The French Connection (1971), the William Friedkin film, has a potent New York City flavor and is good at presenting the determination of drug traders to acquire a lot of dough.  Gene Hackman is perfect as Detective “Popeye” Doyle, but there is virtually nothing admirable about the man.  He stinks.

The movie is not as witty as some have believed.  The talk can be coarse and sophomoric, and it sometimes seems insufficient.  The urgent music is a bit overused, and . . .well, other blemishes in this demotic film are well catalogued.  On the other hand, it is a thrilling thriller.

Cover of The French Connection

There is global dissatisfaction with, even hatred for, Communist governments, for movies that express this have emanated from Russia, China, Cuba, Germany. Christian Petzold‘s 2012 Barbara is one such German film, as important as the others.

Nina Hoss enacts a thirtyish doctor living in East Germany in the 1980s. Her application to leave the country has compelled the government to send her to work in a rural hospital, but Barbara, the doctor, seeks to escape to the West. Communists in power, to her, are “assholes.” This means, even so, that Barbara will be leaving behind some broken people—patients—and her West German lover is willing to live with her in the Red East. Much is forcing her to make a difficult choice.

Having seen Barbara twice, I realize it is a small film. But also it is grave and uncompromising. And it is humanistic—humanistically anti-Red.

(In German with English subtitles)

Kris Kristofferson, as an ex-cop released from prison and now needing to rebuild his life, adds little to the film Trouble in Mind (1985). Divine (remember him?) adds even less.

Directed and written by Alan Rudolph, the picture is a weird film noir which grows dismayingly feeble and dopey. Rudolph does some nice things—images, I mean—with beautiful Lori Singer‘s face and body, but her role is hardly astutely created. Too bad I couldn’t know Trouble in Mind was trouble when it first walked in. (Apologies to Taylor Swift.)

At the center of Lazzaro Felice (2018), by Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher, is a saintly though ignorant young man called Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo). Forced by a female tobacco business owner into so much indebtedness that no salary is possible, he and a large group of workers are mere slaves until the operation is shut down.

With the rotten U.S. title of Happy as Lazzaro, the film is, I think, meant to be mythopoeic. Rohrwacher has invented a modern myth that points up goodness (and naivete) over against evil in human history. Alas, she doesn’t really know where to take this myth, for the final scene is pedestrian, weak. Prior to it, however, what we see is engrossing—a quiet marvel with miracle realism, if you will.

Available on Netflix.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

From Here to Eternity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

James Jones is a much-criticized writer, but the movie adaptation of his book, From Here to Eternity, should not be a much-criticized film.

Deeply interesting, it received very respectable direction from Fred Zinnemann as it relates the story of three men, especially Montgomery Clift‘s Private Prewitt, on a Hawaii military base in ’41.  An able boxer, Prewitt nevertheless refuses to box for his captain’s team because he once blinded a man with his punches.  Others in the unit persistently bully him for this, and although Prewitt’s sergeant (Burt Lancaster) wrongly agrees that Prewitt is making a mistake, he is far more preoccupied with his growing love for Deborah Kerr‘s Karen, who is married to a philandering officer.

The army’s insistence in the film that the individual must be eclipsed by the group, the collective, is centered on something trivial—a boxing competition—compared with what the group is needed for at a later time: survival during the Pearl Harbor attack.  Prewitt the individual is important in his desire to eschew boxing-ring violence.  Prewitt the unit member wants to be a soldier, but the army, though honorable, is too small-minded not to militate against him.

Donna Reed plays the love interest for Prewitt, and although she is miscast as a (nice) prostitute, her acting is admirable.  There is no real flaw here, but there is one in the picture’s intermittent excess:  too many servicemen get stupidly drunk, for example.  Zinnemann, even so, aimed to make serious Hollywood movies, and this one is not only serious but good as well.