/ResourceForWeb/nypost/cinema/38132.htm

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Other Dashiell Writings:
Flicks
- June 2007

The Hostilities Game (1965)

Big Reckon with on Madonna Thoroughfare

The General Died at Commencement

Yolanda and the Thief

Anthology of Surreal Cinema

Black Book (2006)

Mafioso

Julius Caesar (1953)

Man on the Tracks

Miss Julie (1951)

Twelve O'Clock High

Dishonored (1931)

THE CHILDHOOD OF MAXIM GORKY

(Mark Donskoy, 1938).

Donskoy adapted all three parts of Gorky's autobiography, and this first
part was one of the 1930s most popular Soviet films. It tells of Gorky's
boyhood in a small village, living at the house of his grandfather,
who owns a dye works. Mikhail Troyanovsky is remarkable in the difficult
role of the old man–a creature in which cruelty and tenderness are
strangely intermingled. Gorky's uncles become involved in a poisonous
rivalry that gradually destroys their father's business, and the only
stable force in the house is the patient and long-suffering grandmother
(Varvara Massalitinova) who loves her grandson without reserve but can't
protect him from the beatings.

Donskoy and his cinematographer (Pyotr Yermolov) have a genius for conveying
the beauty and mystery of landscape–the visual compositions are breathtaking.
The vulnerability of the boy playing Gorky (Alyosha Lyarsky) makes him
an ideal witness of the family dramas, both brutal and sublime. The
film is several levels above the socialist realism that was standard
in films at the time. But the characteristic broad strokes of sentimentality
prevent it from achieving true greatness. The peasantry is idealized
in the person of Ivan, a dye worker who befriends the boy and embodies
a kind of holy simplicity. The grandmother is an angelic soul. A subplot
involving a crippled boy represents the hope of the downtrodden for
a better future. The choir music on the soundtrack tells us to be moved.

When a film doesn't look deeply into its characters, their trials and
misfortunes don't affect us as much as they might. The stylized image
of suffering ultimately seems tentative. On its own terms, Donskoy's
film can be enjoyed for its passion and pictorial sense. But the fictional
dream never comes fully alive. And for those with an historical sense,
knowing that the film was made under a regime practicing mass murder
and slavery lends its high-handed preaching against oppression an ambivalent
tone. One of the boy's friends is a Marxist intellectual. Eventually
we see him taken away by the authorities. But what was happening to
dissenting intellectuals in Stalin's time? Did any movies depict them?

There was a double world in Soviet Russia: the utopia that was officially
celebrated and the real world of fear that could not be discussed. Even
in the midst of

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky

's beautiful moments,
there is an inescapably hollow feeling.

A witch from the 17th century (Veronica Lake) returns to life along
with her father (Cecil Kellaway) to avenge themselves on a politician
(Fredric March) who is descended from the man who had them executed.
Part of the plan is to have the witch give the politician a love potion,
but she drinks it instead by mistake.

Clair was of course part of a French exodus to Hollywood after the Germans
invaded their country in 1940. He was fairly successful in America,
confidently adapting himself to studio methods. His work improved as
he went along, and unlike Renoir, he made money for the studios. Nothing
he did was run-of-the-mill, but in my view, this particular work has
dated badly.

Veronica Lake was never more beautiful than here, and her combination
of naughtiness and naivete is the picture's main attraction. Unfortunately,
it's not enough to compensate for the film's weaknesses. For one thing,
the plot mechanics hang on the movie's neck like the proverbial albatross–the
witch and warlock here are actually supernatural beings, and the script
goes to great pains trying to spell out the implications of this, all
of which is irrelevant to whether the film's comedy or romance is effective.
I suppose suspension of disbelief was a more difficult affair for American
audiences in the 40s.

This wouldn't matter so much if the dialogue was sharp and witty. But
the humor is club-footed–silly and obvious rather than truly funny.
The team of writers seems to assume that having a witch exist in modern
times is inherently amusing, and they combine this with a sense that
showing a woman being as brazenly forward as Lake is here must be hilarious.
There's little inventiveness or zest. The picture just keeps mechanically
hitting the same notes over and over.

Fredric March was capable of doing comedy once in a while, but here
he's wooden and clearly uncomfortable. Kellaway does his standard whimsical
old gentleman role, and even Robert Benchley fails to brighten things
up. It's no compliment to note that the scenario seems to have inspired
the 1960s TV series

Bewitched

. There's a musty old idea equating
feminine guile with witchcraft somewhere underneath all this. That might
be material for a film studies paper, but the picture is a mere bauble.

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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A black comedy about an upper-class gentleman would-be murderer,
who is always thwarted before the crime. It’s the last film of Luis Buñuel’s
(”Nazarin”/”The Exterminating Angel”/”Él”) Mexican period and though
minor it still has a few witty bizarre touches and some great imagery to
hang its hat on (a toy music box that supposedly can kill, a wax mannequin
of our hero’s girlfriend Lavinia (Miroslava Stern) that goes up in smoke
after our hero fails to murder his spiteful loved one he puts on a pedestal,
and the mirror in a room, acting as a look into our hero’s soul, reflecting
his unfaithful bride Carlota’s rendezvous with her suave married lover
Alejandro).

The wealthy, well-bred pottery craftsman, Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ernesto
Alonsa), tells the chief of police about all his intentions to kill women
that were thwarted. He reminisces when as a child of five, in Mexico City,
to soothe the bratty child his pretty governess (Leonor Llansas) concocted
a tall story about a king who had the same music box like the one in his
house that has the power to kill his enemies. It was the night of the revolution
and his governess was killed by a stray bullet after the spoiled child
played the music box and as a test of the music box’s powers wished for
her death. This incident, whereby he remembers her skirt flying upward
to reveal her bare legs, left him traumatized for life with a sense that
killing is a pleasing sexual thing. As an adult, Archibaldo accidently
finds and buys the same music box in a shop (during the revolution his
house was ransacked). This brings on an urge for him to kill women. The
attempts made on his hospital nurse Sister Trinidad (Chabela
Durán), the upward striving innocent Carlota (Ariadna
Welter), the fickle kept society woman temptress Patricia (Rita
Macedo) and the untruthful model Lavinia, provide some room for
Buñuel to poke fun at his machismo hero while having some fun by
also turning the suspense genre on its heels by reducing it to a tale of
sexual politics.

Buñuel has some laughs at the expense of the decadent hypocritical
bourgeoisie, dumb Yankee tourists, the complacent priests, the capricious
artist and at the Latin male lover image, while including his obsession
with foot fetishism. It never amounts to more than a cheaply made one macabre
joke movie that was only slightly amusing and only somewhat more effective
as satire, but it paved the way for his later more productive period of
creating many masterpieces. 

This esoteric adroitness movie from Makhmalbaf higher- ranking is visually arresting, I suppose, in the self-consciously poetic manner of Paradjanov, but only if you can look past the stultifyingly whimsical nature of its allegory. Korshid is a young blind boy who works tuning melodic instruments. Although his mother is in arrears with the rental, the lad allows himself to be led astray en route to opus by an irresistible impulse to follow the sound of music. It is, one appreciates, a film directed from the inner eye - honest what the world’s been waiting for the treatment of, a structuralist neo-realist art musical for blind kids.

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It´s weird. Throughout chronicle, the vast majority of cultures on Soil have kept women confined to tame roles. To this day, every so often, you perceive about the lionization of female individuals who not just defy social restrictions but course men at the male tournament. For exemplar, during its entire history, France won a war only when lead by a better half–Joan of Arc (Napoleon doesn´t count as a Frenchman because he was born on Corsica back when Corsicans were more Italian than anything else). Catherine the Grand was move simply to Peter the Great in Russian history; she expanded Russian geo-administrative influence to such an scope that Russia became viewed as a threat and not honourable a giant blob on a map. Amelia Earhart is as celebrated of an aviation pioneer as Charles Lindbergh is.

In China, people talk about Mulan, a female warrior who led Chinese armies to overcoming down Mongols and Huns from the north and the west. The Mulan stories are based on true verifiable accounts of women in various wars, though those accounts have all been conflated into one quasi-mythological figure. Disney´s "Mulan" posits the heroine in northern China, fighting off invaders who did not see The Great Wall as a deterrent.

Ming-wa, who did a brilliant contribution playing the lead in Buena Vista´s "The Exaltation Fluke Club", gives Mulan a sense of sophistication, playfulness, and gumption. B.D. Wong, who played a scientist in Steven Spielberg´s "Jurassic Park", provides Mulan´s canoodle property with his voice. The movie is moderately realistic when compared to other legends that have been adapted into movies by Disney. There´s no magic, and the appearance of Mulan´s ancestors as spirits are consistent with obsolete beliefs about the perpetuation of defenceless souls after bodily martyrdom.

"Mulan" is essentially Disney´s first foray into an all-Asian situation. The movie´s dialogue is in English, supposing this isn´t really an child since the French "Beauty and the Beast", the African "The Lion King", and the Arabic "Aladdin" were all given the same treatment. Howsoever, "Mulan" is problematic in the same ways that its studio siblings are. Also in behalf of example:

1) Eddie Murphy as Mushu the dragon. The so-hip-that-it-hurts attitude Murphy brings to the movie is root out of village dedicated the Chinese cultural environment of the movie. In fact, his vague hyper-activeness is annoying.

2) The "Asian" accents in use accustomed to by the voice actors. They just sound ludicrous, period. If everybody can´t do an reliable inflection, then song should not be doing an accent mark at all. Ming-na and B.D. Wong didn´t use contrived accents while playing the leads, and not in the twinkling of an eye is their characters´ "authenticity" ever in question.

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3) Mulan´s name. The Romanization of Mulan´s full name is "Hua Mulan", but the silent picture calls her "Fa Mulan". This is really confusing, principally since this style of the Mulan legend is set in the northern renounce of China. In the north, people run through the Mandarin lingo, and her set delegate of "Flower" is singularly pronounced as "Hua" by Mandarin users. Even the differing historical accounts that attribute other family names to Mulan do not confine references to "Fa".

Disney´s movies (animated or energetic-action) all share basic structural and interpretational faults. The largest ones ("Strength and the Beast", "The Lion King") curtail the impact of these faults and are effective at making viewers make allowances for such abuses. The worst ones are gross exaggerations of stereotypes as well as indications of lazy greenness. "Mulan" is far from being in the "worst" lot, though it is not as artistically loaded as one knows that it could´ve easily been.

Still, the movie generates genuine excitement during its epic battle sequences. This is also a noteworthy attempt in that the heroine is much more "take charge" than other Disney females. Finally, while some of the voice actors´ accents are lamentable, the overall depiction of Chinese culture is quite wonderful. There´s regular a great laugh–"You don´t meet a girl like that every dynasty."

Video:
The 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen picture is not as pleasant to look at as the images organize on the "The Lion King" DVD or "Looker and the Beast" DVDs. A tally of colors look dull or slightly faded, and there´s a slight electronic glow. This is silent a very healthy presentation of the movie´s visual elements, but it doesn´t sparkle with the same lustre as found on other recent Disney discs.

Note: Strictly speaking, Disney is not giving consumers sensational aspect ratios when movies get off on "Aladdin" and "Mulan" are presented in 1.66:1. American movie theatres usually exhibit movies in either 1.85:1 or 2.35:1. However, 1.66:1 can as likely as not be considered the original aspect ratios of most non-leeway Disney animation.