Kudos to Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond for an engaging if imperfect screenplay for The Apartment (1960), which was also, by Wilder, exquisitely directed.  Consider that nothing is under- or overemphasized. . . The film shows us a tug-of-war between the overturning of traditional values such as marriage and respect for women, and the attempt to be decent.  (This while the traditional institution of big business keeps humming along.)

Sure, I don’t like the sentimental romanticism in The Apartment but, all things considered, it’s a worthy film.

Cover of The Apartment (Collector’s Edition)

Suspend disbelief here and there, and you’ll enjoy the Francois Truffaut flick The Woman Next Door (1981) which, though it isn’t saying much, was seen by more Americans than any other foreign film in ’81.

Again, as in other Truffaut movies, there is amatory passion.  Adele H. never quite committed adultery, however; Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant do.  Woman is about the monstrousness of temptation.  Depardieu’s first mistake is not informing his nice wife that before he married he once had a love affair with new neighbor Ardant; he keeps it a secret.  Naturally he soon learns that he and Ardant can’t be just friends.  The tragedy which ensues is especially jarring in a movie this typically lyrical and basically simple, plainly lacking in gravity.  Film buff  Truffaut insisted on his achievements being serious but not grave, which is why there is something of Hitchcock in this tragedy.  But whereas I am not convinced the estimable Hitchcock was an artist, I believe Truffaut was.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Fanny Ardant

Intruder in the Dust (1949 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A brave old lady (Elizabeth Patterson) initiates the digging up of a dead body after nightfall to see what kind of bullet was used to kill the person.  The boys who assist her are brave too.  What prompts this action—a plot device in Clarence Brown‘s Intruder in the Dust (1949)—is the swift arrest of a black man, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez), for the murder of a white man.

The film, based on a William Faulkner novel, is set in the South and was shot in Faulkner’s home town of Oxford, Mississippi.  A finely directed piece, it concerns the perennial struggle for the rule of law, for just procedures for every accused individual (a lesson needed in today’s America).  Lucas has a friendly relationship with a white boy called Chick (Claude Jarman, Jr.) and, in fact, with money, for he is a well-off farmer in a slowly changing America.  But the townspeople disdain his pride, and desire a lynching, and yet scriptwriter Ben Maddow does supply a few essentially good people.  In the case of the murdered man’s father (a strong Porter Hall), this seems to be due to the gent’s having been seasoned by harsh life—the very thing Faulkner never ignored.

Cover via Amazon

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Punch-Drunk Love (2002) is an existentialist romantic comedy.  The protagonist is a severely frustrated misfit (Adam Sandler) who meets a girl who is gaga over him.  What hinders it from working is a rotten subplot wherein Sandler encounters a crooked phone-sex girl and her unprincipled employer; naught but the lamest absurdism is in this.  Virtues include Anderson’s jittery, intimidating mise en scene (the birthday party, the car wreck, etc.) and Jon Brion‘s strange, take-charge score.  Also, the film is often funny but, to me, too eccentric.