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Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Every programming choice needs its counter, and every canon should be challenged. The Great Movies: The Counter Programming series seeks to undermine the ongoing Great Movies Project. By recognizing the glut of white, European and Anglo-American, straight dudes who generally constitute what we think of as “the masters,” it becomes necessary to widen the frame.

 

This is an ongoing project to watch a set of films from non-white, non-Western, non-straight, and/or non-dudes. It will be ongoing, probably, forever. Please feel free to chime in about titles and movements I have overlooked, as I know beyond all doubt there are many. The point is not to slam universally loved and respected films. The point is simply to broaden a conception of where films have been made, by whom, and to what ends or concerns. The larger point, as always, is to discover hidden gems in the rich history of cinema. I hope you enjoy it.

kanchanjangha
CommentaryFilmGreat Movies: The Counter Programming

Walking and Talking in the Shadow of Kanchenjungha

by rick
written by rick

For most revered mid-century filmmakers, noting that a particular film featured their first original screenplay and was their first in color would seem to guarantee it additional attention. Curiously, that’s not really the case for Satyajit Ray‘s Kanchenjungha (1962). A careful tapestry of small interactions set against a backdrop of physical grandeur and social change, it seems to get lost in the critical shuffle, functioning as a kind of way station between the narrative sweep of the first two entries in the Apu trilogy and the more refined, self-aware craftsmanship of The Big City and beyond.

That’s unfortunate, because it’s a wonderful movie, but it was there from the start in Kanchenjungha‘s reception — this sense of something ephemeral or slight. Bosley Crowther, for instance, rather impatiently reviewed Kanchenjungha for the Times in 1966 (it took 4 years after its release to premiere in the U.S., further evidence of its curious also-ran status). Approaching Ray with impatience is, of course, a pretty bad idea in general, as Crowther’s assessment demonstrates:

Lest one be misled by the title of Mr. Ray’s unfamiliar film into thinking it may have something to do with mountain climbing on the world’s third highest peak, be assured that there is nothing as dramatic or strenuous as mountain climbing in it. Indeed, the great mass of Kanchenjungha is revealed only at the end, when the mists roll away and we are shown it as an evident symbol of the emergence of Indian society—or social snobbery—out of the mists of the past.

Armed with a backhanded compliment and dreaming of another epic of Bengali impoverishment (or possibly, inscrutably awaiting the arrival, 26 years later, of Cliffhanger), Crowther concluded that Ray had “not bitten off as much as he could chew.”  Watching it for the first time this year, I was instead struck by how much Ray managed to cram into the text, and how forward-looking Kanchenjungha is, what a break it represents.

Where the “one-man New Wave” of the Apu bildungsroman focuses on the struggling and striving rural poor, with the kind of formal “naivety” that only someone actually making it up as they go along can manage, and The Big City on the social tensions of a more urban modernity, Kanchenjungha falls somewhere in between. The film’s narrative concerns an upper-class family on holiday in Darjeeling, in the shadow of the titular mountain … or what would be its shadow, if the rains would ever lift. Ray creates an almost-familiar nouvelle vague dynamic; his characters seem suspended, held together by place and circumstance for the duration, playing out small, interrelated, naturalistic dramas between them in the open air. Kanchenjungha‘s basic tension comes from this: it’s at once intimate and expansive, grounded in isolated family discourse that clearly hints at tumultuous worlds beyond the fog.

“The idea,” Ray told Andrew Robinson, “was to have the film starting with sunlight. Then clouds coming, then mist rising, and then mist disappearing, the cloud disappearing, and then the sun shining on the snow-peaks. There is an independent progression to Nature itself, and the story reflects this.”

That story concerns the stridently pro-British patriarch Indranath (Chhabi Biswas, so memorable as a very different sort of figure in 1958’s The Music Room); his cowed wife Labanya (Karuna Bannerjee), subservient but possessing hidden reserves of agency; their eldest daughter Anima (Anubha Gupta), unhappily married to Shankar (Subrata Sensharma); dissolute playboy son Anil (Anil Chatterjee); and the youngest daughter Monisha (Alakananda Ray), who they hope will find a man on this mountain excursion. 

Monisha is the moral center of the narrative and the audience surrogate. Pressed to converse, and hopefully pair up, with Mr. Bannerjee (N. Viswanathan) — the Anglicized favorite of her Anglophile industrialist of a father — her attentions turn instead to Ashok (Arun Mukherjee), a young, barely employed figure of the new generation. Poetic, passionate, working class, unapologetic in his anti-colonial patriotism, contemptuous of the idle wealthy, and linked with the natural world, Ashok is everything Bannerjee (and her father) is not. When Indranath offers Ashok a job when they all return to Calcutta, Ashok declines, a moment of small revolution. A reckoning is coming for all of India, a generational struggle boiled down to multiple sets of two.

Final shot of KanchenjunghaThat reckoning won’t happen within the structure of Kanchenjungha. The holiday ends without a marriage (or, for that matter, a divorce). Ray is content to set up the dominoes, and far less interested in knocking them over. The film’s ending is open to any number of possibilities, though, contra Crowther, the long-delayed appearance of the mountain itself isn’t just symbolic of “the emergence of Indian society” (whatever that means). It seems instead part of a continuum, a brute, beautiful fact reasserting itself but transformed; its textual meaning is more a function of the fact that Indranath fails to even notice its emergence … this event that the whole film, the whole holiday in the film, has waited for. He’s lost in thought instead.

Unlike his contemporary (and earlier entrant in this series) Ritwik Ghatak — for whom Partition is a metaphysical presence, a ghostly “hunk of iron and steel,” or an entirely physical one, like a train bisecting the countryside — Ray constructs the entire mise-en-scene in Katchenjungha as a post-colonial contradiction. The mountain itself can’t be said to denote Partition any more than it stands in for a generational divide. It looms, mostly unseen, over the characters strolling contemplatively, stopping, arguing, dismissing, apologizing, reconnecting; there’s something almost Linklater-like in the desperate conversation, an eddying stillness. The relations between them, physical and emotional, and their movements give shape to the larger themes of the film, as Ruma Chakravarti notes:

The film unrolls in the form of several conversations between pairs of characters as they take long rambling walks. At no point in the film are these characters more than a few minutes apart from each other. I felt the different stretches of mountain roads were almost an allegory for the different paths people take. The married couples have their conversations in situations where they are generally static. The younger un-married characters such as Monisha, Mr Banerjee and Ashok are shown walking almost constantly.

If the Apu trilogy charted Ray’s engagement with the Bengali underclass, The Music Room with a patriarch’s fading glory, and The Big City with a tumultuous modernity, Kanchenjungha is located at a crucial mid-point, where any number of paths are open and history is actively being contested. It’s an essential masterpiece from a career that seems to have produced only masterpieces.

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Choi Eun-hee with flowers in My Mother and Her Guest
CommentaryFilmGreat Movies: The Counter Programming

A Brief Encounter in My Mother and Her Guest

by rick
written by rick

With a quiet grace, and the kind of childlike innocence in its narration that lays bare the adult melancholy all around, Shin Sang-ok‘s My Mother and Her Guest (1961) sneaks up on you. It’s a far cry from the violent, Occupation-era love triangle of his A Flower In Hell (a previous Counter-Programming entry released just 3 years prior), though both star Choi Eun-hee.

In form and theme, My Mother and Her Guest is much closer to Hometown of the Heart, 1949’s star turn from Choi. The emphasis is on the struggles of widows and children without parents pushing up against society’s strictures, not amour fou, daytime noir, and deaths in the dirt. This is an understated film, set in a “widow house.” Its pall of sadness is quiet, its hopes are quiet, even its moments of levity are mostly quiet. The soundtrack — almost all Chopin, an interesting choice for a South Korean romance — underlines this at every turn. There’s something stately but ineffable about the whole affair. From the start, it’s clear that My Mother and Her Guest won’t end in blood, but it’s just as clear that things won’t resolve tidily in the classic Hollywood fashion.

Image of Ok-hee at her deskImage of Ok-hee's pictures of her family and villageThe narrative is guided by 6-year-old Ok-hee (Yeong-Seon Jeon). In voiceover, she introduces us to her family, and her village, via the illustrations of each which hang on her wall. Her severe grandmother (Eun-jin Han), a deaconess who scares everyone but Ok-hee; her mom (Choi), the prettiest woman in the world; and the kind maid (Geum-bong Do), who “works hard, eats well, and sleeps well.” These literal sketches are presented with touching grace notes. Ok-hee says doesn’t know what “a widow” is, exactly, but adds “since I’m a widow’s daughter, that means my mom is a widow.” At the close of her intros, Ok-hee turns and addresses the camera, excusing herself as she heads off to kindergarten. We are in a child’s world and a house full of women.

The arrival of Mr. Han (Kim Jin-kyu), an old friend of Ok-hee’s father, comes to stay, for reasons that are never really clarified. My Mother and Her Guest is less interested in plot mechanics than presenting relationships; the simple “guest” of the title will suffice. He and Ok-hee become fast friends and, with Han clearly filling a paternal hole in her heart, she sets out to play 6-year-old matchmaker:

Ok-hee gives a rose to her mother with a huge smile on her face and lies to get her to talk to Mr. Han. She doesn’t care about the expectations of being a widow or the social norms between men and women, she only wants both adults to be happy and start a family. She even tells Mr. Han that she wishes he was her father sometimes, and again the director is exposing the idea that if the world was as easy as a child would hope so, then everyone would get what they desire.

Image of Mr. Han saying goodbye to Ok-hee as Choi watchesOf course, the world is not so easy. There are strictures against conversation outside the family, much less widows re-coupling. Combined with obligations to home and to her mother-in-law, we doubt the possibilities of the romance the film tenderly draws out. Much of My Mother and Her Guest carries the wistfulness of melodrama. The “will they or won’t they?” aspect is more or less cut off at the knees, which is the point. But Choi and Kim convey all their longing effectively, with surreptitious and fumbling attempts at quasi-courtship frequently made even sweeter by Ok-hee’s tendency to just blurt stuff out. There’s a selfishness and a tendency to color around the details to her would-be match-making, which is entirely appropriate to a 6-year-old girl trying to make sense of her world.

Image of maid and egg vendorThe only really happy romantic relationship in the small cast is the one that develops between the maid and the local egg vendor. Shin seems to imply that their particular place in the structure, widowed and working class, allows possibilities denied to more proper folks. (They are even implied to fool around just offscreen when everyone is out of the house, a pretty startling development in My Mother and Her Guest — I was not expecting maid/egg vendor sex.) It rings a bit simplistic, but from the very opening moments, the maid’s appetites are emphasized, and she’s “the happiest person in our family,” according to Ok-hee. So that’s nice.

Image of Ok-hee and Choi watching Mr. Han departStill, as the title would have it, this is not their story. The main focus here is on an impossible romance, and the film manages to portray this without turning didactic. There’s very little anger in My Mother and Her Guest; just a lingering sense of what could’ve been, if the world were different than it is.

But as Mr. Han boards a train and heads back to the city after a season, it’s clear we’re not in that world. Choi and her daughter watch from the hill where he and the child had painted together on lazy afternoons, and Chopin — as Philip Gowman notes, not unlike Rachmaninoff in Brief Encounter 15 years prior — provides a final coda.

The mother will observe silently as Shin’s camera settles on a close-up of Choi. The child will wave enthusiastically. The train will depart.

 

 

 

 

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Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Horror’s Refusal in Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black

by rick
written by rick

Plenty of films, indeed much of modern art and poetry, has sought beauty in apparent hideousness. At least since Baudelaire fondly remembered a romantic stroll among the graceful swarm of putrid maggots inside “that superb cadaver / blossom[ing] like a flower,” it’s been a constant theme. But few have merged the mytho-poetic and the decaying flesh with as much compassion as Forough Farrokhzad did in 1962’s The House Is Black.

In just 22 minutes, and in her only film, the Iranian poet dove deeper into suffering, empathy, and transcendence than many horror filmmakers (or film-essayists, for that matter) have since.

Already controversial for verses articulating female desire in a cultural context less than eager to hear about such things, The House Is Black exists on an entirely different plane. Combining a recitation of extraordinary beauty over elegantly framed, jaggedly edited images — horrific, banal, joyous by turn — the film both bears witness and exalts, in a sort of Persian riff on the Old Testament. It’s aware of the body and aware of the horror, and opts for the body. There’s nothing like it.

Filmed, unflinchingly but with unmistakable specificity, entirely in a hospice in East Azerbaijan Province, a leper colony that may as well exist in another dimension, The House Is Black is a marvel of visual storytelling: no dialog, no linked incident, and just Farrokhzad’s narration. We are presented with a catalog of suffering: a blind man traces the contours of a wall, a man with no face smokes a cigarette in an unexpected fashion, lesions (shudder) are scraped from the bottoms of feet.

The filmic resonances echo and rebound: Freaks, probably first and foremost, but also Chris Marker’s aesthetic, Cronenbergian fixations on deteriorating flesh, Bunuel’s incursions into fictive documentary. But from its opening title card, in which Farrokhzad makes clear she intends The House Is Black to be a defense and an instruction, there are examples closer to home: say, Kiarostami’s early work with Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran, or the earliest works of pedagogical cinema from Oscar Micheaux or Lois Weber (or even, for that matter, the wildly-misconceived final section of Haxan). At least by its own account, The House Is Black aims to educate with the camera as much as it shocks.

But the striking thing about Farrokhzad’s film — one of the striking things — is the way in which it goes about accomplishing this. What could have been a tour of grotesquerie ends up affirming, in sorrow, our commonalities rather than the vicarious pleasure we sometimes find, even against our will, in the abject. Students still go to class to study The Koran, albeit with particular vantage points. (One child, asked to name beautiful things, says, “Mother, Father.” Asked to name ugly things, he replies, “Hand. Foot.”) They play outside, with a joy untempered by physical limitation. There’s a wedding ceremony.

Farrokhzad sugarcoats nothing. These are not ways to paper over the isolation, substitute joys. But they are solaces amid lives circumscribed by the inexplicable, and testaments to the will to persevere — if not in the face of God’s cruelty (how could God be cruel?), then despite His tests over bodies we didn’t choose. The Film Sufi considers three levels on which The House Is Black functions:

  1. The first level concerns the immediate and concrete conditions of the lepers in the leper colony – their circumstances of social neglect and misery.
  2. There is a second level or theme concerning how we understand and respond to what we encounter in the world, especially given the fact that there are always mysteries that we can’t explain.  On this level the film contrasts two main approaches  – the religious and the scientific – and how they deal with the scourge of leprosy.
  3. At a still more abstract level there is the despondent idea of leprosy seen as a general metaphor for the human condition.  Under this guise, we are all seen as lost and lowered to the lepers’ level of misery.

None of these are separable, but, as non-lepers, it is presumably the final one that lasts in the mind. As the door closes in the final frames, we too are left in the dark, in the house, behind fences, alone or with others, and always with our own deformities (which hopefully don’t require quite so many literal scalpels … though let’s not be too certain about that). Though, just as hopefully, there will be a friend inside to comb our hair, as an act of both love and resistance.

The House Is Black is a tough watch, because it is a tough film. The cinematography can only be called beautiful, and not just in Baudelaire’s sense. We feel we’ve witnessed something honest, which is rare enough, but also something searching, questioning, and in pain, even amid the occasional kindness and the rare laugh. It looks a lot like life.

An excerpt from Farrokhzad’s poem is worth repeating in full:

“I will sing your name, O Lord.
I will sing your name with the 10-string lute.
For I have been made in a strange and frightening shape.
My bones were not hidden from you when I was being created.
I was molded in the bowels of the earth.
In your book all my parts have been written . . .
. . And your eyes, O Lord, have seen my fetus.
I won’t see the spring.
These lines are all that will remain.
As the heavens circles, I fell into the bedlam.
I’m gone.
My heart is filled with sorrow.
O Muslims, I am sad tonight.

 

I said if I had wings of a dove,
I would fly away and be at rest.
I would go far away and take refuge in the desert.
I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.
For I have seen misery and wickedness on earth.

 

The universe is pregnant with inertia .
. . and has given birth to time.
Where would I escape from your face?
And where would I go from your presence?
If I hang on to the wings of the morning breeze
And reside in the deep of the sea,
Your hand will still weigh on me.
You have made me drunk with indecision.
How awesome are your deeds!

 

I speak of the bitterness of my soul.
I speak of the bitterness of my soul.
When I was silent, my life was rotting
. . . from my silent screams all day long.
Remember that my life is wind.
I have become the pelican of the desert,
. . the owl of the ruins,
And like a sparrow, I am sitting alone on the roof..

 

I am poured out like water
. . . as those who have long been dead.
On my eyelids is the shadow of death.
Leave me.
Leave me, for my days are but a breath.
Leave me before I set out for the land of no return,
. . . the land of infinite darkness.

 

Alas, for the day is fading,
the evening shadows are stretching.
Our being, like a cage full of birds,
Is filled with moons of captivity.
And none among us knows how long he will last.
The harvest season passed,
The summer season came to an end,
. . . and we did not find deliverance.
Like doves, we cry for justice.
. . and there is none.
We wait for light and darkness reigns.

 

O overrunning river driven by the force of love,
. . . flow to us, flow to us.

Despite its title, The House Is Black is not the darkness; it’s the river, captured, briefly, on film.

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Great Movies: The Counter Programming

The rage and beauty of The Cloud-Capped Star

by rick
written by rick

It would be easy, accurate, and a little reductive to call Ritwik Ghatak “the poet of Partition.” But it’s inescapable. Ghatak’s films are obsessed with that existential trauma, even in something like previous Counter-Programming entry Ajantrik. Here is a guy who can make a love story about a man and his car, a sort of fart-filled Herbie, and still conjure up deeply-felt anxieties about colonialism and territorial integrity. In 1960’s The Cloud-Capped Star, we get something significantly more angry.

Supriya Choudhury and Anil Chatterjee in Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star

There are no farting cars in The Cloud-Capped Star, though the sound design is still integral to the aesthetic. (If Ajantrik mined laughs from the failing vehicle, The Cloud-Capped Star has more jarring things in mind with every sizzling stove.) But we are now in a full-fledged melodrama.

The narrative is brief and brutal. Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) takes care of her family — two parents, three siblings. They depend on the money she’s able to raise from a teaching gig. Her father is an intellectual who increasingly realizes he’s betrayed her kindness and filial care. Her mother resents her seeming angelic behavior, inventing reasons for irritation while simultaneously conveying a sense of her own loss in life. Her sister is a conceited sort of monster. Her two brothers are either entitled or simply able to shrug off her sacrifices, as they pursue their own goals.

Supriya Choudhury in Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star

Much of The Cloud-Capped Star takes place in the family home, or in the marketplace, or, significantly, near the river. This is where we first meet Neeta and her song-singing brother Shankar (Anil Chatterjee). Their relationship will form the crux of the film, though Ghatak cleverly incorporates all sorts of relations into the narrative. It’s a surprisingly sprawling film, given the focus on the home — we keep going outside.

Shankar’s love for his sister is evident, as is hers for him. This is presented in the first frame, as she finds him practicing under a tree. (In a staggeringly astute formal analysis, Raymond Bellour examines its relevance.) He’ll go on to great success, though too late; she will end up in a sanitarium in the mountains, crying out, in what some folks call Bollywood’s most famous line, “I wanted to live!” Here we are.

Supriya Choudhury in wide shot with tree Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star

Ghatak’s anti-colonial feminism is on full display. The Cloud-Capped Star is an angry film, at times a strident one, but always visually compelling. As though in a direct appeal to my personal sensibilities, the train plays a central role.

Ghatak embodies Partition through actual cuts in the frame, the passing train being the most obvious one. Nothing seems to hold as modernity divides our protagonists. Love brings people together, but all kinds of distances and desires separate them. Ghatak seems to feel it could’ve been another way.

Along with the anger, there’s a deep sorrow, a deep pessimism about the future. Even the acute angles suggest something off balance. Neeta has an opportunity to find happiness with a man she admires; he’ll end up with her sister instead, since there’s no time for their love between her work and his ambition.

Supriya Choudhury in Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped StarIs it all so obvious? The Cloud-Capped Star certainly doesn’t hide its affinities. Ghatak films in broad strokes half the time, without filters, and with extraordinary nuance for the rest. The Bengali specificity is there, but there’s a more general, even universal rage here. I have trouble even getting at my admiration for this movie. Like The Goddess, it’s exactly the sort of film I hoped to see when considering this series. It is so rooted in its moment, and so applicable to ongoing struggles, that I just wonder at it.

Ghatak would survive another 16 years after its release, eventually recognized as a master filmmaker, though increasingly lost to alcoholism and depression. Some of the songs in The Cloud-Capped Star would become the most famous of their kind. They remain, and the images remain.

 

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Great Movies: The Counter Programming

The daylight noir and social issue empathy of Ida Lupino

by rick
written by rick

Here’s an imaginative exercise. To get a sense of what it must’ve been like to be one of the very, very few women directors in 1950s Hollywood, we can simply read The New York Times‘ obituary for Ida Lupino, published upon her death 40 years later, in 1995. Alongside Lupino’s biography and a cursory look at her accomplishments, we get this:

Miss Lupino was petite, standing only 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 112 pounds. She had auburn hair and violet eyes framed by half-inch-long lashes.

Again, that’s in 1995.

I haven’t bothered to read their post-mortem of Humphrey Bogart, Lupino’s co-star in They Drive By Night and High Sierra, but I’ll go ahead and presume that his eyelashes do not occupy so prominent a place in the remembrance.

Ida Lupino’s career was long and fascinating, spanning decades. As an actress, she was called “the English Jean Harlow” (or, in her own sly phrasing, “the poor man’s Bette Davis”). As a director — with her first credit showing up in 1949, after a 6-year stretch in which Hollywood failed to produce a single film directed by a woman — she called herself “the poor man’s Don Siegel.”

Even allowing for self-deprecation, Lupino seems even to herself fundamentally second-tier, an artist operating in the scrappy, low-rent margins of representation, a genre-obsessed high femme in a man’s world.

The two films she directed in 1953 both adamantly argue for her inclusion in any discussion of the period. The Hitch-Hiker is a dude-heavy daylight noir trending toward horror, and The Bigamist a fundamentally empathetic “whydunnit” social picture about impossible choices. Neither would’ve been made by a man. Or, at the very least, they would’ve played much differently, and probably much worse.

The Hitch-Hiker is a sweaty, nihilistic piece of cinema. Inspired by the dead-eyed, spree-killing murderer Billy Cook, with a script from blacklisted writer Daniel Mainwaring and tenebroso lighting from Out of the Past cinematographer Nick Musuraca, Lupino’s film is efficient and claustrophobic. Two men escape the doldrums of their post-War suburban lives for a fun weekend of fishing, but a spur-of-the-moment decision to dip into Mexico and relive past bachelor glories saddles them with a serial killer in the back seat. The entire rest of the movie follows the trio as we wait for the inevitable.

Lupino amps up tension all along the ride, and The Hitch-Hiker starts to feel less like noir and more like a psychological horror. This isn’t just attributable to the sun-baked landscapes and the absence of women, neither of which would make much sense in a traditional noir. There is no loot, no one last job, no double crossing. It’s as though we’ve stumbled into a particular variety of mobile, interpersonal hellscape, a kind of Huis Clos on wheels. The killer plays with his victims, taking as much pleasure in tormenting them through tested allegiances as overt violence. The theme, it turns out, is not innate human foibles, but the collision of masculinities and desire.

In The Bigamist, Lupino returns, in a fashion, to the sort of social issue drama that animated most of her earlier films with The Filmakers (one ‘m’, for reasons no one can explain), the production company she set up with her then-husband Collier Young. Others had dealt with rape, polio, abandoned children — noble-minded and of-the-moment, and not things Hollywood was likely to touch with a ten foot pole. (There are remarkable similarities here with Lupino’s predecessor Lois Weber, and the film’s pedantic final moments recall Louise Brooks in Diary of a Lost Girl.)

The concerns of The Bigamist are right there in the title. But if you’re showing up for a lurid story, Lupino aims to disappoint. The Bigamist is overflowing with empathy for its titular hero, a traveling salesman locked in a loving marriage to Joan Fontaine that is feeling more and more like a business partnership, as well as his wife and the woman down in L.A. he ends up marrying after she gets pregnant (Lupino).

In a strange way, The Bigamist is the more narratively noir-ish of the two: totally predictable impulses lead to totally irreconcilable situations, and nothing but the tragic awaits us. Lupino allows the tale to unfold in such a way that guilt, if not hard to establish, is understandable. The film’s soap opera title hides a classic story of a few bad choices writ large.

And, of course, she casts herself as the “other woman,” cannily recognizing how audiences perceived her in the first place. (Not to mention that Collier Young, who wrote the film, would shortly divorce Lupino and marry Fontaine in real life. Awkward.) A famous scene depicts the clumsily philandering, but mostly lonely, husband meeting Lupino on an L.A. tourist bus visiting the Houses of the Stars. The lines between fantasy and reality are blurred, until they’re not; after all, if he’s there for a diversion, she tells him she just rides buses to sleep between waitress shifts.

As in The Hitch-Hiker, and as an actress throughout her career, Lupino has a gift for the small gesture, the ways solitary movement prefigures joint action. Framing the killer between the two kidnapped men, mediated only by the gun that binds them somehow segues to the man in a courtroom, buttressed by wives with equal claims. These are hard-nosed films, horror/noir and melodrama by turn, but Lupino’s hand is recognizable in each.

I have no more explanation why she wasn’t included on the original Counter-Programming list than I do for Germaine Du Lac, whose work I discussed yesterday. But she absolutely merits a place here for any number of reasons: as actress, director, producer, and master of genre. If her work is too square for the round holes of the canon, so much the better. These are films that demand repeat viewings.

 

 

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Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Feminist? Impressionist? Surrealist? The Overlooked Enigmas of Germaine Dulac

by rick
written by rick

There are no doubt a number of reasons why the name Germaine Dulac is not as immediately familiar to most folks, including cinephiles, as her contemporaries Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, or her collaborator-turned-detractor Antonin Artaud. Here are two: the casual misogyny of the Surrealist Boy’s Club, and the fact that Dulac’s films don’t really fit the Surrealist mold very well in the first place. In fact, her two most famous seem, at least at first, at odds even with each other.

Both The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922) and The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) are loose, impressionistic adaptations of literary works, the first indications that Dulac is operating from a different starting point than something like Un Chien Andalou, released shortly after in 1929 to much scandalous fanfare and continuing to fill our heads with sliced eyeballs to this day.

Often called “the first feminist film,” Madame Beudet especially argues against the “pre-Surrealist” tag. Based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, Dulac’s breakthrough is Impressionistic through and through. Dulac deploys superimpositions, in-camera daydreams, distended images, and manipulation of the frame-rate to tell the story of a bored housewife, her nasty and controlling cloth-merchant husband, and her erotic, sometimes violent dreams of escape. When the husband implores her to come to see Faust with another couple, Dulac makes clear how exactly how much this tedious prospect appeals to Madame.

The roots of her ennui aren’t exactly specified, but they’re not hard to discern. In the most immediate sense, her husband is boring and boorish: tallying up numbers, failing to tuck in his shirt like a slob, slurping soup and letting it fall through his gross teeth.

Not to mention his profoundly uncharming, and frankly very weird, penchant for playing mock Russian Roulette at his desk with an unloaded pistol, either for laughs (his own) or as a whiny rebuttal to her failure to be more cheery. (It goes without saying that The Smiling Madame Beudet does not, in fact, smile very much.)

At the same time, Dulac frames this narrative in ways emphasizing her protagonist’s more general imprisonment in the domestic space. The husband is awful, to be sure, but he’s just a foot soldier for the patriarchy.

A recurring motif finds her arranging a vase of flowers towards the edge of a table, only for the husband to breeze through the room and put it back, nice and orderly, in the center. It’s a small conflict that speaks volumes in its repetition:

A flower kept in a vase does not have the same freedom as one growing out in the open air, but at the very least, it’s able to reach for the sun from it’s place on the table. The husband’s almost constant fiddling destroys it’s harmony, and emphasizes the complete control men have over women. The women are not even given the freedom to thrive freely within the confines of their home, and are left with little more than their own body to control.

Much of the film depicts these sorts of simmering resentments, filtered through almost constant, superimposed fantasies of independence and desire. In a memorable scene, a sexy tennis player emerges from a magazine to attack the husband with his racket (one of the moments The Smiling Madame does smile, in some sort of proto-9 to 5 scenario). Mirrors figure prominently, too, underscoring the unsettling reflections and refractions of identity. In the end, as Chekhov could’ve told you, there will be a bullet in that gun we keep seeing.

If none of this sounds particularly Surrealist, I’d agree. The overwhelming sense in The Smiling Madame Beudet is an artist having fun with the possibilities of the cinema to augment, invert, or subvert its source material, to use the camera in a way that distinguished film from the page or the stage. The whole idea of the superimposition — that we can witness two or more things simultaneously, that the mundane real and erotic imaginary can intrude on each other in the same field of vision — speaks to Dulac’s interest in the medium itself.

Five years later, The Seashell and the Clergyman marked a pronounced switch from this approach. Based on Artaud’s book, and shot from his screenplay, this film downplays narrative to the point that the British Board of Film Censors called it “so cryptic as to be almost meaningless.” (British to the end, they added, “If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.”)

The censors overstate the case. In The Seashell and the Clergyman, Dulac and Artaud are pretty clear in their intention: a fragmented vision of frustrated desire, fraught fantasy, and unstable images that intentionally don’t cohere. For these reasons, at least, it often gets saddled with the title “the first Surrealist film,” whether the Surrealists liked it or not. (Note: they did not like it.)

As far as narrative is concerned, this is apparently the story of a priest who lusts after the wife of a general. That’s about it. Dulac is far more concerned with the musicality of its presentation, with the rhythmic editing and odd juxtapositions that Un Chien Andalou would be celebrated for the following year. Perhaps even the fact that a short narrative description is possible is what alienated the Surrealists from it, including, eventually, Artaud himself.

It’s hard to see what he had to complain about, though. His scenario included passages such as this:

 

 

A series of close-ups of the priest’s head, unpleasantly sweet, welcoming when it appears in the woman’s eyes, and hard, bitter, terrible when it considers the clergyman…[The clergyman] is on the summit of a mountain, in superimposition at his feet, rivers and plains interlaced…[The clergyman] throws himself on the woman and rips off her blouse as if he wanted to lacerate her breasts.  But her breasts are replaced by a carapace of seashells.  And snatches this carapace and brandishes it in the air where it shimmers.  He shakes it frenetically in the air and the scene changes and shows a ballroom.  Couples enter; some mysteriously on tiptoe, others extremely busy.  The lights seem to follow the movements of the couples.  All the women are wearing short dresses, legs on display, breasts bulging, hair cut short. […] Servants, housekeepers invade the room with buckets and brooms, rush to the windows.  They scrub all over with intensity, frenzy, passion.  A sort of rigid governess, dressed all in black, enters with a bible in her hand and goes to stand by a window.  When we can distinguish her face, we notice that it’s still the same beautiful woman.  On a path outside, we see a priest who is hurrying, and further away a young girl in a garden dress with a tennis racket.  She is playing with an unidentified young man.

This is exactly what transpires.

Still, Dulac’s concern seems more a particular blend of pure cinema and Impressionism, with the female object of desire retaining an elusive and mysterious agency amid all the ambiguous cuts and contrasts. That alone separates The Seashell and the Clergyman from its more famous younger sibling, with its iconic cloud eyeballs and dragged pianos. Instead of abandoning perspectives in favor of glorious nonsense, Dulac blurs them (along with genders and devotional/erotic ritual). The result is actually more interesting.

Neither of these two films were originally included in this series, demonstrating the degree to which the works of early women filmmakers have been devalued in the canon (and even in the anti-canon). But that’s also why several empty spots were left on the list. There’s just a wealth of incredible film that should get more attention than it does.

Dulac, at least as represented in these films, was a singular and odd talent. The uneasy coexistence of dream and life bring to mind Jean Epstein, the way she shoots water prefigures Mario Peixote’s 1931 Limite, and numerous moments can’t help but evoke that other not-quite-Surrealist of our own time, David Lynch. (In fact, one scene in The Smiling Madame Beudet is remarkably similar to one of the internet’s favorite bits of Twin Peaks nightmare fuel.)

But these comparisons aren’t necessary, as though these two remarkable films from a woman director in the 20s needed validation by fellow travelers and weirdos of the screen. Germaine Dulac’s work is plenty weird and transfixing on its own.

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Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Madness at the train depot in Cairo Station

by rick
written by rick

As Qinawi — our despondent, hobbling, would-be protagonist in Cairo Station — retreats to his shed outside the train depot to rest, he shifts the pants hanging from a ramshackle clothesline to block the midday sun from his eyes. It’s the kind of Neorealist detail that the great Egyptian director Youssef Chahine excels at here, in this, his arguable masterpiece.

Italian Neorealism had more or less run its course by 1958, when Cairo Station was released. Its aesthetic influences and social concerns, creeping across the screens of the globe, were still being felt in treatments like this.

At the same time, Cairo Station could just as easily be cited as a moody noir — with its chiaroscuro window blinds and doomed misunderstandings — or a horror for that matter, or a melodrama. Chahine’s view is expansive.

Youssef Chahine and Hend Rostom in Cairo Station

Casting himself as the rather pathetic newspaper vendor with a limp, Chahine’s 11th film diverged from earlier Egyptian cinema in look, feel, and narrative. Taking place over a single day at the train depot, Cairo Station hinges on an unrequited love triangle (there’s the melodrama!) that develops between Qinawi, the over-the-top vivacious Hannuma (Hend Rostom), and her labor organizer fiancee Abu Siri (Farid Shawqi).

It’s really a love triangle in name only, though, existing in Qinawi fevered, lonely imagination. In close-ups of his own eyes held either agonizingly long or shot through in manic flashes, Chahine indicates where this is going, and it’s no place good. 

Throughout all the film’s mounting intensity, there is also a sense of an Egypt in flux. Concerns range from the effect that the union organizing will have on existing power structures among the vendors, the rise of feminism and a rejection of marriage as an institution, rock n’ roll suddenly emerging as a destabilizing force threatening the traditionalists. Cairo Station packs a lot of social and political observation in among the tragedies and ultimate bloodletting.

Hend Rostom dancing in Cairo Station

And lastly, there is the nameless young couple who make three appearances. In the first, he sneaks through to briefly hold her hand at the station, breaking away from his family to steal a private moment. In the second, she waves goodbye to him as his train departs. And in the film’s final shot, it’s her we see, a spectator to the disaster of love and desire.

Is Chahine implying a new cycle about to begin? Or the possibilities of an unsure future, handed off to the pining youth after the adults have gone mad? It seems like a curiously hopeful, if ambiguous, shot to close on for Cairo Station, which is rarely particularly hopeful or ambiguous in its more general impact.

Chahine would go on to make films throughout the next several decades, though some stories indicate this was the one he held closest. It’s a great place to start.

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CommentaryFilmGreat Movies: The Counter Programming

The Weirdly Erotic Nostalgia of Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik

by rick
written by rick

At a crucial moment in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (frequently translated as The Pathetic Fallacy), our hero Bimal strokes the most important person in his life and says, “Never mind, Jaggadal. You and I … we’re together.”

It’s a poignant moment, this Bengali portrait of devotion and erotic desire in the face of widespread mockery and community derision.

Also, Jaggadal is his car.

Ritwik Ghatak AjantrikAjantrik channels many modes simultaneously: manic slapstick, Brechtian absurdity, deeply felt commentary on social conditions. Satyajit Ray is commonly credited with founding Indian parallel cinema, mixing social realist tropes with local concerns as a quiet rebuttal to mainstream movies, but there’s a good argument that Ghatak — with his first, pre-Pather Panchali film The Citizen — got there first. Ajantrik was his second. Its influences can be felt in Ray’s Abhijan four years later, and in the general outline of Ray-devotee Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver quite a bit later then that.

Regardless of lineage, Ghatak seemed to be up to something different in Ajantrik. The film tells the story of Bimal, a man out of place and not in sync with his time. He too is a taxi driver, but refuses to give up his beloved Jaggadal, an aging, creaking, huffing and puffing car he’s had for over a decade. In his insistence that it’s never broken down, so why should he get a new one, you can hear every stubborn man refusing the latest invention.

But Ghatak mines deeper: even though his beloved is, as he’s constantly reminded by his incredulous boss and mocking neighbors, “a hunk of iron and steel,” Jaggadal is also a symbol that goes way beyond its physical manifestation. It’s a bit of pre-Partition nostalgia, and his clinging to seems to represent a rejection not just of newfangled imports but modernity itself.

Ritwik Ghatak Ajantrix petrolNo one else’s car has a name. And certainly no one would lavish upon their car the care he reserves for Jaggadal. His self-identity is bound up with this thing, which, in Ghatak’s hands, takes on a life of its own. Long before the Disney-helmed Bernie series, post-production sound design give Jaggadal an almost corporeal personality: the car is essentially the main character of the film with Bimal in the supporting role. As Stephen Holden notes, the car constantly produces “a comic symphony of wheezes, honks and rattles.”

All of this is very funny and very ridiculous, but Ghatak isn’t just out for Hulot-like laughs. Another crucial scene features Bimal coming across a ceremony as he struggles to get Jaggadal moving again. Omar Ahmed writes:

One could definitely label this as a road movie, with Bimal’s episodic journey across the plains of the Ganges delta providing some illuminating compositions of rural landscapes. However, it is the observation of the Oraons tribe through the elaborate dance rituals that offers a glimpse of Ghatak’s personal ethnographic fascination with marginalised cultures and people…

In the scene, though, you get the sense that Bimal isn’t comfortable here, either. The observed ritual seems to evoke an even more distant past, one further remote from his struggles than his uncomfortable segue into an unsure modern age. He simply has his car, and he wants to keep it.

It’s not to be. When Jaggadal finally gives up the ghost and is sold for scrap, Bimal treats it as a funeral, perhaps his own. (Ghatak underlines this: Bilal apparently lives right next to a graveyard.)

The eroticism of the earlier scenes isn’t exactly David Cronenberg’s Crash, but the fierce merging of man and machine is evident. We close on a child playing with the car horn, the only piece that survived — appropriately enough, for a film obsessed with noises, the sound-making one. His delight brings a smile to Bimal’s face. Perhaps Jaggadal lives on.

It could be a nostalgic vision only, except that the goofball laughs end up being played straight. There’s certainly something silly about a man whispering to his car, but Ghatak infuses the film with so much historically specific pathos that it feels more like a eulogy.

A eulogy for an inanimate fetish object, sure, but a eulogy all the same.

 

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Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Dialectics and the Korean B-Movie: The Flower In Hell

by rick
written by rick

There is no moment in Shin Sang-ok‘s A Flower In Hell in which the American post-war occupation of Korea is absent. It is the film’s focal point, even when the soldiers aren’t on screen. Even when lovers are rolling around in the grass. Even when the melodrama climaxes, as it must, in blood.

A Flower In Hell is simultaneously a melodrama, a heist flick, a post-war chronicle, and a kind of steamy, self-conscious Korean riff on the American B-movie. It’s the story of a love set in squalor, bad choices in fraught circumstance, a country bumpkin undone by the sins of the city, and a faithless femme fatale pitting brother against brother. But throughout, Shin returns again and again to the American soldiers who haunt this land like plantation overseers. You never forget where all the trouble came from.

Choi Eun-hee and Jo Hae-wan in The Flower In Hell

Choi Eun-hee stars as that femme fatale Sonia, a prostitute who comes between two brothers. Young-shik (Hak Kim) is a local leader, at home in this neighborhood of soldiers and whores on the outskirts of Seoul, who occasionally puts together big plans to rip of the Yankees. Dong-shik (Jo Hae-wan) is his younger brother, fresh out of the army, arriving in the big city to retrieve his sibling and bring him back to the country village of their youth.

From the start, Shin maps a dialectic of city and country values, with the added complication of the decidedly unsaintly love interest that mediates between them. Everything comes in threes here, and the resolution of that conflict will leave two dead in the mud and another, more faithful woman to round out the picture.

Of course, Young-shik is in stupid love with Sonia, and of course Sonia will take a shine to Dong-shik. This is archetypal stuff, some sort of Jungian love triangle we see coming from a mile away. For Shin, the interest seems to lie more in the contextual detail, the way one of humanity’s most basic stories plays out against the backdrop of war.

Jo Hae-wan and Hak Kim in The Flower In Hell

Or rather, the trappings of war. Soldiers go to nightclubs where these women perform. It’s soldiers who pay them for sex, call them (in English) “lovely,” buy their time and scurry back to the base. And it’s soldiers Young-shik and his crew are out to rob. Shin films the heist sequences in A Flower In Hell like a low-budget Korean Jules Dassin, relishing misdirection and elaborate plans. Michael Sicinski sees Edgar Ulmer or Sam Fuller; the frequent, throat-clearing interludes and faces mapped against empty sky made me think of Nicholas Ray.

No matter: the point is, it looks very good. As Sicinski notes:

In maintaining this tricky balance, Shin’s MVP is most certainly cinematographer Kang Beom-gu. Shooting his first feature, Kang moves easily between the Griersonian observation of base life and the sharp, sculptural framing of the love triangle, producing noir-in-broad-daylight compositions that flatten space with bold chiaroscuro and construct the 1:33 rectangle of the academy frame-ratio as a prison of erotic energy.

Choi Eun-hee is particularly strong in this role, the polar opposite of her virtuous widow exhibiting a kind of noblesse-oblige in Hometown In The Heart 11 years earlier. In A Flower In Hell, she is all swagger and sex, a duplicitous woman working on the fringes and playing the boys against each other. Is there a meta-text in this, and perhaps another dialectic? She’s an angel and a whore, a mother and a figure of pure desire. This certainly isn’t a problem restricted to Korean cinema, and one wonders how it can be resolved into something more true.

Shin resolves it with the belated, tacked-on substitution of another prostitute who has been hankering for Dong-shik, a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold trope who takes her place in the moments before the credits roll. It’s not believable. Sam Fuller surely would’ve ended the film in the muck.

In the mud in The Flower In Hell

Still, A Flower In Hell is compulsively watchable, shot through with incident and ideas and striking images. The pairing of melodrama with occupation is brilliant, and the heist sequences generate yet another erotic thrill. (That the climax involves a train seems aimed directly at me.)

Roughly 20 years after the film’s release, both its director and star would be kidnapped by agents of Kim Jong-Il, spirited north and forced to make pictures for the burgeoning autocratic film industry the dictator hoped to recreate. Perhaps he saw A Flower In Hell and assumed it would be a good place to start, what with its clear affection for noir and classic Hollywood tropes mapped through a Korean lens. It’s a monstrous idea, but, if that’s the case, he wouldn’t be wrong.

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Guru Datt in Pyaasa
Great Movies: The Counter Programming

“Burn This World, Blow It Asunder”: The Outraged Melodrama of Pyaasa

by rick
written by rick

The furious quote in the title, courtesy of our tortured poet protagonist Vijay (director/producer/star Guru Datt), arrives near the end of 1957’s Pyaasa. Spurned by a world that privileges commerce over art, that elevates duplicity over sincerity and integrity at every turn, Vijay has had enough. He longs not just for his own annihilation, but the destruction of every social condition that’s allowed for such rampant cruelty and greed. Datt’s Pyaasa is not fucking around.

It was also, somewhat incredibly, a monumental hit with critics and audiences alike. Blending the song and dance of classic Bollywood with comedic elements, doomed romances, and heart-on-the-sleeve social protest, Pyaasa is a very odd entry in late-50s cinema. It’s not hard to see its appeal, though: even if distributors forced a happy (ok, happy-ish) ending on Datt’s production, there is something for everyone here.

It also helps that Datt’s romantic direction, V.K. Murthy‘s expressionist cinematography, and S.D. Burman‘s effectively (and almost uniformly lovely) integrated songs work in tandem — if not seamlessly than at least not in distinction to each other. Pyaasa is a masterpiece of synthesis.

Guru Datt and Mala Sinha in Pyaasa

When the film opens, we find Vijay asleep in the forest, lost in painful reverie. He’s a penniless poet who thinks he has something important to tell the world, but finds the world decidedly uninterested, even hostile. Murthy’s camera trains in on a bee buzzing around a flower, as a poem (presumably Vijay’s) is recited, marveling at natural beauty but wondering what he could possibly add. Moments later, the bee is crushed by the shoe of a passing stranger.

In this moment, we learn two things: that the world is a tenuous place, and that Datt will not go light on the metaphors in Pyaasa.

Like that doomed bee, Vijay will be crushed under the heel of events. His two terrible brothers reject him as a good-for-nothing loafer, selling his poems for scrap paper and tossing him out of the family house, even over the objections of his long-suffering mother. An offer to publish his work ends up being a ruse orchestrated by a man named Ghosh (Rehman Khan) to find out why his wife Meena (Mala Sinha) so admires them. When circumstances indicate Vijay’s death, his work will be “posthumously” celebrated, as everyone in sight rushes to cash in on the fame they withheld during his life. It’s a cynical, untrustworthy land we’ve found ourselves in.

Rehman Khan and Mala Sinha in Pyaasa

The only consistent image of love and beauty is that of Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman), a sex worker as despised for her job as Vijay is for his apparent lack of one. The larger society that casts judgement is implicated for its hypocrisy, while Pyaasa‘s narrative emphasizes integrity and honesty on the margins.

As it turns out, Vijay and Meena had been college sweethearts, but she abandoned him for the security of wealth with the noxious Ghosh. Pyaasa deals harshly with this decision, and for all its emphasis on the dire choices women face in the streets, its text has virtually no sympathy with Meena’s decision. This is an unfortunate missed opportunity.

In any case, something of a love triangle emerges between Vijay, Meena, and Gulabo, though it’s a decidedly chaste one (clear-eyed discussions of sex work aside). I was strangely reminded of Trouble In Paradise, two decades prior and a world away, in which integrity is associated with those who operate outside the bounds of respectability and derision reserved for those who come to their fortunes through standard channels.

Trouble in ParadiseOne crucial difference: Trouble In Paradise never asked audiences to root against Madame Colet, and certainly never subjected her to any lecturing. In that sense, Datt, with his sincere belief in the virtue of the artistic and the maligned, is far removed from the Continental cynicism of someone like Pabst, who views everyone as a crook of one sort or another.

Of course, there are no fur coats or elegant cufflinks to be found in Pyaasa, which Datt actually wanted to partially shoot in the Red Light District until his crew was robbed by pimps and the production had to settle for replica sets. Post-Independence India is a rough place, and Pyaasa portrays it as such, as people with limited options scramble to get by. But through it all, even the most light-hearted moments, there is a very serious emphasis on the importance of integrity in a world of thieves.

Eventually, Pyaasa climaxes in a showdown between Vijay and the adoring audience who never loved him until he died. This is a strong moment in the film, and one with a lot of resonance in this or any time: we’re content to shrug off artistry in life and exalt it in death. Vijay refuses his fame and fortune, refuses even to prove his name. He sings to the riotous crowd:

A world where youth is driven to crime
A world where the young are groomed for the marketplace.
A world where love is another name for trade
For what will it profit a man if he gain the world?

A world where man is worth nothing
A world where friendship and loyalty mean nothing
A world where love is regarded with disdain
For what will it profit a man if he gain the world?

Burn this world, blow it asunder!
Take this world away from my sight!
This world belongs to you, you keep it.
For what will it profit a man if he gain the world?

As The Film Sufi astutely points out (in a piece containing more insight into Indian cinema than you’ll find here):

Since almost everyone that Vijay sees is out for his or her own selfish pursuits, his thoughts have now moved from frustration with his own personal circumstances (romance, family, joblessness) to a condemnation of the entire world.

Poems originally written for Meena, composed in heartbreak, now subsume life itself, at least as it’s lived by those in the gutters. Individual grief becomes social outrage, and Vijay leaves it behind in disgust.

None of this would work without the careful aesthetic, which not only emphasizes both close-ups and almost Wellesian in-depth compositions, but goes further into expressionism. One scene allows the camera to careen from Vijay’s face, zooming in and retreating, creating the effect of distance and longing the characters share. The final riot features an unexpected crane-shot of the assembled group of “mourners”, with Vijay backlit like Christ himself in a Church. Datt and his team are a long way from the static shots of musical numbers, or even the huge, intermittent spectacles of Raj Kapoor’s Awaara. This is something closer, more intimate, and angrier.

All of which it makes it sound like it’s lacking in fun. But the very fact that it was a mega-hit should dispel that notion. There are still songs, dances, and comic moments amid all the tortured meditations on social ills. I particularly enjoyed the goofball character of Sattar (Johnny Walker), a sympathetic huckster, and the brief appearance of Tulsi Chakraborty (the schoolteacher from Ray’s Pather Panchali) as a guy passing off counterfeit coins.

But the overwhelming sense you get from Pyassa is outrage that life can be so cheap, art so disrespected, women treated with such disdain. It’s a far more socially-minded film than I expected, and perhaps this, combined with its numerous other admirable elements, account for its popularity in 1957 and since.

 

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