CLASSIC FILMS

Four classic films taken from Stephen Sondheim’s (RIP) Best of all Time list: faroutmagazine.co.uk/stephen-sondheim-40-favourite-films-of-all-time Smiles of a Summer Night (1955, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)

The recent passing of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was a great loss; he was an inimitable talent. This month’s classics column is a selection of four films from Sondheim’s own personal best-of list. First up is Ingmar Bergman’s sublime romantic comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, which traces the travails of four pairs of lovers who switch partners and allegiances over the course of an eventful Swedish evening. Bergman’s reputation as a forbidding, stone-cold-serious artist is belied by the lightness of touch here, though the film still has all the penetrating insights into human nature that mark his best work. Sondheim was so taken by Smiles of a Summer Night that he adapted it into his great 1973 stage musical A Little Night Music. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.)

The Clock (1945, Vincente Minnelli, United States)

Sondheim’s work is frequently concerned with the external pressures of time and circumstance, particularly on people in love (West Side Story being a popular example of this, his controversial Passion a more challengingly idiosyncratic one). It makes sense, then, that he’d be head over heels for Vincente Minnelli’s magnificent wartime melodrama, in which small-town soldier Joe Allen (Robert Walker) and city girl Alice Mayberry (Judy Garland) meet, fall in love, marry, and part all in the span of Joe’s 48-hour leave. That title is more than apropos: You can feel the tick-tick-tick of some heavenly timepiece in every moment, with all the emotion-stoking ups and downs that that entails. In a mere two days, this pair of lovers seem to live several lifetimes. (Streaming on Amazon Prime.)

The Elephant Man (1980, David Lynch, US/UK)

Another key facet of Sondheim is his empathy with outcasts, as well as his perceptive,

KEITH UHLICH

tending toward pessimistic judgments about human nature. If there’s any hope, it comes via individuals as opposed to societal collectives. Of course he’d have a place in his heart for David Lynch’s second feature, a gently, though still disturbingly surreal fable about John Merrick (John Hurt), a kind-hearted soul afflicted with severe bodily deformities. Exhibited as a freak in 19th-century British sideshows, he is eventually taken under the wing of Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), who does his best (and sometimes worst) to introduce him into high society. There’s a disquietingly palpable tension in how Merrick is treated as either a fascinating specimen of study or—as the socalled “Elephant Man” himself screams in the film’s most famous scene—“I am not an animal! I am a human being. I am a man.” Many of the people he encounters succumb to mobrule cruelty, which makes the moments of true compassion resonate even more. (Streaming on Amazon Prime.)

A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, UK)

Another romance of time and circumstance, though this one literalizes the heavenly machinations. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, that great British filmmaking duo known as The Archers, open this otherworldly love story in space, setting up the stakes as cosmic. Tracking slowly toward our little blue orb, the camera eventually settles on RAF pilot Peter Carter (David Niven), whose plane is crashing, his only companion in his final moments a female radio operator, June (Kim Hunter), talking to him from the ground. Through a divine twist of fate (really a bureaucratic oversight on the part of those overseeing the afterlife), Peter survives, and the couple quickly find and fall for each other. Unfortunately, they now must defend their love via trial before the celestial powers-that-be. Chief among the qualities that surely appealed to Sondheim is the film’s profound mix of the personal and the political. With WWII winding to its end, Powell and Pressburger intended the film as pop-cultural bridge between America and the UK. You can see here the seeds of a show like Assassins, Sondheim’s astonishing historical dissection of the U.S. of A as empathetically filtered through the purview of its most famously murderous malcontents. (Available via The Criterion Collection.) n