I am not the first to say it: Men and women behave strictly according to their physical and psychological needs, whether positive or negative. This is how Olga is behaving in the 2002 novel, The Days of Abandonment, after her husband leaves her for another woman. A writer with two children living in Italy, Olga becomes frantic, impatient, less of a suitable mother, self-alienated (“It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted”).

Days was written by the elusive Italian author, Elena Ferrante, and translated into English (seemingly very well) by Ann Goldstein. It is clear-eyed and searing, and accurately called unsentimental. Ferrante has a distinguished character in Olga. I am glad Italian readers turned the book into a best-seller.

“She was born to be bad”?  (The Gloria Grahame character, that is.)

Well, maybe.  But both spouses in the Fritz Lang film, Human Desire (1954), are very morally flawed, which makes for a more interesting thriller than it would otherwise be.  It’s raw from start to finish, with sentimentality miles away.  Lang seems to respect that it’s based on a Zola novel, creating some of the force and grimness of European cinema old and more recent.  And the sapid cast is not shy about the realization.

Human Desire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Enemies, A Love Story, from 1989, takes place in New York City in the late Forties. Three survivors of the Nazis end up married to a fourth survivor, Herman—a Jewish ghostwriter for a rabbi—at the same time (!) Haunted by Nazi hostility, Herman is the husband of Yadwiga, a good-hearted Gentile intent on becoming a religious Jew. But the man has a mistress, the married and Jewish Masha who, after being granted a divorce, persuades Herman to wed her in a legitimate religious ceremony instead of the insubstantial civil ceremony in which he wed Yadwiga. Then there is Herman’s dead wife, Tamara, who is not dead after all: she managed to escape from a German concentration camp and now returns to her husband, bedding him (once) but not wanting him. They do not go back to living together.

Herman is a genocide survivor taking refuge in women and fornication. And he is choosing irresponsibility. Meant, perhaps, to be neither a wife nor a mother, Masha suffers. Assuredly she should not be with Herman, and the despair she meets is something the devilish Nazis would have seen as her proper lot in life. The genuine Jewish survivor seems to be Tamara.

I have reservations about this film written by Roger L. Simon and Paul Mazursky, based on an I.B. Singer novel, and directed by Mazursky. There seems to be little force of will in Herman, and although he cannot live without her, it is surely unlikely that he would “marry” Masha. Even so, Enemies is riveting and affecting—and with nicely transporting production design and costumes. Ron Silver is merely ordinary, too ordinary, as Herman. He has none of the magnetism or charm of Lena Olin (Masha) or Margaret Sophie Stein (Yadwiga). Angelica Huston (Tamara) is beguiling in her poise. And Judith Malina is fine, too, as Masha’s mother.

So far I have seen only three of Mazursky’s films. I’d have to say that on the strength of An Unmarried Woman and this deeply sad comic tragedy he is an estimable film artist.

Ridley Scott‘s Alien (1979) is a flawed (too foul-mouthed, for one thing) but scary sci-fi treat.

Some of the crew on the film’s commercial spaceship are unlikeable. All are in danger. Yaphet Kotto plays a salary-obsessed technician. Veronica Cartwright acts a brittle woman who likes to complain. They and the others find themselves in a domain of dehumanization and cruelty and, of course, alien malevolence. The technological sets, so often in dim light, still look pretty good, and the acting is solid, save that Sigourney Weaver sleepwalks in the quieter moments. In the tense, hair-raising scenes she is fine.

The movie emits sexual sparks, I should indicate, in the form of Miss Weaver’s thin panties. The footage is brief and it gives Alien a lot more spice than anything else does. Can’t call it a dumb move.