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Released a decade plus few years before later "musicians as psychopaths or sociopaths" character studies like Whiplash and Tar, The Piano Teacher falls comfortably into the Michael Haneke canon of films that could never be made in the U. S. These are quiet, moody, beautifully photographed films where plot elements and even the finales are left for the audiences to fill in. Americans don't care for ambiguity in the era of multiverse superhero movies.

Isabelle Huppert stars as Erika, a 40-something classical piano instructor who still lives with her mother (they in fact share a bed as well), whom she has a love/hate relationship with. Following a private recital, Erika draws the attention of a hopeful future student named Walter, some 20 years younger than her, who is attracted to her beauty, her standoffish behavior, and her intense knowledge of music and composers. This is despite the fact that she does everything she can to repel him--in fact, the harder she tries to repel him, the more attracted he becomes.

Erika harbors a secret that is slowly revealed to the audience and will not be mentioned in this review. Walter discovers this well after the audience does, leaving for some intensity between them, both sexual and violent. Meanwhile, Erika becomes more and more unglued as she coaches other students, particularly a low self-esteem wallflower whom she reluctantly allows to perform in an upcoming recital.

Anyone unfamiliar with the films of Michael Haneke should be forewarned. These are not comfortable watches. They are not showoffy in their approach to violence and sex. But they get under your skin. One other poster for this movie made a comment that he needed to take a bath to "wash this film off." That should serve as a warning. Even his most accessible film, the Oscar-nominated Amour, can be a painful experience at times and ends with a question mark.

In the end, this is the film Tar (the Cate Blanchette film) wanted to be - complete with a European city setting. Although the characters speak French, the film is set in Vienna, which makes sense as that is the center of the classical composer universe. Pictures of Schubert and Schumann are hanging on the walls of Erika's piano lesson room. The music itself is beautiful, although I am not sure if the actors played or if they were professional pianists. I suspect the latter.

This is another film with "piano" in the title - equally as challenging as Jane Campion's The Piano and Roman Polanski's The Pianist, but the lesser known of the three. It's probably not the best Haneke film to start with if you are interested in exploring his unique resume. Caché, which is more of a traditional thriller (but still has the director's stamp on it) or the aforementioned Amour are better starting points.

Gene Hackman gets top billing over Al Pacino for this one, understandable as recent Oscar winner Hackman was the better known star at the time (The Godfather was only two years old when this movie came out). This is an interesting, always entertaining, yet somewhat familiar male buddy movie/road movie. Despite elements that are rather predictable, the two classic stars make for an engrossing two hours.

The film opens with two strangers hitchhiking somewhere in southern California - not much information is provided about them. Do they know each other? How did the both end up along the same stretch of highway? Turns out they are complete strangers but form a bond out of necessity, given their habit of trekking across state lines illegally on freight trains or hitchhiking.

That's not to say they're without cash. Hackman's character Max Millian (great name) always seems to be carrying enough dough for convenience store snacks and beers and sit down meals, including an amusing one in a diner near the beginning of the film. Max is a dreamer and an ex-con (his temper leads to fights which have led to jail time) whose latest quest is to open a car wash in Pittsburgh, of all places. He asks Pacino's character Lionel if he wants in as a partner. Lionel (nicknamed Lion by Max) agrees.

So begins this male bonding odyssey. At various points in the film, the center of attention shifts from Max to Lion, and then back to Max, and finally back to Lion. The duo travel from California, to Nevada, to Colorado, to Illinois, and finally to Michigan, with several long interludes in a few of the states (including a stint in a prison camp in Colorado).

Previous movies that may spring to mind for other film buffs watching this: Easy Rider, Cool Hand Luke (for the prison camp scenes), Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, and John Cassavetes' Husbands. And the film concludes with a sequence that pre-dates One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next by two years.

Hackman once said he was most proud of his work in this film. Considering all of the movies--many of them good to great--he appeared in, that's quite a statement. He does work some crazy magic in this film. Nothing Hackman did in later films could match the sequence in this film where he diffuses a bar fight by stripping off his clothes (with David Rose's The Stripper coming out of the jukebox).

Pacino is equally as magnetic. His big acting moment comes late in the film, in a fountain in Detroit of all places. The scene that seals his fate in the movie. Previously, Pacino appeared in another film from director Jerry Schatzberg, Panic in Needle Park, a well-acted but bleak movie about two heroin addicts. Schatzberg had an intriguing film career, directing movies as varied as Honeysuckle Rose with Willie Nelson, Misunderstood (again with Gene Hackman), and one of the better Cannon films, Street Smart, with Christopher Reeve and Morgan Freeman.

This movie is not as well known as the other films mentioned in this review but perhaps due to the Hackman film streaming since he passed away earlier this year, this one will find a new generation of fans.

This final installment in the Columbia Film Noir boxed sets from the 1940s and 1950s ends the otherwise fascinating and entertaining group of movies on a bum note. Was this a recruitment film for J. Edgar's FBI at the time? It sure as hell plays like one.

First off, the title has an exclamation point...watch out! There could be a sleeper cell of Soviet agents around every city corner! The acting and direction in this movie is bone dry. Ideas had already been used in earlier movies like Walk a Crooked Mile (itself not much of a classic, and part of the same Columbia box set that contains Walk East on Beacon!), and later, better movies like Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (and yes, even what's considered a weak Hitchcock film is more engrossing than Walk East on Beacon!)

No expose is given about why the Americans in this film became Soviet spies. The behind the scenes operations at the FBI play like instructional videos (was there really a "WFBI" radio station then?) Although the crux of the plot involving an apparent Holocaust survivor who fled to the U. S. to become a brilliant scientist to work on complex military formulas before the Soviets could do it has its moments, similar plots were explored better in the aforementioned films.

The ending of the movie is like a love letter to J. Edgar... it is utterly shameless. With the hindsight we have now about Hoover and how his red scare tactics destroyed thousands of American lives, most of action in this film is squirm inducing.

Watch it for how Boston looked in the early 1950s. This is one time when the "on location" reputation of Columbia Pictures at the time basically saves a movie.