Yasujiro Ozu Special: The Only Son (1936)/An Autumn Afternoon (1962)

A couple of weeks back, I was lucky enough to catch a mini Ozu retrospective at the Filmothéque du Quartier Latin, one of Paris’ many terrific little arthouse cinemas in the district around the Sorbonne. Even better, alongside two of Ozu’s best-known films - Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon -the management had decided to include one of the director’s lesser-known works: his first talkie, The Only Son. Having seen Tokyo Story fairly recently, I skipped it this time round to focus on the other films in the series, which I was watching for the first time, and in doing so gained a fresh appreciation of an auteur who only seems to get better with age. Nonetheless, although one of Ozu’s hallmarks is the consistency and continuity which links all of his films together, by juxtaposing his first talking picture and his last we can clearly see that a journey of tremendous aesthetic and an emotional refinement separates the early effort and the final masterpiece.

Rio Grande (1950)

Dir.: John Ford
Plot: A cavalry officer's dangerous task of protecting settlers from rebellious Apache is made more complicated by the arrival of his estranged wife and son.

If you happen to come across any of those unreconstructed heathens who insist against all reason that John Wayne couldn't act, this is the film to show them (either of the two previous entries in the Cavalry trilogy can be used to hammer the point home if needed). The fact that he could act doesn’t mean he always did, of course, and there are plenty of phoned-in performances amongst a filmography so long you could hang your hat on it - Wayne never gave more than he was asked to give, and very frequently he was asked to give next to nothing. John Ford was the only director who consistently pushed for something deeper than a ‘John Wayne’ cowboy archetype from his leading man, and in the Cavalry Trilogy (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande) he got it.

Lawless (2012)

Note: a slightly truncated version of this review first appeared on Kubrick on the Guillotine

Dir: John Hillcoat

Plot: Three moonshining brothers in 1920s Virginia find their activities disturbed by the arrival of a ruthless lawman determined to wipe them out.

Lawless isn't a very good name for a movie, is it? A bit generic. A better name for this would be The Beverly Killbillies. Excuse the corny wordplay, because it serves a higher purpose. Not only does it sum up the plot of the Nick Cave-penned bootlegging drama, it also sums up its fundamental flaw - it isn't sure whether it's a bloodsoaked thriller or a good ol' boy yuk-fest and it never tries probing deep enough to find out.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945)

(This review originally appeared on Kubrick On The Guillotine, a great film site that you should check out)

Dir.: Elia Kazan
Plot: A bright young girl comes of age in a turn-of-the-century Brooklyn tenement, witnessing the tensions and struggles of her family.

Rarely does a young director’s first feature film contain such striking beauty and power as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But then again, rarely is that director Elia Kazan. And the young auteur had hardly set himself an easy task: coming off the back of nothing more than a short film about coal mining in Tennessee, Kazan was to condense an enormously popular 500-page novel by Betty Smith into a 2-hour studio production. The result is an astonishingly assured mini-epic which dampened handkerchiefs across the nation, and launched Kazan into a career that would change American film.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Dir.: Christopher Nolan
Plot: A reclusive Bruce Wayne is forced to reassume his alter ego Batman to protect Gotham from a ruthless terrorist with designs on Gotham.

SPOILERS ABOUND

You can’t have your cake and eat it. This is a fundamental rule of many things in life, and movie making is one of them. The Dark Knight Rises tries to straddle the line between bleak psychological drama and extremely fast motorbikes and doesn’t quite manage it. The result is a frustratingly uneven epic - bolstered with good performances, excellent direction and some memorable set pieces but ultimately overlong, turgid and weighed down with questionable subplots and 2D characterisations.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, Season 2 (1962-3)

The first series of The Dick Van Dyke Show is really good fun, as well as being a textbook example of how to develop rounded, likeable characters. However, this is the season which really gets going, comedically-speaking. It's a mixture of old-fashioned comedy - slapstick, Borscht Belt one-liners, musical interludes - and modern tropes which now make up the staple of sitcoms everywhere. The humour of contemporary domestic tensions, social relationships and suburban pressures was really pushed to the fore for the first time, with smart characters stuck in unavoidable farce yet showing unexpected moments of self-awareness that were previously unseen on television. This season of the show particularly is a fascinating bridge from old to new.

City For Conquest (1940)

Dir.: Anatole Litvak
Plot: An ex-boxer returns to the ring to support his younger brother and impress his ambitious fiancee, with tragic consequences.

 James Cagney didn’t get too much credit as a serious dramatic actor before his Oscar-winning turn as George M. Cohan in 1942. City For Conquest is therefore a rather rare opportunity to see a pre-Yankee Doodle Dandy Cagney giving it his all in a heady, romantic melodrama which demands very little of the bantam histrionics which had defined him for much of the 1930s. An uneven, sudsy affair kept afloat by several strong, affecting performances, it is possibly most notable for its proto-Manhattan use of New York as a romantic metaphor.