Tag: MCM (page 1 of 1)

Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out is a brilliant movie about … well, that’s the question. Some people say it’s a movie about the IRA, but that’s certainly wrong, and not because the name of the organization and the name of the city in which the action is set are never mentioned. This is obviously Belfast, and the organization whose members at the outset plan a heist is obviously the IRA. But within the world of the movie doesn’t matter what cause Johnny McQueen (James Mason) serves — it never matters, to the writer or director or characters or audience. 

So what is it about? I think the movie explores how people try to understand the kind of story they’re in. And Reed wants to sow confusion on that score.

The movie’s look is pure noir — and as beautifully photographed a noir as you’ll ever see, by Robert Trasker, whose work here is even better than in The Third Man, which is saying a lot — and the plot seems for quite a while to come straight out of the desperate-manhunt playbook. But for the kids on the sidewalk who pretend to be Johnny McQueen, it’s a heroic-rebel-against-the-Man story. For some of the ordinary people drawn into the event, it’s a why-can’t-I-just-live-in-peace story. For the painter Lukey (Robert Newton) it’s a great-suffering-makes-great art story. For Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan), it’s a star-crossed-lovers story. For the scavenger Shell (F. J. McCormick), it’s an opportunity-knocks-and-I-answer story. And so on down the line. 

Everyone projects their own sense of the story onto Johnny, because after the first few minutes of the movie Johnny doesn’t act; he is acted upon. Wounded, sometimes unconscious, often delirious, he becomes a kind of package passed from person to person, a problem to be solved — a mirror into which people look and learn something about themselves. Whose side are they on? — a question to be asked with the understanding that in this fractured world there are always many sides.

Meanwhile, in his moments of mental clarity, Johnny tries to understand what his story is to him. And he ends in a very different place from the one in which he begins, even if the seeds of his ending are already planted by the time we first see him. 

Robert Bresson’s films A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959) are book-matched movies, mirror images of each other. In the first an honest and humble man is imprisoned, but eventually escapes; in the second an arrogant and dishonest man freely commits crimes for a long time, but is eventually caught and imprisoned.

The films mirror one another technically as well – and in not just the sense that almost all Bresson movies are technically similar. Bresson relied exclusively on a 50mm lens, because, he believed, that focal length most closely approximates human vision. The great Yasojiru Ozu believed this also, as did that prince of photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson. (Were they correct? Well, it’s complicated.) 

Anyway: in both A Man Escaped and Pickpocket the protagonist narrates his story in voiceover. In both films, close attention is given to the details of certain manual actions repeated almost mechanically: A Man Escaped shows us the prisoner’s methodical work to make an opening in his cell door and then his weaving of long ropes, while Pickpocket shows us the thief’s equally methodical practice of the techniques of his art.

And in each film the protagonist is played by a non-professional (though François Leterrier later became a director and Martin LaSalle an actor). Bresson’s disdain for professional actors – whom he believed could only seem – and his alternative preference for using non-actors or what he called “models” – whom he believed could genuinely be – was, in my view, a catastrophic error of judgment. Almost all of Bresson’s “models” fail in their task, I think, and his movies are much the worse for it. This is very much a minority view, I know, but I really do believe that Bresson, for all his gifts, fails to reach the highest level of filmmaking precisely because of his refusal to use adequate actors. (To be sure, Bresson’s thinking in these matters is subtle and in a way profound; I just don’t think it works.)  

The chief exception to this rule is Leterrier in A Man Escaped: he’s excellent. (Claude Laydu, who is superb in Diary of a Country Priest, had never been in a movie before but had trained as an actor.) Martin LaSalle in Pickpocket is just terrible, at least when he speaks – he and Marika Green alike seem to be merely reciting their lines throughout – and that really compromises, for me, what otherwise could have been a remarkable achievement.

Pickpocket is a simplified retelling of Crime and Punishment, though with less serious crime (Michel, our thieving protagonist, is not a violent man). We get the idea of “l’homme superieur,” the verbal sparring with an apparently meek police officer, the undeserved love of an innocent woman. But there’s an interesting little twist that Bresson, who wrote the screenplay, adds. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov, after his two murders, falls helplessly into a bipolar oscillation, full of arrogance one hour, full of self-loathing the next, and his only anchor in these psychological storms is Sonia, who urges him to confess his crimes – which ultimately he does.

In Pickpocket the Sonia figure is Jeanne, whose kindness to the needy (including Michel’s own mother, whom he is too ashamed to visit) and ready forgiveness of sin eventually touch Michel’s heart: when she becomes a single mother and is in need, he pledges her his help. He promises to go straight, to make an honest living, to help her care for her child. Love changes him – as it changes Raskolnikov.

But this is where the twist comes in – and where we see why Bresson makes Michel a pickpocket rather than a murderer. For the sake of Jeanne and her child, Michel becomes an honest worker … but the work is so long, and the rewards so few. And look, here’s this man with a wallet full of banknotes: just an artful flick of my hand would be enough to liberate that money and to provide for dear Jeanne and her child for months … what would be the harm?

So here Bresson is reflecting on a point related to the themes of Crime and Punishment but bringing those themes home to those of us who are sinners but not murderers: the overwhelming power of habit. Michel had built up over a long time the habits of a thief, and while he had justified them by his belief that he is one of those superior men, after he abandons that belief the habits remain. He has, as it were, demolished the building but left standing the scaffolding he used to construct it. True love, it turns out, is powerful, but habit is even more powerful; and so Michel finds that he cannot make a new life quite so easily. First he must lose everything.

In an earlier post I talked about how good Pauline Kael’s early film criticism — her pre-New Yorker writing — is, and another fine example comes from a long essay she wrote in 1964 for Film Quarterly about Hud. Well, about Hud, yes, but even more about the critical response to Hud. 

For instance, she noted this take by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times: 

The human elements are simply Hud, the focal character, with his aging father, a firm and high-principled cattleman, on one hand, and Hud’s 17-year-old nephew, a still-growing and impressionable boy, on the other. The conflict is simply a matter of determining which older man will inspire the boy. Will it be the grandfather with his fine traditions or the uncle with his crudities and greed? It would not be proper to tell which influence prevails. Nor is that answer essential to the clarification of this film. The striking, important thing about it is the clarity with which it unreels. 

The moral clarity is key to Crowther, and to several other reviewers quoted by Kael. What they like is how unambiguously the movie affirms the archaic moral standards upheld by Hud’s father Homer, and consequently rejects Hud’s selfishness and immaturity.  

Dwight Macdonald, writing in Esquire, hated the film for the very reasons that the much larger crowd represented by Crowther loved it:

The giveaway is Hud’s father, the stern patriarch who loves The Good Earth, the stiff-necked anachronism in a degenerate age of pleasure-seeking, corner-cutting, greed for money, etc. — in short, these present United States. How often has Hollywood (where these traits are perhaps even more pronounced than in the rest of the nation) preached this sermon, which combines maximum moral fervor with minimum practical damage; no one really wants to return to the soil and give up all those Caddies, TV sets and smart angles, so we can all agree to his vague jeremiad with a pious, “True, true, what a pity!” In Mr. Ritt’s morality play, it is poor Hud who is forced by the script to openly practice the actual as against the mythical American Way of Life and it is he who must bear all our shame and guilt. 

Kael’s view — and does she ever delight in proclaiming it — is that everyone is wrong. They’re wrong because Hud is “one of the few entertaining American movies released in 1963 and just possibly the most completely schizoid movie produced anywhere anytime.” Indeed, it is entertaining because it’s schizoid. It is internally divided because it both hates Hud and loves him, repudiates him and affirms him; and the audience shares in this complex of emotions, because the audience is America, and this tension between the upholding of “traditional values” and the relentless pursuit of self-gratification is maybe the single most essential element of the American character. 

I think this reading is compelling. But I also want to set it … not against, but rather alongside a slightly different one: If the audience loves and affirms Hud, might that be not so much because it identifies with Hud’s selfishness but rather because Hud is played by Paul Newman? Men-want-to-be-him-and-women-want-to-be-with-him Paul Newman? There is something about the charisma of a real movie star that shapes our responses in ways that we can’t altogether control. 

I wonder if Kael doesn’t fall for this charisma, to some extent. Now, to be sure, Kael believed in the sexual liberation of women long before it was cool to do so, and we were in 1964 on the cusp of a culture-wide sexual revolution; but even so, it’s strange to hear her question whether Hud’s attempt to force Alma to have sex with him should really be called “rape.” Kael’s logic is that Alma is sexually attracted to Hud and is only resisting him because she wants an “emotional commitment,” so if he forced himself on her he would be giving her something she actually wants — ergo, not rape. (So No means Yes, here as in the minds of thousands of frat boys who think that if any woman is drunk that makes them Paul Newman.) I wonder if Kael would have made this particular argument if Hud had been played by a less gorgeous actor.

Whether or not the movie has the universal clarity that Crowther attributes to it, it seems pretty clear about this business. In his last conversation with Alma, Hud calls his attempt to rape her a “little ruckus,” and declares, “I don’t usually get rough with my women. I generally don’t have to.” Well, we learned what he does when he thinks he has to, didn’t we? 

But charisma and beauty may not be the only forces at work in shaping our response to someone like Hud — there’s also the simple power of putting someone at the center of our attention, especially if that person can act well. Think of how Breaking Bad did everything it could possibly do to reveal Walter White’s transformation into an utter monster, yet, nevertheless, #TeamWalt was a huge thing on social media. And not because Bryan Cranston was presented to us as sexually alluring. 

Another example: when Bertolt Brecht wrote Mother Courage and her Children, a play about a camp follower in the Thirty Years War who through her limitless greed endangers and ultimately destroys her children, he was shocked by the response of the first audiences of the play. Mother Courage is a kind of exemplar of capitalism, and her story is meant to demonstrate the ways that capitalism feeds on war. But of course capitalism doesn’t consciously and intentionally set out to destroy human beings; Brecht was too honest an artist to suggest that, so he certainly wasn’t going to make Mother Courage a slavering child-murderer. She is shocked and genuinely grieved when her children die, and doesn’t realize her complicity in their deaths. So when Therese Giehse, in playing the part of Mother Courage, cried out in her grief at the death of her sons, the audience was so moved that all they felt at the end of the play was was pity for the poor woman who had been deprived of her children. This both surprised and infuriated Brecht, who thought that it was perfectly apparent that her insatiable greed and consequent thoughtlessness towards everything else had led to the children’s deaths, so he rewrote the play to make an already obvious message even more obvious. Unmistakable, unmissable. And when the audience saw this new version of the play, they thought: Poor woman, her children are dead! 

Criterion describes the film thus: “In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him.“ Well … the hit may have been flawlessly planned, but it wasn’t flawlessly executed. 

Nothing Jef does is flawlessly executed, and the problems start (and to some extent end) with his choice of clothing: trench coat and fedora. Like Jean-Paul Belmondo’s cheap crook in Breathless — R.I.P. Jean-Luc Godard, by the way — Jef has clearly watched too many Bogart movies. With the partial exception of an older man we see in a police lineup, nobody else in the movie — set in a very Sixties Swinging Paris — dresses remotely like Jef, so he might as well have a spotlight on him everywhere he goes. And then after he has completed his hit he just walks thoughtlessly out of the room and into a hallway where is is immediately seen. Similarly, after each hit he has the license plates changed on his car, but never considers the value of driving a different car. Jef may think he’s a smooth hitman “with samurai instincts,” but he’s really pretty bad at his job. 

He only survives as long as it does because (a) the police aren’t very good at their jobs either and (b) the woman who sees him after that first hit, a pianist at the nightclub, tells the police that she doesn’t recognize him — for no reason we are ever told. But eventually his own carelessness — combined, I’m inclined to think, with a desire to die, to be done with the charade — catches up with him anyway. 

We can make some guesses about what motivates the pianist who claims not to have seen him, and about why Jef returns to the nightclub to point an empty gun at her; we can try to connect these dots, and others; but we can’t be sure. One of the best things about the movie is its reticence, though not absolute silence, about what’s motivating people. As a character in The Rules of the Game says, “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons” — but in Le Samourai we never learn what those reasons are. But I don’t think there’s any way to tell the story that makes Jef good at what he does. 

Too many viewers of the movie, including critics, take Jef at his own self-valuation, buy into his illusory self-image. Perhaps this is because Alain Delon is so outrageously good-looking. But in any case it’s a mistake. Jef is a young French guy pretending (for whatever reason) to be a Bogartesque hard man, and the story of the movie is how his pretense eventually becomes more than he can sustain. 

It was nearly 30 years ago, I suppose, that Simon Callow began working on his biography of Orson Welles. It was originally conceived as a two-volume project, but after the first volume — whose story takes us to the completion of Citizen Kane — was published and work began on the second, Callow realized that he was not going to be able to narrate the next 45 years of Welles’s life in a single book. Instead, he made the fascinating, and I think wise, choice to devote the entire second volume to the five years following the completion of Kane, because during those five years Welles put an end to his relationship with the American studio system, and was left with only one option: to become what Callow calls a “one-man band.” This became the title of the third volume — and eventually there will be a fourth. (Callow tells the story of the biography’s composition here.)

The standard story of Welles is that he was a great genius destroyed by the unimaginative rigidity of the American movie studio system. But it’s impossible to read Callow’s narrative — which is consistently admiring of and sympathetic to Welles — and come to any other conclusion than this: Welles destroyed his own career. Again and again and again his bosses told him that he needed to do certain things in order to fulfill contracts he had freely signed — to do the task he was being paid to do rather than chase other opportunities that he at the moment found more congenial — to stop spending other people’s money as thought it were his own. He simply never heeded any of these warnings, responding only when absolutely necessary but always in self-defense and even in some cases self-celebration. To put it simply: Welles could never be trusted to do what he was contractually obliged to do.

I think Callow sums up this element of Welles’s character incisively at the end of the second volume, when he is describing Welles’s divorce from Rita Hayworth:

The pattern of flight is unmistakable, one repeated from his relationship with Dolores del Rio, who by contrast with Rita Hayworth was emotionally mature, socially brilliant and a fine artist in her own right. She was neither neurotic nor needy; she simply required commitment from him. And that he would not give. Any form of limitation, obligation, responsibility or enforced duty was intolerable to him, rendering him claustrophobic and destructive. He could only function as a free agent, untrammelled by partners, children, wives, administrators, accountants, producers, studios, political mentors. He must go his own way. His motto might have been Aleister Crowley’s ‘Do what thou wilt shall be all the law’. In terms of his work as a director, that meant that he had, inevitably, to become an independent film-maker. Confinement, whether personal or professional, was unbearable to Orson Welles. His exploratory urges were central to his nature; he indulged them unceasingly for the rest of his life. Occasionally, something close to a masterpiece would result. But that was not the purpose of his journey through life. The doing was all.

This strikes me as inarguably true, and the keynote of Welles’s achievements and failures alike.

Nobody suffered more from Welles’s perversity of character than George Schaefer, the head of RKO studios, who brought Orson Welles to Hollywood — a decision that ultimately got Schafer fired. Callow’s summation of this initially exciting and eventually disastrous relationship also provides a brilliant capsule summary of Welles, to be set alongside the passage quoted above:

Welles, young and flushed with the sense of his own talents, paid lip service to these small qualifications, seeing RKO as an inexhaustible milch cOw. He rejoiced in Schaefer’s enthusiasm for him, and thought that by a combination of charm, bluster and a sly implication of complicity he could get exactly what he wanted, often saying one thing and doing the opposite, in the belief that he would always come up with the goods and that they would always be worth whatever they cost. But he was at the mercy of the nature of his own talent, depending on adrenalin and inspiration to bring off his effects. He had enormous difficulty in engendering material: his real gift was for editing, interpreting, transforming. A screenplay only existed, for him, as a suggestion a of a starting point, which would then acquire its character, its tone, its form and to a large extent its meaning from what he did with it in the act of creation. He could never supply anything to order. But Schaefer, as a businessman an investor, so to speak, in Welles had to believe that he could. The aggrieved letter that Schaefer sent him in Rio was an acknowledgement that the two men were not, in fact, partners at all. The terrible phrase ‘lip service’ sums up the older man’s sense of betrayal and disappointment. Had Welles been straight with Schaefer, had he listened to him, had he understood what a peerless and indomitable ally he had in him, had he grasped that there were limits to any enterprise funded by Hollywood, his history and that of Hollywood to say nothing of that of George Schaefer, might have been very different. Instead of being remembered merely as Citizen Kane’s midwife (who then heroically saved it from an untimely death), Schaefer might have been remembered — as he had dreamed of being — as usher-in of an altogether extraordinary period in the history of cinema.

(See how fine a writer Callow is? The bastard.)

One of the things that I especially enjoy about Callow’s narrative is how his experience as an actor, as a lifelong participant in the making of plays and movies, informs his approach to Welles’s career. This happens in large ways and small, but I especially enjoy the small. For instance, when talking about Joseph Cotten’s performance as Eugene Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons, he notes that Cotten was asked to play someone about ten years older than he was, which, Callow says, is far more difficult than playing someone several decades older.

Similarly, he is very good on the ways in which casting decisions and decisions of interpretation are intertwined with one another. The Magnificent Ambersons again provides an excellent illustration: in Booth Tarkington’s novel, George Minafer is an elegant, epicene youth, a beautiful young man. But Tim Holt, the actor who portrays George for Welles, is stocky, blunt, straightforward – he gives the appearance not of an aristocrat but rather of a middle-class brat. Conversely, Cotten is a bit too elegant to portray the go-getting entrepreneurial energy of Eugene Morgan. The opposition between those two characters, so explicit and unavoidable in Tarkington’s novel, takes on a very different form in Welles’s movie, and indeed somewhat confusingly so.

Callow thinks Welles is an astonishing genius of a director, even if his indiscipline and need to be forever stimulated prevented him from doing the best work he was capable of. (At one point Callow quotes Welles saying that he wasn’t nearly as interested in finished products as in the process of working.) About Welles as an actor Callow is less enthusiastic but equally incisive. For Callow, Welles is a powerful but also a limited actor — a judgment with which Welles himself agreed: he was terribly insecure about his acting, never about his directing. (When performing in a movie or TV show he wasn’t directing, he was known to walk onto the set, take a look around, and then say to the director, “You’re going to put the camera there?”) I think one of the best illustrations of Welles’s strengths and weaknesses as an actor comes when Callow describes Welles as Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil:

Welles as Quinlan is an unforgettable portrait of corruption, physical and moral, but it is not a living one. If there is an actor whom he resembles it is [Marlene] Dietrich‘s old sparring partner in The Blue Angel, Emil Jannings, a performer likewise given to creating extraordinary shapes that he filled, not with lived life, but with a wealth of detail and a selection of off-the-peg emotions.

I could go on and on. These are fascinating books, and I think that when the story is completed, Callow will have written one of the finest biographies of our time, and an unrivaled portrait of one of the most distinctive figures in 20th century art and culture.

Imogen Sara Smith:

Bunker Hill was film noir’s favorite neighborhood. In the 1940s and ’50s, the once-exclusive area of downtown LA, with its rambling Victorian mansions, was attractively seedy and decaying, and supremely photogenic. The steep streets create natural Dutch angles, and the long stairways slice diagonally across the screen, vertiginous and crooked like something in a bad dream. Angels Flight, a whimsical funicular railway, is an instantly recognizable landmark. The houses have tall, narrow stoops with cagelike porch railings and flaking scrollwork, stained-glass transoms, and other emblems of scuffed and dingy grandeur. Most are cheap rooming houses, with sour, suspicious landladies and tenants whose faces and fortunes sag like the buildings. “Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town,” Raymond Chandler writes in his 1942 novel The High Window.

Here are some photographs of Bunker Hill by George Mann.

If you want to have a good time, watch The Crimson Pirate (1952). It’s absolutely delightful. Years ago a critic — can’t remember who — described that masterpiece of cinema Nacho Libre as “endearingly ridiculous,” and that description applies to The Crimson Pirate as well.

(Among other things, you get this fellow in a small and uncredited role: 

Yep, it’s Christopher Lee!) 

That bearded fellow next to Burt Lancaster in the picture at the head of this post? That’s Nick Cravat, who was Lancaster’s old friend and one-time partner in the circus. Burt kept him on his payroll — as his personal trainer, which for all I know was true — for decades, and got him into movies, but typically (and here) in non-speaking parts, because his Brooklyn accent was both thick and utterly ineradicable. Many moviegoers over the years assumed that Nick was actually mute. He’s very funny in this movie, like a muscular Italian Harpo Marx. 

But here’s my favorite little fact: The exteriors were mostly filmed on and around the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples — which is where Auden lived in the summer months from 1948 through 1957. I love to imagine Auden sitting in a favorite taverna — in those years he developed a love for Negronis, and made a point of having one or two every night before dinner — and looking across the tables to see … 

Last night, for the first time in decades, I watched The Magnificent Ambersons, and three points struck me with great force.

First: If Welles’s vision for the film had been realized, it would have been the single greatest work of art to elaborate and dramatize and even extend the argument of Leo Marx’s great 1964 book The Machine in the Garden — it would have offered the best available portrayal of the benefits and the costs, in equal measure, of the transformation of America from a pastoral world ruled over by a land-owning aristocracy to an industrial powerhouse. The scenes in the movie’s early minutes introducing Eugene Morgan’s horseless carriage could have been designed to illustrate Marx’s thesis: “Within the lifetime of a single generation, a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world’s most productive industrial machine. It would be difficult to imagine more profound contradictions of value or meaning than those made manifest by this circumstance. Its influence upon our literature is suggested by the recurrent image of the machine’s sudden entrance onto the landscape.” (Leo Marx, by the way, just last week died at the age of 102.)

Second: The film as it exists has a protagonist, but it’s not Joseph Cotten’s Eugene Morgan or Tim Holt’s George Minafer, but rather Agnes Moorhead’s Fanny Minafer — an “unnecessary woman,” a frustrated and embittered spinster who has no place in either of the book’s social worlds, being equally unvalued by the old aristocracy of land and the new industrial meritocracy. Fanny’s character arc culminates in a terrifying breakdown: this woman who has always been fighting off panic comes to the very end of her powers of self-control. Moorehead’s performance is staggering, and her fascinating and revelatory description of how Orson Welles directed her in that culminating scene, told to Dick Cavett in 1973, may be seen here. You really shouldn’t watch that scene out of the context of the whole movie, but if you absolutely must — or, better, if you have seen the movie but just need to be reminded — here it is. Gives me chills every time.

Which brings me — this is my third thought — to the infamous final scene of the movie, shot by the assistant director Fred Fleck while Welles was in Brazil. It’s just as terrible as everyone says it is, but there’s one way to make sense of it, even, strangely, to make it work. Bear with me for a moment.

Welles had shot what he wanted to be the penultimate scene of the movie, a meeting between Eugene Morgan and Fanny Minafer at the boarding house where she now must live. Stills from this scene remain:

It’s important to understand that Eugene has no idea that Fanny loves him, indeed has loved him for decades, and that the great bitterness of her life is her displacement, by the glamorous Isabel Amberson, from what she thinks of as her proper place in Eugene’s affections. As you can see from the shot above, she has recovered her composure — but at the cost of destroying her inner life. She is a shell of a person, and their meeting is both cold and fruitless.

In the concluding scene shot by Fleck, Eugene visits George Minafer in the hospital, and as he leaves George’s room is met by Fanny, to whom he speaks of the reconciliation between him and George, inspired, he says, by the spirit of his “one true love” — meaning Isabel, of course. Throughout this scene Fanny has a weirdly beatific look on her face, one that, I suspect, Moorehead was instructed by Fleck to wear: after all, doesn’t she now know that the immensely wealthy Eugene will take care of her beloved nephew, and probably of her also? That consoling knowledge, we are asked to presume, is sufficient to overcome her decades of pining for Eugene and her consequent resentment of Isabel.

Not bloody likely, I say.

So I prefer to understand the end this way: Fanny lies in her narrow bed in the crowded, dingy boarding-house in a bad neighborhood of what is now an industrial city, and she indulges in a fantasy. She imagines another life, the other fork of the road, one in which Eugene is reconciled to George, of course, but also, and more important, in which he finally sees that all along, Fanny was his own true love. She lies in her narrow bed, and dreams, and smiles. And her dream is what we see at the end of The Magnificent Ambersons.

(In what follows I’m not saying anything that’s not well-known to film buffs, but, as always on this blog, I’m writing to get my thoughts clear for my own sake.)

So: If Vertigo isn’t the greatest movie ever made, what is? Citizen Kane, as widely believed for so many decades? Maybe. I would not protest the restoration of Kane to the top spot. But if I am allowed to cheat a little, I will select three oddly but closely related movies, what I call the Noriko Triptych.

Between 1949 and 1953 Yasujirō Ozu made three movies that are connected to one another in elliptical and complex ways. (He also made two other movies in that period but we’ll set them aside.) Each of the three — Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), and Tokyo Story (1953) — deserves to be ranked among the greatest films ever made; taken together, as I think they should be, they constitute an unparalleled filmmaking achievement.

In these three films Ozu began his working relationship with the incomparable Setsuko Hara, and in each she plays a young woman named Noriko. In one sense these are three quite different characters, but in another sense they aren’t: you could say that one Noriko finds herself in three different families — three different situations, each of which reflects something about the transformations that her society was undergoing in the years after World War II — three parallel universes. Except in one key scene in one of the movies, she always wears modern Western clothing in public; she always has a job. She is the Modern Japanese Woman, and some of her friends are too, but she also has complex if cordial relations with older women of a more traditional bent.

(Every now and then we even see a woman — for instance, the sister-in-law in Early Summer — who wears modern dress sometimes and traditional dress at other times. I wish I understood the nuances of what these variations in costume communicated to a Japanese audience at the time the movies were released.)

In one universe Noriko is a widow, while in the other two she’s moving towards marriage, though the man she is to marry is either invisible to us or barely seen. The absence of young men — largely of course through death in the recent war — is a constant theme, a kind of vacuole in all the films. We see this not only through the circumstances of young women like Noriko, but also through the older generation, who have lost their sons in war and now must face losing their daughters to marriage. And as the film scholar Donald Richie notes in his excellent commentary on the Criterion edition of Early Summer, in that culture to have a daughter marry is almost always a real loss: one character says, casually but confidently, that no real man would ever live with his wife’s family.

Each film is an ensemble piece; Noriko is never in the strictest sense the protagonist. Indeed, in Tokyo Story her role is formally secondary to the elderly couple whose struggles to find a place in a bustling postwar world are, for most of the movie, our central interest.

But at some point in each film, and at most points in the other two films, Noriko becomes the point of focus, the nexus, the character in which we can feel the vibrating tensions that strain Japanese society — and especially the Japanese family. Even in Tokyo Story the most profoundly moving scene centers on Noriko, but is about the forces that destroy families. The family photograph that’s the essential image of Early Summer is no joyous occasion — though everyone tries to put on a brave face — but rather a tacit acknowledgement that the members of the family are about go their separate ways, split into three parts, and that there will probably be no future opportunity to get them all into one frame.

Notice the mixture of traditional Japanese and modern Western clothing in that shot.

But as great as these movies are simply as x-rays of a society in traumatic and profound transition, they are greater simply as presentations of the most universal and powerful human emotions — love and loss and grief and resignation and despair and hope. And at the heart of these presentations, always, is Setsuko Hara, whose ability to capture in a single moment extreme vulnerability and extreme resilience is simply … well, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another actor do what she does. She and Ozu were, cinematically speaking, made for each other, and it’s fitting, if sad, that upon his death she retired from acting and lived the rest of her long life out of the public eye.

(That’s Hara with Chishū Ryū, another Ozu stalwart, who in these three movies plays her older brother, her father, and her father-in-law.)

If indeed we can treat these three movies as a triptych, a single work in three parts, then in my view that triptych is the greatest achievement in film to date.

Recently I re-watched both Citizen Kane and Vertigo, with the purpose of trying to understand how it is that Vertigo could have replaced Kane as Best Movie Ever in the Sight and Sound poll (2012). When that poll first came out I was stunned: I had never thought that Vertigo is even remotely comparable to Kane, and indeed had never seen it as one of Hitchcock’s best — top ten for sure, but I don’t think top five among his movies. Thus my re-watching. I really wanted to give Vertigo my best attention, my most sympathetic attention, and I think I managed that, but at the end I found myself just as puzzled as ever about the movie’s rise to such eminence.

I think I can make my point by comparing it not to Kane but to another Hitchcock movie from four years earlier, Rear Window. Now, to be sure, Rear Window is a more lighthearted movie than Vertigo, so they are not tonally equivalent, but there are interesting points of comparison. For instance, both of them feature Jimmy Stewart dangling in the air by his hands and then falling from a height — which is sort of peculiar, when you think about it.

About tone: I actually think that the consistently sober tone of Vertigo, its narrow emotional range, — and by that I mean the emotions of the audience as well as the characters — is a weak point. One of Hitchcock’s greatest filmmaking virtues is his ability to display a visual playfulness even when he’s telling a serious story: we perceive an evident delight in the construction of scenes and shots that can bring a smile to the viewer’s face even in the most tragic of films. In his famous interviews with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock expresses some annoyance at the negativity of the British press towards Psycho, and the form of his complaint is noteworthy: he says that his critics don’t have a sense of humor. That is, they didn’t see the wit in the construction of the story, the framing of its shots, its cuts and the sequence of its scenes. And I think he’s right about that. Psycho is in a strange way a witty movie — as is, in a more obvious way, Rear Window, which repeatedly takes us with absolute assurance from laughter to profound tension and back to laughter again. The scene in which Grace Kelly sneaks into the murderer’s apartment and is found there by the murderer — in full sight of a helpless and agonized Stewart — is one of the most suspenseful scenes in the history of movies.

There is none of this tonal variety in Vertigo, which is among the least playful of Hitchcock’s films. There are two moments of real visual imagination: the famous descending-into-madness sequence (which for the record I don’t think quite comes off) and the trick — cleverly achieved by dollying the camera backwards while simultaneously zooming in — of representing the feeling of vertigo as Stewart looks down a staircase.

But aside from those two small things, it’s a visually indifferent movie. Yes, San Francisco is nice to look at, but Hitchcock just … shot San Francisco.

Contrast that to the constant visual stimulation that we get in Rear Window, most obviously in the justly famous opening sequence, where the movement of the camera tells a detailed story, filling us in on everything that we need to know to appreciate who our protagonist is and how he got into the situation that he’s in. And then, when he makes the phone call that sets the plot in motion, the camera restlessly pans around the courtyard, introducing us to all the people who will be the object of our protagonist’s voyeuristic attentions for the rest of the film. Vertigo has absolutely nothing like this, and it’s not because Hitchcock fell off in his abilities. North by Northwest is full of such visual interest. Vertigo simply strikes me as a workmanlike job of filmmaking. And I don’t see how a movie so visually unremarkable can be thought of as one of the greatest films ever made.

And in addition to being visually mundane, its pacing is inconsistent: Hitchcock has some trouble getting us plausibly and vividly from the first tragic visit to the mission to the second one. Rear Window, by contrast, is perfectly paced, and every shot counts.

(Parenthetical note: The two movies, in addition to featuring a Dangling Stewart, have a number of odd correspondences. I’ll just note one: In Vertigo we wonder why he’s obsessed with the female lead, and in Rear Window we wonder why he isn’t.)

I’m going to stop there, because I don’t want to overstress the criticism: Vertigo is a terrific movie. Top-ten Hitchcock is by definition exceptional. But it has significant flaws that the movies it’s now frequently compared to simply don’t have.

The best thing about Vertigo, in my view, is the final shot, which indeed perfectly displays Hitchcock’s famously malicious wit: it is a brilliantly creepy moment, as we see our protagonist finally delivered from his obsession and his fear — at the cost of the life of the woman he’s obsessed with. That’s fantastic, but I think Hitchcock does not get us to that point with his customary assurance and visual flair. I don’t think Vertigo is nearly as good a movie as Rear Window, or Psycho, or North by Northwest, or Notorious, or even Shadow of a Doubt. It’s very good Hitchcock but not top Hitchcock, and the idea that it is superior to Citizen Kane,  and Rules of the Game, and Tokyo Story, and 2001 — well, that’s just incomprehensible to me.

The other day I was urging some friends on Twitter to watch Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which I believe to be one of the greatest films yet made — maybe the very greatest. So I thought I might explain why I have such regard for it, especially since it’s such a disorienting film to watch.

In comparison to Citizen Kane, which is its chief rival in the Greatest Movie Sweepstakes, Rules might seem emotionally incoherent. Kane’s emotional register is much narrower, and moves implacably towards the film’s climax. This suits its subject, which is the disintegration of a great man. But Rules swings wildly between farce and tragedy, and covers most of the emotional territory in between. Watching it, you can often be caught laughing at things you perhaps shouldn’t be laughing at — or laughing in ways that you feel might be inappropriate. But this is all part of Renoir’s strategy.

Whether Rules is the greatest film ever made or not, surely Renoir’s screenplay is the finest example of that difficult art, because in around an hour-and-a-half it takes a wide range of characters through the heights and depths of emotion. It does this through placing them in situations which deprive them of the rules which they have used all their lives to play their social, romantic, and personal games. We all play such games and live by such rules; they govern how we understand ourselves, how we understand our intimate relations, how we understand the social order. We are incorrigibly self-dramatizing on all these levels. And when deprived of our usual rules, when thrown into what appears to be a new game — or, worse, some situation that doesn’t even seem to be a game, that has no evident rules — we flounder helplessly. We become absurd, comical. But we also veer close to the possibility of tragedy.

Through his screenplay, but also through an extraordinarily sophisticated set of cinematic compositions, showing people in an immensely complex set of visual relations to one another, Renoir exposes all the games by which these people live. Marriages are thrown into chaos, as are love affairs, individual self-images, and the whole social order which, after all, is about to immolate itself in the fires of the Second World War — as the hunting scene famously demonstrates.

At the center of it all, in a strange sort of way, is the character Renoir himself plays, Octave. Octave observes all, disrupts all. He has no clear place in society. He is at the margins of everything. He is funny, charming, appealing — but also chaotic. It’s frightening to see how little he understands of himself, and how easily he disorients others without ever meaning to. Octave reminds us — the whole film reminds us — that the games we play, and the rules we play them by, are fragile, easily disrupted. Insofar as those rules help us to avoid painful truths about ourselves and our society, we might welcome their disruption. Except that, it turns out, we don’t know how to live without them.