KEITH UHLICH
Last Year at Marienbad
classic films
Stage Door (1937, Gregory La Cava, USA) What makes a classic comedy? Mostly kismet—the right people in the right place at the right time. Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers head just such a dream cast in this screwball beaut, directed by Gregory La Cava, that also features Adolph Menjou, Constance Collier, Eve Arden, Ann Miller and a fresh-faced talent named Lucille Ball. The setting is a theatrical boarding house in New York, where Hepburn’s snooty up-and-comer actress Terry Randall comes to live. She proceeds to run afoul of most of the residents, Rogers’ flip dancer Jean Maitland chief among them. There’s plenty of Hayes Code-friendly bitchery, always delivered at the perfect rhythm and flow (two other keys to great comedy). But underlying all the cutting surface pleasures are a keen sense of how camaraderie often blossoms out of conflict. This is the movie in which Hepburn spoofs her 1934 theatrical performance in The Lake (“The calla lilies are in bloom again”), which was famously panned by Dorothy Parker (“[Miss Hepburn runs] the gamut of emotions from A to B”). (Streaming on Amazon.) Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais, France) There may be no more classic mindbender than Alain Resnais’ black-and-white masterpiece, his follow-up to the equally challenging Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). You could say Last Year at Marienbad takes the form of a mystery, with an unnamed man and woman (Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi) wandering a palatial hotel, the one insist18
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ing repeatedly that they met the year before, the other assuring they did not. There may have been an affair, there may not. There is a husband (Sacha Pitoëff)…perhaps. Time and narrative sequence are jumbled. The disorientation is pervasive, which only makes the journey more hypnotic. Resnais collaborated with the nouveau roman writer Alain Robbe-Grillet on the production. Robbe-Grillet’s highly detailed screenplay served as a blueprint for Resnais to follow and to dream beyond. The film has a reputation as a forbidding object, inscrutable to the point of existential terror, though this misses out on the frequent playfulness of the widescreen imagery by Sacha Vierny, which illuminates the deadpan comic facets of the deceptively dour central couple. See if you can spot the Where’s Waldo?-esque cameo by a famed American director’s unmistakable silhouette. (Streaming on MUBI.) High and Low (1963, Akira Kurosawa, Japan) The title promises a lot—an equal examination of two extremes. Know that the literal translation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic crime thriller is “Heaven and Hell,” which suggests a metaphysical aspect very much apparent in the crisp black-and-white widescreen photography of Asakuzu Nakai and Takao Saito. It’s there in the performances, too, by Toshiro Mifune as a quietly rapacious businessman (the prime target in a kidnapping plot gone awry); by Tatsuya Nakadai as the level-headed inspector assigned the case; and by Tsutomo Yamazaki as the mastermind, such as it is, of the abduction. We
think we know where our sympathies should lie, but as the tense slow-burn of a narrative unfolds, our loyalties shift, our beliefs get muddied. It’s evident, by the end, that everyone has their reasons in a world that prizes rich over poor, a divide that’s built in even to the architecture of the metropolis in which they live. This a genre story (loosely adapted by Kurosawa and his co-screenwriters from the Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom) as a philosophical cri de coeur, and certainly among the best of its kind. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.) Teorema (1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy) There’s no charm, discreet or otherwise, to the bourgeoisie in this classic caustic satire from Italian provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini. A wealthy family is visited by a mysterious man known only as The Visitor, played by Terence Stamp at the height of his leonine beauty (at one point the camera unashamedly zooms into his crotch, anticipating the orgy of debasement to follow). The Visitor gives so fully of himself to each member of the household, including sexually, that his eventual departure lays bare the tensions brewing under the brood’s conformist surface. Like several Pasolini films, the sacred and the profane are inextricable bedfellows, and the agita that results is incomparably sublime in its sense of feral shock and spiritual awe. No other filmmaker breaks down his characters to quite as subhuman a level, leaving the possibilities of redemption and rebirth to that void to which we are all destined to return. (Streaming on Criterion Channel) n
