Week that Was

The Hills are Alive...

The disintegration of the studio system that brought an end to the classic Hollywood era also all but signaled the end of the prominence of the large-scale movie musical. Yet this week in 1965, The Sound of Music, which premiered in New York City, proved the genre was quite dead yet. The1959 Broadway musical, written by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rodgers just before Hammerstein's death, was given a lavish big screen adaptation with recent Best Actress Oscar winner Julie Andrews toplining alongside Christopher Plummer, and the production overseen by the ever-reliable Robert Wise (himself an Academy Award honoree for West Side Story). Based on a true story about Maria (Andrews), a nun-turned-governess who helps a widowed Austrian naval commander Captain Von Trapp (Plummer) and his seven children escape and the Nazis, the unusually serious plot did little to prevent music taking center stage. Andrews, often accompanied by her angelic septet, brought to life the now-classic songs "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," "My Favorite Things," "Sixteen Going On Seventeen" and, yes, "The Sound of Music," while Plummer lent his less experienced vocals to "Edelweiss." Though so old-fashioned that it was wildly at odds with the mores of the period, the movie was nevertheless an overwhelming success: it was easily the number one movie in 1965 and, taking into account inflation, is the third biggest box office earner of all time. In addition to its financial dominance, it was nominated for 10 Oscars, and took home five statuettes including the big two, Best Director and Best Picture.

The Eyes Have It

A masterpiece of contemporary horror that's surprisingly relevant today was released in Paris on March 3, 1960. Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face tells the story of Doctor Genessier, who abducts young women and mutilates them to perform heterografting surgery to restore the face of his daughter, who has been disfigured in a car accident. The cool, eerie black-and-white film, with its obsessed characters drifting through the hallways of the doctor's secluded mansion, was a precursor to much of the psychological Euro-Horror of the '60s and '70s while influencing U.S. films ranging from John Woo's Face/Off to John Carpenter's Halloween. (Carpenter has stated that the Michael Myers mask for the popular horror series was inspired by the featureless mask in Franju's film.) Novelist Patrick McGrath, in an essay contained on the Criterion DVD, summarized the film's complex and enduring value: "This is a story about the potential for evil of science in general and of medicine in particular, and not coincidentally it is also about patriarchy. It is about the father's tyranny over his women.... The real horror in Eyes Without a Face is that Genessier is not motivated by love at all but by his intolerable guilt at having ruined [his daughter]."

Fear follows Heaven

On Tuesday March 5 in his hometown of Munich, Rainer Werner Fassbinder opened his latest film, the melodrama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The film had its roots several years earlier when in 1971 at the Munich Film Festival, Fassbinder met the German-born American director Douglas Sirk. Many American critics viewed Sirk's lush color palette, melodramatic story lines and sometimes cardboard characters as the stuff of simple tearjerkers. But Fassbinder, who understood Sirk's Brechtian roots, could see the radical simplicity of Sirk's excess. While Fassbinder explored melodrama in such films as The Merchant of the Four Seasons and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), his Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a radical updating of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, proved to be his greatest critical and commercial success to date. In Sirk's 1955 original, Jane Wyman plays a middle-aged upper-class widow in a small town who befriends the local, and much younger, gardener (Rock Hudson). Their affection grows into love, much to the dismay of her children and the town's upright citizens, who are shocked to see her dating a man so much younger and beneath her. In Fassbinder's version, the upper class widow becomes a squat lonely cleaning woman (played by incomparable Brigette Mira) who seeks comfort, then love, in the arms of a younger Moroccan guest worker (El Hedi ben Salem). Although the opulence of Sirk's story takes on neo-Marxist and racial tones in Fassbinder, the emotions remain powerfully the same.

To Be Becomes a Classic

On March 6, German-born director Ernst Lubitsch opened his latest comedy To Be or Not to Be in theaters across the country. It was a daring comedy about a Polish theater troupe (lead by Jack Benny and Carole Lombard) who pretend to be Nazis in order to save a fighter pilot. While Chaplin's The Great Dictator had made light of the Nazi's two years earlier, the subject had grown more sensitive after America joined the war. Even the film's star, Jack Benny, had to convince his father it was a satire after he'd walked out of the theater upon seeing his son in a Nazi uniform. And many critics felt that if this was the Lubitsch touch, it was all thumbs. Bosley Crowther reviewing the film for the New York Times sneered: "Too bad a little more taste and a little more unity of mood were not put in this film. As it is, one has the strange feeling that Mr. Lubitsch is a Nero, fiddling while Rome burns." In addition to the Nazi problem, this comedy opened in the shadow of its Carole Lombard's tragic death. Less than two month earlier, Lombard had died in a plane crash as she was returning from a Midwest tour promoting war bonds. But history has given Lubitsch the last laugh, as the film is now held up as one of Lubitsch's finest (and funniest) films, as well as a high watermark of American comedy.

Pens down, Notebooks shut

On March 7, 1991, a seismic event transformed the world of film criticism: Pauline Kael stepped down for her role as critic at The New Yorker. Whether you appreciated her wit and insouciance or reacted against her often emotionally-driven celebration of pop moviemaking, there is no doubt that Kael transformed not just the landscape of film criticism but that of the movies themselves. Born in 1919, Kael's first jobs as critic were for City Lights magazine, the radio station KPFA in Berkeley, and McCall's. She was fired from the latter, some say, because of her dismissive review of The Sound of Music. After a brief stint at The New Republic she was hired by Wallace Shawn to review films for The New Yorker. There her brash, conversational style fused with the movies of the late '60s and early '70s as she celebrated the work of Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, Walter Hill and Brian De Palma, among many others. When she retired, she left behind a legion of critics highly influenced by her style - they were called, both affectionately and dismissively, The Paulettes - as well as filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino who cited her as an inspiration.

The Coens go far with Fargo

Joel and Ethan Coen reached a turning point in their career 12 years ago this week when they released their sixth feature, Fargo. The Coens once said that they would make a film in every genre and then stop, but after a detective noir (Blood Simple), a comedy road movie (Raising Arizona), a dark psychological drama (Barton Fink), the siblings had underwhelmed critics and underperformed at the box office with The Hudsucker Proxy, their homage to the screwball comedies of the 1940s. Fargo was their snowbound Minnesota-set thriller about a pregnant sheriff (Frances McDormand, Mrs Joel Coen) on the trail of two criminals (Peter Stormare and Coens regular Steve Buscemi) hired by a struggling car salesman (William H. Macy) to kidnap his wife. The film displayed a warm affection for its humble heroine which offset the moments of black humor and stark violence and was blessed with excellent performances. Macy and McDormand were both Oscar nominated, and the latter took home the Best Actress award while her husband and brother-in-law won Best Original Screenplay. Fargo's crossover success elevated the Coens to the level of commercially successful directors who have since thrived with hits The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) and this year's big Oscar winner, No Country For Old Men. The Coens' next film, Burn After Reading, will be released in September by Focus Features.