Week that Was

Two Dangerous Letters…

The English public school has always had a reputation as a stiff-upper-lip breeding ground for the country's great political leaders and entrepreneurs, but that vaunted image was violently exploded with the release of Lindsay Anderson's If…, which opened in New York this week in 1968. Taking inspiration from Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct as well as John Osborne's generation of angry young men, Anderson's movie was an incendiary examination of the public school system. Surreal and irreverent, it scathingly portrayed both the geriatric schoolmasters and the hierarchy of young upper-class brutes, but the film's heart and fiery soul was Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), the leader of a trio of pupils who choose to go against the current. McDowell, in his very first film role, is the embodiment of passionate, wild-eyed youthful rebellion and it's very easy to see why Stanley Kubrick cast him as Alex (a vindictive and more extreme version of Mick) in A Clockwork Orange just a few years later. In many ways, If… is the prototypical modern movie of teenage rebellion and in the intervening 40 years has lost none of its energy, humor, relevance or raw power. McDowell subsequently enjoyed a successful career as a pleasingly idiosyncratic leading man, and even revived the character of Mick Travis in two subsequent Lindsay Anderson movies, O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982).

The Talented Monsieur Delon

Handsome, bare-chested and holding the wheel of a yacht, this was how moviegoers were introduced to the villainous Tom Ripley when the film Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) was released in Paris 48 years ago. The movie was based on Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley and featured a fresh-faced and ruggedly handsome Alain Delon (in one of his earliest film roles) playing the deceitful anti-hero Ripley. Though inspired by film noir anti-heros of 40s cinema, Highsmith's protagonist is unique for how callous, unemotional and thoroughly amoral he is, and yet his total emotional detachment from his actions make him compelling and utterly fascinating rather than repulsive. In Purple Noon, Ripley is revealed as obsessive, deceitful and murderous, an impostor who kills a rich young man who he ingratiates himself with — and then assumes the dead man's identity. Delon gave a memorable performance as the ice-cold opportunist that was a milestone in the Frenchman's career, but he was not to be the last actor to distinguish himself playing Ripley. Since Delon, Dennis Hopper has played an older and very different Ripley in Wim Wenders' The American Friend, Matt Damon embodied him in The Talented Mr. Ripley (2000), and both Barry Pepper and John Malkovich have also recently played the role in Ripley Under Ground (2005) and Ripley's Game (2002) respectively.

Dial M for Murderer

M, the latest film from Fritz Lang, opened in theaters in Berlin today. Different from his earlier films — Metropolis, Nibelungen, Spies — whose epic tales were unfurled with mythic proportions, M was intended to be a psychological study, a look into the criminal mind. Indeed the film's original title, Murderers Among Us, underscores the paranoid feeling of danger everywhere. In making the film, Lang and his wife Thea Von Harbou immersed themselves in the study of forensic science, even traveling to England to meet with detectives from Scotland Yard. They chose a real-life criminal, Peter Kürten, to model their character after, hoping, of course, that the sting of Kürten's evil deeds still rang in people's minds. Kürten, who terrorized all of Dusseldorf a few years earlier by killing over 40 people, had been dubbed the Vampire of Düsseldorf for supposedly drinking the blood of his victims. The film also marked Lang's foray into sound, as he used voice-over, music, sounds, whistling, and the like to accent the action, but never filmed dialogue. And Peter Lorre's unforgettable performance as the child murderer, hunted by the police and criminal world, didn't need any dialog to express what his eyes did. While a huge success, the Nazis banned the film a few years later, then added insult to injury by editing out some of Lorre's performances to re-use in anti-Semitic propaganda. Elsewhere the movie was a classic. Irving Thalberg reportedly screened it to his executives as the kind of film he wanted to make, adding that he'd can any one who brought him a script about a child murderer.

Coppola Buys Hollywood

On March 14, 1980, Francis Ford Coppola stepped up his ambitious plans for an independent movie studio by moving into the old Hollywood Center Studios, a storied set of sound stages in Hollywood, California that housed productions as far back as 1922. Over the years, the Hollywood Center Studios changed hands several times while productions such as Jean Renoir's The Southerners, the Marx Brothers' A Night in Casablanca, the pilot for I Love Lucy, episodes of The Rockford Files and, finally, Hal Ashby's Shampoo all set up shop there. Coppola, however, wasn't interested in renting — he bought the facility for $6.7 million for his American Zoetrope production company. Renaming it Zoetrope Studios, Coppola produced there a string of films that included The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and One from the Heart. Ironically, it was the latter film, a paean to old-fashioned soundstage shooting, which bankrupted Coppola and led to his losing the studio. What was originally intended as a modest production grew to include gigantic Vegas sets, including a replica of the city's airport and runway. After the film's financial failure, Coppola sold the studio to a family of Canadian real estate developers who capitalized on the new market for music videos to bring in as clients Michael Jackson, Prince and Lionel Ritchie, among others, restoring the site to profitability.

A Film You Can't Refuse

The Godfather, recently cited by the American Film Institute as the second greatest film of all time (after Citizen Kane), opened in theaters on March 15, 1972. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on the best-selling novel by Mario Puzo, The Godfather is a grand, near-Shakespearean drama about the Italian Mafia and, specifically, one of New York's reigning crime families, the Corleones. Stories of the film's making are now legendary. Coppola was hounded during production by Paramount studio executives, who worried that the film's casting was off, the violence quotient was too low, and that Gordon Willis's photography was too dark. Coppola won his battles, however, including a crucial one to cast a relatively unknown (and Italian-looking) Al Pacino as Michael Corleone over studio picks Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neal. Upon its initial release, the film became the highest-grossing movie of all time, leading to a sequel, The Godfather Part Two, which is generally considered the best sequel of all time. Another sequel followed as well as a TV re-edit and then the scores of other films and television shows, including The Sopranos, which owed much to Coppola's fusion of family drama, social commentary, and crime movie.

Water Runs Deep

Today Paris got a chance to see Water Dropping on Burning Rocks, the latest film from the wunderkind François Ozon. Ozon, who'd previously adapted the styles of classic directors — Hitchcock and Chabrol in See the Sea and Pasolini and Buñuel in Sitcom — turned to Fassbinder to make Water Dropping. But rather than create something in the style of Fassbinder, Ozon found and adapted an obscure unpublished play that Fassbinder had written when he was only 19. Done as a period piece with electric 70s wallpaper and garish furniture, the film stays entirely within the stage of one over-decorated apartment, but uses its staginess to uniquely cinematic ends. An older man picks up a younger one, and his seduction unfolds over time to encompass the man's girl friend and a number of musical numbers. But what makes the film so exceptional is the way Ozon treats Fassbinder as a jazz musician would a classic standard, taking and improvising the drama in new and personal directions while all along exploring more deeply the master's themes and ideas.