Jules and Jim (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the French film Jules and Jim (1961), from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, Jules, Jim and Catherine flow into play, ecstasy and romantic love and then into disappointment and the reality of Catherine being “a dark flame ready to burn herself or anyone else” (David Thomson).  Sorry, ladies.  This is another Francois Truffaut movie that features an emotionally disturbed woman.  It is also one to which he brings his usual love of life and . . . what?

A caveat:  I get tired of Jules and Jim because of all the talk and all the episodes.  It is not one of my favorite Truffaut films.  It is assuredly inferior to Two English Girls and The 400 Blows.  Still, it can be delightfully vigorous and intelligent.  It makes us glad that Truffaut had a personal style.  And it has Jeanne Moreau.

(In French with English subtitles)

Today’s Hollywood trudges on.  Multiethnic madness—and villainy—prevail in Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver (2017), with its speedily moving wild bunch.

Jon Hamm is even better here, playing a married crook turned killer, than he was in Mad Men.  Hamm is Buddy, who’s fairly likable until his wife Darlin’ (Eliza Gonzalez), another crook, gets shot up by the police about as intensely as Bonnie Parker does in Bonnie and Clyde.  Now Buddy is out for blood—the blood of the dude he blames for his wife’s death:  the getaway driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort), who seldom talks and incessantly listens (to rock music).  In fact he drives, walks and runs to the inescapable music, and even the shoot-out in which Darlin’ loses her life is a dance routine with firearms.

Edgar Wright is a British director whose technique in Baby Driver is cartoonish but soberingly fun and mostly clever.  His compatriot, Lily James, is very pretty and quite pleasing, affecting an American accent, as Baby’s girlfriend.  A lot of things go on in this flick, and I was never bored with any of it.  It’s utterly propulsive but not punishing (I think)—except to the crooks.

Aliens (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Aliens, the 1986 sequel to Alien, is a big-time adventure film, and I mean the 153-minute director’s cut from James Cameron.  It is less imaginative than the first film (by Ridley Scott), however, and completely inartistic.  But the same everything-at-stake suspense and brazen action are there.

So is Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, still behaving like an uncharming man except for being somewhat softened by a little Newt.  Excuse me, I mean a little girl called Newt (Carrie Henn)—not a bad addition by Cameron, writer as well as director of Aliens. 

After her mother’s death, Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) in 1970’s Tristana, becomes the ward of a much older man, Don Lope (Fernando Rey).  Innocent because of her youth, Tristana is eventually propositioned by Don Lope, agreeing to go to bed with him.  Hereafter she hates the man for his sexual proclivity and decides to take up with a young painter (Franco Neri), living with him for two years.  Subsequently Tristana develops a tumor and has to have her leg amputated—and is again in the care of her guardian.  Now, however, the woman is plainly bitter and cruel.

On the one hand, in this Luis Bunuel film, there is Don Lupe’s humane, religion-rejecting 1920s leftism (approved by Bunuel?); and on the other, Don Lope’s imperious attitude and unwise behavior because of sex.  In light of this and Tristana’s corruption, the opus must be considered basically misanthropic.  The themes here, however, have already been explored in Bunuel’s Viridiana, a film with more verve than Tristana.  Why did Bunuel want to make the picture?

Deneuve’s part is dubbed in Spanish by another speaker (the film is set in Spain).  A beautiful Spanish actress would have been preferable to a beautiful French one.

Tristana (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Shane (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Directed by George Stevens, Shane (1953) is a Western—interestingly, one in which everything points to America still being a relatively young country.  Men try to make a living in a spacious land where deer approach farms and a muddy ground fronts a needed dry goods store-cum-tavern.

Here and there the script by A.B. Guthrie Jr., based on a novel, is laughably weak.  (Why does Joe Starrett [Van Heflin] show himself to be naïve about the angry Ryker?)  But the film’s violent action—everything from the shooting of Torrey to the final showdown—is sobering and riveting, and there are exquisite epic images in a non-epic movie.  I am prompted also to observe that, what with all the doings of Brandon De Wilde‘s Joey, Shane is practically a children’s film.