Remembering

Somewhere

Both singers are dubbed and both are singularly limited as movie actors. (Yet who else could go from playing Tony in West Side Story (1961) to playing -- 30 years later -- Benjamin Horne[!] in Twin Peaks?) And yes Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer hated each other on set, since Wood wanted then-husband -- and future-murderer -- Robert Wagner as Tony. Plus the movie is not light and funny, nor a showcase for star performers in their best routines. Still. . .

Where did all this go? What happened to it? This quiet and warmth. This full-bodied belief in transcendence, heartbreak, longing. This sense of doom coming not from covens of corporate vampires creating a world frozen in dread, cynicism, and corruption; rather, a tragic forboding arising from the nature of things, as if one is never in so much danger as when happy and/or alive -- that is when the devils seem to have their day, and hawks steal something living from the gambol on the field. . .

West Side Story can now be seen, 60 years on, as a bleeding-heart opera of the Kennedy Years, filled with a faith in endless possibility and joy, undercut by distant drums -- a movie with a vanished New York City of movement, color, good humor, fellowship, and a loathing of pretension and power at the center of its tender heart.

Let it bleed.

Good Man

Happy 60th Birthday to one of 21st-century Hollywood's very few good guys. [In spite of his continuing support for the criminal organization known as the Democratic Party.]

In this nauseating MarvelComix movie era (going on 40 years now), to experience a classical liberal film is a bracing and uplifting experience. Works such as Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) were pretty much standard fair and what socially-sensitive filmgoers of the late-50s and early-60s would expect from Hollywood: Seven Days in May, Fail Safe, A Child is Waiting, Lilies of the Field, Anatomy of a Murder, Americanization of Emily, Manchurian Candidate, The Miracle Worker, Advise and Consent, Days of Wine and Roses -- but has been a genre so long ignored that it's heartbreaking to see it once more. People can, and should, treat each other decently -- that's the theme of the work. How revolutionary it now seems, when the face of U.S. power and culture appeals to the worst and assumes the very worst about humanity.

A chamber piece that believes its audience (probably a mistake) knows enough about the McCarthy Era to move right into the human element of the time, Good Night embodies the dream of good people working together doing good things; and it works so well because that's what director Clooney achieved on his set. All the actors are quiet, devoid of the usual ET narcissism, and one comes away aching for a group of co-workers doing serious things, treating each other with respect, and feeling safe about it all. (Another dream stolen from us by the corporate totalitarians.)

The picture has its flaws. Perhaps a brief prelude of what was going on in the early 1950s may have helped people jump into the human aspects more readily. (Stone did a great job of that with the Charlie Sheen-narrated prelude to JFK.) The subplot with the secretly-married Robert Downey, Jr (who's particularly good here, as usual) and Patricia Clarkson (who's not, as usual) should've been dumped. And replaced with much more background on the monstrous William Paley (Frank Langella). The director hints at where he could have gone, in the scene where Paley tells Ed Murrow: "I gave you that house of yours. I put your kids through school. I've given you everything you have." It is, of course, entirely the other way around. The Paleys of that world -- and especially in our own -- have what they have because of the blood of people like Murrow, Fred Friendly, Don Hollenbeck, and George Clooney. Paley's bellowing is exactly the way the vampire class always feels about itself. Which is why it must be destroyed. But now I'm arguing for a different kind of film. . .

A generous-hearted actor and director, what Clooney gives us remains special, with an opening as lovely as one of his aunt's songs.

Awakenings

Japan's first movie-kiss occurred on screens in late 1946, in Yasushi Sasaki's Twenty-Year-Old Youth (Hatachi no seishun). Post-surrender reforms imposed on Japan by Douglas MacArthur's "Supreme Commander of Allied Powers" (SCAP) were less economic and systemic in effect, than they were stylistic and emotional. Real power remained basically where it'd been before the Japanese military went insane. (An insanity ignited by the 1930s economic war waged on Japan by white Western forces.) SCAP instead went after the underpinnings of culture both popular and traditional, and blew them, after a period of time, apart: zaibatsu still ran the country; everything else changed. Most dramatically, the role of women. A gradual shift from a culture of tradition to one of youth. Dress. What was acceptable in fiction, journalism, and music. Popular dancing. Ideas of romance and marriage. And sex.

Not long after the release of Twenty-Year-Old Youth, Mikio Naruse became the first prestigious movie director to show the (attempted) physical act of love on screen, and it is a moment of terror. From the point-of-view of 2021 and a world of general human and cultural decomposition, the corporate devouring of myth and consequence ~ and Rin Sakuragi ~ Naruse's Spring Awakens (Haru no mezame) is very hard to believe. Did this world really exist? Watching the movie feels like touching the pre-historic. This isn't Imperial Rome or Renaissance France. My daughter's grandparents lived this world when they were Saya-chan's age. . .

Three pretty high school students genuinely (and believably) know nothing about sex, or how babies are born. (In a movie filled with many small miracles of gesture and nuance, this is the large one.) Two years after the destruction of the country, where is the Year Zero barbarism? (See Mizoguchi's Women of the Night.) Three boys are their friends: an artist, a writer, and a doctor's son. The boys and girls are surrounded by their own confusions: the maid in Kumiko's household must be dismissed for having a black-marketeer boyfriend; Koji's adored older sister is getting married; a "dirty picture" is found in one schoolgirl's desk, causing the ransacking of all the girls' desks. And Akiko must leave school because of a pregnancy, a pregnancy we are are led to believe will soon be terminated.

The boys and girls (and we) are also faced with intense and continuing sensuality: the explosion of spring and summer, as if nature is holding the small town as one holds a bee between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed; Kyoko and Kumiko lying close together on the hillgrass, one girl in kimono, the other in western clothes; Kumiko thinking about where babies come from and Naruse fading on her upturned swinging bare feet; the physical at the girls' school; the boys-and-girls Sunday picnic; Hanae and Kyoko hiking up their skirts -- again one girl in kimomo, the other not -- in the river as they play with a family of ducks and as they try to avoid rocks playfully tossed at them by the boys.

The scene where Noshiro (the artist) forcefully kisses Kumiko, because it came from such a famous director, instantly became legend. Yet the following sequence, during a lightning-and-thunder storm, is the film's greatest. Kyoko and her friend Hanae's older brother are in love. She is terrified of thunder, the sound of falling bombs. Has any other movie sequence better captured a young girl's sexual torment and longing? What would've happened if Hanae had not returned home? And Hanae -- who also loves Koji, who only has eyes for Kumiko -- senses what she may have interrupted. . .

Yet the sadness of the film. (The relationships between Kumiko and her little sister, and Koji and his older sister, are especially moving.) My favorite moment: Kumiko and the doctor's son have loved each other since childhood. At one point Koji's soon-to-be-married sister gives him a memory album for him to keep. One photo is of herself, and Kumiko and Koji as children.

Later, on the morning of the sister's wedding, Koji and Kumiko walk together, discussing nothing in particular, and at the end of their walk, as both feel the other's growing attachment, Koji kicks a stone ahead. Watch the cut.

Another spring, another wedding, two years later. Another shot embodying the love for a girl-as-she-was, this time from a father about to lose her.

The same deep sadness from Ozu and Naruse (and many other places), as if the pain of what has happened and what was happening to Japan was too overwhelming to be numbed by even the most beautiful and most human of dreams.

Naruse's Spring Awakens (1947).