Tuesday, November 09, 2010

The French Get the American Gangster: Jean-Pierre Melville, part 1

In an earlier post about The Town (2010), I mentioned that the filmmakers studied parts of French Film Noir. I am going to explore that a bit in this post while praising some of the more obscure films.

A variation of the American gangster film lived for a while in France thanks to Jean-Pierre Melville and others. There were a number of great French film directors of the 1950s and '60s who were greatly influenced by American film noir. WWII interrupted the showing of American films for a while. After the war, a number of directors ate up the film noir component of the backlog of American cinema. Maybe it was the cheaply made nature of these films that was the allure. After all, deep shadows are a lot cheaper than actually dressing a set.

Melville seemed to take this a small step further.His films are each a distillation of a single theme. Two films of note are Le Doulos and Le Cercle Rouge. Although most film aficionados consider Le Cercle Rouge to be his masterpiece, I think Le Doulos to be a rougher, more ragged film and so much better because of that. Both films have a theme echoed in the recent The Town.

If one had to trim Le Doulos down to the its most central theme (and that is the point of this blog), it would be Bros-Before-Hoes or BB4H. That's it and it is fascinating how it is slowly revealed through the interweave of the story lines of the two main characters. Friendship and loyalty among men are above all.
The second film plays with a similar theme of the Buddy Film (Or BB4H variant), in that it postulates that sooner or later men of a similar nature will eventually cross into the same arena of the story (a red circle in this case). We have similar characters to The Town. Corey (Alain Delon) is the sophisticated criminal who is very close to Affleck's Doug MacRay. Le Commissaire Mattei (Bourvil) is the same policeman who thinks everybody is guilty as John Hamm's Special Agent Adam Frawley. In Le Cercle Rouge everybody else becomes either secondary or a useful tool to highlight aspects of the file. This is true to a point in The Town. The difference is that the Buddy Film overlay imparts a different angle to and complicates the plot a bit.

Monday, November 01, 2010

6k and The Ten Commandments

The other night I saw the beautifully restored version of The Ten Commandments and equally at the classic Hollywood theater, The Egyptian. This was the first public showing of the fully restored roadshow version of the 1956 film. A little talk by the VP of restoration and the Heston family.

Then the movie started and we had an enthusiastic audience applauding right from the beginning. The titles were bright and clean with colors restored as well as dirt and scratches removed. It was beautiful from start to finish. I enjoyed the movie, the cake at intermission (theater’s 88th anniversary) and the whole event in general. It was a little long but it was the 3 hour 39 minute version.

You can skip to the next paragraph but for a technical details about the 6k restoration, I put a little research into it. This was filmed in a widescreen format called VistaVision. This was Paramount’s technology for widescreen instead of CinemaScope. Anamorphic processes such as CinemaScope and Panavision squeeze the image horizontally when photographed and then expand it when projected. This puts twice as wide an image on the same size negative as before. This technology is still used today. VistaVision cameras run the film sideways and then use the area of two normal frames for one frame. This gives only a slight widescreen but tremendous detail compared to the anamorphic process. Eventually the VistaVision source is turned and squeezed for the final print shown in theaters. Only a little over 30 movies were made in VistaVision as better film stock made it obsolete. The version I saw was scanned from the original VistaVision sources and digitally projected. The 6k refers to the horizontal number of pixels on the image as normally shown. A normal DVD would be a 2k scan (2048×1536 pixels) and HD and most modern motion picture production scan at 4k (4096×3072 pixels). A 6k VistaVision scan is two 4k scans turned sideways ( 6144×4096 pixels). Kinda an oversimplification but basically true.

In viewing this movie, a few things became clear to me. Yul Brenner and others in this movie could barely act. Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson could deliver their lines with believability and conviction. Both of these are obvious because of the somewhat dated and stilted dialog. Certainly there was a different method in screen acting 55 years ago. But even factoring in that and the heavy direction, it becomes pretty clear who were the great film actors and who were mediocre at best. It is even possible to differentiate the primarily film actors from classically trained theatrical actors.

An enjoyable experience. Probably going to be a Blu-Ray release soon.

Are we all asleep in Inception?

It has been a few months since I saw Inception. I was so excited about it that I skipped an afternoon at Waikiki to catch it the day it opened. Recently I had a discussion about whether or not the main character, Cobb, was just dreaming the whole thing.


Initially I thought no, then yes and now it varies from day-to-day. I think this needs a little research and I will provide that in a post very soon. I may even need to re-read Ubik by Philip K. Dick. It reminds me of that SF novel from the late ’60s and may actually be the genesis of Inception.


Yeah, I don’t expect that you know of Philip K. Dick and probably think I am just playing with my own name. Nope. Real author (1928-1982). You probably saw a few of the movies made from his novels: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Imposter, Paycheck, Scanner Darkly and Next (Curse you, Nicolas Cage!) Now I can’t get him out of my head and I’ll have to write a piece about how Nicholas Cage is the worst living actor.

The Town

The short version is that I enjoyed this film and consider it one of the best of 2010. That is not saying that there aren’t a few problems with the film. First let’s get an overall impression of the film.


When is a heist film not a heist film? If you had to sort movies and you only had very distinctly labeled buckets, you’d have to put this one in the buddy movie bucket. Most people would consider it a heist movie but Ben Affleck’s character is absolutely tied to Jeremy Renner’s character. The other members of the gang are only there to illustrate the nature of the residents of Charlestown. The robberies (4) are primarily to define the characters.


A heist movie usually has a detailed plot involving a gang trying to a big robbery. There may be other robberies preceding the big heist but they are always in preparation of the big heist. Almost all the gang members interact in different combinations. Think Ocean’s Eleven.


A buddy movie usually has the male friendship as the core theme. Male/female relationships take a secondary and conflicting role.


So here we have Affleck and Renner doing a series of robberies. Affleck has a unsatisfying female relationship replaced by an unsustainable relationship. Renner and another character (a father figure) push Affleck to more felonies. Without revealing too much, the frame-work of the movie is to resolve these conflicts.


All of these elements have been explored previously by Jean-Pierre Melville in a number of movies written/directed from 1955 to 1972. Affleck is no Melville. Although it appears that he and others involved with The Town studied his films assiduously. The core elements in the classic French films are all there in this modern American film.
The Town borrows heavily from Melville’s Le Doulos and Le Cercle Rouge. This is fine as few are going to see movies from the ’60s. Affleck is a second time director and I don’t think he could have done better than learning from these two films. I’ll discuss them in detail in a future post.
 

Movies and Books, That's What I'm Talking About

There are a few things I do a great deal more than other things. I go to movies often and then I research what I've seen. My intent with this blog is to view a few movies, formulate some ideas, see how it meshes with a some online research and then report it.


I also read quite a bit: both fiction and nonfiction. From time to time, I'll talk about books usually in a group with a theme.


If you have a comment, feel free to participate no matter how old the original post might be. I think and rethink movies that I haven't seen in years. I also try to catch a new film every week as well as find a few good, old movies to talk about.