A German film from 1988, The Actress (Die Schauspielerin), directed by Siegfried Kuhn, is about an emotionally vulnerable but also strong-minded theatre actress (Corinna Harfouche) who discards her career in Nazi Germany in order to be with her relocated Jewish beau (Andre Hennicke).  Strange times, with their ludicrous (anti-Jewish) propaganda, drive the actress to do some strange things.  A major theme in the film is that political injustice, political evil, works on the mind.  Indeed, a person may even embrace what is fatal.

An East German production, Kuhn’s opus is subtle, unpretentious and lovely-looking.  Harfouche is extraordinary: talk about power, incisiveness and personality!

(In German with English subtitles)

State and Main (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

David Mamet‘s film, State and Main (2000), concerns contretemps and obstacles between a moviemaking team and the citizens of a town called Waterford, Vermont, where the team is fashioning a film.  The characters captivate: William H. Macy‘s agitated director, Alec Baldwin‘s hugely popular actor and nymphet-loving pervert, Rebecca Pidgeon’s bright, affable bookstore owner, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s diffident scenarist, and many others.

Like the witty dialogue, the plot is fun except that a glaring defect springs up when Clark Gregg‘s pushy prosecutor tries to build a statutory-rape case against Baldwin when he certifiably has no case at all.  Gregg—his character—wouldn’t be that stupid.  But something else bothers me more:  Mamet, in truth, has nothing new to tell us about corruption or Hollywood folly, and that is entirely what his film is about.  All State and Main can do is dispense airy cynicism—well, that in addition to showing us that somewhere deep inside Mamet he is a glorifier of the past.  Not merely deep inside, of course, he is a conservative.

Mamet’s 1999 The Winslow Boy worked (as did his Phil Spector).  The present film almost works, but not quite.  Even so, it’s one of the most enjoyable failures I’ve seen, and if you can put up with airy cynicism you might enjoy it too.

1968: a public high school in Philadelphia.

This is what Frederick Wiseman, America’s most famous documentary maker, trained his camera on 56 years ago, in High School.  A dandy film, it reveals perfectly the unkillable regimentation in modern schools, although the classrooms in this particular, predominately white school do not drive us to the kind of despair that dysfunctional schools in 2023 do.  Still, there are problems, regimentation or no.  Bad behavior runs its course, albeit we don’t see any violence or cussing out of teachers.  There is some fluff in the instruction:  one teacher guides her students to appreciate the “poetry” of Paul Simon.  She reads aloud the lyrics to “The Dangling Conversation,” then plays a tape of the song.  And clinical lectures about sex just might have run counter to the moral values of many of the kids’ 1968 parents.

On the other hand, a Spanish-language teacher inculcates what seems to be the Spanish for “existentialist philosopher.”  Nope: this is not a 2023 public school.

Cover of Counsellor-at-Law

I don’t quite understand what the film Counsellor at Law (1933), derived from a play by Elmer Rice, is about, but it certainly holds the viewer.  This is thanks mostly to director William Wyler and his actors.

John Barrymore carries the film beautifully, with force and despair, and the women here are nigh enthralling.  A successful New York lawyer (Barrymore) becomes imperiled in more ways than one as Wyler’s camera captures the unceasing contacts and interaction in this particular law firm.  Regarding his direction, Wyler said, “No critic ever wrote that [the movie] was just a photographed stage play.”  No, indeed.  The play has been thoroughly cinematized.  Indeed, Wyler’s directing is so astute and sensitive we can forgive the film’s irritatingly pat conclusion.

I consider Iris (2001), about the British novelist Iris Murdoch and Alzheimer’s disease, a lousy film.

Not only does smug Murdoch wear her intellect on her sleeve, which is bad enough, but nothing justifies such a thing since the talk here is constantly intellectually shallow.  Acted as a young woman by Kate Winslet (and here the smugness comes in) and as an elderly woman by Judi Dench, the revered Iris has a penchant for skinny dipping as well as adultery, even lesbian adultery.  She is, then, a run-of-the-mill female rake, which is not very interesting.  And then there’s Murdoch’s husband John Bayley (he’s always fun),  who is such a silly and awkward man it is damned difficult to think of him as a professor of literature.  The blame for the jejune acting of the two men who portray him belongs, I think, to the director, Richard Eyre.  This is Eyre’s John Bayley before it is the actors.’

Iris (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)