Il Posto (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Adult life has begun for Domenico (Sandro Panseri); he goes out to look for a job in a corporation.  And he gets one in Ermanno Olmi‘s marvelous Il Posto (The Job, 1961), albeit the point of the film is that urban organization and anonymity are, at bottom, frightful.  It is this that Domenico encounters upon leaving his modest house for the city of Milan.  What’s more, he both meets a girl he likes (Loredana Detto) and, correlatively, experiences urban loneliness.  But one must work, even if it’s a dreary office job lasting a lifetime, and although it may seem to Domenico that Antonietta, the girl, is likely to permanently slip away from him, this is anything but a foregone conclusion.  Hers is an attitude that should lift his spirits.

Miss Detto must have lifted Olmi’s spirits, for he married her and is still married to her. . . Though the director considered Il Posto “harsh,” it is far from utterly bleak or pessimistic.  It is a trenchant achievement even better—considerably so—-than Olmi’s thoroughly religious Tree of Wooden Clogs.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Il Posto (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Adult life has begun for Domenico (Sandro Panseri); he goes out to look for a job in a corporation.  And he gets one in Ermanno Olmi‘s marvelous Il Posto (The Job, 1961), albeit the point of the film is that urban organization and anonymity are, at bottom, frightful.  It is this that Domenico encounters upon leaving his modest house for the city of Milan.  What’s more, he both meets a girl he likes (Loredana Detto) and, correlatively, experiences urban loneliness.  But one must work, even if it’s a dreary office job lasting a lifetime, and although it may seem to Domenico that Antonietta, the girl, is likely to permanently slip away from him, this is anything but a foregone conclusion.  Hers is an attitude that should lift his spirits.

Miss Detto must have lifted Olmi’s spirits, for he married her and is still married to her. . . Though the director considered Il Posto “harsh,” it is far from utterly bleak or pessimistic.  It is a trenchant achievement even better—considerably so—-than Olmi’s thoroughly religious Tree of Wooden Clogs.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Squishy TV shows, from The Voice to The Talk, keep lying to us with the message that we’re Able and Strong and Good Enough. We’re dreamers whose dreams can come true. They even intimate that we can create, and are worthy of, some kind of national utopia. It’s a false edification. It’s part of a therapeutic culture which mostly ignores the horrors of life. It would NEVER believe in something like the judgment of God on the United States. Its TV shows never explain, cannot explain, why we are Good Enough.

Squishy TV shows, from The Voice to The Talk, keep lying to us with the message that we’re Able and Strong and Good Enough. We’re dreamers whose dreams can come true. They even intimate that we can create, and are worthy of, some kind of national utopia. It’s a false edification. It’s part of a therapeutic culture which mostly ignores the horrors of life. It would NEVER believe in something like the judgment of God on the United States. Its TV shows never explain, cannot explain, why we are Good Enough.

Because he badly needed money, Orson Welles churned out The Lady from Shanghai (1947), an unusual pulp movie with some tragic elements. The seaside party in Citizen Kane re-emerges in this flick and receives expansive treatment with a number of dandy shots. The script, however, is ineptly written, and Welles miscast himself as an Irish-American toughie who, by and by, gets pretty quiet and confused. (Not believable.) Rita Hayworth needs more magnetism in the titular role and, thanks to Welles, is insufficiently glamorous with her cut and bleached-blond hair. A flop, even at the box office.