Cover via Amazon

The commercial Western novels from earlier decades usually had their cowboy heroes fall in love with a young woman who had not yet married.  The 1956 Western movie, Seven Men from Now—it too is commercial, of course—offers a hero with a sure liking for a young woman who is married, but he staunchly refuses to start anything.  A man of principle, he is played by Randolph Scott, and the seven men of the title are the gold robbers who murdered Scott’s wife and are now being pursued by him.

‘Tis strange that Ben Stride, Scott’s character, doesn’t appear to be suffering much over his wife’s death, and neither does the aforementioned young woman (Gail Russell) seem devastated by the vile murder of her husband (Walter Reed).  It’s as though the producers opposed any big-deal, negative emotion (and if they hadn’t, could Scott have delivered?).

All the same, this Budd Boetticher Western, written by Burt Kennedy, is dramatically piercing.  A perfect, and not strident, performance comes from Lee Marvin with his big personality.  Russell, Reed and others provide a handful of not-bad performances. . . In more ways than one, Seven Men is colorful, another ’50s picture proving how well literal color works for Westerns.  Above all, it is just as entertaining as those Western novels from earlier decades—those I have read, anyway.

The nocturnal robber in the 1948 He Walked by Night ends up murdering a police officer and thereby brings down on himself a load of professional energy for his seizure.  Played by Richard Basehart in what is supposed to be a true story, Roy The Killer is a loner obsessed with electronics, for, after all, he himself is an alienating machine.  No emotion, no conscience.  He even shoots and leaves paralyzed a second cop.

He is L.A.’s public enemy no. 1 (so it seems) and gets his comeuppance in the huge dark city sewers.  The pursuit there is a visually striking scene, with direction by Alfred L. Werker and an uncredited Anthony Mann.  Crane Wilbur is the main writer for this filmic procedural with good gunfights.

Cover of I Fidanzati – Criterion Collection

Giovanni and Liliana, engaged to be married, are capable of bringing joy to each other, but . . . it might not happen for a long while.  Or it will happen only periodically.  The couple must be temporarily separated from each other because they cannot afford to marry and Giovanni, much to Liliana’s sadness, has agreed to a welding job in Sicily.  The film—Italy’s The Fiances (I Fidanzati, 1963)—then zeroes in on Giovanni’s solitary life in a mundane Sicilian town.  I mentioned joy—but the town offers little of it.  It can be quite dreary.

The Fiances was scripted and directed by Ermanno Olmi, and it is tempting to think that while making it he was in love with Loredana Detto, the actress in Olmi’s Il Posto, whom he later married, and that this accounts for the film’s eventual romantic feeling.  Expressed here, in fact, is the need for the certainty of love (romantic feeling or no).  Giovanni and Liliana, we see, are more than the weak and financially poor persons they necessarily know themselves to be.  They are fiancés, and to Olmi—a devout Catholic, in fact—this makes all the difference in the world.

Starring Carlo Cabrini and Anna Canzi, the picture is short and artistic, gentle and tasteful.  It has more vigor than an early ’60s Antonioni film, but is more restrained and indeed smarter than a Fellini film.  Few Italian products nowadays surpass it.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

“You can’t compare yourself to God.”

“Am I not God’s image in your eyes?  Is it not to me that you owe your taste for a certain kind of perfection?”

This exchange of words does not take place except in the imagination of Dr. Paul Courreges, the main figure in the Francois Mauriac novel The Desert of Love (1925), which exchange is between Courreges and the woman he has long been passionate about (and it ain’t his wife): Maria Cross.  Doubtless Maria is the kind of woman to see “God’s image” in a man she falls for, but Courreges, it turns out, is not that man.  Yet the doctor still loves Maria, whereas she gradually falls for Courreges’s son Raymond.  What the novel directs us to is, on the one hand, the deep secularization of French society and, on the other, “the desert of love” one encounters after connections are made with the desired person.

Very little is working out for these characters, and not a one of them adheres, as Mauriac did, to any particular religion.  The Desert of Love is very solemn and even tragic, though with Christian overtones.  Although God is seldom mentioned in the book, when He is, the references are not only sobering but also encouraging.  Example: “There could be no hope for either of them, for father or for son, unless, before they died, He should reveal Himself Who, unknown to them, had drawn and summoned from the depths of their beings this burning, bitter tide.”

To think that God would summon from a person a burning, bitter tide!  I was prompted to use the word “encouraging” for a reason.

Cover of The Desert of Love

The France wherein jihadists have slaughtered innocents is the France of the 2008 film, Skirt Day—a scathing picture indeed.

Here, Sonia, a public high school teacher who often wears skirts, is trying to teach a drama course to wild, disrespectful immigrant kids from Muslim backgrounds.  (They hate skirts.)  Astonished to find that a thuggish African boy has a pistol in his possession, Sonia grabs it and is badly bullied for her trouble.  Now in shock—and feeling vindictive—she unintentionally shoots the boy in the leg and takes the students hostage, though only with the aim of delivering this day’s school lesson.  A police detective, Labouret, is sent to investigate and remedy the situation.  Sonia’s estranged husband, too, arrives at the school, enraged at the principal who has long failed to adequately help Sonia with discipline problems.

The film tells us that Muslim boys have learned to be misogynistic, and even misogynistic criminals.  They also use the word “kike.”  French society here is choking on its racial-ethnic insanity but, what is more, it witnesses the awful weakening of the institutions of school and marriage—and of French customs.  The result is that people feel deracinated and fretful.  Labouret, for example, understands that his marriage is at an end.  Personal angst is running high.

The director-writer is Jean-Paul Lilienfeld (talented), the actress who plays Sonia is Isabelle Adjani (talented—and superlative here).  The film’s climax is not that good, but everything else is dramatically skillful and unspeakably provocative, with a sprinkling of bitter humor.  Skirt Day may be the most politically honest and disturbing French artwork since The Camp of the Saints.

(In French with English subtitles)

La journée de la jupe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)