Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain (1952)

No essay available at this time.

Ishiro Honda's Gojira (1954)

No essay available at this time.

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)

No essay available at this time.

Phil Tucker's Robot Monster in 3-D (1953) and National Geographic's Sea Monsters 3D (2007)

The Rubicon and SPA Film Club present
"3-D: Then and Now"

Then… Robot Monster

In 1953, the first major motion picture in 3-D (Man in the Dark) hit theaters. Patrons donned their anaglyph glasses, sat in stadium seats and watched as American cinema changed forever.

In that same year, 25-year old Phil Tucker directed and released Robot Monster, a science fiction movie shot and projected in dual-strip, polarized 3-D. The stereoscopic photography in the film is high quality for the time, impressive from a crew that had no experience with the previously unused camera rig. In spite of this accomplishment, Robot Monster is considered one of the worst films ever made.

So why would we choose it? Because it is SO bad, it’s good. Who can resist a character like the evil “Ro-man” who comes to earth in his bad gorilla suit and diving helmet to exterminate all the “hu-mans” remaining after the rocket explosions, lightning storms and giant lizard attacks? Or odd courting rituals like tying a woman up to show her deep, undying affection? And who can forget moments like Ro-Man’s impassioned line (think Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech): “I cannot - yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do ‘must’ and ‘cannot’ meet? Yet I must - but I cannot!” Try getting that one past an SPA English teacher in an essay. No, actually… please don’t.

This film is wonderfully terrible and an important 66 minutes of 3-dimensional history.

Now… Sea Monsters 3-D: A Prehistoric Adventure

The way monsters are depicted in National Geographic’s Sea Monsters is a stark contrast to the 3-D of the 1950s. While Robot Monster focuses on adding depth behind the screen, the Sea Monsters swim toward the viewer. In truth, both effects are created by playing with depth perception but that is not the point: truly, you will be carried away by the mysterious creatures in this animated documentary.

Sea Monsters shows what marine life looked like in prehistoric times, and you will see no gorilla suits, here: everything from the Dolichorhynchops family we follow through the film to the amazing Styxosaurus, a fish larger than an adult male, is connected to archeological discovery.

Not only is Sea Monsters 3-D, but it was shot in IMAX for the biggest of the big screens. National Geographic cut no corners making this film; they brought in big names like Tony Award-winning actor Liev Schreiber to narrate; Richard Evans, David Rhodes and Peter Gabriel collaborated on the score. Think of Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything, John Cusak and boom box and you’ll recall how iconic Gabriel’s music can be in a film.

And speaking of the 1980s, when I was in elementary and middle school 3-D films made a comeback, especially with sequel thrillers. Jaws 3-D (1983) and Friday, the 13^th 3-D (1982) hit the screens and had me covering my eyes but peeking through my fingers. So when The Rubicon staff said, “Let’s do a 3-D issue,” I couldn’t help but think terrifying … and fun!

Today 3-D is more popular than it has ever been. With the invention of Real 3-D and 3-D televisions, the big screen magic 1953 film patrons experienced can be replicated in the comfort of your own family room… or in Bigelow Commons. Enjoy the shows!

Kathryn Campbell
The Rubicon Adviser

François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959)

Rather than discourse on tonight’s specific film, Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), we’d like to reflect, for a minute, on foreign film in general and its marginalized place in American movie culture. Even designating a film as “foreign” makes us a trifle uncomfortable, like when we find an eyeball floating in our chicken-noodle soup and the waiter reminds us that in some cultures such things are considered a delicacy. As long as we resort to terminology like “foreign,” those films so designated will always remain alien, outside of our experience, and the sort of thing one only finds at Landmark theaters. Yet foreign films offer something intensely valuable in the film-going experience: difference.

Cultures can become inoculated by their own narratives, and in American film, where bottom-line economics plays such a big role in how stories get told, more often than not financial success is found in the reuse of formulae. What’s that movie where a cop, who’s kinda sexist or racist or xenophobic or something, and his partner are sitting in a restaurant and the partner is musing about how close he is to retirement and then a bad guy busts in and kills the partner and the cop vows revenge but his vengeance is hampered because he’s soon saddled with a woman or a foreigner or an alien for a new partner? Oh, yeah, it’s like twenty movies. And don’t even get us started on sequels.

Foreign films, because they come from cultures with different formulae, tell stories with different textures. They tell stories that draw on different myths. They tell stories that rely on different imagery. They tell stories that reflect different values. They tell stories that don’t conform to our fetishistic expectation that all films should be roughly two hours long (unless it has lots and lots of special effects).

When we become inured to our own formulae, films lose their power except as spectacle, which may account for the rise is graphic horror films, special effects-laden but story-poor super-hero flicks, and the blunt, sketch-driven, irony-heavy comedy of the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler. We can become jaded by our own art. It’s not healthy. We need our palette cleansed from time to time.

Watching only Hollywood-produced and American independent films is like only eating pizza for dinner. Dining out once in a while at an Indian restaurant (Planet Bollywood!) or ordering out for Chinese or sampling the yak kothe and momo at Everest on Grand will make you appreciate your pizza more. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. You like a variety of foods, right? Why not film?

We won’t generalize about the cultural traits of foreign films from specific countries, not even to ask if all French romantic comedies are required to have love triangles. Suffice it to say that these foreign traits reenergize our expectations for all the movies we see. To experience difference is to be transported some distance, no matter how small, from the familiar, and to look back at it is to see it from a new perspective.

We believe that American film-goers like this re-awakening. Look at the success of Slumdog Millionaire, from one point of view a traditional rags-to-riches story, but from another a completely fresh take on how one tells the rags-to-riches story. What may happen next is that the unfamiliar traits we associate with this film will find themselves imitated by and evolving in American film. Thus, foreign films of note can make American film fresh.

This happens all the time. Not too long ago The Matrix (1999) used martial arts style action, drawing on the influences of hundreds of Hong Kong films from the 1980s and ‘90s. A year later Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) became a huge success in America and now it’s nearly impossible to see an action film that doesn’t have some martial influenced fighting in it.

Tonight we see Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a film that was itself in 1959 ground-breaking film-making and which influenced an entire generation of film-makers. We don’t need to get all historical to appreciate it though. All we need is to enjoy its difference, and cleanse our palette for our weekend excursion to The Watchmen.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Richard Thorpe's Jailhouse Rock (1957)

A lot of performers have made the jump from music to film, and done it well. Check out Beyonce in Cadillac Records or Queen Latifah in Hairspray and The Secret Life of Bees. Certainly, being in the entertainment industry prepares you for more than one genre, and Hollywood has a long history of capturing charismatic talents and presenting them on the big screen. But we wonder if Hollywood still thinks of these performers as exploitable celebrity – hey, this guy’s popular; let’s put him in a movie and rake in the dough from his fans – rather than exploitable talent.

Take Elvis Presley. From 1956 to 1969, Elvis made 31 movies, and it may have been "Saturday Night Live" that used to have a joke about them. In a skit, Elvis is portrayed as showing up a little dazed to a film shoot. A director runs in and tells him he’s going to be playing Sam or Dave or Jim, or some other innocuous name, and that he’s going to be in a particular situation. Like:

“Elvis, in this movie you’re Sam and you’re in the biggest car race of your life.” And the Elvis character would sing “Gonna win that race!”

Or, “Elvis, in this scene you’re Dave, and you’re a sea captain trying to save your ship from sinking,” and “Elvis” would sing “Gonna save that ship!”

Or, “Elvis, in this scene you’re Jim, and you’re making out with the Larimer County beauty queen at the State Fair,” and “Elvis” would sing “Gonna kiss that girl.” Etc.

The point was that from a popular perspective, Elvis’s movies were cookie-cutter formula flicks with generic scripts designed to place a visually (if increasingly pudgy) Elvis on screen for his legions of fans and collect their ticket money without much regard to the quality of the films. Just stick him in front of the camera, get him to sing, and people will pay. And that’s certainly true of forgettable movies like Clambake, Spinout, and Harum Scarum.

The irony to all of this is that, in the beginning, Elvis really wanted to be a great actor. His early roles, in films like King Creole and Loving You and Jailhouse Rock, are dark and James Dean-esque, and, dare we say it, require actual acting. As early as 1961 Elvis was explaining to anyone who would listen that he wanted his acting to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, the movie studio failed to hear those pleas because it was easier, and cheaper, to throw together lame scripts, go through the motions, and still make money. They considered him more of a B-movie actor and by the mid-1960s he was saddled with regrettable claptrap like Tickle Me.

Here, in Jailhouse Rock, though, we have the early Elvis, a good script, some good actors, and some very memorable songs. It’s no surprise that people still remember this movie after they see it. The images from it have been reused and imitated for decades (see the final scene of the original Blues Brothers), and one can only think wistfully at what might have been if Elvis’s film producer, Hal Wallis, and his manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, had respected Elvis’s wish to become a serious actor. Perhaps Elvis wouldn’t be consigned now to be remembered as an actor by comedy sketches and a critic’s statement that “No major star suffered though more bad movies than Elvis Presley” (Wikipedia).

Fortunately Jailhouse Rock isn’t one of them.

R. Findlay
SPA Film Club Adviser

Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954)

How do we account for the continued popularity of Audrey Hepburn? Ask your parents or grandparents about her and they’ll mention Roman Holiday, Funny Face, My Fair Lady, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and almost no one has anything critical to say about her. She’s beautiful. She’s fabulous. She’s Audrey.

Is it too simple just to say that she was a movie star, in that old time way that movie stars used to be larger than life, more glamorous than any star seems to achieve these days, and so she sticks in our collective consciousness? As do Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor, Charlton Heston.

What it boils down to for Heburn is class. Hepburn had class – style, couture, grace, savoir faire. Watch her in Sabrina. Even when she’s playing the chauffeur’s daughter, before she’s gone to Europe and hobnobbed with culture, she has that class. The only thing different about her when she comes back is she has fashion – gorgeous dresses designed by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head.

(You know Edith Head. She’s the fashion designer Brad Bird caricatured as Edna Mode or “E” in The Incredibles, the designer of their costumes. The real Head, a legend, designed costumes for over 400 movies, from 1927 until 1980. We don’t know if any of them had capes.)

We don’t really need to belabor the point here. To watch Hepburn in Sabrina is to see, to understand star power, to know what was so compelling about her. The other stars in the film – and they were big (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden) – seem to pale when she’s around.

Perhaps a more interesting line of inquisition is why so few Hollywood actors today can achieve this? Certainly part of it is the studio system which no longer exists. The studios controlled, rigidly, the public personae of their stars, and they were able to amplify and shape them into the gods and goddesses we remember. Today things are different; the central publicity machines are missing and the Internet is here, where anyone with a digital camera can catch you nude, overweight, and having a bad hair day on a beach, then post the pictures on their blog for everyone to see. We live in an age in which the sheer volume of personal, and often unflattering data, destroys any possibility of one’s mythologization.

Russell Crowe. Didn’t he hit some guy with a telephone? Julia Roberts is one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. Fans are equally aware of her movies and her tempestuous love life.

Myth cannot exist in a world of trivial minutiae that diminishes star status. This is true not only of movie stars but presidents (a 2005 book about Abraham Lincoln claimed he might have been homosexual – the claim is disputed by most historians – and recent revelations about John F. Kennedy’s indiscretions in the White House have done a bit to tarnish his Camelot image), civil rights leaders (historians have argued that some of Martin Luther King’s academic papers and speeches contained plagiarism), and sports heroes (steroids, anyone?).

If anything, watching Audrey Hepburn now allows us to return to a time when we were allowed to have movie stars, and they could exist in a bubble unpunctured by too much information. Could Audrey Hepburn, the glamorous, the embodiment of class, exist as a star today? We think not. That’s why we can revel in and honor her as the star of movies like Sabrina.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950)

Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, in their book Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, call Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A., which stands for “dead on arrival,” an “unusually cynical film.” That’s quite an eye-opening statement considering that one of the defining characteristics of classic film noir is its cynicism. That’s like saying SPA is an unusually educational place to go to school. It seems to us that when you tell stories about characters who are either obsessed or, more likely, alienated and thrown into a fatalistic, irrational world where the primary protagonist is not so much another person as the malevolent force of a corrupt society, and they end up dead, then cynicism is a natural result.

D.O.A. has a great plot. It’s about a certified public accountant named Frank Bigelow who goes on vacation to San Francisco. Feeling sick, he consults a doctor and learns that he has been poisoned (radiation!) and has only a day or two to live. He begins to search for his killers.

So here we have another film noir protagonist who will be destroyed by forces outside his control, joining doomed men such as Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity, Frank Chambers (John Garfield) in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) in Asphalt Jungle, and Jeff (Robert Mitchum) in Out of the Past. Each reaches a point in the story when he accepts what will happen, embraces the inevitably of his destruction. Silver and Ward suggest “this resignation to being annihilated by a relentless, deterministic abstraction, is the only, bitter solace that the noir vision permits.” If that’s not cynical, then we don’t know what is.

But here’s the point. Cynicism is not a pleasant or respected outlook on life. It involves pessimism, disdain, disparagement, distrust, contempt, and a whole host of other rather ugly words that fly in the face of what we believe to be the American spirit. Yet film noir was and is again a relatively popular genre. (Heck, D.O.A. itself was remade in 1988 starring film’s paragon of pert perkiness, Meg Ryan.) So what’s our obsession with film noir?

Perhaps it is because Americans see themselves as an optimistic, Fate beating, can-do people that we are fascinated by the seamy underbelly of it all, like children, grossed-out but drawn to and fascinated enough to gather around and poke at fresh roadkill. Maybe film noir is another form of thriller, where the audience can sit for a couple hours, watch a life transformed by horror, feel the frisson of “there but for the grace of god…” and then walk blithely out of the theater, into the sun and home to dinner.

Film noir says we are all corrupt in some way, all vulnerable to Fate, all out of sync with society, all at sea in an existential world, all involved with people whose motives we don’t really understand and really shouldn’t trust. Do we believe it? Maybe the only thing that protects us from such a reality, and the cynicism that would result, is that we don’t, that we trust in good, in hope, in honesty, and the benevolence of our fellow men. Maybe, if we believe that hard enough, it’ll be true. And maybe Frank Bigelow will find his killer, convince him to reveal some unexpected antidote, and survive his personal nightmare. Check yourself; see how many times you think such a thing will happen as you watch D.O.A. Then you’ll know if you’re a cynic.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

We’ve said before that critics claim that film noir is not a genre, but a style – that you can have a noir-ist western or a noir-ist science fiction film or a noir-ist crime drama, but that a film is rarely just a film noir. Tonight’s movie is a good example of this. John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle makes most critics’ top 10 film noir lists because it has so many of the conventions we’ve come to associate with the style – a dark, urban filmscape, a corrupt, amoral world, a deep feeling of paranoia and alienation, a pervasive sense of guilt and despair. You can see this (or feel it because it is as much a mood as a visual style) from the very beginning of the film.

Foster Hirsch writes in his book, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, that “The Asphalt Jungle begins with shots of empty New York streets, with scattered newspapers blown about by the wind the only signs of movement in the early morning gloom. The film’s kaleidoscope of the city at dawn is beautiful but threatening, as if New York is ready to explode; the city’s awesome canyons seem indifferent to human concerns.” Well, you might ask, does a city in any movie ever care about the humans that live in it?

Sure. Watch Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, where all the buildings seem friendly, built to happily serve and contain the needs and desires of the protagonist. (The irony in Truman is that they are built to make Truman happy, but that’s another story.) Or check out Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the city in which Sam Lowry lives and works seems to take a malicious glee in making his life difficult. It may not be friendly, but it has personality. The point is that film-makers endow settings with character just as much as they do the people in a movie. And in film noir the depiction of the city sets a definite mood.

So, The Asphalt Jungle is noirist, but a noirist what? The genre here is heist. If you’ve seen Spike Lee’s Inside Man or The Thomas Crown Affair or The Italian Job or Ocean’s Eleven, you’ve seen a heist film. Essentially, the plot revolves around the elaborate plan and execution of a robbery. We would further separate the heist film from the con film in that the robbery involves defeating a challenging technical anti-theft apparatus, like a impenetrable bank vault with a flawless time-lock or an alarm system with random roving electric eyes, whereas a con film focuses on an elaborate deception that results in people willingly parting with something valuable (think The Sting or The Grifters).

In The Asphalt Jungle, a group of criminals led by a “mastermind” plan a jewelry heist. One of the conventions of a heist film is that the robbery itself comprises a significant part of the movie – here it is 11 minutes long. Another important convention is the complication. Few heists go according to plan, and often participants plan to double-cross one another or something causes the plan to unravel. This is one of the joys of the genre – what does the unraveling reveal in terms of character? What storytelling trick will surprise us with unexpected exposition or resolution? What suspense will result from improvising on a meticulously pre-conceived plan?

Heist movies also offer one of film’s most delicious ironies – a plot that often makes you root for the criminal element of society. This is especially hard in a noir film where people aren’t especially likable, but it is an interesting element in human nature that we tend to root for humans to succeed at difficult tasks, even if the task in question is a robbery. Why do you suppose that is? Anyway, we hope you enjoy tonight’s film noir heist film as both a remarkable example of a genre and a style

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957)

Let’s do something really wacky this time. Let’s consider how Macbeth transcends the era in which Shakespeare wrote it – Jacobean England circa 1605 – and comments presciently on our own day and age. English teachers are always telling us that Shakespeare speaks to every age; it’s why we continue to find him in the modern classroom. Yeah? So what, really, does a guy who communes with witches, hears fatal prophecies, stabs a king to death, sees ghosts, falls for the idea that a child delivered by Caesarian section is “not of woman born,” and gets his head hacked off have to do with us?

First, let’s consider Macbeth’s relation to its own time. Although set in Medieval Scotland, the play’s Renaissance audience could see a direct parallel between the play’s situation and their own. Critic Terence Hawkes points out that “on 5 November 1605 a search by security forces, instituted at the personal behest of King James, discovered beneath the Houses of Parliament a secret cache containing enough gunpowder, fuses, and other implements to blow the king, his ministers, and the lawful government of the entire state sky-high” (Hawkes 2). This “Gunpowder Plot,” prepared by Guy Fawkes, a member of a group of English Catholics bent on assassinating King James, failed. Fawkes’ notoriety survived him though as the English celebrate the failure annually on Guy Fawkes Night.

This plot to kill a king, though, would have been foremost in the minds of Shakespeare’s audience. It would have seemed that Macbeth himself was, in part, a literary version of Guy Fawkes, although more successful. The play’s depiction of Lady Macbeth slipping into insanity, Macbeth receding into moral emptiness, and the natural world going crazy, all as a result of the regicide, confirms the Renaissance view of the king as rightfully placed and cosmically protected and explains the heavenly reason for Fawkes failure.

Now if Fawkes’s name rings a bell that’s because it has been in vogue lately. Ever since Alan Moore’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, was made into a movie, people on this side of the Atlantic have been reintroduced to Fawkes, except the movie casts him as a hero, a vigilante who tears down a corrupt and oppressive government. (And if you want to see this transformation taken to an absurd extent, look at how the character and the slogan associated with him – “Remember, remember, the 5^th of November – have become affixed to libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.)

The V character wears a Fawkes mask, his anonymity making him more of a symbol against tyrannical governance than an outraged citizen. So where does this take our connection to Macbeth? In a world where the anti-government, proto-terrorist vigilante is celebrated because he succeeds in blowing up Parliament, succeeds in bringing down the “king,” where does that leave Macbeth? Is he not a sort of hero? Well, no.

There is nothing in Macbeth that indicates that Duncan is corrupt (although there is little to suggest that he is not, too). Macbeth’s own inclination prior to the murder is not to do the deed. He feels, as host to the King, responsible for him. And afterwards he suffers from intense guilt. Everything about the play says his action is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Still, our society is distrustful of political power at this moment. It would be easy to digress and consider Macbeth as a version of Moore’s V, a man not driven solely by ambition or by a shrewish wife or by his own fevered visions, but by the desire to cast aside the powers-that-be and take control of his own life. If that’s not what Ron Paul wants, it’s certainly what his supporters want. Forty-five years ago, we may have been able to make a similar comparison to Lee Harvey Oswald. The point is that Shakespeare gives us room to consider all his characters in a modern context. You just have to connect some dots.

“Hey, hey, hey,” you’re yelling. “Aren’t we watching an Akira Kurosawa film? A JAPANESE film? About a guy not even named Macbeth?” Well, yes. But it’s the same story, and we encourage you to consider just what might have compelled Mr. Kurosawa, in 1957, to make a Japanese version of an early 17^th-century English play. Perhaps because where, or when, it takes place does not matter. What matters is the universality of the human condition it depicts. Enjoy Throne of Blood.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959)

Before we begin looking at a specific aspect of this film, notice that like our last film, Double Indemnity (1944), Some Like It Hot (1959) is directed by Billy Wilder. Now, the two films are vastly different – one’s a dark, cynical noirist drama, one’s a comedy; one’s a product of the war years, one’s from the boom era after the war; one tweaks our moral sense although good triumphs over evil in the end, one seems to conform to our moral sense although the end is humorously ambiguous – but it is worth asking yourself, what qualities does the director bring to both movies?

Billy Wilder is one of America’s greatest directors (he would win a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writer/ Screenplay award for The Apartment in 1960). What, as you reflect on two of his better films, are his identifying traits? What makes him a good director? What kind of story does he like to tell? How does he tell it differently than another director might? Let us know what you come up with.

That said (or asked), let’s take a moment to look at what’s at the heart of this comedy – cross-dressing. Drag. Guys dressed up as women. In this case, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, on the run from the mob after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, dressed up as 1920s flappers in order to pass themselves off as musicians in an all-girl band. Quick, make a list of the films in which this gimmick provides the centerpiece of the plot. Okay. Pencils down. How many of you had: Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Big Mama’s House, White Chicks, Nuns on the Run, I Was a Male War Bride? (Give yourself extra credit if you got more.) The question here is: why is this so funny?

First, a simple answer: Guys look hilarious when they’re dressed up as women. If you look closely, you’ll realize it’s never the point to make them completely feminine. Often the opposite is true. They stumble around on high heels. They walk like men. They struggle keeping their voices from being “manly.” They’re forced to adjust their bras, and girdles, and hosiery at inopportune times. Quickly we’ve descended into the comic irony – by watching men dressed as women we’re celebrating how NOT-women they are.

Which leads us to an even bigger irony. The men-in-drag technique is a particularly enjoyable form of dramatic irony. We know those guys are men, but many of the onscreen characters don’t. Consequently we hear the men’s lines two ways – the way the other characters do (a “female voice”) and the way we know it really is (the “male voice”). In Some Like It Hot, both Lemmon and Curtis try to find ways to insinuate themselves with Marilyn Monroe. So we combine this dual voicing with a lot of sexual innuendo, both ironic and otherwise, and the result is pretty comic.

One of the more interesting paradoxes of men in drag is whether it reinforces typical gender roles (men should be men, and if they try not to be they look silly and are funny) or blows them up (cross-dressing men appeals to some inner sense of desire we have, and we only drape it in comic styling to shield ourselves from our non-conformist ideas). You work it out. In the meantime, enjoy Some Like It Hot, one of Hollywood’s classic comedies.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954)

To understand where we are now, we must understand our past. Every month, Hollywood releases some large action film with big actors and fight scenes. But how did today’s action film begin? The answer lies not in America, but in Japan.

Akira Kurosawa’s three-and-a-half hour sweeping epic Seven Samurai remains the epitome, and the beginning, of today’s adventure and action films. It takes a simple story, combines it with compelling characters, throws in some heart pounding action scenes, and a pinch of romance. But unlike the action films of today, all these parts work as a whole, and were made for the glory, not the money.

The story follows seven samurai who decide to defend a helpless village from a group of bandits who are planning to raid their crops during the harvest. The samurai will be fed small bowls of rice and given little to no payment, with the chance of success at a minimum. Why bother then? Maybe it’s for the samurai code and honor. Maybe for the adventure. Each comes for his own reason.

At three-and-a-half hours, Seven Samurai IS a daunting task for many to watch. The original American release had fifty minutes cut. But there is a reason for its length: to build real characters. Each samurai is given his own story without feeling unnecessary. We see the relationship between the samurai and the villagers grow. We see the crops grow. So when we get to the big raid of the village, we actually care for the characters and can actually mourn their deaths. It’s an ambitious task to say the least.

Kurosawa seems to meander toward two main characters. Takashi Shimura, also greatly known for his role in Ikuru, plays Kashimi, the eldest and leader of the samurai. He is not the strongest or best swordsman, and spends much of his time shaking his head, planning out the attack, and mapping out the story for us. Shimura simply plays this straight, not trying to overact. He is a knowledge bowl of mystery, a quiet man with a great aura, and works perfectly as our guide throughout this adventure.

Our comic relief and slight underdog is Kikuchyo played by the phenomenal Toshiro Mifune. Kikuchyo is only posing as a samurai, while actually a farmer’s son. He is bold, impulsive, clumsy, and a showoff. He carries a sword longer than others, thinking that can prove his worth. But in a film that’s 207 minutes long that, we start seeing him less as comic relief but as a full-fledged character that we will cheer for.

As Kurosawa would influence generations of filmmakers, Seven Samurai has many influences. Marxist ideas and Russian literature flow through the story. The action scenes feel inspired from Americans DW Griffith and John Ford. The characters, as fleshed as they may be, can be attributed a lot of Western cinema. Japanese critics attacked Kurosawa for being too Western sometimes, but he was simply doing what he must do – breaking out of the norm. His Japanese auteur counterpart, Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story), whose films were slow meditations on human nature, has no place in Kurosawa’s epics.

As much as Seven Samurai influenced today’s modern action films, it also created the remake. The Magnificent Seven, a western set in Mexico, is one of the first remakes ever made. Many of Kurosawa’s films would be slightly remade for American audiences, including Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars and The Hidden Fortress as Star Wars. Influences are simply not just in remakes but also in story arch, character types, and climaxes.

Seven Samurai is the king of action and adventure films. It’s brilliant in character, production design, and story. Although it is a daunting task to watch the entire film, the breadth of the film allows audience’s to appreciate its brilliance. To understand where we are going, we must know where we came from. One of the most influential films of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is a true masterpiece.

Peter Labuza
Film Club

Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

In the mid-1950s, rebellious youth were running rampant on the screen. Brando had terrorized small-town America with his motorcycle gang in The Wild One (1954). Sidney Poitier had played one of the troubled city high school students in The Blackboard Jungle (1955). Such was the climate when Nicholas Ray cast James Dean in the title role of Rebel Without a Cause. Ray took his title from a book published by Robert Lindner in 1944, the story of an imprisoned juvenile delinquent who could give no reasons for his crimes. As a sociologist, Lindner had studied the postwar generation of youth – often violent and inarticulate – which he believed was rebelling against conformity. Ray was intrigued by Lindner’s views; he talked to law officers and young offenders, then wrote a short synopsis for the film. He created the roles of Jim and Judy with Romeo and Juliet in mind because he considered Shakespeare’s play “the best play about juvenile delinquents.” … For [Ray] the central focus was “the problem of the individual’s desire to preserve himself in the face of overwhelming demands for social conformism.”

If Nicolas Ray became a kind of cult hero among film critics and directors, James Dean (1931–55) became an even greater idol among young viewers. When Dean was killed in an auto accident at the age of twenty-four, he left a legacy of only three feature films. For two of his performances, both directed by Elia Kazan (East of Eden, 1955; Giant 1956), he had won Academy Awards for best actor. … Francois Truffaut described Dean’s acting as “more animal than human,” noting how “he acts beyond what he is saying; he plays alongside the scene.” Yet off the set, Dean could be articulate about his philosophy of performance: “In the short span of his lifetime an actor must learn all there is to know, experience all there is to experience, or approach that state as closely as possible.”

From the first shot of the film, Dean’s talent is at work. While the credits roll, we see him playing on the sidewalk with a windup toy monkey. It is a whimsical moment – the youth is a bit tipsy – but it reveals the sensitive child within. On the soundtrack, a discordant jazz piece mingles with the strident scream of sirens. Amid the sounds of discord is a cry for help. In the police station, Jim mimics the sirens. His tie and jacket barely cover his emotional dishevelment.

Later in the film we are introduced to the [characters’] families, and we see their large suburban homes. In the planetarium, the context becomes cosmic. “The problems of man seem trivial indeed,” intones the professor of astronomy, while a cataclysmic ending of the earth is enacted on the dome overhead – a movie within a movie. … Back on earth, the issues acquire Freudian overtones. Jim’s father, wearing an apron, appears weak and foolish; he fails to be the male authority his son is yearning for.

These teenagers adrift are left to work out their inner tumult in knife fights, gangs, and chickie fights. They rebel with reasons, but without a cause.

William Constanzo
Reading the Movies (p.105-108)

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Feed the Kitty" (1952)
Mark Har's "My New Life" (2003)

Consider the thriller. The world can be a terrifying place, yet most of us feel an inexplicable and irresistible pull to sit in a dark movie theater and watch a film that terrifies us. Whether it’s watching Mike Myers (not that Mike Myers) stalk a nubile Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or gelatinous acid ooze from an alien’s interior mouth just before it attacks in the Alien films or a shadowy government conspiracy threaten heroic FBI agents in "The X-Files," we love to be scared.

In those examples the protagonists face overt, vicious monsters. (Yes, Your Humble Commentator just compared secretive, unaccountable government cabals to serial killers and blood thirsty aliens.) Alfred Hitchcock, on the other hand, dealt in a more subtle form of suspense, the thrill of watching ordinary people mistakenly get caught up in a life-threatening situation. In Rear Window (1954), Jimmy Stewart is “Jeff” Jeffries, an action photographer cooped up in his apartment with a broken leg. When he’s not fending off the marital advances of his girlfriend Lisa (played by Grace Kelly), he spends his time staring out his back window at the residents of the various apartments across the courtyard. And in one of the apartments, a man’s wife suddenly disappears. Jeff suspects foul play. Or is it all a product of his over-active imagination?

Say what you will about the suspense in this film, there’s a lot going on in addition to a few cheap thrills. Hitchcock, for instance, seductively doles out the minor melodramas of Jeff’s neighbors in a way that turns us into voyeurs as much as it does Jeff. It is just like Hitch to suggest impishly that the act of going to a movie is a form of voyeurism, especially if that film includes any form of intimacy. Think about that the next time you laugh when Peter Seller’s character Chance in Being There says “I like to watch.” Don’t we all?

Another form of fear we indulge in for entertainment is the urban legend. And while that may evoke images of sitting around the campfire, telling the one about the escaped one-armed psychopath and the hook hanging off the car door handle or the one about your friend who knows someone who went to a bar, passed out and woke up without a liver, local filmmaker Mark Har has put a little urban legend up on the big screen with his short "My New Life." Coincidentally, Har’s 15-minute film, which was shot in the Twin Cities area, has the feel of an episode of … "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or perhaps "Tales from the Crypt." In the end, we here at Blake Classic Films are happy to give you the opportunity to gratify that funny little penchant you have for artificially encouraged fear. No doubt it’s a welcome relief from the real life fear of taking your AP exams.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century" (1953)

Your Humble Commentator remembers being ten years old, some time ago, sitting at home on summer Sunday afternoons in his basement watching classic sci-fi B-movies on his family’s black and white TV: Them, The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Incredible Shrinking Man. All great; all part of his current video collection. But the best of them all? That would be Fred Wilcox’s 1950s space epic Forbidden Planet. Perhaps that’s because the screenplay was taken from a script by some guy named Will Shakespeare.

Wait, you think, Shakespeare never had robots or spaceships or Anne Francis in a really short skirt in any of his plays! Well, no. But Forbidden Planet falls into a category that Shakespeare-on-Film critics call an “unfaithful pop culture adaptation.” That means it dumps Shakespeare’s language, borrows the plot of one of his plays and reuses it in a genre film more in keeping with the tastes of modern film-goers. Hence Taming of the Shrew can become a teen sex comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You or Macbeth can become a foul-mouthed mafia flick like Men of Respect or Hamlet can become an animated morality tale like The Lion King. (Yes it is. Yes it IS.)

So what? Watching this 1956 film you’ll probably notice more parallels to the not-too-distant cultural happening known as Star Trek than the vague allusions to Prospero (Morbius), Miranda (Altaira), Ferdinand (Commander Adams), and Caliban (Robby the Robot). And reveling in the B-movie effects and cheesy ray guns and flying saucer vision of space travel and terrifying monster will no doubt drive out any thoughts of Forbidden Planet as a cultural lens through which we can reflect on Shakespeare and Captain Kirk at the same time. Yet what we have here is a movie that aspires to the same cultural greatness – an entertaining, swashbuckling tale that rises above the common B-movie fare by singing a captivating song not of the aforementioned accoutrements of Eisenhower-era sci-fi films but of the more complex elements of human frailty and pride. Will you hear it? Good, for “the hour’s now come; the very minute bids thee ope thine ear. Obey and be attentive.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser