Act of Violence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An early Fred Zinnemann flick, Act of Violence (1948), is at least plausible:  A vengeful lame man (Robert Ryan) with a nice girlfriend is hunting a married suburbanite (Van Heflin) who wreaked terrible damage by turning into an informer for the Nazis.  Both men were in a German concentration camp; now Ryan wants to kill Heflin.

To me, this mere plausibility pleases less than the movie’s momentum—and Zinnemann’s control.  How well he works with his actors!  Ryan is perfectly somber without being a goon.  Heflin is every inch an ordinary suburbanite reduced to a pursued wreck.  Vincent Minnelli couldn’t get much energy from Mary Astor in Meet Me in St. Louis, but Zinneman does in this film.

Act of Violence ends with an unfortunate stinting on sympathy for the Janet Leigh character (who is married to the ex-informer), but at any rate Leigh, too, gives a committed, vigorous performance.  And she looks like a million bucks.

Cover of Minority Report [Blu-ray]

Washington D.C. in 2054 has apparently solved the social problem of murder through the use of a trio of humans known as “Pre-Cogs,” who mystically predict when homicidal deeds will occur.  Tom Cruise‘s John Anderton is at the helm of the Justice Department’s precrime unit which employs the Pre-Cogs.  The plot crisis breaks out when it is predicted that Anderton himself will soon murder a man he does not even know; did the Pre-Cogs make a mistake?    Anderton believes he is being set up, but by whom?  And how?

Anything but dull, this Steven Spielberg science-fiction picture is nevertheless a flop.  Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, declares that “Spielberg the liberal is asking what the dangers might be when law and order submit to logic and nothing else.”  Okay.  But the liberal Minority Report is not exactly early John Dos Passos.  In reality, law and order are not always submitting to logic in the film:  it is asseverated that the Pre-Cogs occasionally disagree with each other about a future homicide.  Yet an arrest is made anyway.  The film is not so much about dystopia logic as dystopia injustice.  Unfortunately, the Scott Frank-Jon Cohen screenplay (based on a Philip K. Dick story) is maddeningly absurd, especially with all that Pre-Cog fairy-tale stuff.  Things are hardly improved by the aging character enacted by Max von Sydow.  I like von Sydow, but not the part Spielberg gave him to play.

Tom Cruise’s part is fine, vital, but Cruise performs uninterestingly.  Janusz Kaminsky provided Spielberg with the locker-room hazy, supremely dank cinematography the director wanted.  But why did he want it?  Alex McDowell’s futuristic production design is easer to take, for even the cinematography can’t undermine it.

Cover of Minority Report [Blu-ray]

Washington D.C. in 2054 has apparently solved the social problem of murder through the use of a trio of humans known as “Pre-Cogs,” who mystically predict when homicidal deeds will occur.  Tom Cruise‘s John Anderton is at the helm of the Justice Department’s precrime unit which employs the Pre-Cogs.  The plot crisis breaks out when it is predicted that Anderton himself will soon murder a man he does not even know; did the Pre-Cogs make a mistake?    Anderton believes he is being set up, but by whom?  And how?

Anything but dull, this Steven Spielberg science-fiction picture is nevertheless a flop.  Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, declares that “Spielberg the liberal is asking what the dangers might be when law and order submit to logic and nothing else.”  Okay.  But the liberal Minority Report is not exactly early John Dos Passos.  In reality, law and order are not always submitting to logic in the film:  it is asseverated that the Pre-Cogs occasionally disagree with each other about a future homicide.  Yet an arrest is made anyway.  The film is not so much about dystopia logic as dystopia injustice.  Unfortunately, the Scott Frank-Jon Cohen screenplay (based on a Philip K. Dick story) is maddeningly absurd, especially with all that Pre-Cog fairy-tale stuff.  Things are hardly improved by the aging character enacted by Max von Sydow.  I like von Sydow, but not the part Spielberg gave him to play.

Tom Cruise’s part is fine, vital, but Cruise performs uninterestingly.  Janusz Kaminsky provided Spielberg with the locker-room hazy, supremely dank cinematography the director wanted.  But why did he want it?  Alex McDowell’s futuristic production design is easer to take, for even the cinematography can’t undermine it.

France with its Catholicism exists, of course, in Madame Bovary, but it is somewhat more pronounced in Francois Mauriac‘s short novel, Therese Desqueyroux (1927).  After all, Mauriac was a Christian—or on the verge of becoming one when he wrote Therese—and his titular heroine commits a grave sin by trying to poison to death her husband Bernard.  Peculiarly Bernard, with Therese’s father, works out an exoneration for Therese, but he also forces her to live in near-confinement in his house—a kind of penance.  This goes on for a limited time, however.

I have not read in full Mauriac’s other three fictions about Therese, but apparently the errant woman finds God in the one called “The End of the Night,” which I cannot get through.  It is Therese Desqueyroux that I find riveting as well as superb, albeit therein there is no salvation.  Yielded by the story is the message that a marriage not founded on love can lead to the worst perversion, and such themes as the spiritual worth of a friendship (that of Therese and Anne de la Trave) but also its transience.

Cover of Madame Bovary

Isabelle Huppert is extraordinary as Emma Bovary in Claude Chabrol‘s Madame Bovary, a long 1991 effort.  The formal achievement of Flaubert’s classic novel means that MB cannot really be filmed, but, besides the acting, what shines here is the directorial talent.  Chabrol is after authenticity—in character, in locations, in boredom, in anguish—and gets it.  He emphasizes only that which should be emphasized, and with a style never arty but always flavorous and even brave.  Check out the dancing at the ball, the doctor’s “bleeding” of a patient, the scenes of an Emma buried under debt.  No, we do not see Flaubert, but Chabrol and Huppert; and it’s fascinating.

Huppert has truly gone from strength to strength.  In the 1970s film The Lacemaker, she was quietly appealing; in Madame Bovary she is commandingly nuanced and gripping.

(In French with English subtitles)