FILM FILINGS MAY 2025
JORDAN M. POSS: WARFARE (2025)
Over at his blog Jordan Poss reviews the new film Warfare directed by Alex Garland. A snippet:
The movie, which is apparently the result of conversations with Garland during the making of Civil War, is based on his experiences during the Battle of Ramadi in the fall of 2006. Mendoza appears as a character, a young SEAL radio operator, though he is by no means the central protagonist. Warfare is an ensemble picture, and the team—radioman Ray, observation post commander Erik, sniper/corpsman Elliott, petty officer Sam, Marine fire support officer Mac, callow new guy Tommy—shares the spotlight.
Check out the whole review here.
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CHRISTOPHER WITTY: HITCHCOCK’S THE BIRDS (1963)
Recently the premiere post on The Movie Balcony, my Ranking All 56 Films of Alfred Hitchcock has been going gangbusters in search result clicks. I put a lot of love and effort into that ranking, so I’m delighted it’s doing wonders for website trafffic. However, somehow in the last two years I missed this lengthy review of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds from IF-contributor Chris Witty. Here’s an excerpt:
Boyle read ‘The Birds’ as more of “a mood piece” rather than a story with enough going on to justify a feature length film. On that point, I for one am in agreement. If you take Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 adaptation of Du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ as an example, it is clear that Roeg was using a series of images and motifs that translated the mood of the story perfectly as opposed to the story itself. Each frame was carefully constructed in order to heighten the feelings of grief which steadily build until a dreadful mood takes over. If you were to ask somebody what the story of Don’t Look Now is, they wouldn’t be able to tell you anything more than it’s kind of a horror film about weird things that happen to a married couple who are grieving for their daughter. They would, however, probably go on to tell you that the mood of the picture left them feeling disturbed.
You gotta check out the whole thing. It’s long but Witty’s sources are only the best, as is his analysis!
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SAM STEPHENS: SHANE (1953)
Shane (1953), directed by George Stevens. ***spoiler-filled analysis***
An interesting thing happened while watching Shane. Interesting because I already had a lot of context for believing what kind of film Shane was, based on other opinions, and on other Westerns with a similar set up. Hondo starring John Wayne, from the same year, is one. Delmer Daves' 3:10 to Yuma from 1957 is another. Even Daves' Jubal from the previous year, lacking a central kid actor, plays off similar beats—a strange who man comes to town and is hosted by a local family. The man is revealed, in so many scenes, to be the equal or better of any man in town, but he's an outsider and a loner, and his fate ultimately carries him away.
And that's exactly what happens in Shane. So far so good.
BUT…
Shane's is not a tragic story. It's a complete success, and filled with good things. When Shane leaves it's not to the detriment of others, or even himself, but as an angelic being whose work is done. And that's exactly what Shane is: the American Spirit—the spirit of the forefathers in the frontier.
Corny? Too much to take? Too bad. The evidence is all there.
1. In other films, the Visiting Loner, even against his own will, emphasizes how limp-wristed the Residing Father Figure is. Although the story contains a macho-redemption, I point to Van Heflin's other character in 3:10 to Yuma. But in this film, Heflin's character is not a weakling. In fact, scene after scene shows his gumption and resolve. He's not a cool cucumber like Shane, but nobody else is either. Ergo, this movie is not about Shane showing up any other man's machismo.
2. We have Joey and Marian loving on Shane, with Joey even stating he loves Shane as much as his own dad. And in the final scene Marian seems to believe Shane did what he did for her, but Shane rebuffs her. Notice that Joey's language is not excessive (okay, maybe it is) -- he only says he loves Shane as much, not more, than his own father. But this could be true about an older brother, too.
3. Shane himself acts like many things: a hired hand (reclusive, dutiful), a brother (shows Joey how to shoot), an impulsive relative (starts fights in bars), and very often like a sad puppy as he trudges out into the rain-soaked outside like a whimpering dog. At no point does he ever act like an intruding lover.
4. Shane is not The First Hero. Meaning, he does not come to save the town at the cost of everyone else's bravery. Many men try to be brave and do what they can, but it's too much even for a posse of good men. When Heflin's character sets out to meet the baddies in their trap meeting for him, Shane knows they will kill him. He can't convince Heflin to stay with his family, so he has to fight him to stay. It's an act of heroism. Marian's belief that it's for her love is deluded--or a popular misinterpretation of what "for her" means.
5. Shane's wear is unlike that of any other character. Although a backstory is hinted at, we never learn exactly what that story was. His trapper look evokes a pre-industrialized West...almost as if his character is evoking those predecessors that Ben Johnson's racist Calloway is using as a way to belittle the Swedish immigrant community. As a rebuke, Shane's evocation of those earlier immigrants sides not with the racists, but with the hard-working newcomers. He's there to back them up, not make their decisions for them.
And so goes my Shane review and analysis.
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NATHAN GILMORE: THREE REVIEWS
“Babette’s Feast” (1987), dir. Gabriel Axel.
Taste and see. Sometimes, in the inscrutable filing cabinet of my brain, I can’t remember if “Babette’s Feast” touched me quite so deeply the first time I watched it as a kid.
Surely this homely-yet-urbane tale of a French cooking woman and her provincial employers flew directly over my head. Surely I didn’t know what I was seeing.
No matter. The movie has aged like the best wine. Like almost all great movies, it can be approached from several angles: a simple fable about communal peace and harmony, an exploration of the power of food to bring people together, or a deeply religious and symbolic allegory of the Christian rite of communion.
It’s all of these. Two pious sisters, great beauties in their youths, have lived out their later years in a small Swedish fishing village. They had once had dreams of love and relationships, but those are long gone and now they spend most of their time attending service and caring for the elderly members of their small Protestant congregation. Quite out of the blue, Babette Hersant appears at their door with a letter from one of the sisters’ erstwhile suitors. Though the sisters cannot afford to pay her, Babette works as a housekeeper for free.
Over the years, Babette is never called upon to cook anything more than the sisters’ austere menu: a singularly unappetizing combo of salt fish and ale-bread soup. Quite suddenly, Babette discovers that she has won the lottery back in Paris. Quite contrary to the sisters’ assumption that that’s the last they’ll see of Babette, Babette asks and receives permission to blow the 10,000-franc prize on a lavish dinner in the classic French style.
The pleasures of “Babette’s Feast” are many. The bickering of the villagers is trivial, rather than vicious. Isn’t it often the smallest irritants, given enough time and resentment, that cause the biggest rifts between people? Isn’t hospitality so often the best salve to those irritants?
The guest of honor is a general, once a rejected suitor of the sisters. He assumes the role of master of the feast, commenting on this matter of taste, this quality of the wine; this, of course, theologically echoes the principle of the “last shall be first” at another Feast somewhere in the future.
But see how this doesn’t give him airs. He is served and he serves. He is important because of who he is, and he makes others important, because they are not him: no one is greater than the other.
Babette herself is a wonder. Played with serene self-assurance by Stèphane Audran, she is both a servant and running the show. Why does she spend her fortune on one meal? It’s not just mere generosity. Babette takes a very fitting and proper delight in her own talent. She knows she’s good; she knows her talents are best used in service to others. The villagers hardly even know just how good the meal is, but Babette’s not looking for compliments. The art is the artist’s reward. I carry that piece of the movie with me. When I take my writing too seriously, or not seriously enough, the little scene of Babette sitting in the kitchen with a well-earned glass of wine plays in my head. Sometimes all you need is the satisfaction of a job well done.
But the sacrifice is real. And this is the real deliciousness of the movie. Love, real love, always includes an element of profligacy. Give everything you have to someone and you know it’s love. Someone who (and, yes, Who) gives everything does it for love.
There are a hundred sermons and hymns that say this, of course. But “Babette’s Feast” says this between courses of fine French pastry and sips of gourmet wine. I can never decide whether “Citizen Kane” or “Babette’s Feast” is my favorite movie ever. “Kane” feeds my brain, with the camera tricks and the timeline trickery. “Babette” feeds my heart and my soul.
A beautiful, beautiful movie.
***
Letter Never Sent (1959), dir. Mikhail Kalatazov.
All that glitters.
Mikhail Kalatazov, perhaps better known for his paean to the Cuban Revolution, 1964’s “I Am Cuba”, takes a more understated approach in this earlier work. A simple, stark story of survival in the wilderness, “Letter Never Sent” follows four geologists as they trek through the Siberian wilderness in search of a near-mythical diamond deposit. Interestingly, the diamonds are not discussed in terms of aesthetic value, only monetary. They are a way to supplement a life spent working.
Complicating matters is the nascent love triangle between Tanya, her boyfriend Ivan and the bespectacled, philosophical Sergei. Ivan is uncultured, if not uneducated; Sergei, the more intellectual, lays out his case in a long, exhaustive letter to his wife.
The twist, and the hook, of “Letter Never Sent” is that Nature cares not a whit for either Sergei’s philosophies or Ivan’s brave masculinity. In this, the movie takes a courageous departure from mere propagandizing and presents an unnerving depiction of man’s helplessness in the face of untamed nature. There are echoes of “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, and of Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”: nature is insuperable, and no amount of ideological devotion can long withstand the urgent demands of raw survival.
The dizzying handheld camera never zooms out any further than just above the desperate wanderers’ heads— we are stuck there with them.
Nature, then, defeats philosophy. There is no amount of mutual aid that will save them, and the dying radio that links them to their Communist comrades back in civilization gives them hope only to have it crackle and die.
If one reads it as an anti-materialist, anticapitalist fable— the party is searching for diamonds, and early on wax rhapsodic about the riches in store— “Letter Never Sent” would be effective, but pat. But it is more. It is a part of the stark and beautiful oeuvre of films that sit back and stare at the landscape, letting the landscape be and do what it does: kill without mercy and without passion. And it is a small voice calling in the wilderness, warning us against the hubris of man. Great movie.
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Come and See (1985), dir. Elem Klimov.
There is a sound throughout “Come and See”, a rasping screech. At times, it sounds like the howl of a warplane overhead. At other times, it could be the grinding gears of a truck. Once or twice, our minds convince us that it is the sound of human screams.
All of these sounds, of course, are incidental to the horrors of war, and we expect to hear them in a movie about war. But the sounds of “Come and See” are different. They are insidious. They are constant. They are inescapable.
So too the photography. Many war movies (notably Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan”) have adopted the handheld camera as a means to convey immediacy and urgency. Stark colors, natural light. Here, the scenes are covered in a grey pallor, a chiaroscuro of gunpowder and bomb smoke. The pallor carries over to the face of our main character, a young boy named Florya. At the outset of the film, he is youthful. By the end, he is weary, dead-eyed, and wrinkles are threatening at the corners of his eyes, because those eyes have seen horrors. Even when the horror escapes him, when it is merely happening in the background out of his view, we see it. Violence permeates this film like a poisonous gas. We become not inured to it, but we miss some of it simply because our perspectives cannot catch all of it. The title, taken from Revelation, is an invitation, a challenge, to see and observe what humanity has wrought.
This film is a visual interpretation of Wilfred Owen’s “Pro Patria Mori”. Indeed, the film’s opening sequence of children finding a discarded rifle and dreaming of glorious martyrdom for the fatherland is given a brutal rejection— an eternal, irrefutable rebuttal of jingoism and violence. The closing scenes remind us, through actual footage, of the greater evil that begat this evil.
It works. Truffaut’s assertion that you cannot make an anti-war film because you inevitably end up glorifying war has never rung so hollow. I had to watch this movie in two sittings, though it is not a long one. I don’t know that I will watch it again any time soon. But this is the prime example of the power of film to work in favor of a message. War is hell, and the heart of man knows no limit to the evil that it may breed.
