Lost in Criterion

Jean-Pierre Melville is called Melville because he really liked Moby Dick and apparently the French Resistance just let you pick your own codename because anti-fascism. His 1956 film Bob le Flambeur is a French gangster film that is often called a precursor to the French New Wave, but Pat and I aren't buying it.

If you've listened to any of our early episodes concerning her roles, you're no doubt aware that Pat and I love Giulietta Masina, long time wife and part time love interest of Federico Fellini. After the success of the great 8 1/2, Fellini decided to do some more navel gazing in 1965 with Juliet of the Spirits, but this time the author avatar character would be gender-flipped and played by Masina....

After The Cranes are Flying a few weeks ago we may have set our hopes too high for our next foray into Soviet "Thaw" era films about World War 2. It's not that Grigori Chukrai's Ballad of a Soldier isn't good, but that bar was really high. Released in 1959, two years after Cranes, Ballad of a Soldier feels like a throwback, more influenced Eisenstein than, well, anyone other than Eisenstein. And E...

Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. Such a beautiful and poetic film. Released in 2000, a scant three years after the British returned rule to China, a time of many questions and possibilities, the film tells the store of a love parallelogram that for better, or usually worse, can't quite come together. There's little to say here except watch it? And give us a listen.

Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying takes a critical look at what World War II did to the average person's psyche. Well, a lot more critical than almost anything released west of the Iron Curtain.

Milos Forman claimed he didn't mean for The Fireman's Ball to be a condemnation of the Czech government. Maybe it was just a happy accident?

We're headed back to Czechoslovakia this week for a few rounds with prolific Czech director Milos Forman. First up is Loves of a Blonde, Forman's 1965 comedy about a working class girl in need of...distraction. It's possibly the best known film of the Czech New Wave, and for good reason.

What happens when a man is so singularly obsessed with possessing a woman that he doesn't even pay attention to who she is? It's a question possibly only accidentally asked by Luis Bunuel in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Bunuel's final film, it is also arguably rather autobiographical, and from what we've learned from Bunuel he is the sort of self-deluded fool that thinks he knows himself...

In his 1977 film The Last Wave Peter Weir sought to show what it would be like if a pragmatic person started to have visions. Of course, a pragmatic person who starts to have visions would ignore them, so the premise is flawed in any attempt to make a film longer than thirty seconds. Instead what Weir makes is the classic tale of a white man trying to find meaning in traditional spiritualism after...

Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise (1945) has been called the French Gone With the Wind because it is also long and racist? At least Children of Paradise keeps its racism contained to a few background characters in terrible blackface. Also, unlike Gone With the Wind, which features a war, Children of Paradise went the extra mile by being filmed during and just after the Nazi occupation of France,...

Federico Fellini's 1963 navel-gazing comedy-drama 8 1/2 -- named for how many films he'd reckoned he'd made at the time -- may prove that Fellini is self-aware but it also prove that knowing and acknowledging your problems doesn't automatically absolve you of them. Still, Fellini's acknowledgement that he -- or at least his stand-in character Guido -- is really not very good at life is pretty ente...

Ingmar Bergman had a busy 1957, releasing The Seventh Seal in February and then running along to make a television film and Wild Strawberries. Inspired but his own memories of childhood -- and with a name meaning "an underrated place" -- Wild Strawberries is the story of a grumpy old man who takes a trip back in time as he travels to his hometown to be honored by his Alma Mater, though his actual...

Donovan Hill adds a third point of view that probably isn't "truth" as he joins us to talk about Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). The film invented an oft-poorly-imitated film convention and introduced Kurosawa to the West. Pat says modern Japan sees it as one of Kurosawa's "classics." You know, like the rest of his films.

In 1946 Alfred Hitchcock was still under contract to David O. Selznick and they still hated one another. But Selznick realized a scheme to make a little more money out of the star director: instead of producing Notorious himself, he sold it off to RKO just before shooting started. Of course he still tried to exert a bit of control, attempting to get Joseph Cotten in the lead instead of Cary Grant....

The second of Alfred Hitchcock's films made directly under David O. Selznick, 1945's Spellbound is markedly more Hitchcockian than Rebecca, though honestly not as Hitchcockian as Sluizer's The Vanishing. It also seems to be out to prove Haxan right about the contemporary state of psychology. But there is a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali which is a total treat.

When he first started working in America, Alfred Hitchcock was under contract to legendary producer David O. Selznick and by most accounts they hated each other. Perhaps no clearer is that tense relationship more clear in the results of a film project than in their first: Rebecca (1940). We'll be talking about a few other films made under this contract in the next few weeks, but here we start with...

Benjamin Christensen's 1922 documentary Häxan is about as much documentary as Nanook of the North, but immensely more entertaining for its absurd claims. A history of witchcraft drawing heavily on a 15th century guide for German Inquisitors, Häxan is ridiculous in so many definitions of the word.

Hey look, a psychological thriller about a sociopath that's actually good. Now we never have to talk about Silence of the Lambs again.

Peter Medak directs Peter O'Toole in an adaptation of a Peter Barnes' play. Jeezy pete.

On the other side of the Czechoslovakian New Wave we started into last week come a film with a wholly different sensibility. Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966) also takes place in a Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, but instead of the emotional drama on the dangers of ignorance that was last week's film we get a coming-of-age sex romp about a kid who'd really just like to lose his virginity p...

Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos's The Shop on Main Street (1965) is an incredible film, one of my favorites we've seen so far in this project. Set against the backdrop of the Nazi aryanization of Czechoslovakia during World War II, Main Street is a tale of willful ignorance and the dangers of pretending everything is fine.

Not since Rififi has watching criminals work been so engulfing. Jacques Becker's 1960 Le Trou, the story of five men breaking out of France's Le Sante Prison, is a meticulous and suspenseful look at desperate men learning to trust an outsider, for better or worse. It's beautiful, even if based on the semi-autobiographical novel of possibly one of the worst people in history.

Torban Skjodt Jensen's 1995 documentary on the life and works of Carl Dreyer is an homage in content and style.

Gertrud abandons Dreyer's previous religious themes for a different sort of spiritual question.

There's one joke in Ordet, and Pat and Adam disagree on how good it is.