which the spectator constantly pulls away, struggling to wake up in a less disordered universe. No question, though, that it is at least fitfully effective“

Fitfully effective? How about ahead of its time. Both the Sean Connery character (Mark Rutland) and the Tippi Hedren character (Marnie Edgar) are obsessed in different ways. Marnie is a thief who cannot bear to be touched by men. Mark, on the other hand, is obsessed with using the tools of popular psychology to “cure” Marnie. In a way, both characters are equally out of it.

What escaped the 1960s critics was that Marnie was a strikingly beautiful film, perhaps the most beautiful color film ever produced. From the moment we see Marnie from the rear wearing a black wig walking down a train station platform with a yellow bag full of money under her arms, we are hooked. At least, I was.

Even the obvious fakery that Hitchcock seems to throw at us seems to actually add to the story in this instance. When Mark drives Marnie to her mother’s Baltimore row house, we see an obviously painted backdrop of an ocean freighter at the end of the block. In the foreground, several little girls are skipping rope while singing:

Mother, Mother, I am ill
Call for the doctor over the hill.
In came the doctor,
In came the nurse,
In came the lady with the alligator purse.

In the end, Mark and Marnie drive off and take a left just before the painted backdrop, where moments ago it seemed there was no exit.

Ars Est Celare Artem

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Japanese Film Director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963)

It was Horace in his “Ars Poetica” who wrote ars est celare artem, meaning that true art conceals the means by which it is achieved.

The film medium has an unusually rich variety of tools that can be used in movies, including zooms in and out, pans, wipes, tracking and dolly shots, tilts, and crane shots. And these do not include the complex technically-assisted tools such as are involved in computer generated imagery (CGI).

In Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock created a stunning visual effect by combining zooming out with tracking in. Some directors like Sergei Eisenstein, Max Ophuls, Jean-Luc Godard, and Andrey Tarkovsky have used the language of film in new and exciting ways.

Just as there are writers like Ernest Hemingway who employ a simple style. There are others, such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Georges Perec who used all the bells and whistles of literature to achieve their aims.

If there is an equivalent to the Hemingway style in film, I would have to say it is in the films of Yasujiro Ozu. In the dozen or so films I have seen, I remember only one camera movement, a slight pan in his Tokyo Story (1953), in which we follow an elderly couple as they walk alongside a wall at a seaside resort. With Ozu, there is, for the most part, only a succession of simple shots, most frequently at the level of a Japanese person seated on a tatami mat.

Intercut with these shots are others that are almost like stills. In the sound pictures, the music wells up, and the audience is meant to absorb what has just happened. This is referred to in Japanese as mono no aware. literally: the pathos of things. There is, for instance, this recurring shot in Floating Weeds (1959):

As one American writer put it in The Other Journal:

When I reflect on Japanese cinema, I find that one of the things that continually draws me back to it is a sort of gentle melancholy and pensive longing. Granted, this isn’t true of all Japanese films — I don’t know if you’d find it much in violent yakuza films or over-the-top kaiju films — but the ones that have stuck with me over the years are typified by this emotion and seem to contain it in large amounts.

There’s a Japanese phrase that sums up this feeling I’m describing: “mono no aware.” Roughly translated into English, it means “the sadness of things”. It’s not sadness in the sense of depression or angst, but rather, it refers to an awareness of the fragility of existence, of the transient and bittersweet nature of life, which, I’ve found, can make for incredibly beautiful and poignant cinema.

That feeling is present in all the Ozu films I have seen, which is why I regard him as one of the greatest of all film artists and perhaps the preeminent artist in the Japanese cinema.

Floating Weeds

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Rieko Yagumo and Yoshiko Tsubouchi in Story of Floating Weeds (1934)

Over the last two days, I have had the good fortune to see two great films by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, one the remake of the other. Although the technology to make sound films existed in Japan, Ozu deliberately made only silent films until 1936.

His A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) is about a traveling Kabuki player troupe that visits a small town. On a previous visit to that same town, the head of the troupe, played by Takashi Sakamoto, had an affair with a local woman who ran a small restaurant/bar and had a son by her. In the intervening years, he sent money for his education and begged the mother to say that he was the boy’s uncle instead of his “deceased” father.

Sakamoto loves spending time with his son, and that arouses the envy of Rieko Yagumo, his mistress on the road. She bribes her fellow actress Yoshiko Tsubouchi to seduce the boy, but they fall in love with each other. Furious, Sakamoto dissolves the acting troupe.

Like all of his films, A Story of Floating Weeds shows a group of people at odds with one another coming together in the end with an enhanced respect and gentleness.

It is no surprise that Ozu remade the film in 1959 as Floating Weeds. It is the same basic story, but with sound and color.

The Same Two Roles a Quarter Century Later

I actually prefer the original silent 1934 version. It was a better story and had better actors (even though the 1959 version had Machiko Kyo in the role of the mistress in the troupe). It was so good, in fact, that I plan to buy the recent Criterion release of both versions on DVD.

Yasujiro Ozu was one of the five or ten greatest film directors who ever lived. Over the years, I have seen over a dozen of his films, and there was not a clinker in the bunch. Even John Ford, Jean Renoir, and Carl Dreyer made some stinkers. But not Ozu. The world lost a magnificent artist when he died in Tokyo in 1963. I plan on discussing his film style in a later post this week.

Selfie With Barbie

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Yours Truly with Barbie

Who is that skeptical-looking muckenfuss with lovely Barbie? Oh, that’s me. I must have been making that sour face because both Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig were unfairly denied Oscars for their part in making what, to my mind, is the best film of 2023. Why should I be surprised? Awards, particularly in show biz, reflect the petty hatreds of professionals. Rarely have I agreed wholeheartedly with the Academy’s choices.

Now that I am on my way with Barbie to the Real World, I’d better check my bright yellow inline roller blades and my rad duds for making the scene on Venice Beach.

I guess I loved Barbie because it was so refreshing to see a purely feminine viewpoint unmarred by crass mansplaining. Mattel actively participated in the film even though its 100& white male Board of Directors in the film is actually pretty evenly split between six men and five women.

Barbie and Ken on Venice Beach

What struck me is that both Barbie and Ken were totally naive and un-selfconscious about their roles. It was like the story of Pinocchio, with both characters striving to become real people, or at least contented to be themselves. I felt for Ken and his attempt to set up the patriarchy in Barbieland, to be renamed Kenland. The Barbies ultimately win, but then the Kens accept their second-string status.

In a way, it was a pity to see the Mojo Dojo Casa House disinfected and returned to Barbie. Some, like Bill Maher, see the film as ultimately a man-hating product. I did not.