At the center of Lazzaro Felice (2018), by Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher, is a saintly though ignorant young man called Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo). Forced by a female tobacco business owner into so much indebtedness that no salary is possible, he and a large group of workers are mere slaves until the operation is shut down.

With the rotten U.S. title of Happy as Lazzaro, the film is, I think, meant to be mythopoeic. Rohrwacher has invented a modern myth that points up goodness (and naivete) over against evil in human history. Alas, she doesn’t really know where to take this myth, for the final scene is pedestrian, weak. Prior to it, however, what we see is engrossing—a quiet marvel with miracle realism, if you will.

Available on Netflix.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

From Here to Eternity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

James Jones is a much-criticized writer, but the movie adaptation of his book, From Here to Eternity, should not be a much-criticized film.

Deeply interesting, it received very respectable direction from Fred Zinnemann as it relates the story of three men, especially Montgomery Clift‘s Private Prewitt, on a Hawaii military base in ’41.  An able boxer, Prewitt nevertheless refuses to box for his captain’s team because he once blinded a man with his punches.  Others in the unit persistently bully him for this, and although Prewitt’s sergeant (Burt Lancaster) wrongly agrees that Prewitt is making a mistake, he is far more preoccupied with his growing love for Deborah Kerr‘s Karen, who is married to a philandering officer.

The army’s insistence in the film that the individual must be eclipsed by the group, the collective, is centered on something trivial—a boxing competition—compared with what the group is needed for at a later time: survival during the Pearl Harbor attack.  Prewitt the individual is important in his desire to eschew boxing-ring violence.  Prewitt the unit member wants to be a soldier, but the army, though honorable, is too small-minded not to militate against him.

Donna Reed plays the love interest for Prewitt, and although she is miscast as a (nice) prostitute, her acting is admirable.  There is no real flaw here, but there is one in the picture’s intermittent excess:  too many servicemen get stupidly drunk, for example.  Zinnemann, even so, aimed to make serious Hollywood movies, and this one is not only serious but good as well.

A French woman, “Mellie”, kills the man who rapes her (he’s still in the house) and tells no one about it. An investigating American colonel demands to know the truth. Mellie lies to him, all the while being thrust into a world of bullying and profound moral decay.

This is Rider on the Rain, a 1970 French-American production directed by Rene Clement. Despite absurdity in the plot, it is a unique and piercing potboiler—starring Charles Bronson yet! Ah, but the capital actor here is Marlene Jobert, who is magnificent as the consistently worried, often gutsy Mellie. She appears in nearly every scene. Most of the film’s virtue is hers, though it is also nice that spiky Rider has a happy ending.

Two hours of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) as an arrogant Smartest Person In The Room, with little drama seeping in, is not my idea of worthwhile cinema. Being the Ricardos (2012) is a disaster.

Apropos of his trip to Hell, Bill Wiese wrote, “I was horrified as I heard the screams of an untold multitude of people crying out in torment.”

Wow.  The Lord must hate the wretched people He has to damn—instead of loving His enemies.  And never mind that Wiese also declares there is absolute silence in Hell (a contradiction).

I might as well broach the subject of Carlton Pearson explaining to people that years ago God spoke to him and said the afflicted Rwandans whom Pearson saw on TV, though non-Christian, “don’t need to get saved,” that “they’re already saved.”  Although it’s possible Pearson never heard any such message, why should any Christian be expected to believe that the preacher’s experience was illusory while the Hell experience Wiese reports was flat-out authentic?