Cutter's Way also known as Cutter and Bone

 Cutter’s Way aka Cutter and Bone

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Cutter’s Way (1981) is one of the best Czech films ever made and, indeed, the last gasp of the Czech “New Wave” cinema.  Yet the movie was shot in Hollywood and produced by the iconic American studio United Artists.  And the movie features an early and impressive performance by Jeff Bridges, shirtless through much of the movie to display his physique, with the title role played by John Heard.  Lisa Eichhorn as the alcoholic “Mo” also delivers a character study that has been called “the most underrated performance in the eighties”; she won a retrospective award for her work in this movie at the Deauville Film Festival.

Why do I say that Cutter’s Way is a Czech “New Wave” film?

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The director of Cutter’s Way was Ivan Passer.  Passer was a central figure in the short-lived Czech “New Wave Cinema”.  

Passer was born in 1933 in Prague.  He attended a prestigious boarding school with other future luminaries in the Czech cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski and Milos Forman.  Another student at the boarding school, King George School in the spa-town Podebrady, was Vaclav Havel, the playwright, dissident, and the last president of Czechoslovakia before the country’s dissolution in 1992 into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.    

Passer was interested in theater and making films.  He attended the well-known FAMU in Prague (the Academy for Film and Television) but didn’t complete his degree.  When Passer was about 30, he collaborated with Milos Forman on the writing of two landmark political comedies The Firemen’s Ball (1967) and The Loves of a Blonde (1965), both also directed by Forman.  Passer also directed his first feature film, Intimate Lighting (1965).  The movie is very subtle and sophisticated romantic comedy that some writers believe to be Passer’s masterpiece.  

Passer and Forman’s work in Czechoslovakia forms the keystone of the Czech New Wave movement.  In the early 1960's, the political climate in the country relaxed, the censors were less vigilant, and the Soviet bosses of the Communist country were willing to tolerate films that eschewed the Socialist Realism that had prevailed during the Stalin era.  Stalin’s death was seen as license for filmmakers in the Bloc countries to experiment and push the limits with respect to social criticism.  Key films in the Czech New Wave are Daisies (1966) Vera Chytilova’s feminist and surrealist picture (it’s superb and still packs a considerable punch), Closely Watched Trains (1968) directed by Jiri Menzel (which won an Academy Award) and Jeres’ Valerie and her Week of Wonders (1970).  Jan Svankmeyer’s grotesque and brilliant animated films were also central to the movement.  

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Around 1970, PBS presented a series of foreign films introduced by Kenneth Turan, the movie critic for the Los Angeles Times.  When I was about ten, I began reading film reviews in various magazines to which my parent’s subscribed.  For Christmas, I asked my parents to buy me some books on film history.  I faithfully read Pauline Kael’s criticism in The New Yorker and carefully perused reviews as to movies that I was too young to attend.  As a result of this study, I was thrilled when PBS aired classic films selected by Turan and introduced by him.  My readers must recall that before the advent of video and DVD (and, of course, before streaming) almost all movies from the past were unavailable to people interested in the cinema.  It is hard to imagine but I grew up in a world in which you couldn’t see a movie like The Rules of Game or The Seven Samurai without waiting for the picture to be screened for only a few days at one of the two repertoire movie houses in the Twin Cities, usually as part of a so-called Janus Fim Festival (for some reason, to this day, Janus owns the distribution rights to most classic foreign films.)  Foreign pictures weren’t shown on TV except in a hideously disfigured format, late at night, with commercials interrupting about every eight minutes and the characters speaking in metallic and ghastly dubbed voices.  This was also before the era of wide-spread film preservation and restoration – the circulating 16 mm. prints of films like Renoir’s The Rules of the Game or Kurosawa’s Rashomon were scarred, mutilated, and virtually illegible – the faint white subtitles simply melted into the black-and-white images and couldn’t be read; sound was like something heard over a bad telephone connection.  Therefore, I was thrilled to have the chance to see some monuments of foreign film in good prints broadcast on PBS weekly – it was in this series that I saw Rashomon, Tokyo Story, the Seventh Seal and The Grand Illusion.

I wasn’t particularly enthused about Turan’s selection of Intimate Lighting by Ivan Passer as part of the TV series.  I didn’t know anything about the Czech New Wave and wasn’t interested in it.  (I believe Turan likely presented the movie in solidarity with the Czech filmmakers, then, under attack by the Soviets and their tanks.)  Nonetheless, I dutifully watched Intimate Lighting and, by the end of the film, had tears streaming down my cheeks.  I had never seen a movie so beautiful and poignant.  Great things were expected from Ivan Passer in 1970.

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In 1968, the Soviets sent tanks to crush a nascent rebellion in Prague, the so-called Prague Spring under President Alexander Dubcek.  Students were demonstrating for freedom in Wenceslas Square.  One of them, Jan Palach, lit himself on fire and burned to death as a protest against the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia’s affairs.  Tanks from Warsaw Pact countries (Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary) together with armored vehicles and troops from the Soviet Union, rolled into Prague.  (East Germany was chomping at the bit to join the invasion but the Soviet leader, Brezhnev, thought that the presence of German troops in Prague might induce a bit of unpleasant deja vu among the Czechs).  There was fighting in the streets, tanks set on fire, and gun battles.  If you go to Prague today, tour guides will proudly show you facades in Wenceslas Square pockmarked and cratered with bullet holes.  The Czech Spring was duly crushed and repressive political measures implemented.  Subversive and bawdy satirical comedies like The Firemen’s Ball were a thing of the past.

In March of 2006, Vladimir Putin visited Prague and apologized for the Warsaw Pact incursion.  “There is no legal responsibility,” Putin said.  “But we Russians bear moral responsibility for what happened.

***

In 1969, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ivan Passer and Milos Forman defected to the West.  Forman had a contract to direct an American film about hippies and the counterculture.  He obtained a visa to travel to Hollywood and, further, helped his friend, Passer, also negotiate a visa to leave Czechoslovakia to travel to California.  At first, Passer and Forman moved to Greenwich Village in New York City where they had a good time entertaining hippie girls, smoking dope, and “researching” their movie on the counterculture.  The resulting film Taking Off, directed by Forman was controversial but moderately successful.  Forman, then, made a film version of Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 anti-war book Johnny Got his Gun, also a success d’estime but too grim for audiences.  The movie involves a World War I veteran with no limbs and his face blown off pleading with his caregivers (by banging his head on a pillow in Morse Code) for death.  Forman won two Academy Awards for Best Picture – One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and, later, Amadeus (1984).  Forman was highly successful in Hollywood and made several other notable movies The People v. Larry Flynt (with Woody Harrelson) and The Man in the Moon starring Jim Carrey as the comedian, Andy Kaufman.  Forman returned to the Czech Republic in 1993, but maintained residency in Los Angeles up to his death in 2018 (in Danbury, Connecticut). 

Ivan Passer was less successful but still made several well-known movies in Hollywood.  Unfortunately, he was vexed by bad luck.  In the movie industry, as elsewhere, luck plays an important role.  Forman had good luck; Passer had bad luck – that‘s all there is to say.  Born to Win (1971) was Passer’s first American film, a well-regarded study of heroin addiction that the director had researched during his months in Greenwich Village with Forman.  Born to Win had a good cast including George Segal and Karen Black, but though the film received some good notices, it was thought to be erratic and “hit and miss.”  Passer, then, directed a couple of forgotten crime films said to be “comedy-dramas” in the mid seventies.  The mere fact that these films were characterized as “comedy-dramas” points to the fact that Passer’s subtle humanism made the movies hard to market – they didn’t fit it any particular genre known to American audiences.  In 1978, Passer directed Silver Bears in Great Britain – he hadn’t been sufficiently bankable to get backing for his films in Hollywood.  Silver Bears starred Michael Caine and Cybil Shepherd and, in fact, is a very good movie.  Unfortunately, the same weekend the movie was released in Los Angeles, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind hit the screens.  Competition with the Spielberg blockbuster, in effect, killed Silver Bears.  Nonetheless, the film’s craft was admired and Passer was able to make Cutter and Bone (Cutter’s Way) in 1981.  Despite excellent reviews, no one went to see the film.  Passer got a couple more chances.  In 1988, he directed Haunted Summer, a period piece about Lord Byron, Polidor with Percy and Mary Shelley in Switzerland – the film is about events leading to Mary Shelley’s writing of her novel Frankenstein.  Again, Passer’s bad luck struck: the same season Ken Russell had directed a much more  lurid narrative of the gathering in Switzerland called Gothic.  Gothic was marketed under a poster showing a Fuseli demon squatting on the chest of a naked woman.  Haunted Summer was considered weak tea next to Gothic and no one saw Passer’s version of the story.  Passer became a professor of film at UCLA and had a distinguished teaching career.  In 2005, he traveled to Kazakhstan at the invitation of the president of that country to direct Nomad: the Warrior.  The movie was the most expensive film ever made in Kazakhstan (costing 34 million USD) and it is terrible.  Passer died in Reno, Nevada in 2020 – he was 86.  

The other night, I was watching David Mamet’s first film House of Games (1988) on a streaming service.  If possible, I always remain on-line for the closing credits.  The assistant director of House of Games is Ivan Passer, Jr., Passer’s son by his first wife.    

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In what way is Cutter’s Way, a Czech film?

Here are features of the Czech New Wave cinema that I find represented in Cutter’s Way: the film expresses a strong and insurgent contempt for authority which is highly characteristic of the Czechs.  People in power are portrayed as brutal, oppressive, and corrupt.  The film is highly sensual and intimate – Czech films often feature bawdy sex scenes between characters who look like real people.  The primacy of desire as a motive for human action is another characteristic of the film which the picture shares with sexually explicit Czech New Wave movies.  In this respect, we should think of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel (and later movie directed by Philip Kauffman) that chronicles the affairs of a Czech Don Juan, an inveterate womanizer and seducer.  Czech films are highly cynical; the Czechs in general are skeptical of the motives of those who seek to reform or improve the world: “the world lacks heroes,” someone says in the film. Finally, Cutter’s Way addresses a fundamental concern in Czech films: to what extent are we responsible to remedying injustices that we see around us?  Cutter, of course, as a result of his Vietnam experiences is a grievance collector and irrationally vehement about imposing his sense of justice on the world.  By contrast, Richard Bone is irresponsible: it is said by the women with which he is involved that he “always walks away.”  In large part, Cutter’s Way is a study of two types of characters: one of them, Cutter, is obsessively fixated on rectifying injustice and exploitation: in the crime committed by the oligarch, Cord, Cutter sees a paradigm for hundreds of years of violent exploitation – the genocide of California’s Mission Indians, for instance, and the massacre of civilians in Vietnam are all part of a pattern of oppression that Cutter plots to expose in his misbegotten crusade against Comb.  By contrast, Bone would rather get laid.  He repeatedly counsels Cutter to walk away from his conspiracy theory promoted against Comb.    

***

My roommate in college, Dan Thomas, sometimes told me about Santa Barbara.  The place was a kind of paradise, he said.  He had discovered this when visiting his older brother who was a surgeon in Santa Barbara.  Apparently, there were beaches along the coast and great green mountains dipping their feet in the Pacific and a climate of perpetual Spring.  I first drove through Santa Barbara about 1991.  At that time, I had retained an expert witness whose offices were in Santa Maria on the central coast, about a third of the way to San Francisco.  (Santa Maria is 158 miles from LA on Highway 101.)  My client authorized me to travel to Santa Maria to interview the expert so that I could evaluate him for testimony in a case pending at that time in Aspen, Colorado.  I flew to LAX and, because of the time difference, arrived only a little after I had left by the clock, around mid-morning.  I rented a car at the airport and drove through the traffic in LA through the Ventura valley and, then, north into the coastal mountains.  For a dozen miles or so, the highway skirted the coast, occupying a shelf blasted into the mountain bluffs looming over the sea.  A dozen miles away, perched above the toppling tumult of the waves, I could see big oil rigs hovering above the water.  The oil rigs were stilts and seemed to be small factories poised over the sea.  101 curves uphill to angle through Santa Barbara.  The highway ran in a groove lined with orangish bricks and eucalyptus trees clustered around the exits so that the air was heavily perfumed with their scent.  I reached Santa Maria about an hour later.  The town was a cheerless collection of warehouses, treeless expanses of tract housing where agricultural workers lived and big switching yards where railroad lines were knit together behind cyclone fencing in an industrial park.  I met the expert the next day at his offices.  He worked out of an old recording studio where there was a fountain (disabled) in the middle of a vaguely Moorish courtyard.  Flowering trees like red and yellow torches stood among the benches and concrete paths in the courtyard.  The meeting was productive and I enjoyed talking to the expert, an older man about 65 years old.  He told me that many famous rock and roll albums had been recorded in what was now his office suite.  

“They wanted to come up here to be away from distractions in Los Angeles,” he told me.  “They got better work done up here without all the interruptions of groupies and so on.”

I stayed at a historic motel once patronized by movie people like Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson.  The conference rooms in the motel were named after old Hollywood stars.  The next morning, I drove back through the mountains and down the coast to LAX.  My flight was booked for the following day and I wanted to avoid the heavy traffic around rush hour in LA so I decided to loiter for a couple hours in Santa Barbara.  I came into the town, smelled the heavy medicinal scent of the eucalyptus and, then, exited, driving down to the marina in the town’s small harbor.  

The marina was crowded with sailboats and cruising vessels, white hulls with their wings neatly folded away.  Wooden and plastic walkways extended out over the calm waters and the boats bobbed very slightly, bumping up against their moorings and straining at their tethers so that the whole harbor seemed to flex and shudder.  The sea was flat and blue, an abstract plane that extended out to the turrets and cranes of the oil rigs lined up one after another against the horizon.  Music was playing somewhere and a few workers were scrubbing the decks of some of the bigger yachts.  The day was mild.  I had seen on TV that there was a blizzard in Minnesota but here the weather seemed unchanging, sun in cloudless skies, the shiny bright leaves of the eucalyptus and flowers as big as dinner plates in the green arbors.

I found a bar with a restaurant jutting out over the water and sat on the cantilevered deck in the sun. It was cool for the people hereabouts and they wore caps and sweaters.  But I felt gloriously warm.  I ordered a sandwich with fries and had a couple bourbon and waters.  A breeze skittered in from the sea and the boats rocked gently as if each were occupying a kind of cradle and the air smelled of water and seaweed and salt.  I could have stayed there, sipping my drinks, forever.  But around 4:00, I went back to my car, a little tipsy I’m afraid to say, and drove back to Los Angeles.  I stayed at an anonymous hotel on the strip of highway leading into the airport.  Planes slipped by overhead, flashing their landing lights, and I walked a block to a club with “exotic dancers” where I sat for an hour.  It seemed pointless and so I returned to the hotel and flew out the next morning.  

The case in Colorado was advancing toward the phase of expert disclosures and, so, I packed up copies of the depositions for the expert to review and flew back to LA.  Again I rented a car and drove up to Santa Maria.  The expert and I worked all afternoon in his recording studio suite.  I outlined what I thought to be the most significant testimony in the case, a substantial fire loss at a condominium project up in the Colorado mountains. The expert said that he would be pleased to take me out to dinner and, so, I met him around 5:30.  He had a big Lincoln Continental and I rode in the car along some hot-looking country roads, arid land with patches of vivid green where fruits and vegetables were being grown.  We came to a beach on the sea where some kids were surfing.  Above the beach, there was a restaurant flying nautical pennants with its glassy facade poking out over water that swirled and churned under slimy-looking wooden pylons.  We sat on the deck and had a couple drinks.  I think I ordered something like swordfish served with a sweet pineapple salsa.  

From the deck, we could see the sun setting at the end of a long corridor of reflections marching out to the red horizon.  The air darkened.  On the nearby hillsides, dozens of expensive houses winked down at us, big structures suspended in air on steel pillars.

“It’s so beautiful,” I said to the expert.

“Too many people,” the expert told me.  “But, before the crowds came, this was just about the most beautiful real estate on earth.”  

I agreed with him.  

The next morning I drove back to LAX and took an early evening flight back to Minneapolis.  I didn’t have time to loiter in Los Angeles.

A week later, the expert’s grown son called me to say that his father had died of a massive and unexpected heart attack.  I expressed my condolences and said that he should send me a closing bill.  The expert’s son apologized and said that, in light of the inconvenience, he wouldn’t bill me for that last conference.  

Et in Arcadio ego.

***

Santa Barbara was built at the site of a large Chumash Indian village.  About 600 Chumash lived in the village, supporting themselves post-contact by selling otter skins to Russian and American fur traders.  The Chumash were impressed into labor at the Mission built near their village and, more or less, eliminated, mostly due to disease.  (A big mound in the center of waterfront is thought to mark the location of the defunct village – this is Burton Mound, a three-story heap of shell-fish shells).  The Presidio of Santa Barbara was built in 1782 and, then, knocked down every couple of generations by earthquakes.  The religious compound and church at Santa Barbara is called “the Queen of the Missions.”  There were about 78,000 people in Santa Barbara when Cutter’s Way was shot.  The movie’s exteriors were filmed in the city.  Many Hollywood celebrities maintained houses in the town,  and the surrounding Santa Inez mountains, notably Robert Mitchum, and the seafront faces south due to a bend in the coast and, therefore, is remarkably temperate, the so-called “Riviera” of California.  There are oil fields around the town and buried under the sea-coast.  The only hostile encounter between the Japanese and Americans occurred in Santa Barbara when a Japanese submarine surfaced in the harbor and lobbed some shells into a petroleum processing facility on the outskirts of town – this was on February 23, 1942. The fire from the Japanese ship was inaccurate and did no damage except knocking down a catwalk in the installation – damages were said to be $500.   

Santa Barbara’s most notable festival is the annual Fiesta celebrated in August.  The Fiesta was originally called “Old Spanish Days” and instituted in 1920.  The concept of “Old Spanish Days” was to host a series of parades for tourists in competition with the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.  “Old Spanish Days” features “flower girls” who march in the parade with bouquets – they are 13 and younger.  Older girls appear on floats and march as the “Senoritas”.  The Fiesta is organized by The Sons of the Golden West and the Daughters of the Golden West, an organization of Civic Boosters.  Girls and boys who participate in the Fiesta parades are eligible upon turning 16 to join respectively the Daughters and Sons of the Golden West.   

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Cutter maintains that Santa Barbara is built on the site of a great crime, the slaughter of the local Indians who were destroyed like the Vietnamese peasants caught in the crossfire in the war in which he fought.  The film is a neo-noir, designed on the model of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.  A seemingly random sex crime, one of Las Senoritas sodomized and, then, thrown away like garbage in an alley dumpster, upon investigation discloses corruption at the very highest levels of Santa Barbara society.  A theme in the movie is that both Cutter and Cord, the murderer, are veterans and seemingly have been deranged by their involvement in warfare.  The oil fields at sea and on the land are an important element of the local economy – in fact, Cord has made his fortune from exploiting oil in the area, a controversial line of work since the oil pipelines are periodically ruptured by earthquakes with petrochemicals spilling into the otherwise pristine sea.  All great fortunes, it is alleged, are built on great crimes and Cord seems to exemplify this idea.  

***

Nina Baroness van Pallandt is featured in the first scene in the film at the La Encantada, the supper club and motel where an oilman’s convention is underway while Bone is engaged in a tryst with an upper echelon lady.  (Bone is hoping to persuade her to nag her husband into buying a yacht at the Marina where he works – the Marina, as it happens, is an enterprise owned by Cord and he is thought to have acquired the place by murdering its former owner, Georgie’s father.)  Nina van Pallandt occupies an important niche in my Memory Palace of the 1970's – for me, she exemplifies the decadence of that era and, in fact, seems to have embodied that quality in the movies she made in that decade and thereafter.  In Cutter’s Way, Baroness van Pallandt implies that the great ladies ‘ man, Bone, is a dud in bed.  

Van Pallandt was born in 1932 in Copenhagen.  She was married to a Danish nobleman Frederik van Pallandt, a man hardwired into the surviving remnants of the northern European aristocracy.  With her husband, Nina was part of a singing duo, Nina and Frederik, and, in fact, added to her husband’s fortune by performing in a series of songs that were hits in Europe – Nina and Frederik were folk singers who, curiously enough, specialized in calypso-tinged tunes.  The two divorced in 1976 and Nina was then associated for a time with the Eurotrash jet set, partying with the Rolling Stones and other celebrities.  (Baron Frederick van Pallandt was gunned down in 1994 with his Filipina girlfriend while smuggling cannabis in the South Seas.)  She appeared on American TV and was a sort of muse for Robert Altman: she is indelible as the unfaithful wife to Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye; she also appears in Altman’s A Wedding as well as in Quintet.  She also plays the role of Claire Dejavue in Altman’s little known O.C. and Stiggs, a move completed in 1983 but never really released – the production was vexed by Altman maintaining an open bar in the hotel where his cast and crew stayed, located conveniently close to a dog track that the director patronized.  By this point, Altman had progressed from weed to cocaine and everyone appears to have been high during the entirety of the production.  (The role that van Pallandt plays in Cutter’s Way is similar in some ways to her rather forlorn part in The Long Goodbye.)   She was also excellent as the manipulative Swedish madam who pimps out Richard Gere in American Gigolo.  

In the Seventies, van Pallandt was famously the girlfriend of Clifford Irving and played an important part in exposing that writer’s fictional “autobiography” of Howard Hughes.  (Irving claimed that he had met Hughes in South America and interviewed him at length for an autobiography, none of which was true.)  The relationship ended when Irving went to prison for 17 months for criminal fraud – he had to return his $765,000 advance received for the book.  (The story is central to Orson Welles great “documentary” F is for Fake, released in 1973).  Van Pallandt had starred in Danish sit-coms and she was a staple in the seventies and eighties on TV detective and crime shows made in Hollywood.  She married a South African playwright and aviator Robert Kirby.  Kirby was a notable satirist.  Even van Pallandt’s fans don’t know when she married Kirby or how long they were together.  Kirby told the Guardian that she “kidnapped (him), took (him) to an island where he was a captive for one year.”  

Baroness van Pallandt is still alive – “she is living yet unless she has died,” a formula with which the Grimm Brothers often ended their Maerchen.  She is 93.  

*** 

Ivan Passer’s direction of Cutter’s Way is exemplary for its clarity and lucid diachronic presentation of the story.  The action can plotted against a time line encompassing several days and nights during the Old Spanish Days fiesta in Santa Barbara.  Parts of the film are stylized – for instance, downtown LA seems to be eerily empty as is the case with the amusement pier in Santa Monica.  The entire movie is shot in a kind of golden haze that forms an aureola around the locations in Santa Monica.  The movie encompasses events that occur across four days beginning at El Encantado and ending at Cord’s estate.  The viewer always understands exactly what is going on and where the characters are located.  

***

Cutter’s Way is bracketed by scenes featuring men on horseback.  In the early part of the movie, we see J. J. Cord, ramrod erect and proud, on his white horse.  He looks like a 15th century robber baron, an Italian condottieri.  By contrast with the proudly military bearing of Cord, we encounter Cutter as crippled, unable to walk except with an exaggerated limp that is painful to see.  Cutter’s mutilated figura is the opposite of Cord’s aggressive appearance on the beautiful white horse.  But, at the end of the film, the mangled Cutter seizes Cord’s white horse and rides like a knight through the cocktail party at Cord’s estate.  Cutter is liberated from his disabilities and embodies chivalry, the warrior on horseback, in the film’s final scenes.  As in a Peckinpah movie, Cutter hurls himself through a window (never mind the question of how he knows where to point the horse) to confront Cord.  Vengeance (for the cheerleader and Cutter’s “wifey”) belongs to Cutter and, so, Bone holds his hand, lifting the gun he is clutching to point it at the millionaire.     

  

Father Mother Sister Brother

 Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother (2026) is a slight film, a wisp of a thing that is both abstract and feather-light.  There's not much to the movie and the acting, as well as mise en scene are very restrained.  The movie has a nonchalant profundity and I recommend it.  The picture is an omnibus of three narratives (or anti-narratives) in which very little overt happens.  But the stories are tied together in an ingenious way and cumulatively they make an important point:  children are mysteries to their parents and, similarly, parents are enigmas to their children.  We can never really know our father or mother and, in fact, of all human relationships the bond between parents and their children is the most awkward because deeply fraught with emotions that once existed but are now dormant because unnecessary.  Parents love their children when they are small and know everything about them.  But when the children are emancipated, both sides of the relationship grow remote and the silence of incomprehension descends between them.  This silence is heavy and painful because it substitutes for a close and intimate relationship that was once necessary.  Grown children and their parents have little or nothing in common.

In "Father", the first episode, two apparently successful middle-aged siblings are traveling to a remote house in the forest where their father lives alone.  Since the father never really worked, the siblings muse about his entitlement to social security.  They wonder how he survives.  The sister (played by Mayim Bialik) is caustic and skeptical; the brother (Adam Driver) feels guilty about the old man's poverty and the fact that he has not visited for two years.  The father putters about his house, a nice lakeshore property in a deep snowy woods concealing his new furniture under ragged sheets and hiding his expensive appliances.  When the kids arrive, they are distressed by the old man's ruined-looking Chevy pickup and conclude that he is destitute.  The old man (Tom Waitts) has nothing to say to them.  They awkwardly sit in the house, gazing out at the view over the snowy lake and hills.  The son wants to see the new septic system and plumbing that he has financed but the father isn't willing to give him a tour.  They toast to their deceased mother and to "family relations".  The son presents a big box of treats and groceries to his father:  expensive bourbon, Trader Joe style Italian pasta and pickles, cookies and crackers and the like  When brother and sister depart, the son gives his father a wad of cash to "tide you over."  But there is an incongruity that the sister notices:  the old man is wearing a Rolex.  When she comments on it, the father says it is a "fugazi" that is, a fake.  After the couple leave, the father calls a girlfriend, tells her he has some extra cash, and asks her to make a reservation at an expensive restaurant.  Then, he departs, pulling a shroud off his brand-new car that was hidden around the back of the cottage.  

In "Mother", we see a handsome older woman lying on her couch in a very nice home talking to her therapist on the phone.  It's an emergency "phone session" probably intended to shore her up in light of the visit of her two daughters.  One daughter, with flamboyantly colored hair, is riding with her friend, another young woman -- there is an intimation that the women are lesbian lovers.  She wants to arrive in an Uber and, so, the friend lets her off a block from the house so she can claim that she hired a car to take her to the luncheon -- in fact, it's a sort of "high tea".  The other sister is coming by car but her vehicle fails.  She figures out that a wire is disconnected in the engine, reconnects it, and, then, drives to the tea with her mother.  The family members embrace but have nothing to say to one another.  The sister whose car failed says that she has been appointed to a prestigious Board (the Heritage Board) in Dublin.  (The story is set in Dublin.)  We learn that the mother is a romance novelist and, apparently, very successful.  The other daughter with the brightly colored hair tells her mother that she is extremely successful and has made a lot of money.  She shows the mother her designer purse but, then, admits that it's a fake.  The sister with the colored hair calls for an Uber but has to use her mother's app (since she apparently doesn't have any money to pay for the ride).  The three stand silently in the doorway waiting for the Uber to arrive.  During the tea service, the three make a toast with tea to their being reunited on this occasion.

"Sister Brother" involves two handsome siblings who meet in Paris where their parents lived to clean out the family apartment.  (The parents have been killed in an airplane crash in the Azores.)  In fact, the brother, who is micro-dosing on "shrooms", has already cleaned out the rooms and had the furniture and personal effects transported to a storage unit.  There is a close bond between brother and sister and they reminisce about old times.  The brother takes the sister to the apartment which is eerily empty and they sit on the floor looking at old photographs from their childhood and pictures of their parents, a very handsome interracial couple.  The brother is wearing a Rolex watch that he found in his father's effects and they wonder whether the watch is real or fake.  Their parents apparently kept many of their school drawings and pictures and reports. A landlady appears and scolds them for remaining in the apartment.  The brother and sister, then, go to the storage unit packed with old lamps and settees and many, many boxes.  They agree that they never really knew anything about their parents.  The brother makes the comment that some of the boxes now in storage were effects owned by their grandparents which their own parents never bothered to open.  This suggests that the pattern of  mutual incomprehension between parent and child is multi-generational.

Jarmusch imposes a formal order on these materials which, in fact, comprises a single story repeated in three variations.  This story is universal, with examples cited in the United States (rural New Jersey), Dublin, and Paris -- the universal story is that parents and their children are mysteries to one another and that there is a wall of incomprehension between them.  Jarmusch's style is "parametric" to use David Bordwell's term -- the story is subject to "parameters" in the way that it is presented.  In each narrative, we will encounter three young men on skateboards, filmed in slow motion.  (The skateboarding motif is an example of the incomprehensibility of behavior by young people to those older to them.)  Each story will involve a toast or toasts accomplished through a non-alcoholic drink and the question:  can you toast with (tea, coffee, or water)?  Each story will feature diagrammatic vertical shots showing tables with cups and other things on them -- for instance, vertical shots emphasizing the elaborate tea service that is presented by the Mother.  Each story will involve a road trip complete with the amplified sound of turn signals.  In addition, someone will say "Bob's your uncle" or "Robert's your uncle" in each narrative.  In each story, we will be presented with a luxury item that may, or may not, be a "fugazi" -- the rolex watches and the designer handbag.  The continuity of these incidental motifs in all three stories presents the viewer with the sense that the kind of muted conflict that exists in this situation -- parents and children having nothing to say to one another --  assures us that the situation is not particular but universal, even, perhaps, a Platonic essence of how parents and grown children interact.  Jarmusch has done this sort of thing before:  consider his Night on Earth with interlocked stories involving cab rides in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki, and  his omnibus film about Elvis and Memphis, Ghost Train,, also a series of stories that are formally separate but, nonetheless, connected by motifs and occult repetitions of events and incidental details.  

Apache Drums

 The Museum of Modern Art in New York is presenting a retrospective of Westerns produced by Universal Studios in June and July of this year (2026).  Among the offerings is Apache Drums released in 1951 and directed by Hugo Fregonese.  The picture was produced by Val Lewton, the auteur responsible for films that have attracted a cult status, B movies made on low budgets during World War II -- these pictures include Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People, Isle of the Dead (with Boris Karloff), I walked with a Zombie, and the wildly morbid and disturbing The Seventh Victim said to have influenced Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby.  Although these films are all directed, at least nominally, by other people, the highly literate and intelligent Val Lewton's stamp is apparent in all of the pictures.  Apache Drums is Lewton's only Western, produced for Universal, about nine or ten years after the cycle of horror pictures in the early forties for which he is now famous.  The movie is made on a micro-budget and, therefore, has to suggest its effects as opposed to putting lurid images on screen.  The characters are quirky subverting the types that they are playing.  Lewton's low-buck movies always feature wonderful photography and the technicolor imagery in Apache Drums is very effective, particularly in the final sequence involving an Indian siege of townspeople sheltering in an old adobe church.  As is the case with all of the films associated with Lewton, the picture is intensely atmospheric and replete with small, but telling, details.  The movie is marred mostly by its poor players -- the principals in the film are C-grade or worse Universal contract players and they are wholly lacking in any charisma.  Even if you are familiar with classic Hollywood pictures from forties and fifties, you won't recognize anyone in this movie.  Furthermore, at times, the constraints of the very low budget are sometimes visible in the mise-en-scene which is allusive and elliptical so as to avoid putting anything on-screen that would cost too much money.  This can result in spectacular effects -- for instance, the use of color to suggest violence and chaos in the climactic siege scene in which many shots are bathed in an infernal red glow.  But, in other instances, this way of filming seems overtly threadbare.  The movie is distinctly inferior to Lewton's great works a decade earlier but it is serviceable -- not great by any means, but reasonably entertaining and cleverly designed.  Lewton's films were typically shot in two weeks -- some of them were made on a ten day schedule -- and, so, a lot of what you see is covering for deficiencies in the production.  

The archetypes are thick on the ground in Apache Drums.  A tiny hamlet plopped into the middle of bone-white, waterless desert is becoming civilized.  The sheriff and mayor is a burly stiff, the town's blacksmith whom we see with hammer and anvil.  The sheriff with the ladies in the village reckons that he will clean up the town.  He expels the village's charismatic professional gambling man, an ambiguous character named Sam Leed but called "Sam Slick", by the townsfolk.  Sam isn't happy about his ouster, particularly since he's in love with virtuous local "school-marm" -- although this character doesn't teach school but instead works as a waitress at the town's boarding house and restaurant; she is, however, always clad in white or light pastel colors exemplifying her virtue and is the prudish, responsible "school-marm type."  Sam proposes to the girl and asks her to accompany him on his life of vice.  She rejects him. She's also been keeping company with the blacksmith who would be a better husband, but lacks the "bad boy appeal" of the mustachioed gambler.  The blacksmith with a committee of town elders, including a rabid preacher-man, confront the village's "Jezebels", a company of about six gorgeous prostitutes who have somehow been marooned in this jerkwater, desert hamlet.  (It seems that about half the women in this town of about 18 people are whores.)  The villagers buy-out the prostitutes and they gladly depart the barren and impoverished hamlet -- it's called Spanish Boot.  As a background to these transactions, all efficiently displayed in the film's first 8 or nine minutes, the Mescalero Apaches led by the war-chief Victorio are on a rampage -- they have crossed the Mexican border into Arizona territory and are hellbent on killing the White settlers.  (The Apaches are depicted as colorful demons in the movie, but a couple of titles at the outset establishes in obligatory fashion that they have been oppressed and are starving; therefore, their cause is just although their methods questionable).  Of course, the prostitutes end up strewn all over the desert likewilting floral corsages in their impressive Victorian dresses and corsets and the Apaches knock over their little surrey with its fringe on top.  The gambler, on his way out of town, finds the dead whores, as well as the town's one Black man named Jehu; he's been scalped alive and is still conscious when Sam finds him fallen up against a wagon-wheel.  In typical Lewton fashion, the film understands that what we don't see is more alarming than what is actually depicted on-screen.  Jehu is wearing a beaver top hat and he warns Sam not to remove the cap since the Indians "have taken my hair."  Jehu dies and Sam hightails it back to town to warn the good folks of Spanish Boot -- but, of course, his motive is to humiliate the blacksmith sheriff who exiled him and win the girl.  As he returns to Spanish Boot with about 60 Apaches hot on his trail, Sam encounters a column of cavalry pointlessly patrolling the bleak desert -- they are looking for the Apaches and intervene to save Sam from their raiding party.  Back at Spanish Boot, a young buck is dispatched to the Fort to summon help.  The Apaches kill him and dump his corpse in the town's only well, poisoning the water.  (All of this is effectively suggested but not shown -- the action is all off-screen.)  The townspeople send a wagon out to a nearby river to get some water in barrels.  The Apaches attack and there's a perfunctory battle.  The fanatical Welsh preacherman turns out to be handy with a pistol and with Sam hunkered down in a dry buffalo wallow, the two men hold off the Indians.  The climax of the movie is the siege, a startling sequence that has a running time of about a quarter of the movie -- I think the picture is about ninety minutes long.  The townspeople take refuge in an old Spanish church and bar the door.  It's nighttime and the Apaches attack  through windows located about 10 feet off the floor, little openings through which the colorfully dressed savages hurl themselves to assault the besieged townspeople.  The Indians call for a short truce and ask that a doctor be sent out to treat the war chief Victorio who has been badly wounded.  The brave blacksmith volunteers for this duty and pretends to be a medic.  Apparently, he's not too effective in this ruse because an Apache runs him through with a lance and he dies on the floor of the church thereby eliminating the romantic triangle.  The Indians, then, set the shacks in the town on fire and redouble their assault, leaping acrobatically through the high clerestory windows only to be gunned down as they plunge down into the church.  The Apaches, then, light the church's door on fire.  The defenders stack pews and hymnals in burning doorway to create a threshold of fire over which the Indians can't advance.  The end is near.  The preacherman tells the women and children to prepare for death.  Then, at the last minute, the cavalry arrives and, within 90 seconds, the movie is over.  

The film is notable for the siege sequence which is flamboyant, even, operatic and has been cited as an influence on John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 which involves a similar siege of police in their precinct stationhouse.  (Assault on Precinct 13, however, is modeled on Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.)  Apache Drums uses an interesting technique that I haven't noticed often in films, a horror movie trope that aligns the picture with Lewton's earlier work in this genre.  In an early scene, the camera shows us a plume of dust rising over the desert -- the Apaches are approaching but none of the characters in the shot seem to notice the conspicuous evidence of their attack.  Similarly, at the film's climax, the Indians set the wooden door to the church afire -- the camera shows us the flames penetrating the door but the defenders don't react immediately:  the audience sees the threat many seconds before it is noticed by the characters.  Finally, at the climax, the budget has reached its limit and the rescue of the besieged townspeople by the Cavalry all occurs offscreen.  Once again, the cavalry's presence is announced by bugle calls signaling a charge -- something we hear long before the imperiled characters learn that they have been saved.  There's a mythic element to the movie:  Just as the townsfolk take action to eliminate lawlessness in their community, there is the "return of the repressed" in the form of the gaudy and vengeful marauders.   

Marty Supreme

 The "Marty" in Josh Safdie's 2025 Marty Supreme is self-evidently Marty Scorsese, a director whose fingerprints and influence are visible in every frame of this picture.  Simply put, Marty Supreme is the Raging Bull of ping-pong or table tennis movies.  This is a little hard to comprehend and, I admit, I wasn't enthused about seeing this picture since it is ostensibly about ping-pong, a mild activity that people play in their basements for genteel amusement.  In fact, Marty Supreme is a raw, bare-knuckled narrative about gangsters and poverty -- the film is shockingly violent and seems to have been made in a kind of feverish frenzy.  

Set in 1952, the film explores the ethnic slums of Manhattan's Lower East Side, a kind of ghetto full of aggressive, hustling Jews whose businesses are tribal -- the workers in these little airless shops are all relatives, uncles and in-laws.  Marty Mauser (Timothee Chalamet ) is selling shoes and banging his married girlfriend back in the inventory stacks.  She gets pregnant and Mauser decamps to London where he is enrolled, as it were, in an international tennis tournament.  The contrast between the genteel, aristocratic sportsmanship and noblesse oblige of the tournaments and the hard-edged Yiddish milieu of the Lowe East Side where everyone is always yelling obscenities at everyone else is central and thematic to the film.  Marty almost wins the tournament but is defeated by a deaf Japanese player Endo (he lost hs hearing in the great Tokyo Air Raid) whose use of spin overpowers Marty's brute power approach to the sport.  When Marty loses, he pitches a fit and throws a waste paper basket, earning him a 1500 dollar fine from the tournament sponsors and the international association.  This fine will be the central catalyst for the action in the last two-thirds of the movie.  Marty is brash and self-confident although he's only 23.  He seduces a much older Hollywood actress, now unhappily retired, just to show that no woman can successfully resist his charms and blandishments.  The older actress played by Gwyneth Paltrow is married to a successful businessman who makes pens and Marty courts him, as well, hoping he will sponsor his table tennis career.  In London, Marty also spends like a sailor and incurs huge debts, lodging in imperial-sized hotel rooms full of lavish art and furniture.  

Marty is desperate for another shot at defeating Endo and tries to raise money for a trip to Tokyo.  He gets into a bad scrape with a hideous gangster.  In a flophouse hotel, where Marty is hiding from his pregnant girlfriend and her cuckolded husband, Marty takes a bath.  The bathtub falls through the floor and crushes the gangster, almost cutting off his arm and injuring the thug's loyal dog.  The hoodlum tells Marty to take his dog to the vet.  Marty's girlfriend has been beaten by her husband and has a swollen face and black eye. (Marty later bludgeons the husband with one of his bronze table-tennis trophies.)  They go to the house of a friend, a fat business associate who is helping Marty to hawk "Marty Supreme" orange-colored ping pong balls.  There's a big fight there and Marty appropriates his uncle's car (the fat guy is Marty's cousin) and with his girlfriend they go to a bowling alley in New Jersey where Marty sandbags the local table tennis champs and, by virtue of side bets, makes $1500 dollars to pay off the fine so he can enter the Tokyo tournament.  Marty still has the gangster's longsuffering pooch with him and has no intent in taking the dog to a vet.  The aggrieved table tennis gamblers from the bowling alley chase Marty in their pickup trucks and there's another big fight -- this results in a gas station being set on fire and exploding.  The gangster's dog runs away, darting through the smoke from the blast.  Marty has lost the money to the thugs who knock him around and take the cash.  So he goes back to Manhattan and decides to blackmail his movie-star girlfriend who is trying to make a comeback on Broadway courtesy of her husband's money financing a production of some sort of Tennessee Williams play featuring a young cock of a method actor modeled on Marlon Brando.  He has sex with the actress and steals her necklace that seems to be set with diamonds.  Unfortunately, it's just costume jewelry and worthless.  Marty then makes a Faustian bargain with the actress' husband.  If the husband will finance his trip to Tokyo, Marty agrees to play an exhibition game with his nemesis Endo and commits to throwing the game in Endo's favor so that the businessman can curry favor with the ping-pong mad Japanese public. (The businessman, Rockwell, plans to corner the Japanese pen market).  Marty's pregnant girlfriend tries to extort money from the gangster saying that she is holding his dog for ransom.  This is a bad idea and leads to the gangster stabbing some people.  The gangster, then, takes Marty and his girlfriend to Jersey where Marty says he can find the dog.  In fact, Marty knows the dog has been seized by a hillbilly farmer who is heavily armed himself and ready to defend his property.  The gangsters attack the hillbilly to get the dog and there's a shootout that leaves all the hoodlums dead as well as the farmer -- the dog flees again.  Marty has insulted the businessman (played with sinister aplomb by Kevin O'Leary of Shark Tank) and the pen merchant refuses to give him any funds.  Marty's actress girlfriend has been humiliated herself -- the reviews for her comeback performance are awful and we last see her weeping with her female friends in her big Manhattan townhouse.  (She has earlier given Marty a valuable necklace but when the two of them get caught having sex in Central Park, they are blackmailed by some corrupt cops and she has to buy her way out of the scandal by giving the police the diamond necklace.)  Marty finally has to plead with Rockwell to take him to Tokyo.  Again, Rockwell exacts a price in humiliation -- he makes Marty drop his trousers and spanks him on the bare butt with a ping-pong paddle.  This sets the stage for Marty to travel to Tokyo where he is supposed to lose the match with Endo.  And, of course, after the manner of all sports movies, there is a climactic table tennis duel for real stakes between Endo and Marty.

The movie is made with great craft, lots of whiplash camera movements and writhing violent tableaux.  The faces and figures of everyone in the movie are East Coast ethnic, dumpy, slovenly, people with huge hooked noses, and slatternly women -- it looks like the extras from Raging Bull, presumably all dead now, have been resurrected for this movie.  The film is a sort of raucous comedy and, in fact, features a specious redemption scene in which Marty weeps over his infant son -- in the frenzied and violent last half of the movie Marty's pregnant girlfriend gets shot and, then, delivers her baby after the gun battle over the dog.  Oddly enough, the movie's sound cues feature old Doo-wop and crooner tunes from fifties and 1980's pop songs -- it's an odd combination but it works well.

Marty Supreme is exhausting to watch, but it's wildly inventive and brilliantly acted and made.  There are some staggering visuals.  In one scene, Marty's obese cousin hurls a box of Marty Supreme orange ping pong balls out a window and we see hundreds of them bouncing on the street.  Another scene features a completely gratuitous but extremely moving flashback to a concentration camp.  A former Auschwitz survivor, now a washed-up table tennis professional, persuades Marty to travel with the Harlem Globetrotters giving exhibition matches at half-time.  (They play pingpong on a miniature table, with pots and pans, and, even, with a seal who uses his flippers to bat back the ball.)  The Auschwitz survivor in the flashback to the camp finds some honey when he is defusing shells in a woods.  He smears his body under his ragged camp uniform with honey and lets the starving men in his barracks lick the honey off his body.  It's a strangely powerful and sacramental image that has nothing to do with the film but which is intensely memorable.  

Pagliacci (Minnesota Opera - May 16, 2026)

 Pagliacci is an opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo, premiered in 1892.  The production by the Minnesota Opera company that I saw has been inherited from Britain's Glimmerglass Festival.  The show is an exploration of the blurring between reality and fiction that occurs on the stage of Comedia dell' Arte production performed by an itinerant troupe of traveling players.  Although characterized as the type of a verismo opera, that is "slice of life" realism, the show is designed to also exploit archaic theatrical effects and stylized forms of acting -- the effect is a melange of realistic elements combined with overtly theatrical and broad effects within the play within a play.  There are aspects of the work that bring to mind Luigi Pirandello's Six Actors in Search of an Author.

The first act is about fifty minutes and establishes the situation.  There is a brief framing prologue.  Tonio is recalling the tragedy that occurred on stage 40 years ago.  He's exploring a sort of warehouse full of wagons and props once used by the troupe of traveling players of which he was a member.  A lonesome train whistle hoots in the distance and the characters in the show appear as ghostly presences.  Tonio, played in this production by a large, heavy set Black man, dons a resplendent red jacket with brass buttons and, then, reminds the audience that the actors that we see on stage are flesh and blood people, just like those watching the show from their seats in the theater.  The opera's narrative commences with introducing the characters.  Canio is the jealous and violent husband of Nedda.  She is flirtatious and high-spirited, but also the mother of a strange, sad little boy whom we see near her.  (The child introduces performances by blowing on a horn.) Tonio desires Nedda and, in fact, tries to rape her.  The scene is graphic with the hulking Tonio pushing Nedda onto a barrel or sawhorse, pulling her legs apart and trying to press himself between her thighs.  She pulls a small gun from Tonio's pocket, brandishes it, and forces his retreat.  Tonio has been joking with Canio that he would like to spend time with his wife alone, taunting Canio into a frenzy of jealousy.  After Tonio has been vanquished, Nedda's actual lover, Silvio, appears, a dapper young man in a vanilla-colored coat.  The two pledge their love and Silvio plots with Nedda to extract her from her unhappy marriage to the cuckolded Canio.,  

During the much shorter second act, the itinerant performers put on a comedia dell'arte skit casting Nedda as the coquettish and unfaithful Columbine, Canio as Columbine's husband, and Harlequin played by Beppe, another member of the company, as Columbine's lover.  Canio becomes increasingly incensed when he observes Nedda (as Columbine) flirting with Beppe.  He loses his grip on reality and takes the action in the skit for further evidence of Nedda's infidelity.  In a fit of jealousy, he uses the gun Nedda took from Tonio to shoot her to death.  Silvio, Nedda's actual lover, rushes on-stage to provide assistance to the wounded Nedda.  This exposes him as Nedda's paramour and Canio guns him down also.  Tonio, in his resplendent red and gold jacket, stares at the scene of carnage and utters the opera's last line:  La commedia a finita! -- this famous line is usually spoken by Canio, but here is sung by Tonio, completing the loop with the opening scene set forty years later.  

The scenario is simple with archetypal elements.  We are presented with a frame story set in the warehouse full of abandoned properties, a sordid story of marital infidelity and a story within a story that presents a grotesque parody of the actual dilemma in the plot -- this is the comedia dell'arte show presented for the public by the traveling players.  The music is only rarely memorable and mostly just sighs and thunder from the orchestra to underline the action.  The set is very complex with the stage crowded with two circus-wagons (one of which serves as the stage), various props, bits of furniture and neon-lit letters each about three feet tall that spell, if properly assembled "comedia".  There is a large chorus, too many people to fit on the congested stage, and so the chorus often ranges through the audience in the aisles of the theater.  Ordinarily, the domestic violence in the show is accomplished with knives -- here, the show is staged as an example of gun-violence run amuck.  The acting in the play within the play, the comedia skit, is very broad and relies on pratfalls and colorful clown costumes.  The most notable feature of the opera is the tortured performance by the witness to the violence and the would be rapist, Tonio.  This element of the show seems designed to make the audience cringe -- Tonio as played by the jolly and obese African American, Reginald Smith Jr. has a minstrel show aspect, he grins mindlessly, connives, and rolls his eyes.  The rape scene caused people in the audience to gasp out loud -- this monstrous gorilla of a Black man menacing a petite White girl.  As I left the theater, I saw Smith on the street corner outside, his white shirt untucked, leering at the passers-by, and was a little alarmed by the strange spectacle -- it was as if the actor had also lost his moorings in reality.  

I think the show should end with someone in the confused audience clapping reluctantly at the carnage on stage and, then, the rest of the chorus joining in that acclamation.  After all, how can we be sure what is real and what is merely staged?  

Odds Against Tomorrow

 HarBel is the name of the production company founded by Harry Belafonte around 1959 to make the movie Odds Against Tomorrow, a pungent little heist picture.  Belafonte had become rich, flashing his million watt grin and singing calypso songs.  By 1959, after acting in Carmen Jones, Belafonte was hoping to broaden his range by becoming a movie star.  He hired Abraham Polonsky, the blacklisted director of 1948's Force of Evil, to write (under a pseudonym) Odd Against Tomorrow, based on a recent novel.  Robert Wise was engaged to direct the movie.  Wise is known today as a avuncular Hollywood liberal who edited Welles' Citizen Kane and directed The Sound of Music and West Side Story.  But as a young man, he made some notable noirs including a well-received picture starring the monstrous Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill and directed Robert Mitchum in Blood on the Moon as well as the iconic boxing picture The Set-Up.  Accordingly, he had all the credentials to make a serviceable crime picture and, in fact, Odds Against Tomorrow is successful and compelling in those terms.  A little less successful is the implied plea against racism embodied in the clash between a White bigot played by Robert Ryan with a snarl on his face and Harry Belafonte, performing against type, as a hair trigger Black man with his own form of bigotry.  This part of the picture seems a bit contrived, but, generally, works well enough so as not to be offensive.  The movie is bleak and grim, shot on locations that have the debauched appearance of rural and small town desuetude.  No one's tending the store in these ruinous places and the picture looks like a cross between Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront) and the ultra-tough film noir directed by Don Siegel and Anthony Mann.  Another obvious influence is John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle made nine years earlier.  

The premise of the film is that an ex-cop who has served time for contempt (apparently a refusal to rat out his equally corrupt colleagues) is recruiting a team for a heist at a bank in a backwater named Melton a hundred miles north of Manhattan in New York State.  The cop lives in a hotel in Harlem and, after some misadventures, he enlists Harry Belafonte playing the role of a Calypso singer with a jazz combo and Robert Ryan, a bitter veteran of World War II and an avowed racist.  In the opening scene, Ryan's character (Earle Slater) picks up little Black girl playing on the sidewalk at the cop's place and calls her a little "pickaninny" -- his racial discourse goes down from there.  Belafonte's character, Johnny Ingram, despises Earle and, of course, the feeling is mutual.  However, Ingram has to be Black because the scheme for the robbery involves busting into a Bank when a colored counter-man delivers, as he does every Thursday night, a meal to the workers doing overtime in the Bank -- they are counting money for deposit from corporate employers who are going to make payroll in cash on Friday.  The scheme developed by the cop (played by the enthusiastic and depraved Ed Begley) is implicitly racist.  It seems to rely on the notion that the White Bank officers won't be able to distinguish the lightly disguised Johnny Ingram from the actual Black counterman who delivers the meal each Thursday.  The African-American cafe worker is essentially an invisible man, known only by his color, and, therefore, thought to be fungible with Belafonte's character.  

Of course, the scheme goes awry, primarily because of the racial hatred between Earle and Johnny.  The two men, both armed, end up hunting one another through tank farm full of volatile fluids with predictable dire results.  The movie is mildly didactic.  A couple of nonchalant coppers looking at the charred remains of the two protagonists asks:  "Which is which?"  The other cop shrugs his shoulders:  "Who knows?"  The White man and his Black counterpart are indistinguishable in death.  The theme that racial hatred leads to mutually assured destruction in a towering fireball sparks some ill-advised (to my mind) allusions to the nuclear bomb and the arm's race.  There is a subtext of nuclear holocaust in the film that seems somewhat non sequitur -- a sop apparently to those who want to find a meaning in the picture but might reject the implication that racial animus is unwarranted; after all, the movie was made in 1959, before the March on Selma.  

The picture is full of interesting characters.  Earle is sleeping with a sad, somewhat bedraggled prostitute or call girl, played by the hapless Shelley Winters.  This poor actress was always playing women who were pretty but not that desirable -- she gets dumped in favor of Elizabeth Taylor in An American Tragedy; she gets rejected in favor of Sue Lyons, playing her own daughter in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita.  In this picture, Winters' character is desperately clinging to Earle who is brusque, brutish, and not that great of a catch.  Furthermore, in a puzzling little interlude in the middle of the film, Earle seduces (or gets seduced by) his downstairs neighbor, another desperate woman who speaks as if she's full of lithium, seems to be mentally ill, and who comes to see him in a house dress that  can be easily pulled open to display her lacy black brassiere -- if I'm not mistaken, this part is played by Gloria Graham who was, at the time, Nick Ray's wife and, apparently, having sex with his teenage son.  Johnny Ingram has a sexy barroom girlfriend and an ex-wife.  The ex-wife is an upright righteous woman who still loves the disreputable Johnny and seems willing to tumble for him if the opportunity is right.  When he comes to drop off his son whom he has taken to the park and zoo, she's hosting a meeting of the local PTA in her small apartment, consorting, Johnny later says, with the "ofays", a word I haven't heard for years.  Johnny,  who is no saint, accuses her of not being Black enough.  Johnny is in hock to a mean loan shark named Bacco; it's interesting that Bacco has a henchman who is obviously gay although in an insinuating sinister manner.  There's a stationwagon that's equipped with a super-duper high-powered engine.  This is something of a cheat because the stationwagon never is used as a get-away car.  

This is a good picture, notable mostly for the documentary style photography of New York City and the down-at-the-heels environs of Melton, New York.  Some of the camera work looks like Walker Evans.

I was born, but....

Released in 1932, Yasujiro Ozu's I was born but... is a silent film, ostensibly about children living in the Tokyo suburbs.  During the year that it premiered I was born but... was listed as Japan's best film by the  influential Kinema Junpo film magazine.  The feature was something like Ozu's 24th movie, almost all of which have been lost.  It's presently regarded as Ozu's first masterpiece, although filmed in an exuberant style that is quite different from his famous post-war family dramas.  Ozu obviously liked the picture because he remade it years later.  Ozu is such a strong filmmaker that we can't be sure it was his first masterpiece -- there may have been one or more silent features that preceded this picture that are masterworks.  Today, no one knows.  

The movie's plot is inconsequential:  two brothers move with their family to the suburbs.  They are bullied by a gang of neighbor kids.  At first, they are afraid to attend school for fear of being humiliated and beaten up there.  So they play hooky and grade their calligraphy exercises to pretend that they have earned "E's" -- that is, for "Excellence."  They are found-out and ordered to attend school --in fact, their father a salaryman employed by a corporation walks them to school.  At their father's workplace, rows of men scribble notes on pads of paper, answer phones, and yawn repeatedly.  The work is dull but, apparently, well-paid.  The big boss is eccentric, an amateur 16 mm. filmmaker who is constantly perusing rolls of celluloid with a bottle of scotch on his desk.  Sometimes, the big boss gives the father a ride home in his stately black sedan.  The boys who were previously bullied have now become bullies themselves and one of the kids they order around is the boss's son; he wears a black suit on which dust and dirt show when he pushed down on the ground.  One evening, the boss's son invites the boys over to his home for a family movie night.  The boss is screening some of his home movies.  In one of them, the boy's father is featured making funny faces and grotesque gestures.  Everyone laughs uproariously except the two boys.  They are ashamed of their father.  That night, the boys throw books around and make a mess, ostentatiously denouncing their father as a "weakling" and a "failure".  After rather mildly spanking the elder boy, the old man retreats to the kitchen where he sits morosely, hunched over and smoking a cigarette tucked in the side of his mouth while drinking booze.  The tempest concluded the boys fall asleep.  The next morning, the boys decide to mount a hunger-strike but their mother makes rice balls, apparently something of a delicacy and the boys are tempted, succumb to temptation, and, finally, eat alongside their father.  The two boys continue to mistreat the boss's son but, in the end, they become friendly with him and there is a rapprochement between the kids.  In closing shots, we see the three boys with a arms around each other's shoulders walking along a dismal, unfinished suburban lane.  The conflict between the boys and their father is very slight and readily resolved -- it's a mild crisis and, in hands less skillful than Ozu, the picture would simply blow away in the slightest breeze.  Ozu gives the picture gravitas by his consummate framing, camera placement, and lateral tracking motions executed by his camera.  

A principal character in the movie is the suburban location where the movie is shot.  I know this setting from two separate sources.  First, the vacant lots, half-finished construction sites, muddy lanes, and bungalows lined up on treeless avenues are all familiar to me from old Laurel and Hardy two-reelers -- many of those movies are filmed in cheerless housing tracts obviously under construction in which there are crews of pugnacious laborers, half-built houses, and empty barren places full of debris and deep puddles of water.  I also know this environment from my own childhood.  When I was in elementary school, the neighborhood where I lived was under construction, a wonderful playground with big vacant lots, empty fields running down to new tracts of small houses being built, mud-pits, and houses being framed and, nearby, a major construction site where big earthmovers and paving crews were building the freeway through the northern suburbs, the belt-line four-lane 694 through New Brighton.  Our toys were stolen two-by-fours, shingles, buckets of nails and we spent hours digging in house-high mounds of dirt thrown up around muddy basement excavations where concrete blocks were precariously stacked on white cement footings.  There were fascinating bugs, small ponds in the fields, millions of frogs and salamanders and lots of dogs roaming around.  In those days, families were big, and, as in Ozu's movie, mobs of kids roamed the construction sites and the fields alternately fighting with one another and forming alliances.  In Ozu's movie, the Tokyo suburbs are an uncanny wasteland through which electric street cars hustle back and forth on railroad tracks guarded by wooden gates.  Utility poles are prominent in Ozu's compositions, forming long perspectives along muddy lanes.  (In an early shot, we see the utility poles with one of them leaning against another, an image for the two boys but, also, education to the eye -- we are being shown that we should look closely at the patterns and alignments the poles make.) In several scenes, we see houses under construction in the background and people ride through shots on bicycles.  The street cars pose an ever-present hazard -- they seem to run right through the backyard of the small house where the protagonists live. Ozu equates the monotony of salary-man work with the regimentation at school by using matching tracking shots along columns of bored office workers and school boys.  The children have odd quirks.  The two boys carry their lunch, wrapped in white paper, atop their hats.  The kids are always placing things on each other's heads.  Bullies threaten by menacingly raising a fist in the air.  The adults are distracted and absent and there is a complete absence of little girls in the movie:  this is a world dominated by gangs of eight and ten-year old boys.  (In fact, there are very few women in the movie, just the boy's mother and one or two secretaries at the office.)  The boys raid sparrow nests, crack the eggs, and slurp up their contents raw, thinking that this will give them strength.  This means that ladders are always precariously leaning against houses where birds have made their nests in the gutters.  Dogs are tied in the backyard, right next to the train tracks.  When a bully demands subservience, he twists his fingers into a talismanic sign and his victim must immediately lie down in the dirt and, then, remain there until he is allowed to rise, this signal provided by recondite hand gestures that look a bit like a devout Catholic crossing himself.  The kids are middle class, but their parents live in straitened circumstances --  on pay day, the wives are happy and the boys tell the beer deliveryman, who totes bottles of beer on his bike, that their mother will have the money to buy six bottles, thereby, earning the thanks of the delivery man who, then, intimidates one of the bullies threatening them.  The movie is very slight, but probably one of the best pictures ever made about childhood and, despite its trivial content, very engaging.