4/29/2023 0 Comments The plague doctor apexThe camera movements seem to trace the effects of Kane's centrifugal force. Orson Welles' jigsaw-puzzle portrait of a Hearst-like magnate named Charles Foster Kane is a completely and excitingly externalized portrait of a world-class power-monger. His ability to inject modern skepticism into medieval fable, without diluting either, delivers spiritual adventure with the detail and nuance of experience and the heat of prophecy and inspiration. Bergman takes one visionary leap after another, without a net. In a countryside ravaged by plague and fear, Max von Sydow’s Crusade-weary knight cries out to a deity "who must be somewhere." Does he receive a response? In the climactic image a string of travelers dance with the Grim Reaper "away from the dawn"-as writer-director Ingmar Bergman put it in the screenplay- “while the rain washes their faces and clears the salt of the tears from their cheeks." Does that mean they will be redeemed? These questions are the source of the movie’s tension but not of the black magic it sustains from the moment the knight joins Death in a chess match to a dance of death so poetically acute it invades our dreams. Kurosawa's masterpiece dwarfs its legions of successors. The test of a great, innovative movie is whether its power survives decades of imitation. No one can match his visual range, either: here his vision spans the storybook tableau of a white-clad woman sitting near a white horse in an enchanted grove-and the horrifying set piece of a bound husband watching a brute ravishing his wife. “Rashomon.” No other director can match Kurosawa’s genius at developing a story by leaps and bounds while revealing irresolvable discrepancies in a multi-voiced group narrative. He tightens his focus so unerringly that the final shot - of Umberto D playing fetch with Flik, trying to win back the dog's alienated affections - becomes a prodigious expression of canine loyalty and human solitude. His artful symmetries support his embracing vision. The movie starts with its only panoramic scene: elderly men demanding an increase in their pensions De Sica echoes that scene later in a dog pound. But De Sica turns mundane incidents into searing presentations of character: when Umberto D teaches Flik to beg with his homburg hat, the combination of heartbreak and comedy is transporting. On the surface, he simply follows the title character, played with tattered bourgeois hauteur by the retired professor Carlo Battisti, as he and his dog Flik wander through Rome in a futile search for money and fellowship. With this story of a debt-ridden retired civil servant, he quietly scales the peak of neorealism. It’s that he fills the frame with so much life that the virtuosity of his staging and compositions become trivial by comparison. UMBERTO D.Ĭontrary to what Orson Welles said, the greatness of De Sica is not that he makes the camera and the screen disappear. William Holden brings a multilayered gnarliness to the role of the gang's leader: he screwed up in the past and is determined to pull off his last job and “do it right.” No movie embodies "doing it right" better than 'The Wild Bunch.' It's the Gotterdammerung of westerns. It releases the group energy of the most quirkily expressive ensemble ever assembled for an action movie. The script, cowritten with Walon Green, puts the cast through tests of individual strength and loyalty that harrow Peckinpah’s obsessions with appetite and anarchy and the codes that rein us in. Peckinpah's lyrical image-making and kaleidoscopic editing catalyze complex feelings about their freedom, brotherhood and professionalism, their manliness and childishness. Peckinpah's bandits experience the closed frontier as purgatory and Mexico as an escape-hatch. It's at once an extraordinary summation of Peckinpah’s complex personality and a wrenching piece of 20th-century mythology about the last stand of an Old West outlaw gang. He creates a masterpiece: the apex of the kind of personal filmmaking that's capacious enough to encompass history and the world. The director, Sam Peckinpah, rips himself open and, against all odds, puts himself back together, frame by bloody frame.
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