Flicks with The Film Snob

James Mason plays a wounded Irish gunman in Belfast, pursued by a manhunt, in Carol Reed’s tragic and beautiful film from 1947. Odd Man Out , a 1947 film by British director Carol Reed, is that rare work of suspense that conveys a tragic vision. I recently had a chance to see it again, and was struck once more by the film’s humanity and how it brings a profoundly spiritual point of view to a polit...

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film about coming of age in a small north Texas town in the 1950s has endured as an American film classic. The Last Picture Show, the breakthrough 1971 film by Peter Bogdanovich, takes place in a declining north Texas town in the early 1950s, where a group of teenagers experience loss and self-discovery. Among them is the quiet Sonny, played by Timothy Bottoms, who has an...

Robert Altman’s account of a gang of hapless bank robbers during the Depression highlights the difference between romantic illusions and sordid reality. In Robert Altman’s 1974 film Thieves Like Us , three convicts (played by Keith Carradine, John Schuck and Bert Remson) escape from a Mississippi prison during the Depression and go on a bank-robbing spree. Along the way, the youngest thief (Carrad...

Jean-Luc Godard’s misunderstood antiwar film from 1963 exposes the stupidity of war by ridiculing the aesthetics of war movies. The philosopher Simone Weil once remarked that evil is attractive in literature, but ugly and stupid in real life. Les Carabiniers , a 1963 film by French director Jean-Luc Godard, succeeds in portraying this truth. It’s an antiwar film that, instead of evoking indignatio...

Tom Courtenay plays a young man who loses himself in grandiose fantasies in order to escape his dull life, in this sharply observant film from 1963. Overshadowed by the French New Wave of the late 50s and early 60s, England had its own cinematic revival during the same period. A group of young directors challenged old assumptions about what a film should be. One marvelous example is the 1963 film...

Robert Bresson’s 1983 film, his last, portrays the inexorable descent into inhumanity that begins with a simple dishonest act. The great French director Robert Bresson directed his last film in 1983. It’s called L’Argent , which translates as “the gold” or “the money.” The story starts with a couple of schoolboys passing off a forged 500-franc note at a photography shop. Later the shop owner recog...

The passion and mores of a lost era, turn-of-the-century France, is recreated in Jacques Becker’s great romantic melodrama from 1952. One of the more underappreciated French filmmakers was Jacques Becker, who brought a great deal of style and intelligence to the cinema in the 1940s and 50s. In 1952 he directed what many consider his masterpiece, Casque d’Or, which translates as “Helmet of Gold” bu...

An alcoholic contemplates suicide in Louis Malle’s devastating 1963 film about the human desire for meaning. Louis Malle was a director of astonishing range. He did so many different kinds of films that critics have tended to underappreciate him, because they can’t put him in a neat little category. My favorite of his films is one of his earliest—the 1963 poetic drama The Fire Within. The story co...

A study of Boston-area Bible salesmen was the breakthrough documentary of the brothers Albert and David Maysles . The Maysles brothers, Albert and David, pioneered what came to be known as “direct cinema”: a form of documentary without narration or interviews, which allowed the subject to develop in unplanned and unexpected ways. Perhaps you’ve seen Gimme Shelter , their account of the Rolling Sto...

Topsy-Turvy , a British film that came out in 2000, is about Gilbert and Sullivan, and how they came to create their masterpiece, The Mikado. It’s a magnificent work, beautiful in soul and in conception, glowing with love of the theater, and a triumph for the writer and director, Mike Leigh. Now, it’s rare in period pieces that we escape the sense that a romantic haze separates us from the time in...

Vincente Minnelli’s musical slice of Americana was his first starring his future wife Judy Garland. In addition to being a film snob, it would seem that I’m something of a Scrooge. I don’t really care for Christmas movies, as a general rule. There is the great Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol , which I’ve talked about before. But beyond that, it’s hard for me to think of one to recommend,...

Three New York photographers put together a low-budget movie in 1953, outside the Hollywood system, using the story of a 7-year-old kid at Coney Island to provide a cinematic slice of real New York life, and Little Fugitive ended up being an influential example of independent film. The independent fiction film was indeed a rarity in the heyday of the studio system. In 1953, Hollywood was making wi...

Fellini’s first film as director, in collaboration with the veteran Alberto Lattuada, was this witty comedy about a small time traveling theater troupe. When we consider the career of Federico Fellini, we immediately think of his most famous and important films, such as La Strada , La Dolce Vita , or 8 ½ . And rightly so. But I like to explore a genius’s earlier works to get a fresh idea of the so...

Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 version of Julius Caesar, starring James Mason, John Gielgud, and Marlon Brando, is one of the few Hollywood renderings of Shakespeare that works. Hollywood has had a rather dismal record adapting Shakespeare to the screen, but one of the few happy exceptions to this was Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 version of Julius Caesar. For those unfamiliar with the play, it concerns the...

Toshirô Mifune plays a cop in postwar Tokyo who has suffered the humiliation of having a criminal take his gun from him, in one of Akira Kurosawa’s excellent early films. Before Akira Kurosawa became a world-famous director, there was a period right after World War II when he made his reputation in Japan with a series of inventive, socially conscious films. Among them was a police drama shot in 19...

A lonely little girl is visited by the ghost of her father’s first wife, in a drama about childhood imagination that was marketed as a horror film. The old RKO studio in Hollywood had a knack for slapping silly titles on producer Val Lewton’s sensitive low-budget films. With 1944’s The Curse of the Cat People, the studio attempted to make audiences believe that it was a sequel to Lewton’s hit 1942...

A shocking tale of murder and deceit, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, was presented in great style in this 1960 film by French director Rene Clément. In French director Rene Clément’s 1960 thriller Purple Noon , Maurice Ronet plays Philippe, a rich playboy who enjoys goofing off in Italy in the company of Tom, played by Alain Delon, a young acquaintance who’s been sent by Philippe’s father to...

A real life scandal from the pre-World War I era, involving an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, is brought to life by director Istvan Szabo, and his brilliant star, Klaus Maria Brandauer. Hungarian director Istvan Szabo is most famous for his excellent 1981 film, and surprise international hit, Mephisto, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, and this is understandable. But I would like to draw your...

Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 film explores the extremes that the grieving mind can go to, in a story of a couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) struggling to encounter the ghost of their recently deceased young daughter while staying in Venice. I’m not that big on the horror genre, outside of the old classics like Frankenstein , but there is one very unusual film I would like to recommend for a st...

A boy in an English mining town trains a falcon in his spare time, in Ken Loach’s 1970 working class drama. Kes was a film, produced in 1970, that brought director Ken Loach to the world’s attention, marking a new beginning in the British realist tradition. It’s about a boy in a Yorkshire mining town named Billy, played by David Bradley, who is neglected by his overworked mother and mistreated by...

A day in the life of an abused young girl, presented by director Robert Bresson as the epitome of unjust human suffering. In the history of film, a handful of directors have attained, in a body of work spanning their careers, a level of artistry that transcends conventional genres, equaling in some degree the status of classic literature. Among those I’d include Carl Dreyer, Jean Renoir, and, perh...

The work of the film innovator who brought fantasy and illusion to the movies, is presented in a documentary and a collection of Georges Méliès most significant works. The earliest filmmakers were inventors and businessmen, and their product was made up, for the most part, of so-called “actualities,” filmed records of real events. The novelty of motion pictures kept audiences entertained for a whi...

John Huston’s 1948 classic took some very unusual risks for a Hollywood movie of that era, and it won popular and critical acclaim. I often try to shine a light on older movies that are obscure or that you might not have heard of, but today I want to talk about a film you probably have heard of, and maybe even seen. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , a John Huston film released in 1948, is an exam...

The story of a thoughtless young man during the occupation of France in World War II, who becomes involved with the Vichy Gestapo, is an exploration of the nature of evil and the possibility of escaping it through love. In his 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien, the versatile French director Louis Malle dealt with the painful issue of wartime collaboration during the German occupation of France. The story...

Mexican director Arturo Ripstein dramatizes the notorious “Lonelyhearts Killers” case, transposing it to 1940s Mexico, and depicting the matter-of-fact nature of evil. In Deep Crimson , the 1996 film by acclaimed Mexican director Arturo Ripstein, an overweight, depressed single mother named Coral (played by Regina Orozco) longs for romance. Through a personal ad, she meets and falls for a “Charles...