Tag: Josef von Sternberg

Criterion offers three looks at collaborations, fruitful but strained, frustrated by external forces, and consummate. Stephen Prince reflects on screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto’s career, which was stimulated by Kurosawa’s unique method of setting his screenwriters off against one another, though Hashimoto ultimately focused his complicated relationship with Japan’s military history on screenplays for other directors. (“Hashimoto had joined the front rank of screenwriters with the flashback structure of Rashomon and had surpassed that design in Harakiri. Though a screenplay furnishes a film with its scaffolding and a completed film necessarily goes beyond the script, it remains true, as Mansaku Itami and Kurosawa knew, that to make a good film one must have a good script. Hashimoto’s passionate writing helped burnish Japanese cinema with the golden luster it enjoyed for two decades after the war. He believed that a good script was self-sufficient, that it was like a musical score in its written form, and he felt when writing as if he was composing a symphony. Although he grew rueful about the possibility that his collaborative training in Kurosawa’s inner circle of writers might have inhibited him from developing a robust and distinctive authorial voice, the wonderful movies that resulted from his writing give us the best measure of his literary talent and its enduring contributions.”) Elvira Lindo’s acknowledgement of how central to Spanish culture Victor Erice’s El Sur has remained can’t help but compare the director’s ambitions for the film to the final product, whose producer pulled the financing, thereby truncating the film before the ending found in its source material (written by Erice’s then-wife Adelaida García Morales). (“Some of the aura of mystery surrounding the film might have been dispelled if the production had lasted the agreed-upon eighty-one days, instead of the forty-eight days of shooting that actually took place. Even knowing how consistently Erice has expressed frustration over the truncation of his project (and in fact, those who have had the opportunity to read the script in its entirety have proclaimed it a jewel of screenwriting), the reality is that the viewer does not experience the film as incomplete, because the South, so different from the North of Spain, is contained in El Sur as though it were a dream, inside the boxes where the girl keeps the postcards she has received from that region, signed by her grandmother and the woman who was her father’s nanny, Milagros.”) And even if you’re convinced there’s nothing new to be said about the von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich collaboration, Imogen Sara Smith manages to say it beautifully. (“Over the course of the six films they made together in Hollywood, von Sternberg took Dietrich out of the smoke and sweat of The Blue Angel’s waterfront dive and put her in ever more exotic and lavish settings—his versions of Morocco, China, Russia, Spain, with a single detour to contemporary America (Blonde Venus). Between angel and devil, he cast her as goddess, empress, adventuress. The amoral, blithely destructive Lola Lola made way for romantic martyrs in their first four American films, then fatal temptresses in the last two. But the impassivity and cool insolence remained throughout and beyond the von Sternberg films, from the nonchalant poise with which Dietrich faces a firing squad in her second American film with him, Dishonored (1931), to her seen-it-all, sibylline detachment in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). With these qualities lingers an ambiguity distilled by that dressing-room scene from Morocco: she seems above and beyond caring yet takes infinite care with everything she does.”)

“To see him in his early roles is to know that those demons were at least part of his appeal; his working-class bravado was underpinned by vulnerability. He seemed both masculine and feminine in the mold of most of the great screen idols—Rudolph Valentino, James Dean. Stardom demands actors to be broad enough for the audience’s projections, but also to be startlingly specific in their humanity. Mickey’s combination of the sensitively effeminate and the pointedly macho opened him up to all kinds of readings. Over the years, he has phoned it in and loused it up, and the quality of the films he’s starred in have ebbed and flowed. But when it’s right—as in Rumble Fish, Angel Heart, Diner, Barfly, The Pope of Greenwich Village—it’s very right.” Christina Newland traces Mickey Rourke’s inability to capitalize on the comeback The Wrestler afforded him partly on his self-destructive streak and partly, and more intriguingly, on how feminine the hulked-out actor can read to audiences. Via Mubi.

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