On Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2013):

A close friendship ceases to be what it was previously.  The dream of becoming a professional dancer all but deflates.  The friendship and the dream belong to Frances Halliday (Greta Gerwig), she who becomes acquainted with transience.

Up to a point the film is a simulacrum of an old New Wave picture, for it was made in black and white and throws in some music Georges Delerue wrote for Truffaut.  Baumbach knows this to be a good mode for 1) showing us free-spiritedness (that of Frances) and 2) reminding us of the desultory nature of life.  In addition, the film can be seen as an homage to Truffaut.

Frances Ha is thin and almost undramatic—far from great.  I’m not sure it belongs in a movie theatre; DVD is fine.  It is, nevertheless, a small and canny work of art.

It is remarkable how advanced cinematography and production design are these days, and how much beauty can be put into costumes.  Go see Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella (2015) and you’ll agree with me.

Better, the film is as innocent as it is enchanting, leaving irony alone and driving home its moral meaning (“Have courage and be kind”) but without getting moralistic.  Lily James is pleasingly sweet and never mushy as Cinderella.  Derek Jacobi is ever the professional, ever the artist, with grace and poise, in the role of a king.

Cinderella is a Disney film and, notwithstanding critic Joe Morgenstern liked it, he also opined that “it’s no replacement for the studio’s 1950 animated classic.”  If that’s true, I am eager to see the said classic since I decidedly esteem the current movie.

Peter Lawford is an inadequate singer but a spirited performer in the 1947 version of the movie musical, Good News, which co-stars June Allyson with her husky charm and splendid voice.  A show about college life, the flick is emphatically social with fine ensemble work, although, to be honest, I didn’t catch the melody in Joan McCracken’s “Pass the Peace Pipe” number.  Maybe I need to see it again.  (McCracken, by the way, is a commanding singer-dancer.)  Such songs as “Varsity Drag” and “Lucky in Love”, however, are solid show tunes, and there is some agreeable dancing.  There: that’s the good news about Good News.

Cover of Good News

In Old West mythology–and not, perhaps, in the actual Old West—it is necessary for a greenhorn to learn how to shoot a gun.  The greenhorn in Hannie Caulder (1971) is a woman (Raquel Welch’s Hannie Caulder) who is expertly taught by a bounty hunter played by Robert Culp.  This goes on after Beauty meets the beasts:  Hannie’s husband is murdered by three wicked thieves who in turn rape her and burn down her house.  Hence a revenge story gets underway.

The gun fights are riveting, even if Burt Kennedy’s film is highly imperfect, including directorially.  But, although Raquel is too much the nonactress, she is so easy on the eyes it is almost uncanny.  The characters are not exactly bland, and there is even a man of sheer mystery thrown in.  Re Westerns, in ’71 ’tweren’t dead yet: Hannie Caulder has a real vitality.

Cover of Hannie Caulder (1971)

A Danish man of God, Absalon (Thorkild Roose), allows an unrepentant practitioner of the dark arts to be executed on the stake despite his having rescued his young wife Anne’s witchcraft-practicing mother from the same fate.  The year is 1623; the film is Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) , which reveals by and by just how disturbed Absalon is over his refusal to save the now slain woman.  There is, however, a kind of punishment that befalls him through the actions of his wife (Lisbeth Movin) and his son (Preben Lordorff Rye), for they embark on an adulterous affair.

In Day of Wrath, adapted from a play called Anne Pedersdotter, people commit sin because it means something to them; it means a lot.  It shouldn’t, but it does.  Dominant here is a not-my-soul-but-my-body stance:  The witch-woman (superbly acted by Anna Svierkier) is uninterested in repenting and converting, but is terrified of a physical snuffing-out.  Absalon’s wife Anne refuses to renounce physical love with Martin the son. . .  The religious Absalon dies without being willing and, subsequently, able to produce a resolution for these matters.  Everyone in the film is standing empty-handed before God.

Dreyer’s masterpiece is the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc.  Day of Wrath is a lesser work, but still a classic full of powerful meaning.

(In Danish with English subtitles)