The opening sequence of the 1931 French film, Le Million, by Rene Clair, is great.  A medium-long shot of a man and a woman saying goodnight at the window of each person’s flat is followed by stylized footage of Paris rooftops and then a scurrying of two figures to the skylight of one of these roofs.  It’s an enchanting sequence, but then Le Million is an enchanting musical comedy, a brave if idiosyncratic adaptation of a play.

Michel (Rene Lefevre) is not a very lovely hero, really, but he is entitled to the million florins that a Dutch lottery ticket ensures for him.  He just has to retrieve the jacket in whose pocket the ticket can be found.  It’s missing. . . The film’s humor is droll, though there’s no wit:  The dialogue, you see, is improvised.  The music, some of it operatic, is often pleasant, curiously featured as though it were beside the point.  The cast is generally fun, the leading lady (Annabella—one name only) inarguably, unglamorously pretty.

It’s Clair all the way.

(In French with English subtitles)

Le Million (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan did not, in my opinion, put out a truly successful film with Manchester by the Sea; but he does better, without quite redeeming himself, in the scenario-penning for Howards End (2018), a four-hour TV miniseries.  I have watched more than the first two hours of the show on Amazon Prime and love how limpid and fundamentally profound it is.

Because of landscapes near the sea and very winning costumes, the “film” is twice as lovely-looking as Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility.  I am much enjoying Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard as reformist young women of the early 20th century and Matthew Macfadyen in all his solidity.  E.M. Forster’s Howards End is yet another novel I have not read; I suspect I wouldn’t want it said that this Howards End is yet another TV series I have not seen.  More on the show later.

Liberal men (and female feminists) in today’s post-MeToo movie industry would never release a film like Brian De Palma‘s Dressed to Kill (1980), for they would obtusely suspect it of being sexist.  It is rather refreshing to see such a candid work from the past, although I myself am bothered by the film’s sensationalism at the beginning and close to the end.  Indeed, it is this and Angie Dickinson‘s second-rate acting that make the film so unpromising for the first 15 minutes.  Then it gets stronger.

Dickinson plays an unhappy, sexually dissatisfied wife and mother who ceases to have any scruples about her marriage.  Eventually she is murdered.  Dressed to Kill, which De Palma wrote as well as directed, is Psycho with sex steadily focused on, sex taken utterly seriously.

The movie, I repeat, gets stronger, but only for a while.  De Palma intentionally steals from Hitchcock but is not as powerful a thriller director as Hitchcock.  Further, his screenplay contains too much that is hard to swallow.  Deeply sensual through its female bodies—including that of Nancy Allen, De Palma’s ex-wife—the movie is nevertheless non-sexist.  Why did it have to be non-sexist sensationalism?

To Denys Arcand, the American empire must be a North American empire, which is to say Canada and the United States (not Mexico).  His film, The Fall of the American Empire (2018), after all, is set in Montreal, where there is as much hunger for ill-gotten money as in Chicago or Houston.

This movie doesn’t cut it, though.  For most of its running time it isn’t dull, but Arcand is an unsatisfying writer, The Barbarian Invasions notwithstanding.  It’s politically insignificant and artistically paltry.

(In French with English subtitles)