River's Edge (1986)

Peter's nite

Janet Maslin in the New York Times:

As he demonstrated in ''Tex,'' Mr. Hunter has an extraordinarily clear understanding of teen-age characters, especially those who must find their own paths without much parental supervision. But the S. E. Hinton story for that film is a great deal more innocent than this one, and a lot more easily understood. While Mr. Hunter retains his ear for adolescent dialogue (the screenplay is by Neal Jiminez) and his eye for the aimless, restless behavior of these characters, neither he nor we can easily make the necessary leap to understand their casualness about Samson's crime. That Mr. Hunter is brave enough to avoid easy moralizing and easy explanations finally makes his film harder to fathom.

Much of ''River's Edge'' - which is based on several actual incidents, especially one in Northern California - is acted with utter conviction by a fine and largely unknown young cast. But the uncertain conceptions of a few key characters are damaging, especially that of Layne, who in his confusion becomes Samson's accomplice. Layne thinks himself more daring than his classmates, and without question he is more stoned. That leads him to conclude that loyalty to Samson is the only practical option. Samson and Jamie were both friends, he reasons, but it is Samson who's still alive and needs support. This is the film's key moral position, but it is explicated cartoonishly by Crispin Glover, who makes Layne a larger-than-life caricature and creates a noisy, comic impersonation instead of a lifelike character. Nor does it help that one of the film's other moral polarities comes from a 60's-minded, hipper-than-thou schoolteacher who declares, ''We took to the streets and made a difference!'' To his bored, jaded 80's high-school students, this kind of self-righteousness makes no sense at all.

Most of the performances are as natural and credible as the ones in ''Tex,'' with Mr. Roebuck a sad and helpless figure as Samson, and Keanu Reeves affecting and sympathetic as Tim's older brother; a different kind of generation gap already exists between these two, and the threat of fratricide between them leads to the film's most frightening confrontation. The ravishing Ione Skye Leitch (daughter of the singer Donovan) seems convincingly troubled as the character who must wonder why she feels more watching television tragedies than she does about her dead friend. And Mr. Hopper, whose scenes with the party doll ought to be thoroughly ridiculous, once again makes himself a very powerful presence. For better or worse, Mr. Hopper is back with a vengeance.

Crispin Glover via MTV:

"Personally, there are three [of my] films I like on the whole as films. ... 'The Orkly Kid,' which was a short film I made at [the American Film Institute] when I was 19, 'River's Edge,' which I think is an excellent movie, and 'What Is It?,' which I made. ... There was a reshowing of 'River's Edge' at one point in time, and [writer Neal Jimenez] said to the audience, 'When I first saw "River's Edge," I thought Crispin had ruined the film. But now, I feel like he ultimately made the film.' "

NYT on Neal Jimenez:

By the time the screenwriter Neal Jimenez had reached his mid-20's, his career seemed golden. A script that he had written in film school for what would become the well-received "River's Edge" was set for production. Agents and studios swarmed around dangling job offers even before he graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles.On a personal level, Mr. Jimenez's life was more complicated. He was having a serious affair with a married woman who was considering leaving her husband.

Then one night in July 1984, while on a camping trip near Sacramento, he slipped and fell into a shallow lake, breaking his neck. Within days, Mr. Jimenez, now without the use of his legs, was wheeled on his back into a rehabilitation center, where he found himself surrounded by other patients with similar injuries. His life, he felt, was as shattered as his spine.Mr. Jimenez, now a 31-year-old paraplegic, has drawn upon his experiences at the center to create "The Waterdance," which opens Wednesday. The film, written and co-directed by Mr. Jimenez, won an award as the most popular film at the Sundance Film Festival in March and also received the festival's prestigious Waldo Salt screenwriting prize. Its co-director is Michael Steinberg, a film maker and friend of Mr. Jimenez's since student days, who was brought into the project to add his personal perspective and, since Mr. Jimenez had never directed before, to help with technical matters.

Die hard (1988)

Pamela's Nite

Jon Stuart on writers' strike

Looks like I'll be updating MovieNite sooner than I thought.

Don't try to be original -- just try to be good.

This is specifically about design -- but so much of it applies to filmmaking.

Updates will be slow...

MovieNite updates will be slow through December. But I'll catch up.

Winter Kills (1979)

Stuart's Nite

Via William Richart's site:

Helming his own adaptation of Richard ("The Manchurian Candidate"; "Prizzi's Honor") Condon's novel, Richert crafted a jet black comedy starring Jeff Bridges as the younger brother of an assassinated president who becomes embroiled in a mind-boggling conspiracy as he searches for the real assassin. Though "Winter Kills" was his first fiction feature as a director (having previously helmed several "cinema verite" documentaries), Richert managed to round up an extraordinary cast in support of Bridges including John Huston as the patriarch power broker, Anthony Perkins, Toshiro Mifune, Sterling Hayden, Eli Wallach, Dorothy Malone and Elizabeth Taylor. Not surprisingly, his powers of persuasion are legendary.

Production began in 1976 and screeched to a halt a few weeks before completion when union representatives arrived on the set. "Winter Kills" was shut down for non-payment of salaries. MGM impounded the negative and the production went into bankruptcy. A bad situation became surreal as one of the neophyte producers was found dead in his apartment, handcuffed and shot through the head, while the other was arrested for drug smuggling as part of the biggest marijuana bust in California history. The making of the film had become every bit as dark, convoluted and absurd as its plot.

While struggling to raise money to complete "Winter Kills", Richert scripted (from a Larry Cohen story) and directed another off-beat satire starring Jeff Bridges, "The American Success Company/American Success/Success" (1979). The targets were capitalism and machismo as Bridges portrayed a rich and passive young man who spices up his life by developing an alternate persona. Made in Munich with German tax shelter money, the film was barely released to mixed reviews. Deemed quite funny but uneven, "The American Success Company" has its share of ardent admirers including Steven Spielberg who owns a print that he shows to friends.

Meanwhile, Richert convinced Avco-Embassy to put up the money for two more weeks of shooting on "Winter Kills". He reassembled the necessary cast members and finally finished the film in late 1978. The $6 million budget had inflated to $8 million but many creditors were never paid. "Winter Kills" was released briefly in 1979 to mostly perplexed reviews and quickly pulled by the studio in favor of a less estimable flop, "Goldengirl", with Susan Anton. In contrast, the reputation of Richert's film has only grown over the years.

In 1980, Richert and former studio exec Claire Townsend formed the Invisible Studio, an unorthodox distribution company which re-released "The American Success Story" as "American Success" in 1981 (the title was later shortened to "Success"). "Winter Kills" was revived, re-edited and re-released with its original ending restored in 1983.

On the Town (1949)

Nora's Nite

Via American Masters:

Born in 1912 into a large middle-class Irish family in Pittsburgh, Kelly's father was a traveling record salesman and his mother was possessed with a formidable determination to expose her children to the arts. By his teenage years, Gene and his brother Fred took over a failing dance school with their mother and their father slid deeper into alcoholism. After choreographing local shows and playing nightclubs with Fred, by 1938 Kelly felt he was good enough to buy a one-way ticket to New York City and eventually won the lead role in the original Broadway production of Pal Joey.

Seeing him on stage, MGM head Louis B. Mayer assured Kelly that the studio would like to sign him without so much as a screen test but, through a series of miscommunications, a screen test is requested and Kelly refused. Writing an acerbic letter to Mayer accusing him of duplicity, Kelly turned down the counteroffer and set the stage for a lifetime of acrimony between the two men. Ironically, Kelly was put under contract at Selznick International by Mayer's son-in-law David O. Selznick, who had no interest in producing musicals and thought Kelly could exist purely as a dramatic actor. With no roles forthcoming, Kelly was loaned out to MGM to co-star with Judy Garland in FOR ME AND MY GAL. The film was a hit and Selznick subsequently sold the actor and his contract to MGM.

A series of mediocre roles followed and it was not until Kelly was loaned out to Columbia for 1944's COVER GIRL, with Rita Hayworth, that he became firmly established as a star. His landmark "alter ego" sequence, in which he partnered with himself, brought film dance to a new level of special effects. With Stanley Donen as his assistant, Kelly created a sense of the psychological and integrated story telling never before seen in a Hollywood musical. Realizing what they had, MGM refused to ever loan him out again, ruining Kelly's opportunity to star in the film versions of GUYS AND DOLLS, PAL JOEY and even SUNSET BOULEVARD. Back with producer Arthur Freed at MGM, Kelly continued his innovative approach to material by placing himself in a cartoon environment to dance with Jerry the Mouse in ANCHOR'S AWEIGH yet another musical first.

During his marriage to the actress Betsy Blair, Kelly was radicalized and the couple became well known for their liberal politics. In 1947, when the Carpenters Union went on strike and the Hollywood studios were looking for an intermediary to intervene on their behalf, Kelly was chosen much to everyone's surprise. He traveled back and forth from Culver City to union headquarters in Chicago for two months, mediating a strike that was costing the studios dearly. When a settlement was finally reached, Kelly was shocked to learn that the studios felt it was unfair and that they had been cheated by his siding with the strikers. Naively and genuinely trying to help and unaware of unstated expectations, underhanded tactics, and slush funds Kelly's efforts only resulted in further exacerbating his relationship with Louis B. Mayer.

As the Blacklist Era began, Kelly along with Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Danny Kaye, and others joined the Committee for the First Amendment. Hoping to diffuse the rising situation in Washington, DC, the group created a kind of whistle-stop national tour to present their views to the public prior to their command performance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Their efforts and press conference deteriorated into a fiasco and forced many of the stars to return to Hollywood and focus more on personal damage control than on their original idealistic intent.

More mediocre roles in "revue" films followed and Kelly's frustrations mounted. He was, however, able to continue refining and showcasing his unique appeal and approach to new material with standout numbers in THE PIRATE AND WORDS AND MUSIC, among other films. Determined from the start to differentiate himself from Fred Astaire, Kelly concerned himself with incorporating less ballroom dancing and more distinctly American athleticism into his choreography. Easter Parade and the chance to co-star with Judy Garland would have been Kelly's opportunity to get away from what he considered substandard fare. But, in a show of bravado in his own backyard, Kelly broke his ankle during one of his infamously competitive volley ball games and, ironically, had to turn the film over to Fred Astaire.

Finally, Kelly and Stanley Donen were assigned their own film to co-direct 1949's On the Town. In just five days of shooting selected sequences, they opened up the genre as no one had ever done before, creating another first a musical film shot on location. Followed by his two masterworks, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, with its 17-minute ballet sequence, and SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, Kelly achieved icon status at the age of forty. In 1951, he was awarded a special Oscar for AN AMERICAN IN PARIS for his "extreme versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, but specifically for his brilliant achievement in the art of choreography."

Candleshoe (1977)

Pamela's Nite

Deadly Is the Female (1950)

Peter's Nite
Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton via senses of cinema:

Gun Crazy deserves a place by itself. First, because it's a nearly unclassifiable work. Gangster film? But here the gang is reduced to the minimum, to the association of two murderers. Criminal psychology film? It contrasts absolutely with the tone of that genre. Besides, the ambivalence of the story permits two very different interpretations. In effect, it's a question of a man with a mania for guns and his desperate attempts to conquer his virility through means other than murder. His companion, who plays the determining role in their career outside the law, is a splendid specimen of bitch. She has a strong preference for pants or cowboy outfits, and polarizes the aggression of the couple. The final episode, in the marsh, becomes an avenging execution by her lover: he prefers her death to that of the sheriff, his boyhood friend, whom she is about to shoot.

But rather than consider Gun Crazy as a story with an edifying conclusion, supported by pathological causes-as we appear to be invited to do-we prefer to see in it one of the rarest contemporary illustrations of L'AMOUR FOU (in all senses of the word, of course) which, according to André Breton, "takes" here "ALL THE POWER". Gun Crazy would then appear to be a kind of Golden Age of American film noir.

Could one say that the poetry misleads one a little? But everything is done here, visibly, so that the viewer, oblivious of his involvement with murderers, passes to the other side of the barricades with John Dall and Peggy Cummins. The memory of their death immediately joins the recollection of the deaths of other celebrated lovers in cinema and literature. Dall, throwing out his last scruples, becomes an outlaw. This is so as to be welcomed back by a triumphant woman stretched out on the bed, wearing only stockings and a robe. Taken with a veritable frenzy of passion, she waits in silence, nostrils quivering and mouth parted, for the embrace of her lover; their attitude-they seem to want to snap each other up voraciously-shows a singular desire. And one understands, in the presence of such consuming passions, how they could have lost their senses of traditional morality.

Laurie: What a joint! No more hot water.
Bart: Well, it's a roof anyway.
Laurie: Yeah, it's a roof alright. How are we gonna give the room clerk the money when we move out?
Bart: I can still get that job at Remington.
Laurie: Forty dollars a week?
Bart: We can get by on that.
Laurie: Yeah, maybe you can, but not me. It's too slow, Bart. I want to do a little living.
Bart: What's your idea of living?
Laurie: It's not forty bucks a week.
Bart: Tell me, when did you get this idea?
Laurie: Oh, I've always had this - ever since I can remember. If I don't get it one way, I'll get it the other.
Bart: I didn't think we'd had it figured out that way. (She steps into her bedroom slippers.)
Laurie: Well, so I changed my mind. I told you I was no good. I didn't kid you, did I? (She lights a cigarette for herself.) Well, now you know. Bart, I've been kicked around all my life. Well, from now on, I'm gonna start kicking back.
Bart: What is it you want?
Laurie: When are you going to begin to live? (She leans down with her hands on his shoulders from behind, speaking directly into his ear.) Four years in reform school, then the Army. I should think they'd owe you something for a change. What's it got you, being so particular?

Bart: Let's not argue. I'll hock my guns. It'll give us enough dough to make another start.
Laurie: There isn't enough money in those guns for the kind of start I want. Bart, I want things, a lot of things, big things. I don't want to be afraid of life or anything else. I want a guy with spirit and guts. A guy who can laugh at anything, who will do anything, a guy who can kick over the traces and win the world for me.
Bart: Look, I don't want to look in that mirror and see nothing but a stick up man staring back at me.
Laurie: You'd better kiss me goodbye, Bart (she drops onto the bed and reclines back), because I won't be here when you get back. Come on, Bart, let's finish it the way we started it, on the level. (She cooly drags on her cigarette as he nervously clenches his fist.)

Strada, La (1954)

Stuart's Nite

Peter Matthews via Criterion Collection:

The particular battlefield for La Strada was the 1954 Venice Film Festival, where right-wing Catholic critics lustily endorsed what they saw as Fellini’s turn to religion. It proved a red flag to their Marxist and leftist counterparts, who fired back that the movie represented a grievous abdication of social responsibility. Fellini had made three previous films (including the sly small-town satire I Vitelloni), yet he was still chiefly known as co-screenwriter on Rome: Open City and Paisà, both directed by Roberto Rossellini, the founding father of Italian neorealism. Arising from the ashes of the Second World War, that enormously influential school had astonished the world with its raw photographic immediacy and fervent championing of the dispossessed. But though acclaimed abroad, the neorealists were increasingly isolated figures at home —attacked by the church for wallowing in filth and by the state for a reckless defeatism that threatened to sap the spirit of Italy’s postwar recovery.

It didn’t help that their gritty, downbeat films mostly bombed at the domestic box office. Italian audiences favored so-called pink neorealism, which retained a working-class ambience, but usually amounted to Silvana Mangano or Sophia Loren parading her charms around some rambunctious peasant hamlet. The movement in its unalloyed form was declared obsolete when 1950s consumer affluence changed the national mood from black markets and street urchins to la dolce vita (a stereotype that Fellini himself would later enshrine in the movie of that title).

The leading lights were obliged to strike out on their own. Vittorio De Sica settled down to those rose-tinted sex comedies, Luchino Visconti mounted gorgeously operatic costume spectacles, and Rossellini launched a series of cryptic existential dramas starring his wife, Ingrid Bergman. Hard-liners were naturally aghast at these developments, and spoke of a crisis in neorealism. For them, the shift to upper-class settings and interior probing could only be a shameful desertion of first principles. Rossellini and the others had betrayed the collective struggle by succumbing to the vice of bourgeois individualism. The filmmakers answered that neorealism was never a testament carved in stone, and that they must be free to explore and invent as their artistic consciences dictated.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

Nora's Nite

Porky's (1982)

Pamela's Nite

MovieNite supports European Film!

From the European Commission. (really!)

Vanishing Point (1971)

Peter's Nite

Via Wikipedia: Gilda Texter (born 26 November 1946) is an American costume designer, wardrobe supervisor and actress. While Gilda Texter is quite accomplished for her work in the Costume and Wardrobe Department of over 40 movies and television productions, ironically she is probably most famous for her feature film debut in the movie Vanishing Point in which she appears completely naked for her entire performance and being credited as "Nude motorcycle rider" despite having a speaking part.

Texter only appeared in three movies which all came out in 1971. Other than Vanishing Point she had parts in Angels Hard as They Come and Runaway, Runaway. In further irony to Texter's later career in costume and wardrobe, the tagline to Runaway, Runaway was "PLEASE NOTE: If you are shocked or embarrassed by total nudity and sexual activity, you are urged NOT to attend".

Fidanzati, I (1963)

Stuart's Nite

Chris Fujiwara in the Boston Phoenix:

Olmi is phenomenologist first, musician second, and storyteller third. In his roaming, nervous, expansive films, narrative is obscured, or elided, or cut off. Key plot points are invisible: in the pivotal scene of Un certo giorno/One Fine Day (1968; August 8 at 6 p.m.), neither we nor the characters notice until it’s too late that the advertising-executive hero has just hit a road worker with his car.
The sense of death that haunts most of Olmi’s films is linked to a passion for meaning and coherence. In Il posto/The Job (1961; August 1 at 8 p.m. and August 4 at 11 a.m.) and I fidanzati/The Fiancés (1963; August 2 at 6 p.m. and August 3 at 11 a.m.), two films about work, Olmi shows characters who are in danger of losing their lives to work. "We take nothing into account anymore of how we live, how we behave," the hero of Un certo giorno reflects. The filmmaker sets himself the task most of his characters can’t even articulate: recuperating the forgotten and neglected parts of their lives.He trained for this task from 1952 to 1959 by making some 40 short documentaries for Edisonvolta. He later said, "Whatever I try to say in my films derives from and belongs to that world, the world I have personally known: modern industry and the civilization it creates." In 1959, he expanded what was to have been another entry in his industrial series — a documentary on a hydroelectric dam in the Italian Alps — into his first feature, Il tempo si è fermato/Time Stood Still (August 1 at 6 p.m.). The film is astonishingly simple: during an interruption in work on the dam, a middle-aged watchman and a young student who has just signed on as a short-term replacement worker share a snowbound cabin. At first the older man is gruff and discourages contact, but eventually the two bond. In Il tempo si è fermato, Olmi establishes some constants of his later films: paid labor as a factor that organizes human activity; the impact of weather and nature on human behavior; the derailing of narrative teleology through distraction and detail; the exploration of the magic of down time.

Il posto, Olmi’s second film, is the key to all his work because of the way it illustrates a recurring motif in his critique of modernity: how the "place" or position becomes more important than the people who occupy it. Olmi’s sense of detail is evocative: shots are taken as if on the fly, as the young hero (a bumpkin from the outskirts of Milan applying for a job in the big city) surveys his strange environment with clear-eyed reticence.

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

Peter's Nite

Richard Schickel
In the late Sixties, when Czechoslovakian films burst upon the West, they seemed something of a miracle. They were small in scale. They were typically about ordinary, unglamorous people, who were generally regarded with a humorous and humane eye. They were also different in tone from other national cinemas that had earlier caught our attention—Italian Neo-Realism, for example, or the French New Wave. There was a wryness about them, a gently stated sense of the absurd, that reminded us that the Czech national epic was—uniquely—a comic one, Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk.

We were frequently told that Svejk’s sly subversions of the warrior mentality represented the best that a small, geopolitically unfavored nation could offer in the way of resistance to its surrounding bullies, and we were glad to see that the work of a new generation of filmmakers—their attitudes formed during the Nazi Occupation of World War II, sharpened by the Stalinist dictatorship of the post-war period—confirmed the novel’s continuing relevance. The portrait of Czechoslovakia we pieced together from its films of the 1960s was of what we might now call a slacker nirvana, a place where private problems always took precedence over public issues, where ideological pomp was ever subverted by the imp of the perverse.

There was something delightfully casual about the manner of these films, too. Loosely structured, often shot in the streets and on provincial back roads, frequently acted by amateurs, their lack of formality seemed all the more remarkable since they were, after all, the products of an Iron Curtain country. Perhaps its rulers were not as sternly censorious as those of the other Middle European Stalinist regimes, but still…

Prague Spring or not, Dubcek or not, we wondered how the chief figures of this renaissance—Milos Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jirí Menzel, all the other graduates of FAMU, the famous state film school—got away with it. Mostly, though, we were simply grateful and welcoming when, at roughly the same historical moment, Forman’s Loves of a Blonde, Passer’s Intimate Lighting, and Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains struck us with gentle, insinuating force.

None was more successful in the United States than Menzel’s marvelous film. Even cranky John Simon thought it was “unique, indebted ultimately only to [Menzel’s] individual genius”—and his opinion was echoed by every major American reviewer. It went on to gain the fond regard of sophisticated audiences, such modest, but meaningful, commercial success as their patronage could grant an “art house” movie, and the Academy Award as the Best Foreign Language Film of 1967.

We always return to such widely hailed and greatly beloved films with trepidation, so often is our initial enthusiasm betrayed by the passing years. We wonder, especially with films that are so immediately adorable, if we were taken prisoner by people carrying false papers, whispering too-sweet nothings in our ears. That’s not the case with Closely Watched Trains. If anything, it seems to me more powerful—certainly more poignant—now than it did when it first appeared some 34 years ago.

I think we were all somewhat misled by the film back then. A lot of us, Simon included, treated the end of the film as no more than a coup de theatre, a sudden lurch toward seriousness that the director and the writer (novelist Bohumil Hrabal) somehow pull off without spoiling the film’s overall sense of absurdist fun.

There’s some truth in that argument. But what most powerfully struck me when I returned to the movie was how integral to the movie that ending is, how carefully it all along prepares us for its conclusion. Yes, it is a surprise at first glance. But on second thought it appears to be utterly inevitable. And utterly right. What’s most clever about the movie is the canny way Menzel and Hrabal deceive us, lead us into believing, right up to the end, that their aim is nothing more than a sort of chucklesome and off-hand geniality.

It seems that Menzel is one of the many victims of 20th Century megapolitics, yet another artist on whose art the difficult business of surviving in a totalitarian society imposed too much of a distorting strain. The descriptions one reads of his many unseen works sound so graceful, so original. We can only hope for the opportunity to one day see those films, to be in touch with the full career of this most insinuating and ingratiating filmmaker. In the meantime, we are lucky to have Closely Watched Trains, a film that remains as fresh and potent as it was when we first saw it so many years ago, a film that continues to reward many a close re-watching.

TIME 100 Best Movies of all time:

In the brief cold war moment before the Soviet Union brutally crushed its vitality in the crackdown after the "Prague Spring," the Czech cinema exemplified the country's sly, humane rebelliousness to the world. And Menzel's film, about a feckless young crossing guard at a sleepy railroad station who becomes an unlikely (and tragic) hero of the resistance to German occupation was its sweetly funny, curiously moving masterpiece. TIME thought Menzel kept his mood-shifting movie "on the track all the way." Indeed, he did.

Czech radio on the Time Magazine selection:

The American weekly Time magazine has just published a list of the 100 best films ever, compiled by its two much-respected film critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss. The list, which includes such American classics as The Godfather and Pulp Fiction, is well-balanced, containing many non—US titles, among them 'Closely Watched Trains' -one of only three Czech films to ever earn the Best Foreign-Language Oscar.
Made in 1966, 'Closely Watched Trains' is generally considered a small masterpiece by both Czech and foreign audiences the coming of age story of a shy young man in wartime, who longs for love but sacrifices his life in a futile mission against the Nazi occupiers. Based on Bohumil Hrabal's novel of the same name, the film drew rave reviews in the 60s and continues to enjoy a great following today. We caught up with fim historian Karel Och:

"The most beautiful thing on the film for me is this sort of intimacy which goes together with the main character. And all the things that are happening to him are sort of by coincidence, but actually describe the most important things in life. He is not sort of a likeable young man, he is very, very ordinary, very unglamorous, let's say. But, there's this gentle way of showing him, and all the absurd things that happen to him, which is very universal."
The loss of innocence and absurdity where characteristic of Hrabal, who also contributed to the final screenplay. Following the success of 'Closely Watched Trains' Hrabal and Menzel collaborated on several notable screen adaptations in the 70's, but never got around to Hrabal's seminal "I Served the King of England". Jiri Menzel, after a long hiatus, is getting set to make that film that now, something many film fans are looking forward to with great anticipation. Karel Och again:
"Jiri Menzel sort of disappeared, I mean it's been a long time since his last film, and as we can see a lot filmmakers who were successful in the 60s changed a lot and maybe their films are no longer as successful as they were before. It's one of Hrabal's most beautiful books, so it will be a tough task."
If anyone is up to it, it should be Jiri Menzel, who adapted more of Hrabal's work anyone else. The only shame is that Hrabal himself could not live to see it.

Prague Life on Hrabal:
Along with Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal is one of the most important Czech writers of the 20th century, and even more central to Prague than Kundera.
Kundera even said of Hrabal: “Bohumil Hrabal embodies as no other the fascinating Prague. He couples people's humor to baroque imagination.” Hrabal finished Law at Prague's Charles University, and lived in the city from the late 1940s until his death in 1997. Though not as internationally known as Kundera, Hrabal had more admirers than adversaries in the Czech Republic than the former, probably because he didn’t leave his homeland and language behind for France. However, Hrabal does have his admirers abroad, even inspiring the novel The Book of Hrabal by Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy.

Hrabal was born in Brno in 1914, but his home became Prague after he finished university there. In 1965 Hrabal published his best known novel, Closely Watched Trains, which was made into a film by Czech director Jiri Menzel. Hrabal’s style was distinctive, often utilizing run-on sentences (the whole novel Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is written in one long sentence) and the schizophrenic struggle between individual moral conscience and the demands of society. The classic Shakespearean clown character is ever-present, seemingly a fool but often pulling bits of profound insight out of the air.

Many of Hrabal’s works were translated and published in English, including his last, Total Fears: Letters to Dubenka, published posthumously. When in Prague, the best place by far to find English translations of Hrabal and other Czech writers is Anagram Bookstore, where they have a whole section of Czech literature. Hrabal’s death is nothing if not ironic like his works: in 1997, he fell from his fifth story hospital window, supposedly feeding pigeons. Hrabal lived in a fifth story apartment, however, and in several of his works a character has ended his life by suicide from the fifth story. Coincidence? Perhaps, but the truth shall never be known.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Nora's Nite

Writer-Director Robert Hamer (1911 - 1963)

Whenever anyone who knew Robert Hamer writes about him, they paint a portrait of a doomed figure whose early promise was cut short. He shares this quality with many of the characters in his work. Yet, with less than a dozen films to his credit, he still managed to achieve more than most of his contemporaries.

He was born in Kidderminster. His schooldays were successful and he gained a scholarship to Cambridge. He seemed set for great things but he was suspended for homosexual activities and his academic career never recovered. After graduation he started in the film industry as a clapper-boy at Gaumont.

He worked his way up through the ranks and by 1940 he was an editor at Ealing and also making script contributions. He was also married to aspiring actress Joan Holt. His big break as a director came with the Haunted Mirror section of Dead of Night. His next two films also starred Googie Withers but it was his fourth for which he will best be remembered: Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Despite his success, his gloomy world view was at odds with that of boss Michael Balcon and he found it difficult to come up with acceptable projects at Ealing. Outside Ealing things were worse as the 50s industry stopped taking risks and turned bland. Hamer's drinking, always a problem, got worse and his marriage disintegrated. His alcoholism finished him off in 1963 shortly after he got the push from writing additional dialogue for 55 Days at Peking.

With his first five films, Hamer created a stylish reflection of post-war disillusionment. The films he made after, though lesser works, usually have moments which make them worth watching.

Britmovie.com on Hamer:

Hamer was the son of British character actor Gerald Hamer and educated at Cambridge University. He worked as an editor at London Films during the 1930's on films including Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939). He joined Ealing Studios in 1940, first as an editor, then producer, writer, and from 1945, director. Hamer made an uncredited co-directorial debut on San Demetrio, London (1943) and Fiddlers Three (1944), before shooting the "Haunted Mirror" sequence in the portmanteau chiller Dead of Night (1945). His first feature-length assignment was the Googie Withers femme-fatale drama Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946).

For several years, Hamer's career soared, thanks largely to his quartet of films with Alec Guinness; superior black-comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Father Brown (1954), the weak comedy To Paris with Love (1955) and impenetrable Daphne Du Maurier adaptation The Scapegoat (1959). After Ealing, and affected by alcoholism, Hamer directed two films of note, the John Mills film-noir The Long Memory (1952) and comedy classic School for Scoundrels (1960).

Britishpictures.com: Joan Greenwood (1921 - 1987)

It was the voice that set her apart. Husky, plummy, sexy. It cut through her essential gentility and made her seem like a woman of the world even when she was playing it innocent. In one of the most memorable cinema quotes, Karel Reisz described her speaking her lines "as if she dimly suspected some hidden menace in them which she can't quite identify".

She was born in London and went to RADA and then did some theatre. In her first films she usually played children and it wasn't until Latin Quarter that she got her first star role. Shortly after, she signed a Rank contract. Her parts improved but it was Whisky Galore and Kind Hearts and Coronets for Ealing that really put her on the map. Her sexy ingénue in The Man in the White Suit was equally memorable.

Her Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest is the definitive portrayal. Unlike other actresses of the period who made films but preferred theatre, she never gave the impression that she was slumming. She made a couple of films in Hollywood and then retreated to the stage. Marriage in 1959 (to Andre Morell) and children meant that she worked less though she did manage to appear in The Mysterious Island battling against giant crabs and wasps. She also got another good role in Tom Jones.

Her career petered out in small roles in bad films. She turned up on TV in the sea-going soap Triangle as the passenger who never got off the ferry. Triangle was a low point in many people's careers but she was watchable. She was the mad landlady in the sitcom Girls on Top and looked set for a long career playing old bats, but she died after a fall at home. Before she died she left one great performance as Mrs Clennam in the two-part version of Little Dorrit.

With glowing skin and cheek-bones to die for, she photographed beautifully. Unlike many beautiful actresses, she could deliver wonderful performances. She was mannered, but that never seemed to matter since she chose roles for which her style was appropriate. On the rare occasions she chose a realistic role (The October Man) she showed that she could cope well with its demands.

For more see our July 2004 post on The Man in the White Suit also starring Guiness and Greenwood.

Fame (1980)

Pamela's Nite