Goodbye_Ruby_Tuesday

As with THE SILENCE--and, really, most of Ingmar Bergman's best work--this is a film of quiet grace, a subtle film that takes patience but is ultimately deeply rewarding by the end. It's a love triangle of sorts between two friends, a bachelor Maxime and his quiet friend Stephane who are business partners running a violin repair shop. Maxime begins a relationship with the beautiful violinist Camille, who soon becomes attracted to Stefane, who does not overtly return her advances. Stefane is really a voyeur who belongs in the same group as Harry Caul, L.B. Jeffries and Damiel the angel, all people who are flawed or broken in some way on the inside and feel compelled to look at others only from a distance, refusing to become involved. They seem to understand from behaviorism the depths of other people but can barely conceal their own loneliness or broken relationships--Stefane correctly states that he can never give Camille, or any "normal" woman, what she deserves. He deliberately pushes her away when he feels pressured into intimacy. He loves music and handles his violins (which can be argued are shaped like an ideal female body, revealing Stephane's asexuality) the way Maxime and other "normal" men handle women. Director Claude Sautet has a gift with letting human drama unfold, and he carefully studies the behavior of his characters, who come alive without force or question, so much that the audience feels like a you're listening on close friends fighting. Then a real-life couple, Emmanuel Beart and Daniel Auteuil are stunning (such a great, unique romance for a real-life couple--you couldn't ever imagine Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie ever tackling this together), hitting all the right notes (pun intended) with the precision and understanding of great actors, and even better human beings. Auteuil in particular is spectacular because of Stephane's deep introvert nature, and Auteuil has to allude to so many conflicting emotions that are barely visible beneath the surface, and he does so much just with his eyes, which flutter with happiness and fall with regret with perfect grace.

When the 1999 Best Picture winner American BEAUTY came out, its marketing campaign stressed for the audience to "look closer" at the typical American family; while I still enjoy Sam Mendes' debut film, I wish people had taken the film's famous tagline more to heart and sought out this obscure gem of a film, because it's both a time capsule of its time and it's one of the most ageless films of all time. James Mason delivers possibly his greatest performance under Nicholas Ray's trusted, fatherly direction (the master auteur also worked wonders exposing the surprising depth of Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in IN A LONELY PLACE (1950), Cyd Charisse and Robert Taylor in PARTY GIRL (1958), Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell in THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948) and of course the trio in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE) as a man going insane from 1950s repression. It's one of the greatest American films ever made that few Americans have actually seen (as of this writing it's not on Region-1 DVD), though Jean-Luc Godard, who named it one of the greatest American films of the 1950s and briefly referenced it in his film CONTEMPT (1963), and Martin Scorsese, who has written of its power and included clips in his great documentary A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH American MOVIES WITH MARTIN SCORSESE (1995), are big fans of this film.

Nicholas Ray's CinemaScope masterpiece was criticized and neglected upon its initial release after his smash hit REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955). What did they expect from a filmmaker whose titles of films, especially his previous one, defined his existence? BIGGER THAN LIFE is his subtle, scathing attack on the suffocating 1950s conformity and the empty promise of the American Dream--to the hip indie crowd, this is the 50s answer to HALF NELSON (2005). Like his Humbert Humbert of LOLITA (1962), Mason plays a British intellect who falls from grace in America. On the surface this film is an attack on Cortisone (and to the publicity department at 20th Century Fox, this film refused to place blame on the doctors, instead making the whole film look like Mason's fault with such captions of a doctor saying "I prescribed it--HE misused it!"), but what came first, the drug or the social claustrophobia? The Cortisone didn't create Ed Avery's psychosis, it only highlighted it, and it certainly won't cure it (Ray once wryly said that the film "is about a miracle drug. I don't believe in miracles"). Even as he eschews religion ("GOD WAS WRONG!") and the school system ("We're breeding a race of moral midgets!") during his bouts of heightened egomania, some balancing on horrifyingly awful and terrifyingly true, he's never free from his repression, which makes the film's seemingly Hallmark Happy Ending all the more disturbing.

It's a masterpiece of repression, innocence lost, and, more simply, amazing film-making. I cannot stress how badly this film begs to be seen and rediscovered by a newer audience, not unlike how Hitchcock's VERTIGO received the respect it deserved after its initial lukewarm reception. God was wrong. Nicholas Ray was right.

In the background in one shot of Sydney Pollack's great film, one can see the poster for MGM's all-star GRAND HOTEL. This places the film around 1932, when Busby Berkeley was beginning to put on his kaleidoscopic, dreamy dance numbers and Marlene Dietrich was gliding on the other side of the gauze-filtered camera. These are the films that were popular distractions, one which Jean Harlow lookalike Alice Leblanc (Susannah York) probably flocked to see. THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? (TSHDT) is closer in tone with the gritty noir films starring Paul Muni, I WAS A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG and SCARFACE, deeply black portraits of a world gone crazy--films which the strong-willed but brittle Gloria Beatty (Jane Fonda in one of her greatest performances) surely would've tipped her hat off to. TSHDT is closer to the latter, though the contestants are deceived by images of the former, with females hoping to be noticed by talent scouts or directors in the audience. This false sense of hope is what causes them to be put through an inhumane dance marathon (which includes dancing for 10+hour stretches and three-legged races) that really makes the contestants closer to cattle than humans, bet on for sport and by the end hoping for a way out. The marathon will eventually break the spirits or minds or bodies of almost everyone involved in one shape or form, leading to a finale that may be downbeat, but all the same I feel that there's really no other way this film could've ended.

There are flaws in the late Sydney Pollack's depressing Depression-era masterpiece, the first being the flash-forwards that take us out of the action and try to make it be a murder mystery that really doesn't matter (I feel Pollack was trying too hard to make Robert, Gloria's dance partner, likable), and the second is Michael Sarrazin's bland performance next to the ferocity of Jane Fonda's amazing performance as the brave but breaking spirit Gloria, the quiet explosion of Susannah York and Gig Young as the ringmaster who knows he's manipulating the contestants. But Pollack's film is tonally assured--one can almost feel the exhaustion of the parade of desperate people who become human race horses, agreeing to be part of a non-stop dance contest in the blind hope of getting a $1,500 prize money. And yet even before the downbeat and unresolved ending, we never really care about who wins the contest--not because we aren't fascinated by the characters, but because already we can sense that there will be no happy ending (trust me, this ain't Capra) for these survivors struggling not to lose themselves to their environment. Maybe the bigger reason for doing the contest isn't the money--maybe it's the need to have hope in something.