Lucinda Williams at the Paramount Theater

Lucinda Williams, an icon of the alt.country and blues-rock scenes, performed with her band  on September 23, 2022 at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Minnesota.  The show was remarkable in several respects.  First, the mere fact that this performance occurred in our small city (pop. 23,000), a hundred miles from the Twin Cities, is a matter for astonishment and celebration.  (As it happens, Williams is married to a Minnesota-born record producer who now lives in Nashville; her husband, Tom Overby, is a native of Austin and, indeed, part of a large family with many branches that still live in town.  It's my impression that Mr. Overby was in Austin for a high school class reunion, Class of '77, and that Williams accompanied him on this occasion.)  Williams is the real thing, deservedly famous for her songwriting and concert performances -- her 2020 album Good Souls Better Angels was nominated for two Grammy awards and her jazz singing with Charles Lloyd and the Marvels on the 2018 Vanished Gardens album is a noteworthy element on one of the very best records that I have ever heard.  Of course, she's all over You-Tube performing in places like Boulder and Memphis and collaborating with other artists such as Neil Young, Emmy Lou Harris, and, of course, Tom Petty who covered one of her songs, the scorching "I changed the Locks" to good effect.  Williams is probably best known for her 1998 alt.country record, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.  Her father, Miller Williams was a renowned poet who taught at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and recited his work at the second Clinton inauguration in 1997 -- he died in 2015.  I recommend that you watch Lucinda Williams in a video produced by a Seattle radio station, KEXP about three years ago -- Williams performs with the core of her touring band, Stuart Mathis (lead guitar), David Sutton (bass) and Butch Norton (drums); this ensemble known as Buick 6, augmented with a steel guitar and dobro player, played with her at the Paramount gig.  It's a superb, hard-rocking band and Williams has always been generous about sharing the stage and encouraging her musicians to take the limelight in some feral, slashing solos influenced, it seems, by Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse.

At the Paramount, Williams played for about 100 minutes and performed an encore consisting of two politically inflected songs.  The theater was, more or less, sold-out to an enthusiastic audience.  Williams was voluble during the first half of the show, speaking in self-deprecating terms -- she accused herself of rambling and, indeed, got lost in her remarks a couple of times, noting that she was referring to herself in the "third person" meaning that she had a "split personality".  In fact, her verbal asides were fascinating and, when she got down to business in the second half of the performance, I regretted that she wasn't as loquacious as at the beginning of the concert.  Williams provided "back stories" on several of her famous songs from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, at least, three times referring to her lyrics as "Southern Gothic" and invoking Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty as inspirations.  She explained that "Drunken Angel" and "Lake Charles" were about poets maudit who ended up taking their own lives.  (This is apparent from the words to these songs, but,  in concert, she names names and circumstances.)  The play list included a spooky, savage version of "West Memphis" complete with rattlesnake rattles in the percussion and a half-dozen tunes from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, "Joy", "Can't let go", and several others.  She's an expert songwriter, probably best when focused on vengeance for sexual or political affronts.  Like all great lyricists, she uses many slant rhymes -- for instance, 'labor" and "savior", recognizing the it's the vowels that rhyme and approximate is as good as perfect in a rock and roll or country song.  The words, hard to hear in concert, are simple and unpretentious but piercing in their effect.  Many of her songs have a  novelistic character:  she uses many place names to establish context and has a acute eye for the particularly ripe melancholy of southern decay and desuetude:  her lyrics are full of broken bottles and smashed doors and yards full of rusting auto parts.  She's shows an indignant but not downtrodden attitude, evidenced by the black tee-shirt that she wore that read (in white letters) "You can't rule me."  (However, her jacket covered the apostrophe and "t" on the legend emblazoned on her chest and, probably, some people in the audience not familiar with Williams most recent album Good Souls better Angels on which that song appears, thought that Williams was strangely proclaiming "You can rule me".)  Williams rendition of the bleak, almost imprecatory, song "Long Black Train" was one of the show's many highlights, a scary invocation of the onset of depression.  

Williams had a stroke the day before Thanksgiving in 2021 and she is obviously partially paralyzed.  The 68-year old singer has difficulty using her left hand which she mostly held clenched at her side.  She walks with a shuffle and had to be helped across the stage to her position at the center of the band.  (At the end of her set, when she moved forward toward the audience, a crew member squatting behind her sprayed the edge of the stage with rays from a flashlight, presumably to keep her from tripping over cords or falling from the platform.)  She began the show in excellent voice, belting out her songs with brassy enthusiasm, but she weakened as the gig continued and, in some later songs, her intonation waivered.  She's not mobile although she can shake her hips in time to the music.  She wore dark jeans and tennis shoes and, of course, remains beautiful in a trashy, southern Gothic sort of way -- she surrounds her eyes with dark shadow and has frizzy bleached blonde hair, cut far shorter than her coiffure depicted in photographs in her last records.  She no longer can play the guitar and has been diminished by her illness but soldiered through the show with palpable enthusiasm, standing for more than ninety minutes.  I mention these points because the reason you attend a live concert is to see the performer, watch how she moves and interacts with the audience, and participate in her presence -- elements of the experience that you can't measure by simply listening to her studio album.  Williams has always had an endearing, feisty persona and, if anything, the sequelae to her stroke merely enhance that aspect of her appeal.  She's not someone to mess around with and seems wholly courageous and indomitable.  (You can see her blithely answering 21 questions with Nic Harcourt on You-Tube -- this interview was around 2016 and Williams looks hungover with a spectacular black-eye.  She doesn't seem abashed at all about her appearance; people who claim to know such things say that she got into a barfight the night before -- at that time, she would have been about 62 years old.)  

The climax of the show was an incandescent encore in which Williams played "You can't rule me", a song she dedicated to the United Supreme Court.  Most of the audience was standing.  Williams finished with Neil Young's "Rocking in the Free World", a blazing performance with all band members singing in unison and guitar breaks that sounded more like John Coltrane or Charley Parker than Eric Clapton.  It was a howling, thunderous performance and strangely reassuring, even, inspiring.  "There's one more kid that will never go to school / Never fall in love, never got to be cool" and "We got a thousand points of light/ for the homeless man/ We gotta kinder, gentler machine gun hand" -- a sentiment punctuated by a rattle of rim shots on the drums accompanied by screaming guitars.  Williams told the audience to continue resisting, that good will prevail in the end, that people need to keep pushing the rock up the hill.  Out on the street, I ran into a young woman who I have known since she was a little girl -- I think of her as young but she's probably about 40 now.  Her boyfriend was taking a picture of her from a low angle to show her face framed with the Paramount marquee advertising Lucinda Williams.  She was flushed with excitement and pumped her fist in the air:  "Rocking in fucking free world", she proclaimed.  With my wife, I went down the street to the library parking lot where I had left my car.  Williams' tour-bus, colored chartreuse was parked behind the Paramount Theater.  A taco truck was operating.  The air was cold, infused with the scents of autumn.  I wanted to buy a taco made with lengua or tongue, but I had already eaten and it was time to go home.   

Black Gravel

It's October 1960.  Germany is being rebuilt after its war-time devastation.  Construction sites abound.  A small-time hustler, Robert Neidhart, drives gravel trucks on contract to the U.S. Air Force.  At the military base at Sohnen, runways are being built for Raketen (missile-loaded) jets.  Neidhart, with his sleazy partner Krahne, steals black gravel allocated for air force runways,  working at night to deliver the material to construction sites around Sohnen.  The military base has its gate at the edge of Sohnen.  A title tells us that the town, once pop. 261, is booming -- it's population has doubled, although the newcomers are almost all whores, catering to the lonely soldiers.  The town's leading establishment is a bar and brothel called the Atlantic operated by an older Jewish man tattooed on his forearm with his KZ-lager ID.  An opening title tells viewers that the characters and events are all fictional, but the time and place is not.  Although directed in 1961 by Helmut Kaeutner, Black Gravel resembles Fassbinder in all respects (the movie is similar to Lola made about 20 years later) -- maybe, it is more fair to say that Fassbinder, perhaps, mimics Kaeutner, at least, with regard to the corruption on display in his famous BRD Trilogy.  Black Gravel, a relentlessly bleak and disturbing movie, was a minor sensation in Europe when it was rediscovered in 2017 after restoration by the F. W. Murnau Stiftung.  Shot in grim black and white, the movie looks backward to Italian neo-realism (it has big searing close-ups), channels American film noir, and seems to be a precursor for the more gritty aspects of the New German cinema, particularly, Fassbinder's studies of post-war corruption.  It's not clear how many people saw the movie when it was first released in 1961; the few remaining Jews in Germany launched a criminal prosecution of the film for alleged anti-Semitism, a completely misguided charge since the character who slanders the Jewish brothel-owner is obviously a deranged, Nazi-sympathizer, but the survivor-community was understandably sensitive after war-time atrocities and, perhaps, it wasn't a prudent time for Kaeutner (who wrote and directed the film) to make ironic points about atrocities committed 18 years earlier.  In any event, the criminal prosecution was dismissed but the damage was done -- the movie was re-edited and denounced and it dropped out of sight to the point that the movie was thought to be lost by the late nineties. Nonetheless, a camera negative existed, although without the offending passages (those had to be restored from badly damaged prints) and, finally, the film was carefully cleaned and reconstructed.  The Kino-Lorbeer DVD of Black Gravel presents both the premiere (original) and edited version along with an idiosyncratic and amusing commentary track by Olof Moeller.  (See as well the Kino Lorbeer version of Die Grosse Freiheit # 7 also with commentary by Moeller and previously reviewed here as Port of Freedom).

Kaeutner was a skilled scenarist and he designs his films, so far as I can determine, with rather unremitting and Teutonic attention to detail.  All elements of his movies (at least the ones I have watched) are constructed to cohere tightly both thematically and visually.  Black Gravel is structured around a fateful, if apparently, meaningless event:  a black and white dalmatian is barking at some construction workers queued up to unload dump-trucks full of black gravel.  One of the drivers throws a big rock and kills the dog.  There's a desultory fist-fight between an American civilian contractor and the German who murdered the dog.  People look on but don't intervene, a pattern in this film.  The dog is pitched in the gravel poured into a big ravine that the contractors seems to be filling up so that it can be covered in asphalt to make an airbase runway.  The dog's stiff paw sticks up like an accusing finger from the magma-like spill of gravel.  A hundred minutes later the film will end with dog's corpse exposed at this same construction site.  Robert Neidhart, a penny-ante grifter and black market entrepreneur, picks up the dog's collar and plans to extort some money from the animal's owner -- apparently, at this time there was a brisk trade in ransom for kidnapped pets.  On the way back from the pit full of gravel, Neidhart agrees to give a tow to a stranded American general, John Gaines and his attractive German wife -- the woman, Inge, was previously Neidhart's girlfriend when he was working the rackets in Heidelberg.  Neidhart senses that Inge has made a marriage of convenience with the American -- the Germans call the Americans "Amis" translated as "Yanks" in the subtitles.  He tries to seduce Inge who resists him, at first.  As it happens, the murdered dog, Tub, was Inge's pet.  Neidhart lives in a weird compound out in the country in which he has built a scale model of a local church -- his shack is full of American posters, an ad for Nat "King" Cole playing with Quincy Jones and a rodeo poster from Wyoming.  Ultimately, Neidhart succeeds in his aims on Inge.  However, after making love to her, Neidhart (with Inge in the truck) crashes into a couple of lovers, an American sergeant named Rodgers and his fiancee, an East German girl, Anni. Both are crushed to death under the wheels of Neidhart's dump-truck.  A criminal investigation is already underway with respect to the black gravel that Neidhart and Krahne (who plans to emigrate to Canada) have been stealing.  Neidhart buries the two bodies in the gravel pit, apparently near the dog.  A CIA operative who has been tracking Anni as a East German agent suspects Neidhart with regard to the disappearance of the betrothed couple.  Then, the American civil engineers undertake compression tests on the asphalt and gravel, tests so sensitive that they might uncover the corpses hidden in the road-bed.  Neidhart plans to flee with Inge, but, as it happens, the road-bed compression tests don't uncover the corpses.  It seems as if Neidhart's hit-and-run crime has evaded detection although Inge is appalled by the situation and, apparently, on the verge of confession.  Then, Gaines announces that something has been found buried in the gravel. Neidhart panics and Inge admits her adultery to her husband, General Gaines, who coldly tells her that it makes no difference and that they shall never speak of this again, although it is evident that the will never forgive her.  The film ends in catastrophe, after another ironic and disturbing plot twist.  

The movie is precisely detailed and disheartening in the sense that everyone is either cruel or corrupt or both.  The only positive character in the film is the naive Sergeant Rodgers and he's horribly dispatched after about 45 minutes (with his girlfriend who may be a spy).  People are afraid that the missile base will mean the end of the world and there's an eerie apocalyptic aspect to the movie -- in one scene Neidhart threatens to kill his partner Krahne in a wasteland of scrub-brush while American war games take place off-screen:  the rattle of machine guns and heavy artillery.  American fighter jets continually scream over the town and its miserable inhabitants.  In an early scene, Neidhart drives along a long line of parked cars -- "lovers' lane", he says, as we observe whores coming and going from the big, boxy vehicles:  "beds rent for 30 dollars an hour" and so the prostitutes and their customers are making due with the cars.   Neidhart has a blonde girlfriend whom he mistreats and, ultimately, tries to sell to Krahne.  This woman, Elli, is always drunk.  Neidhart's apartment in the brothel is a garret with a big poster of a naked woman on the slanting ceiling over his bed.  Inge and Gaines live in an antiseptic flat on the base that embodies everything that Germans despise about Americans -- it's full of kitsch with neat 1950's style sit-com twin beds.  (The Amis are depicted as arrogant simpletons, continuously reprising their adventures in Normandy and at D-Day, and, attending weird church services in which the preacher delivers a sermon about Christopher Columbus.)  In the brothel Atlantic there's always American jazz on the jukebox.  (Neidhart who keeps a banjo on his wall is a fan of Dixieland and says he'll take down the instrument  soon  because that style of music is "coming back" -- much of the soundtrack is atonal with aggressive bebop.)  The film is excellent in all respects, beautifully written, but unpleasant.  The characters are all, more or less, despicable and the price for doing the right thing is either death or doom.  In a big bar fight between Krahne and Neidhart, Elli gets flung to the floor and one of her breasts is exposed -- none of the drunk GIs intervene in the brawl, fought with knives and broken bottles, but they all hoot and applaud for Elli's bare bosom.  The song "Hey Joe" is a popular favorite and interpreted as accusatory by Neidhart -- he throws a bottle and ruins the juke box, probably to the relief of the bar's Jewish owner, because the selection of music offered includes German military marching songs and there's an elderly man who hobbles back and forth with a mop over his shoulder like a gun. dancing to the music.  In the film's last shot, we see a pile of black asphalt, fateful as destiny, the battered dead dog, and an American jet screaming low over the dismal landscape.  

Hardcore Henry

 Technically  impressive, if vacuous, Hardcore Henry is a non-stop murder spree that simulates for audiences the experience of playing a first-person shooter computer game.  The film executes this premise effectively but one is left with this question:  what's the point? --  the movie isn't as fun as playing a first-person shooter and, for viewers who aren't gamers, the abstract non-narrative slaughter will seem pointless and, perhaps, more than a little tedious.  In other words, if you like mowing down lizard-men and fire-demons in games like Doom than just stick with the game.  If this kind of action doesn't interest you enough to play games of this sort, then, the movie will likely be insufferable and, even, a bit demoralizing -- after all, ninety minutes of gory massacre by shot gun, machine gun, revolver, saber, baseball bat, and various sharp-edged pieces of broken metal isn't exactly uplifting and, indeed, will be, to some sensibilities, disheartening.

At first, Hardcore Henry is interestingly abstract:  we see things refracted through water and, then, confusedly, in split-screen.  The movie is simulating Henry's return to action.  A beautiful young woman in a strangely revealing gown restores the dead and mutilated Henry to life, screwing on a prosthetic arm and leg.  Slowly, the first-person perspective comes into focus and the woman tells Henry that she loves him, putting a wedding ring on one of his fingers.  Lab technicians are sardonically installing a voice-box apparatus into Henry's throat (one of the lab guys asks Henry if he wants to sound like Louis Armstrong -- there's a selection of different voices on offer), when a bunch of bad guys, led by an albino named Arkan with telekinetic powers attacks the laboratory and guns everyone down.  The laboratory apparently is locate in some kind of orbiting satellite and Henry with his wife escape in a pod, dropping into Moscow where they are, then, relentlessly hunted by Arkan's henchmen for the next hour.  The film is nothing more than a continuous romp through various mazes and landscapes in which Henry blasts Arkan's enemies into bits and pieces.  Sometimes, he is aided by a character named Jimmy.  Jimmy turns out to be a young man that Arkan has paralyzed for some reason.  The real Jimmy is in a mechanized wheelchair and using a virtual reality simulator spawns an army of clones who battle Arkan's cyborg battalions before gracefully dropping back into paralysis. (The clones speak in a sardonic British English, a bit like cross between Cary Grant and Erroll Flynn.)  As we come to learn, Arkan has resuscitated the dead and turned them into killing machines.  Henry is a corpse as well but an even more lethal killing machine, probably because he is motivated by his love for Estelle, his wife and the woman who we see resuscitating him in the first five minutes of the movie.  (At one point, someone says that cyborgs, who are reanimated cadavers, are not very good on the battlefield because they aren't motivated to fight -- thus, Henry represents an improvement on the design because he is killing for a purpose, that is, the save and protect Estelle.)  There are battles with grenade launchers on rural roads, fights in skyscrapers, underground labyrinths, laboratories, and weird aerial platforms.  Henry mows down hundreds of cyborgs launched against him by Arkan and, of course, as is the custom in films like this, finally squares off against the peculiar-looking arch-villain atop a towering skyscraper at night.  Henry learns to his dismay that Estelle has motivated hundreds of cadaver-killers by pretending to love them.  He butchers everyone in sight and, then, apparently dies.  

The continuous action is brutal, often funny in macabre manner, and spectacular but like all good things too much of this stuff becomes dull and, ultimately, the picture succumbs to tedium -- it's got nowhere to go but increasingly ridiculous battles (one against ten, against a hundred, against a thousand) and there's no dialogue to speak of (Henry's got no voice) and nothing much in the way of a narrative.  I used to play first-person shooter games and enjoyed them and the picture, I think, fails on its own terms.  In the first-person shooter, you manipulate controls to run around in a colorful maze, encounter enemies, and, then, point and click to gun them down.  The pleasure in playing these kinds of games is learning the hand-eye coordination to pick your targets and successfully eliminate them.  The viewer in Hardcore Henry feels weirdly paralyzed, a bit like Jimmy in his motorized wheelchair -- the experience, which is supposed to be active, is passive and the viewer seems confined in someone's increasingly perverse fantasy.  Second, in a first-person shooter there's an aspect of target selection -- you see the bad guy, aim at him, and, then, eliminate the adversary.  In Hardcore Henry, the targets appear a split second before they are blown to pieces and there's no pause between sighting and killing them.  This renders all the mayhem completely abstract and, therefore, uninvolving.  Curiously, the picture shows a certain weird failure to understand the very nature of the pleasures afforded by the first-person shooters that are emulated.  (There's one exception -- a scene involving a sniper rifle staged in an abandoned medical center works well, but this is because it's more leisurely:  we see the rifle sight aimed at attackers, tracking them before they are murdered.  This is a lot more fun than the super-fast slaughter in the rest of the picture.  We can imagine that we are doing the killing and this makes the assassinations much more engaging and amusing.)  There are a few funny lines and sequences;  we learn that in Russia 50,000 baseball bats are sold yearly and only 50 baseballs leading to some amusing conjecture as to what the bats are being used for.  In one scene, the hero tries to mount an beautiful stallion and the score surges with the theme from The Magnificent Seven, but, then, the horse bucks Henry off and the soundtrack reverts to its characteristic super-accelerated punk rock themes.  Jimmy uses a half-dozen elegantly dressed clones to stage a musical number featuring a Cole Porter tune -- this is very grotesque, funny and even well-choreographed.  The film  has a sort of theme:  Hardcore Henry is mostly motivated by his love for Estelle, a figure who is a false memory and illusory (called the "power of the pussy" in the movie'scharacteristically vulgar Duke Nuke-em diction.)  But when Estelle fails him, Henry has memories, presumably from his childhood before he was killed, about his tough-guy father, played by Tim Roth in a cameo, admonishing him:  "Are you just gonna lay there choking on your own blood or are you gonna get up, spit it out, and starting spilling their blood?"  This question is accompanied by an image of Henry (I think) as a young punk hurling a complicated piece of hardware against a wall where it breaks into a million pieces, an image for the several deaths that Henry experiences in the film from which he is resurrected to continue his adventures.  When Estelle is revealed to be an agent of his betrayal, Henry is inspired to kill yet another legion of foes by this fatherly encouragement.  Everything about the film is excessive:  a scene involving a massacre in a brothel uses not one or even a dozen shapely naked whores, but, in fact, at least fifty blonde bare-bosomed prostitutes.  This is a movie in which you get your bang for the buck.

The film is directed by the Russian Ilya Naischuler and was made in 2015 .  Although the movie is essentially garbage, it aligns with certain ultra-violent films directed by Alexei Balabanov, for instance, the notorious Cargo 200.  The movie has the brutal, nihilistic esthetic of Balabanov and, for that matter, even the great Alexei German (and its horror-film producer Timur Bekmambetov). The question that the picture raises is what does this ultra-violence do to its consumers and can we trace some of the horrible events in Ukraine to this sort of cinema?  Probably not, and it's well to note that the movie was shot mostly in Moscow but also in LA and features some Hollywood performers -- indeed, it's an American-Russian co-production apparently although most of the behind-the-camera crew and technicians seem to be Russians.  But the idea of an army of revived poorly motivated cadavers without soul or conscience unleashed on the world may have an inadvertent meaning today that didn't exist in 2015.   .

Port of Freedom (Die Grosse Freiheit #7)

 Helmut Kautner was a German film-maker highly regarded  in his country but little-known in the rest of the world.  (David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film describes Kautner as an estimable figure who make reputable and tedious prestige movies -- but Thomson, fond of magisterial declarations, seems to have seen only a couple of Kautner's thirty or forty pictures.)  A chief obstacle to Kautner's evaluation is that, until recently, most of his movies were unavailable in subtitled DVD versions.  Further, Kautner's first eight or nine movies were made under the auspices of the Nazis and, accordingly, are tainted by the historical circumstances of their production.  Because Kautner was apolitical and, in fact, specialized in melodramas, Germans admire him for making war-time movies that are inoffensive -- they seem to be generally without propaganda.  However, adopting an apolitical stance toward the National Socialists, that is, engaging in what Germans call the "inner emigration," doesn't appeal to most non-Germans who fancy that, if they were faced with the tyranny under which Kautner labored, they would have behaved more heroically -- this assumption has always seemed quixotic and unjust to me.  In some respects, criticisms about Kautner echo Peter Gay, a cultural historian of the Weimar Republic, who has argued that German Innerlichkeit (that is, the tendency to withdraw from political reality into realms of soul-searching and romantic fantasy) led to the Nazi regime -- this also seems somewhat naive and simplistic in the context of the destruction of the Weimar Republic.  Certainly, one of Kautner's signature films, Die Grosse Freiheit #7, released in 1944 depicts a Germany in which there is no war and no politics and that indulges in the wishful thinking that the characters' main concerns are not starvation, air-raids, and violent death, but rather navigating a romantic love-triangle.  I think it's generally unfair and a bad critical practice to denounce a film for what it is not -- it's not reasonable to blame Kautner for choosing fo film a love-story instead of an anti-war tract for the subject of Die Grosse Freiheit #7.  In other words, Kautner's film should be regarded in terms of the genre that it exploits (the romantic melodrama or "woman's picture") and not condemned for not channeling Fassbinder or Volker Schloendorff.  (And it's worth noting that Kautner's film, addressing male-female relations in the context of prostitution, in fact, demonstrates the abuse of power that often arises in that context -- erotic desire is usually asymmetrical to the grief of one of the parties and this subject is integral to Kautner's 1944 film.)

The Germans are often commended for being great engineers and Die Grosse Freiheit #7 is very cunningly constructed, indeed, superbly engineered -- all of the film's moving parts fit together beautifully and the picture's structure relies upon leit motifs and symbols that reoccur with increasing significance throughout the picture.  The plot is simple, but it is worked into an intricate pattern that is skillfully designed and that contains enough pathos and surprise to intrigue the viewer.  It's also true that Kautner's carefully controlled mise-en-scene and the way that he develops themes is, indeed, a wee bit tedious -- he's so disciplined and thoughtful that the wilder aspects of the melodrama don't work as well as they should, although there are some spectacular flourishes including a penultimate dream sequence that unleashes a torrent of feverish fantasy just at the point where the film threatens to become most predictable.  Die Grosse Freiheit # 7 ("the great freedom, # 7) is the address of a bizarre combination cabaret/hippodrome off Hamburg's notorious Reeperbahn -- that is, the center of the port city's red-light district.  A seaman, Hannes, who has spent 18 years plying the waters of the world  (most recently on a majestic schooner called the Padua), performs nightly at the cabaret; he is living, more or less, with Anita, a middle-aged red-haired floozy who runs the combination horse-show and night-club.  Hannes plays the accordion and sings, much after the manner of a male Marlene Dietrich -- in other words, he growls out lyrics in a rich, deep baritone.  (The songs are all Weimer-styled and decadent ballads, generally rife with ribald double entendres).  Hannes is summoned from the stage mid-performance to attend at his dying brother's bedside.  Hannes' brother is reprobate and he has got a provincial girl in trouble.  Apparently, the brother has twice stolen (literally) Hannes' life-earnings and it's not clear what sort of awful illness is killing him.  While Hannes is denouncing his brother, the poor fellow dies.  The dead man's last wish is that Hannes care for the small-town girl that he has abandoned.  Hannes travels to the girl's home dominated by a rustic-looking church, a place in which girls walk in lock-step.  The young woman, Gisa, has been seduced and abandoned by Hannes' caddish brother and she is despised by everyone in the village -- she is viciously "slut-shamed" to use a modern locution by her own mother. Hannes rescues Gisa from her plight and sets her up as his roommate in Hamburg.  Hannes is about 30 years older than the young woman and, at first, regards her with mildly amused irritation.  He finds her a job in the dry-goods store where Gisa is courted by Georg Willem Koll, a importunate and aggressive young man who works as a welder at Blohm & Voss, the big shipyard in Hamburg.  Gradually, Hannes falls in love with the girl and plans to propose to her.  He decides to abandon his cabaret job and go into the business of leading Hafen Rundfahrt (a staple of Hamburg's tourist industry even in 1943 -- that is, conducting tours of the harbor on pleasure boats.)  Hannes gets a wedding ring and plans to buy a vessel that he will rename after Gisa.  But, alas, Gisa is not attracted to the older man and, in fact, begins a love affair with the welder, Koll.  This leads to a triangle in which Koll and Hannes vie for Gisa's affections.  In the end, Gisa ends up in bed with Koll -- German films are much more candid about sex in this period than Hollywood movies.  Poor Hannes gets drunk, wanders about the desolate Reeperbahn in the middle of the night and, at dawn, departs on a beautiful sailing ship, the Paloma -- in the final shot, we see him grappling with the Paloma's great steering wheel.

This is a fairly slight story, but it's very intricately developed in its details.  One example may suffice for many:  early in the movie, one of Hannes' former crewmates (who adores him) gives the hero a model of the Padua in a bottle.  Meanwhile, the real Pdua is moored in the harbor awaiting another trip to the South Seas.  The ship imprisoned in  the bottle is a symbol for Hannes' dilemma, a noble mariner trapped as a cabaret performer and confined by his affection for a disreputable, if somewhat, pathetic whore, the madame at the Grosse Freiheit.  Hannes has a pet name for Gisa; he calls her La Paloma (the white dove) and at a key inflection point in the plot he sings the song La Paloma in a German version at the cabaret.  Later, the ship in the bottle gets smashed when Hannes flies into a drunken rage when he learns that Gisa has gone dancing with Koll at an idyllic river-side plein-air ballroom.  By this time, the film has clearly conflated the "white dove", Paloma, with the beautiful sailing ship with its huge white sails, the Padua.   The broken glass that contained the Padua, then, rhymes with another shocking close-up in which Hannes, again enraged that Gisa has not appeared at his betrothal dinner, crushes a glass in his hand and cuts himself. The Padua in a bottle is echoed by a wooden statue of Hannes playing his accordion posted as a advertisement outside of the cabaret.  In the astonishing dream sequence, Hannes meets his Doppelgaenger in the form of the wooden statue (it's like a ship's figurehead) that eerie figure invites him down a long sinister corridor.  At the end of the corridor, we see the Gisa, that is, the tourist boat, which sets out on the river for a harbor tour (surely a humiliating trade for an accomplished deep-sea mariner) and, then, promptly sinks.  At the end of the movie, the sadder, but wiser, Hannes is seen working as Helmsman on the beautiful tall-ship Padua as it plies the Seven Seas.  

This movie is very famous in Germany and much beloved.  It features Hans Albers, a matinee idol and greatly admired cabaret and ballad singer.  (Albers is so beloved in Hamburg for his role in this movie that Jorg Immendorff, the German neo-expressionist, has made a statue of the actor as he appears in the movie, playing an accordion -- that statue stands in one of the seediest courtyards in the Red Light District, in the very center of the prostitution zone and is inscribed with lyrics from one of the signature songs in this film:  "Half past Midnight on the Reeperbahn...")  The acting is all excellent (Albers is lit so that his blue eyes shine with uncanny splendor) and Kautner works to keep things amusing on all levels -- there are dirty songs, riding stunts including a sailor mounted backward on a  jackass, and, even, an impressive, if a little too choreographed, barroom brawl that involves men fighting over women but, then, battling for the sheer fun of it. (The film obsessively dwells on romantic rivalries:  one of Hannes' shipmates gets entangled with a prostitute and, when she practices her trade with other men, tries to strangle her and there are shrewdly filmed confrontations between the young, tough but innocent, Gisa and the older madame from the bar and brothel; of course, this all occurs in the context of Hannes' rivalry with Koll.)  The dream sequence with canted angles, double exposures, and grotesque imagery tinted dark blue is extraordinary, most of all because it isn't really programmatic -- that is, it defines the conflicts in the film but doesn't solve them.  The men are all anxious to avoid entanglement with women, but, of course, love and romance and, therefore, commitment (entanglement) is what everyone is seeking in the movie.  The camerawork is spectacular with foggy shots of Hamburg's harbor and a bravura sequence involving a thunderstorm at the open-air ballroom that looks like something by Jean Renoir.  The movie is shot in rich and atmospheric Agfacolor and is resplendent in the DVD restoration (by the F. W. Murnau Stiftung) -- the colors are steeped in an amber glow, muted but still vibrantly pronounced.  Fog- and ship horns bellow on the soundtrack.  The many cabaret numbers are beautifully staged -- the soundtrack, however, is overly explicit in underlining the drama.  Even the film's rear-projection work, visible in the harbor tour scenes, is superb -- and you get to see landmarks of Hamburg's Hafen before it was bombed into ruins, particularly the old Kaiserspeiche (Imperial Warehouse) on the point of land where the Elbe divides into its main channel and the host of canals leading to the depots in the city -- this is where the ElbPhilarmonie building is now located.  Apparently, the film was made under very difficult circumstances.  Operation Gomorrha in July and August 1943 destroyed Hamburg (and killed 34,000 people), ending filming on location.  The movie's production was, then, transferred to Berlin Babelsburg where again the studios were bombed into rubble.  The film's final shoots were done in Prague.  When the movie was screened for Dr. Goebbels, he thought the picture was an insult to German womanhood and a celebration of prostitution.  So the picture was censored in Germany and not shown there until after the War.  The movie was released in the rest of the world, however, to considerable acclaim.   

The Kino-Lorbeer DVD of the film has an interesting commentary track by Olof Moeller.  Moeller tells jokes and raves enthusiastically about Albers -- he's a true fan -- and he explains the peculiar political and historical aspects of this film.  The Nazi censors were concerned about the movie and demanded that the title, originally just Grosse Freiheit be clarified to be not a concept but an address -- hence, the addition of the #7 to the name.  Moeller makes the interesting point that the Nazis were careful to provide "something for everyone" -- in other words, their regime was not uniformly detestable and party officials manipulated affairs so that even their enemies had to concede certain things to them.  In effect, a film like Grosse Freiheit was made to be politically troublesome and, even, problematic -- the point was to create the illusion of freedom, not actual freedom.  Albers was suspected to be anti-Nazi and the authorities' "tolerance" with respect to films like this was supposed to demonstrate that there was room in Germany for all types of politics, including the Weimar-era aspects of Kautner's movie.  Moeller says that "German film history is not for people who like clear-cut narratives."  In fact, post-war Germany was, in some ways, more censorious than the Nazis -- the scene clearly depicting a post-coital conversation between Koll and Gisa (their clothing is strewn all over the floor) was cut when the picture was finally released in Deutschland in 1948,  Albers had a long career in German films -- he appears as a brash young thug in The Blue Angel and continued working in film through the sixties.  Grosse Freiheit # 7 is his signature performance.  Kautner delivered the eulogy at his funeral and said that Albers, the mariner, was merely resting before embarking on his greatest voyage, the trip to the Grosse Freiheit and, then, quoted the final lines in the film:  "Calm seas and good sailing!"        

Kleo

 Kleo on Netflix is an eight-part German spy v. spy series.  Like the old MAD magazine cartoons, the show features comically elaborate assassinations and there are disguises, weird lairs, and plenty of grotesque and sinister figures all plotting against one another.  The film is paranoid and conspiracy-oriented, suggesting that much of recent history has been the playground of international cabals of spooks and their fellow-travelers -- a main plot point links an assassination attempt on President Reagan to the East German STASI.  The program is effectively shot and fairly well-staged, although there are scenes that, sometimes, are difficult to follow -- a sequence in which the heroine cuts up a puffer-fish to extract its paralyzing venom didn't make sense to me except in retrospect.  In Germany, the show may have some vaguely allegorical aspects, elements of the plot that don't really register in the United States.  The only real reason to frequent this series is the amazing performance by Jella Haase as the titular spy.  Haase is one of those beautiful women who can look very different in every sequence in the film.  She's appealingly weird and awful, like a nightmare-figure from one of Grimm's more outre and macabre fairy tales.  Haase is as sardonic as a female James Bond, often taunting her victims before she murders them, but she's also strangely child-like, humming and whispering to herself, bopping villains on the nose before she offs them, and making strange autistic noises as she goes about her business.  After a couple programs, the viewer has the disquieting sense that she is completely and irretrievably mad.

Kleo is a spy, raised from early childhood to be a bland, efficient and supremely callous murderer.  In the opening scene, she blithely strolls through a tunnel under the Berlin Wall, struts around a West Berlin disco called Big Eden, and, then, offs a pussy-hound who may be a CIA operative.  Returning to East Berlin, she's inexplicably arrested by the STASI, sent to prison for a long term without any evidence of wrongdoing, and brutalized while confined (she's pregnant and has a bloody miscarriage).  When East Germany collapses, Kleo is released and immediately sets about hunting down and slaughtering the STASI operatives complicit in her confinement.  The film assumes the character of triple chase -- she has a Russian KGB spy chasing her, a CIA operative, and, also, a zealous, if inept, detective employed by the West Berlin police. (In fact, its a quadruple chase -- Uwe, a graduate of the same spy qua assassin school that Kleo attended, also pursues her.)  Borders and identities are fluid.  East Germany apparently still exists but in a phantom form and its secret police are busy trying to sell the State secrets to the West (or to the Russians).  Against, this background, Kleo appears as a true-believer, the last of the die-hard STASI assassins.  She calls herself a "scout", seemingly a euphemism for a specially trained murderer, and salutes old secret service colleagues (before killing them) with a cheery Immer Bereit, a sort of girl scout motto that means something like "Always Prepared!"  Kleo remains committed to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the people she kills, are guilty both of betraying her and betraying the East German regime that they once served -- its this aspect of the show that seems to have symbolic resonance.  

As is the case with most mini-series, Kleo is too long and, therefore, padded.  The show could have successfully completed its business in about five one-hour episodes -- but, then, who has ever heard of a five-part mini-series?  As the program progresses, it devolves away from the briskly jaunty and ironic mayhem in the first three episodes into something that is more serious, more bleak, and less interesting.  For instance, one episode is devoted to establishing Kleo's unhappy back-story, showing her separated from her mother (who is not a true believer in Sozialismus), and her training as a spy and assassin.  This is about the show's 5th program and introduces some new characters, including a Chilian operative named Jorge with whom Kleo had a school-girl romance and who has some significance in the last few episodes.  Otherwise, the surrealistically-staged flashback (Kleo is unconscious due to a bullet injury) adds nothing to the show and, in fact, weakens the program by being overly explicit.  Furthermore, introducing new characters this late in the game seems a bit desperate, a way of extending material that is about to become exhausted.  There's a heavily pregnant East German murderer, a bit like the very pregnant police commissioner in the Spanish show La Casa del Papel ("Money Heist") -- the villainous pregnant lady is now a trope in Netflix crime shows.  Kleo forms an alliance with Thilo, a Techno-Music fan who is squatting in a Kreuzberg flat near the Wall.  This kid has ridiculous blonde bangs over soulful eyes and he's an interesting character although he doesn't have much to do except to be threatened by the various thugs trying to execute Kleo.  (In a hommage to the Coen Brothers, Thilo, who believes himself an operative from the star Sirius, is whisked away by a cartoonish flying saucer in the last episode.)  About mid-way through the show, a plot develops around a suitcase with some sort of top-secret and highly sensitive contents -- this device plays out like a variant on the valise integral to Repo-Man and Kiss me Deadly.  There are a number of chases and shoot-outs involving the suitcase and, ultimately, it is recovered by Kleo, but, then, stolen and sent to the CIA by the assassin's hapless and inept sidekick, Sven, a cop working for the West German police.  (Sven's marriage collapses during his pursuit of Kleo and, at the very end, he becomes something like the heroine's boyfriend.)  

The film is shot in garish lollipop colors and features some attractive locations.  (It's as if the filmmakers wanted an excuse to work in Mallorca and Santiago de Chile.)  The last couple shows exploit some spectacular landscapes, apparently, foothills to the Andes near Santiago and, generally, the program is very pretty and features pretty people -- Ramona, the pregnant assassin is beautiful as is Sven, Kleo's assistant and, finally, boyfriend.  Logic and continuity is not Kleo's strongpoint -- for instance, a car chase up to the heights overlooking Santiago involves glorious vistas and dangerous-looking hairpin curves, but, then, ends on a flat pampas that doesn't seem even remotely connected to the preceding landscapes.  The longer the show runs, the more conventional it becomes and the more sentimental.  But, apparently, the show was sufficiently successful, at least, in Germany to warrant a second season because in the last five minutes, Kleo reverts to her savagely murderous origins, chases Sven out of her bed as a "class traitor" and one of the chief bad guys. a villain that we counted-out as dead, revives and seems to be ready to go on the offensive once more.   Presumably, this is all grist for the mill of a second season.  

Wheelman

 Wheelman (2017) is a modestly entertaining crime film directed by Jeremy Rush and produced by Netflix.  The picture is only 82 minutes long, inconsequential, and very cheaply made.  

In the film, Frank Grillo plays an unnamed "wheelman"or get-away driver. He's an ex-con and needs cash to pay off debts incurred in supporting his family (he has an ex-wife and 13-year old daughter) while his was in the pen.  So the driver agrees to transport two thugs to a nighttime robbery at a bank.  (The bank is lit up and full of people -- it looks like a gallery reception.  Since when are banks open at night?  This is the first of many incongruities that seriously mar the picture.)  While the robbery is underway, the driver gets a cell-phone call telling him to have the gunmen put the dough in the trunk so that he can, then, abandon them on the street outside the bank.  The driver is working for the local mob, but the "guys from Philly" are trying to infiltrate the city (also unnamed although I think it's supposed to be Boston), and the cell-phone call represents an attempt to intervene and humiliate the native crooks.  This leads to a double chase:  the driver attempts to elude the Philly gunmen who want to hijack the job and steal the stolen money; at the same time, the local mobsters are chasing the Philly criminals and trying to rub them out.  After some confrontations and shoot-outs, the wheelman lures the Philly gangsters into an ambush and they are exterminated by the local mob.  And, so, the film ends happily, the local mob rewarding the wheelman for his doughty assistance by forgiving his debts.  

The filmmaker devised the movie to be shot entirely from the perspective of the get-away driver, featuring tight interior close-ups in the car, lots of gear-shifting and braking in close-up (a little like the shots you get in a concert movie of the virtuoso's fingers on the keyboard), footage taken through the windshield, and exterior shots with the camera mounted about six inches above or beside the speeding car.  The opening sequence, for instance, is shot entirely from within the get-away car as it is parked in dark garage and, then, brought out onto the street so that the driver can take command of the vehicle.  But this austere program for the film proves to be too confining and claustrophobic and, so, the movie, in fact, violates its own rules with several sequences shot remote from the get-away car.  And, toward the end of the movie, the battered car is replaced by a shiny Porsche.  (This vehicle is owned by the ex-con; exactly how he can afford a lavish sports car of this sort is left unexplained).  Complicating the action is the hero's 13-year old daughter who has, apparently, been taught to drive by her dad on a "track".  She is very precocious and has to drive at high speeds for a few minutes in the picture.  (As it happens, I just watched The Nice Guys which also features a precocious 13-year old girl and a bitchy ex-wife -- The Nice Guys is a much better picture, but, in both cases, the device of ginning up the suspense by putting a young girl in harm's way is a little cynical and, even, unpleasant.)  Nothing in the movie makes much sense.  The city streets where the action takes place are wholly empty.  Yet, we know from dialogue that the film takes place in real-time between about 8:30 pm and 10:00 pm and so it's bizarre that there is never any traffic anywhere.  In one scene, there's a stand-off in a long tunnel, apparently the tunnel system created by the "Big Dig" at Boston -- the hero just parks his car in the tunnel and, with a couple exceptions, there's no traffic at all.  The whole film could be brought to a swift conclusion if any one of the idiotic gunsels aimed at the tires on the get-away car.  But despite fusillades of bullets, no tire is ever hit.  The poor getaway car takes a beating but keeps on ticking -- despite many crashes it seems to drive perfectly fine as if, somehow, invulnerable.  Several scenes take place in parking garages, strange places that don't seem to require that you pay to park or exit.  For some reason, implausibility is highly destructive to crime films and this movie seems to have been written with no regard for reality.  Frank Grillo is apparently a well-known actor with rugged good-looks, a bit like a younger Sylvester Stallone.  He's pretty good in this movie. From his bio, it seems that he specializes in comic book films.  

The Nice Guys

 The Nice Guys is an unpretentious buddy picture starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe.  Released in 2016, the movie apparently sunk like a stone and made no lasting impression on anyone.  The film is reasonably entertaining and a pleasant diversion, but not much more.  The two principal players are appealing in a low-energy way and this is one of the few movies that I have seen in which I'm able to tolerate Ryan Gosling, an actor that I ordinarily detest.  

Set in 1977, the film follows the exploits of two private investigators, the effective, if brutish, Healy (Russell Crowe) and the comically inept March (Ryan Gosling).  After an initial confrontation in which Healy efficiently beats up March and, then, gratuitously breaks his arm, the rival gumshoes join forces to search for a missing girl.  The girl, Amelia, is involved in the porno industry and, now, on the lam from a cabal of assassins who are trying to kill her.  As it happens, all the participants in a porno film that has now gone missing are being systematically eliminated, perhaps, because of the content of the movie.  The plot is complicated but, ultimately, makes sense and there are some very amusing twists and turns to the story.  March is so feckless that he discovers important clues by literally falling on them.  In one case, March tries to impress a girl at a party and drops off a balcony falling about two-hundred feet down a hill where he comes to rest next to a bloody decomposing corpse.  March does variations on old Three Stooges or Bud Costello double-takes when he sees the gruesome body, a schtick that will amuse some viewers and disgust others (I sort of like the Three Stooges  and Abbot and Costello and so I admired Gosling's audacity in imitating them.)  There are a couple exciting shootouts in which March drops his gun and or can't get it loaded, while the omnicompetent Healy blazes away at the bad guys.  Kim Basinger appears as the ultimate bad mother -- she's taken out a contract on her rebellious daughter Amelia, and, such is the temper of the times, that she's the boss of the Department of Justice, of course, corrupt and in league with the villains.  (The bad guys are Detroit auto-makers trying to foist pollution-causing catalytic converters on the public in spite of anti-smog demonstrations in LA where the film is ostensibly set -- it was actually shot mostly in Georgia.) The film's MacGuffin is the reel of porno film that contains an expose of the villainy of the Detroit auto makers and, at the climax, the round tin containing the film rolls around merrily while all sorts of mayhem occurs in its wake.  The film amusingly re-creates the hair styles and garish clothes of the late seventies and there's a nostalgia-inducing soundtrack.  The movie's biggest misstep is that the action relies upon a 13 year-old girl, March's daughter, to keep her incompetent father on-task and to solve important aspects of the crime.  Since the milieu of the film is the ultra-corrupt adult film industry, there's something a bit distasteful about the young girl's involvement in the plot.  Mores evolve quickly and what was tolerable when the script was written (2002) and, even, marginally acceptable in 2016 when the film was released, is probably not suitable for mass-market consumption today in late 2022.

I thought the movie was fun, a nice diversion, and completely trivial.  It's directed by Shane Black, a Hollywood yeoman-director, who can generally be counted on to deliver a movie inside budget and with enough flair to break even on ticket receipts.  A few of his pictures, for instance, Iron Man, have been huge box-office successes.  You don't know his name because his accomplishment is to anonymously make films that are entertaining using a largely invisible and generic style -- the director is like Howard Hawks:  he doesn't draw attention to himself.   

 

The Devil Strikes at Midnight (Nachts wenn der Teufel kommt)

 Oedipal currents infused film culture in the early sixties.  The French New Wave derided their forbears as "papa's cinema".  This mob of young film critics including Rivette, Goddard, and Truffaut believed their own propaganda and spent half their lives denouncing the movies that their parents had cherished.  The same thing happened in Germany with even more vehemence.  A wave of young cineastes declared their independence from the German films made during the Nazi era and the next two decades; in the so-called Oberhausen declaration, the New German cinema was born -- 26 signatories to the manifesto declared that old German cinema was dead and that a new independent Kino had arisen in its stead.  The 1962 manifesto, brief and exceedingly general in content, simply declares that Papas Kino ist tot (Pa's cinema is dead) -- although that phrase doesn't appear in the actual text but was the way in which the manifesto was interpreted.  Only one of the 26 film makers producing this bold, if empty, declaration accomplished anything -- this was Alexander Kluge.  However, within the next ten years, a New German cinema had, indeed, arisen and its proponents declared themselves free from the foul influences both of Nazi aesthetics and, also, independent from the pop culture commerce in movies (musicals, sex comedies, Heimat films) produced during the so-called post-war (late forties and fifties) Wirtschaftswunder.  Once again, an adolescent screed was regarded as truth and the young Germans, in effect, believed their own bullshit.  As a result almost all of the prestigious German movies produced in the wake of World War Two (as well as all of Nazi cinema) was consigned to oblivion.  We are only now re-evaluating some of the pictures produced in West Germany as part of the world-wide film noir movement.  One of the most remarkable of these movies is Robert Siodmak's Nachts wenn der Teufel kommt (At Night, When the Devil Comes, a lurid and misleading title that was translated as The Devil Strikes at Midnight, throughout the rest of Europe and as the film's English title when it was shown in this country).  

Siodmak was German Jew who fled his homeland in 1932, worked in Paris, and, then, claiming that he had been born in Memphis, Tennessee, emigrated to Hollywood in the late thirties  (As far as we know, he was born in Dresden.)  Siodmak was a skilled and audacious director -- his early collaboration with Fred Zinneman and Billy Wilder, Menschen am Sonntag is a landmark of German silent cinema, a quasi-improvised documentary-style film, that was an important influence on the French New Wave.  In the United States. Siodmak made psychologically acute thrillers and, then, a cycle of very important film noir.  He was lured back to Germany by the Jewish producer Alexander Brauner in 1952 and The Devil... is his second German-language film.  The movie defeats all expectations and remains compelling on many levels.

The audience is alerted that something unusual and startling is afoot in the opening shot.  A group of men, perhaps thirty or forty, walk in parallel rows across a devastated landscape that looks like something from one of Anselm Kiefer's gruesome canvases -- it's all mud and wrecked foliage against a dismal forest of scrub pines.  In the foreground, a strange figure with an anguished white mask-like face is sunk in  a pond of black water.  The monstrous figure slowly pulls into the mire a birch tree with chalky white bark.  What this means is unclear and this overture-shot is never repeated in the film and never integrated into the narrative.  But its astonishing and establishes the film's mood -- foreboding and dire, although, as we come to see, shot through with weird moments of satirical comedy.  The picture, then, cuts to a Nazi Harvest festival in which a plump swinish Nazi is sexually harassing a bunch of Aryan maidens, awarding them prizes of flour (no one has anything to eat) while making boorish comments about their physiques.  The Nazi has a homely waitress as his out-of-town mistress (he's married and supposedly a good family man).  He's courting the waitress in her squalid apartment with food to which he has access.  She's hiding some cherries in a baby perambulator and, when she goes down into the Expressionistically-lit Treppenhaus (stair-well), the scary figure with the pale face half-drowned in the pond during the opening sequence strangles her death.  All Hell breaks loose -- it's an air-raid and bombs whistle through the air as the murderer drags the corpse off-screen.  The Nazi official (he's named Willi Keun) is arrested for the crime and, because he was drunk when his girlfriend was killed, he can't recall anything and confesses to the crime.  This misfortune, as they say, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.  Enter a wounded war veteran from the Eastern front, Inspector Kerstens.  He's assigned to the homicide division in Berlin.  Both he and his boss think their work is meaningless -- what's the point of solving crimes involving homicides when thousands of people are being slaughtered every day at the Front.  Nonetheless, Kerstens is an honorable man and quickly determines that the swinish Nazi bureaucrat lacks the physical strength to have strangled the robust bar-maid.  There's no suspense involving the solution of the crime.  From the outset, we know that a half-wit gorilla named Bruno Luedke is the killer.  Luedke is a serial murderer and has killed some unknown number of women.  Kerstens figures this out and gets Luedke to confess.  Luedke, who is mentally challenged, is a show-off and confesses to 80 murders.  We see him exchanging gruesome information for cigarettes and Kersten's approval. (Cigarettes seems to be the only viable currency in late 1944 and Kerstens meets his romantic interest, Helga, when she asks him for his cigarette rationing coupons.)  Meanwhile, the Gestapo decides that the whole situation is an embarrassment to the Reich and a suave, feline Gruppenfuehrer tells Kerstens to let sleeping dogs lie and abandon the case.  The Nazis don't want to admit that they have tolerated these murders without successfully bringing the perpetrator to justice.  Further, there are weird theories about hereditary and race as factors that cause crime and the authorities don't want to accommodate the circumstances of this case to their ideology.  The Justice Department, as it were, plans to go ahead and execute the loathsome Willi Keun.  Kerstens protests and tries to save Keun.  But he's told that he's just making things worse for all concerned, including Kerstens'  own girlfriend Helga.  Keun is unjustly executed for a murder that he didn't commit and the moronic killer, Bruno, is also "liquidated" for a good measure.  The Nazis punish Kerstens by sending the limping, wounded man back to the Eastern Front as a "buck  private."  Helga escapes with the help of her cousin, a Nazi who is sexually interested in her and has been, more or less, stalking the woman.  With her loutish alcoholic cousin, Helga prepares to flee to Sweden.  A locomotive swarmed with soldiers departs for the Eastern Front; the men, including Kerstens, are all getting drunk before their deaths "as heroes" of the doomed Third Reich.

The film is brilliantly shot and conveys in an oppressive way the corruption of Nazi regime.  In one scene, we see the Gestapo officers with their girlfriends partying while bombs fall.  They go downstairs into a bomb shelter equipped with a bar and buffet.  There's a bravura suspense sequence in which Bruno prepares to commit a murder of opportunity -- he's brought potatoes to a Jewish woman who is hiding in an apartment; Bruno, who is a mass murderer himself, seems to know nothing about the slaughter of the Jews by the Germans -- he's never heard of Auschwitz.  When one of the Gestapo officers goes to discuss the Luedke case with Hitler, we see the Nazi Rolls Royce parked in front of an official ministry while the soundtrack blares the theme from Liszt's Les Preludes, one of the radio anthems of the Third Reich.  There's an astonishing sequence in which Bruno confesses to a murder committed in a woods and runs around frantically -- we don't know if we're watching a flashback or if this is happening during the investigation.  The big scene at the end at the train station is gorgeously lit and serves as a sinister coda to the action -- a nurse who was friends with Bruno asks about the man.  Kerstens, who is now complicit with the regime, says that he's never heard of Bruno and, as far as he's concerned, the man never existed.  The film's atmosphere is grim:  people work in offices with roofs caving in over their heads and, near the end, when Kerstens returns to his office in Berlin, the place has been half-destroyed, a big rotunda filled with debris and files heaped up and half-burned on the steps leading to his looted rooms -- these sequences are remarkably designed and look like Tarkovsky at his most grim.  

Obviously, this is an impressive film with very sharp, ironic dialogue, replete with grimy characters so carefully portrayed that you can almost smell them.  Later, Fassbinder was to work with the actor who plays the porcine nasty little Nazi, Willi Keun.  It's hard to imagine that this film, which won many German awards and was a  huge box-office hit, wasn't a powerful influence on the directors who later comprised the German New Cinema.  

Collateral

 Michael Mann's 2004 Collateral combines effectively all of the elements for which this director is famous:  there are lots of shots of men running at top speed, vehicles slink through dim city streets under flaring sub-tropical skies that look like exotic fruit cocktails, and music videos punctuate the action.  Everyone labors hard for their money, including Mann's professional criminals who always have a blue-collar work-ethic notwithstanding their sleek physiques and tailor-made clothes.  The tough daily grind inspires dreams of escape in Mann's characters -- the hero in Collateral posts on his taxi's visor above his dashboard a picture of a South Sea atoll to which he wishes to escape; this is similar to James Caan's thief in Mann's first movie keeping in his wallet photographs clipped from some magazine of the ideal life to which he aspires: blonde wife and baby and house in the suburbs).  Everyone is driven by dreams of success and escape and express the Protestant view that you have to work incessantly to achieve happiness but, in fact, the very impulse to acquire good things through relentless labor taints and poisons the very objects that you desire.  Mann's pictures have a sleek, overwrought quality and they are pictorially spectacular -- you can recognize the filmmaker's work in every sequence in his films; he doesn't ever deviate from his hard, glossy style and this is, at once, Mann's greatest accomplishment as well as his greatest flaw:  his films are mostly cold with impenetrable surfaces and what you expect is always what you get.  In Collateral, an excellent example of Mann's esthetic, an alert viewer will figure out the film's crucial plot turn and the mechanics of its climax at the end of the movie's first sequence -- but it doesn't matter: the climax is what you anticipate but better.  On the other hand, there is something soul-less about a film-making style that excludes any sort of improvisation or detour or accident, a style that is story-boarded within an inch of its life.

Collateral is particularly appealing because of its classical simplicity.  A hardworking and fantastically expert taxi-driver (played by Jamie Fox) is hired and, then, coerced into chauffeuring a professional assassin (Tom Cruise) around Los Angeles from twilight to dawn -- the killer is executing a contract to murder witnesses who have been subpoenaed to testify in a drug cartel case.  His work requires five stops and, then, the taxi-driver is supposed to let him off at the airport so that he can make is getaway through LAX.  A LA detective, Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), figures out that a contract-killer is murdering trial witnesses and initiates a chase through the city streets in hot pursuit of the murderer.  There are a series of assassinations and shoot-outs and, at last, a bravura set-piece involving the killer's final victim.  (SPOILER alert: the last victim is a spunky, hardworking female prosecutor in federal court; she is the taxi driver's first fare for the night and their encounter, a classic Hollywood "meet-cute", motivates the frantic climax -- the taxi-driver risks everything to save the young woman who serves as the implicit, if never consummated, romantic interest in the film.)  The movie preserves Aristotelian unities of time and place -- the action takes between sunset and dawn across a single night and everything happens on the precisely delineated grid of streets comprising central LA; if you knew, the city, I think, you could chart the the film's events on a map (the scenario obligingly provides exact addresses).  Everything is coordinated to the plot and there are no random occurrences -- the opening meet-cute turns out to be a central pivot point on  which the plot turns, although the viewer will, at first, regard the encounter as preface to a romance not a big gunfight; similarly, a visit to a jazz club (similar to the visit to the Blues bar in Thief) also turns out to be part of the plot and not the detour advertised by the gunman.  The film is wildly entertaining and visually gorgeous -- palm trees flare melodramatically against skies that are the deep color of expensive rum; the belly of a helicopter gleams with reflected city lights; the night-time streets are sinister and glamorous at the same time.  There are too many close-ups for my taste, but Mann is so successful with these images that, after a while, I forgot my objections to this style of moviemaking.  (Mann's Public Enemies is so clogged up with close-ups that I found the movie impossible to watch on the big screen; but in Collateral, this technique seems more expressive and less intrusive.)  There are spectacular set pieces, similar to the downtown LA firefight in Heat, for instance, a big shoot-out in a disco in Korea Town filmed like a music video and the climactic sequence set in office buildings and their adjacent parking lots is a master-class in complex, but lucid, mise-en-scene using deep focus in the pre-dawn night to link actions occurring hundreds of yards apart.  The acting is excellent:  Tom Cruise with grey hair and whiskers is a philosophical world-weary assassin, a nihilist who argues that the world is completely indifferent to human suffering and that the only thing that matters is professionalism in executing one's contractual obligations.  The no less hard-working taxi-driver argues that the meaning of life is achieving one's dreams, although the killer points out that the hack is apparently willing to defer his dreams forever.  Both men claim bad parental influence and we even meet the taxi-driver's mother -- again this scene seems like a deviation from the plot's mainsteam, but, in fact, serves an important plot point in the story:  the taxi-driver has to keep assisting the murderer or the bad guy will kill his mother.  The movie plays out as a perverse buddy-film -- gradually, the taxi-driver and assassin begin to blend into one another:  the driver becomes more brutal, cunning, and amoral while, perhaps, the assassin has some second thoughts about his chosen profession.  The film is successful because, despite its glossy format, the picture eschews cartoon-style heroics.  The taxi-driver is an everyman and acts pretty much as you would expect in the circumstances -- he doesn't have any super-powers and doesn't turn into some kind of hyper-efficient action hero and killing machine.  Furthermore, the assassin, despite his professionalism, errs himself -- at one key point, he runs out of ammunition.  The transfer of qualities between the two principals in the film is integral to the movie's appeal and, indeed, at one point the taxi-driver has to  literally impersonate Tom Cruise's character, acting in that scene with even more desperate aplomb that the professional killer.  

My only cavil relating to this movie is that, when considered after all the sound and fury is concluded, the picture is somewhat implausible.  The plot turns on a wild coincidence which we accept while the movie is screening but may question later on.  Further, at the climax, the murderer becomes a bogey-man who seems to have a preternatural skill in tracking his prey -- his victims have too many places to hide and the advantage of knowing the city, but, nonetheless, the assassin successfully pursues them, sniffing a bit like wolf or tiger, scenting his would-be prey in the air itself.  A movie like this lives or dies on its claims to plausibility and I thought there was a little whiff of the incredible in the film's last reel.  Nonetheless, I recommend this picture highly.   

   

Man v. Bee

 Man v. Bee is 2022 Netflix comedy series, divided into 9 chapters.  Starring Rowan Atkinson, the British comedian famous for his persona, Mr. Bean, the film's premise is elegantly simple:  a hapless half-wit finds work house-sitting in a hyper-modernist home owned by snooty Euro-trash and filled with priceless artwork, a mischievous (and sometimes incontinent) dog and a big yellow bumble-bee.  What could go wrong?  The show is entertaining and completely unchallenging -- it's so easy to watch that viewers will go from Chapter 1 to Chapter 9 without any pause at all.  Individual "chapters" seem to be about ten minutes long and the whole series, if it can be so characterized, is over in 90 minutes.  The show requires no investment of effort by the viewer and, if truth be told, repays the viewer with only modest laughs.  It's a perfect diversion but nothing more, akin to a pop song with a catchy riff that you enjoy hearing but that doesn't interest you enough to learn the lyrics of the tune or, even, the name of the band that performs it.  

Man v. Bee is efficient entertainment:  the premise is set up in the first minute or so and the program, then, proceeds predictably toward ever-increasing destruction and mayhem until, in the last scenes, the hero is stalking about the sci-fi house with a flame-thrower blasting fire at art masterpieces.  The irritating small dog is crushed under a projectile in the backyard and a two-million pound-sterling Jaguar is crashed and burning near the corpse of the dog.  (The show is mostly family-friendly -- viewers shouldn't despair as to the dog:  don't worry -- the critter is only wounded and will survive.)  The agent of all this destruction is the pesky bee that persecutes the house-sitter and evades all his attempts to capture or kill it.  On a couple of occasions, Atkinson's hero, who has apparently suffered a humiliating divorce, refrains from murdering his endearing, fluffy and bright orange antagonist, an animal characterized as a drone driven from his hive and alone, although he quickly repents of his mercy and returns to the fray escalating his pursuit of the insect until the entire house and its cargo of art lie in ruins around him.  Man v. Bee is true to its premises, as stripped down as a theorem by Euclid, and doesn't deviate from its theme:  man tries to swat bee but instead smashes a priceless statue or defaces a canvas by Piet Mondrian.  There are a couple of apparent detours from this theme and its variations:  the hero has an annoyingly judgmental ex-wife and an adoring daughter with whom he has a rather cloying long-distance relationship -- the man and his daughter are planning a camping (caravan) excursion to the Isle of Wight much deferred by the mayhem at the house.  A police officer intervenes on occasion to act as a foil to Atkinson's increasingly bizarre behavior and there are a trio of burglars as inept and hapless as the hero (they seem to have wandered in from a Home Alone movie); the robbery seems inconsequential but, in fact, is a cleverly concealed plot point that motivates the film's happy ending.  I note that in real life Rowan Atkinson is a car aficionado who, in fact, seems to specialize in wrecking fantastically valuable vehicles and this theme is also evident in Man v. Bee.  

The movie is relentlessly cheerful despite all the destruction  and without any foul language, although there are some off-color gags involving dog shit and a scene in which Atkinson's character does a sort of burlesque dance thrusting his pelvis repeatedly at the nonplussed cop -- he has a bee in his crotch.  The colors are bright and primary and the editing and mise-en-scene completely lucid.  The sight-gags all work, although some of them are less funny than others.  The poor pooch is almost killed twice but survives so that no one will leave this show with any concerns about the dog (named Cupcake).  The movie is like a poor man's Jacques Tati without the French comedian's sometimes surreal and  highly abstract gags.  Tati is so cerebral that he often forgets to be funny.  Man v. Bee similarly isn't as funny as it hopes to be -- but it's amusing from beginning to end.  There's a motif in films, dating as far back as The Black Cat and North by Northwest that vicious European villains live in ultra-modernist houses -- this movie exploits that motif:  the house is a perverse character itself in the movie and its condescending owners are evil and corrupt.  Everything in the house is voice- or gesture-activated and doors crucial to the action require weird passwords -- of course, the hero gets stuck in digitally activated cat entrance to the home.  The only jarring feature in the film is that the hero's antagonist is a bumble-bee -- it's hard to imagine a bee as being malicious and, in light of hive-collapse syndrome and other maladies affecting these useful pollinating insects, the viewer ends up rooting for bee.