A silent film by Ernst Lubitsch, The Doll (1919) is cinematic artifice at its most curious. Lubitsch pretends it is crafted from what he pulls out of a toy chest, and a story gets underway presenting a babyish, hypersensitive young man (Hermann Thimig, fascinating) who refuses to get married. What he does instead, to gain an uncle’s dowry (for some gluttonous monks!), is to “marry” what he believes to be a mechanical doll. But not so. The dollmaker’s daughter is pretending to be the doll. Ossi by name, she is played by Ossi Oswalda, a German actress who attained a lot of fame in the Silent era and, in ill health, died at only 48. Here, she seamlessly displays the daughter’s mischievousness and is a luminous delight. In fact, so is The Doll. Anyone who is getting into Lubitsch must see it.
Bed and Board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Francois Truffaut made Bed and Board (Domicile Conjugal, 1970) to show us his autobiographical character, Antoine Doinel—a former juvenile delinquent—as a married man with a child. Casually he tosses in the revelation that Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is often selfish, and drama would be absent from the film had he not had Antoine cheat on his wife (Claude Jade) with a Japanese woman.
Less successful than Truffaut’s other Antoine Doinel pictures, Bed is nevertheless pleasurable with its slight goofiness and, well, essentially meaningless high spirits. It is usually the equivalent of a Paul McCartney love song, except that it’s pretty risqué. The Story of Adele H. it ain’t.
(In French with English subtitles)
Claude Goretta‘s 1977 French picture, The Lacemaker (La Dentelliere), deals with a shy, gentle working-class girl (Isabelle Huppert) and a smart, unassuming college student (Yves Beneyton) who simply do not belong in a serious amatory affair with each other. It is also about lives that become empty and disillusioning and even nonsexual, and are thoroughly secular. After seeing it on videotape years ago, I was never able to see it again except recently on YouTube in an auto-translated version—not the best subtitles; in fact they’re worthless. Still, I’m grateful for it.
The film is an excellent one, splendidly, poetically directed by Goretta. There are beach scenes as lovely as the camera placement is inspired. There is dandy camera movement too (the crane shot) and meaningful fades to black. The Lacemaker derives from a novel by Pascal Laine. On its own, Goretta’s screenplay impresses. As in his film The Invitation, he loves his characters. Huppert and Beneyton are persuasive actors; Florence Giorgetti even more so.
Christmas in July (1940), by Preston Sturges, is a nice short story of a film. It isn’t novelistic, yet it is a feature film. Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) is tricked by co-workers into believing he won a commercial slogan contest. He can’t possibly afford the purchases he then makes; enter the police, etc. As in other Sturges movies, a pendulum swings from being poor to being rich or vice versa, and it happens one way or another. An American fond of Europe, Sturges looked at New World wealth with European guilessless and consternation but also hope.
Christmas is slight but pleasurably rowdy. Not as good as, say, the more novelistic Sullivan’s Travels, it is nevertheless engaging. Powell’s acting is ready for tragicomedy and successful. The daughter of an Irish-born barber, Ellen Drew is likable as Jimmy’s wife but seems to have a bit of an accent which harms her voice appeal in lengthy speech.
Film critics are offended by the “fascism” and the politics of Uwe Boll‘s Citizen Vigilante (2026), but it doesn’t matter. Nobody is reading these reviews, few though there are, and scores of people are renting the film from Amazon Prime and Apple TV; and it’s resonating with them. Yes, the film is irresponsible—and agitprop—but it makes the point that the authorities in Western society are also irresponsible. They cruelly represent progressive indifference to rampant immigration, incompetence about immigrant crime (and crime in general), and wimpy permissiveness.
Banned in Germany, where Boll was born, the English-language CV is pulpy, gory, grim, and even sexy. Armie Hammer‘s performance probably cannot be improved on. Margarita Mladinic is never false as a prostitute and has a clearly comely body.