Military pride and victory, battlefield suffering, religious conviction, and death in all its pervasiveness all meet in the Julien Duvivier film, La Bandera (The Flag, 1935), whose gritty screenplay Duvivier and co-scenarist Charles Spaak adapted from a novel.

The picture concerns a Frenchman called Gilieth who murders a man in Paris (“a piece of crap” he calls him) and then runs away to Barcelona, where he is unemployed and hungry.  In order to survive, he joins the Spanish Foreign Legion, though not without a clandestine Spanish detective on his trail.  All the legionnaires, Gilieth included, volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and an agonizing, disastrous experience it is.  Can there be—is there—the acquisition of honor in this?

The French actress Annabella, who was married to Tyrone Power, has top billing in this film (she plays an Arab girl whom Gilieth marries), but she is not the star.  Jean Gabin is, satisfyingly cast as the one-time murderer. . . La Bandera is now creaky and obstreperous, but also vivid and candid.  I would say that at first its attitude is misanthropic, but eventually it does see Gilieth as acquiring honor as it puts a measure of faith in men on the battlefield, as it necessarily respects human risk and endurance.  At least the Spanish detective seems to see Gilieth as acquiring honor (or expiation).

(In French with English subtitles)

Tom is a college boy who is not very virile, and because of the ridicule and suspicion he elicits, the college headmaster’s wife, Laura, is kind and helpful to him.  Laura herself could use some kindness, though, since she is married to a man who, though manly, resists her and is a repressed homosexual.  He is seemingly jealous of Tom—a heterosexual, by the way—who knows how to receive and appreciate Laura’s sympathetic care.

The agony associated with what the human heart demands and needs is what Tea and Sympathy (1956)—film by Vincent Minnelli, play and screenplay by Robert Anderson—is about.  Properly and knowingly, Minnelli put the play on the screen, and the top-notch cast from the Broadway production (Deborah Kerr, et al.) was used.  The result is a truly adult film, i.e. one for an adult sensibility, presented with appreciable power.  Kenneth Tynan rightly thought the play a good middlebrow work; no less so is the movie.

Tea and Sympathy (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Directed by Robert Mulligan, The Stalking Moon (1968) is a rough-hewn Western wherein a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) kidnapped long ago by the Apaches, and now rescued, struggles to keep the Indian father of her half-Indian son from taking the boy away.  Helping her in this effort is a retiring army man (Gregory Peck) voluntarily serving as her escort.  The likable action scenes hardly redeem this picture once it starts failing to make sense—perhaps the novel from which it is adapted is more illuminating—and since it too quickly and casually ends.  As it happens, Moon is one of the weakest Westerns of the past few decades.

Cover of The Stalking Moon

The Nutty Professor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The “inner man” Prof. Julius Kelp releases from himself through chemical means is the rude, unspeakably conceited Buddy Love—not a good inner man.  Julius, a college chemistry teacher, fails to realize this, and never expects Stella (Stella Stevens) to fall for him.  We don’t expect it either; he’s a nutty professor—played with farcical adroitness by Jerry Lewis in the Lewis classic, The Nutty Professor (1963).

However, the movie ends on a dandy note by having Julius and Stella walk off to get married as Stella, unknown to her fiance, bears on her belt two bottles of the weird chemical that turned Julius into masculine Buddy.  Sincerely wanting the qualities of Prof. Kelp, she also wants, I would say,—for Julius—some of the qualities of Buddy Love.

Lewis’s film is a sassy, leisurely, corny delight—with “some scenes that can hold their own with the classic silent comedies” (Pauline Kael).  One such scene contains a tracking shot of people on the street looking astonished at an unseen, very, very cool Buddy.  Another shows, in a flashback, Julius’s darkly, grimly funny parents while goofy baby Julius is in a nearby playpen. . . Stella Stevens fills the bill as the lady-love, and is youthfully beautiful.  Del Moore, as the college president, and Howard Morris, as the professor’s father, are successful as well, hilariously right.

In ’63, The Nutty Professor may have been the best American comedy since Pillow Talk.

Cover via Amazon

If it is a Christian who is baptized (excluding the infants), the baby donkey baptized by children in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is a Christian—or, rather, a “Christian.”  He is a “Christian” in the sense of a suffering servant—“an epitome of passive suffering,” says Vernon Young.  He is frightened and scorned and abused by men, while, on the other hand, a girl named Marie (Anne Wiazemsky) loves him as a pet.  But Balthazar, the donkey, is removed from Marie, and Marie—virtually the Mary Magdalene of the film—removes herself from respectable company.  Not only does she love the vile hoodlum Gerard (Francois Lafarge), she also resorts to prostitution.  Balthazar must live with the earthy, earthly reality.  Marie chooses to live with, to embrace, the worldly.

Its flaws keep Au Hasard Balthazar (At Random, Balthazar) from being as powerful as it could be.  All the same, it manages to be one of the good movies of Robert Bresson (unlike those he made in the Seventies), a profound Christian opus acknowledging that there is Christological truth in the natural world.  It also conveys that the sufferer is superior to the sinner, albeit Marie too, after sinning, suffers.

(In French with English subtitles)