AFI #8: Schindler's List (1994)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on May 29, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(M) ★★★★★

Director: Steven Spielberg.

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagalle, Embeth Davidtz, Malgoscha Gebel, Shmulik Levy, Mark Ivanir, Béatrice Macola.

The colour grader had messed up once again.

Schindler's List exists because a Jewish man, Poldek Pfefferberg (played in the film by Jonathan Sagall), pressured author Thomas Keneally to write the book Schindler's Ark to honour the man that had saved the life of Pfefferberg and 1200 other Jews. Pfefferberg then talked Steven Spielberg (also a Jew) into making the film - it was basically Pfefferberg's life goal to get this story turned into a novel and then rendered on the big screen purely so the world would know about what Oskar Schindler did.

All this makes Schindler's List the most elaborate "thank you" in history.

It also happens to be a truly incredible film. It's the kind of movie that makes your soul ache. Nothing demonstrates the horrific depths humanity has the potential to reach quite like the Holocaust, and nowhere is the misattributed quote about evil triumphing when good people do nothing more fitting than in Schindler's List.

Filmed in timeless black and white, its crisp cinematography and often handheld camerawork are never overt. Spielberg aimed for a documentary feel, eschewing Steadicams, storyboards and zoom lenses to capture an unplanned, in-the-moment vibe. The film hits all the harder thanks to these smart directorial decisions.

Schindler's List hits you because of the human glimmer of hope amid the horrendous atrocity of it all, but what really gets me about it is the slow creep of everything - the steady escalation of the violence, the gradual awakening of conscience in Schindler, the raising of the survival stakes, the progressive dehumanisation of the Jews. At the 30-minute mark, we're still wondering if Schindler is anything more than a shark or opportunist. At 40 minutes, when he meets the worker with one arm, we're wondering where his moment of revelation will come from. Just minutes later, we're shocked by sudden violence. At 50 minutes, Amon Göth arrives, and soon after that we get the "liquidation" of the Kraków ghetto. The movie slowly surrounds you, like a gang of bullies moving in one by one, before holding you down and beating you into submission.

So much of the film works because of its extremes. The violence is unflinching and in your face, but impactful things like the camerawork and John Williams' score are unobtrusive. The splash of red in the girl's coat is a powerful touch amid a film bereft of colour. The line between survival and death is narrow and unpredictable. And Schindler and Göth are at polar ends of the humanity scale, despite their shared love for the good things in life.

It's worth noting that Neeson and Fiennes had been longtime jobbing actors prior to Schindler's List but only achieved A-list status as a result of this film. They certainly weren't unknowns, but Spielberg definitely picked them due to their low star wattage. He could hardly have chosen better. Neeson has the requisite bravura and bluster as Schindler, without chewing the scenery, plus he makes the transition from carefree bon vivant to humanitarian utterly believable. His nervous wink towards the film's end,  after asking the Nazi guards if they wanted to "return to (their) families as men instead of murderers" is under-rated acting.

As for Fiennes, his Göth is a pudgy bully but worse than that, he is an utter psychopath in the truest sense of the word. He doesn't often come to mind when we think of great movie villains, but the American Film Institute saw fit to put him high up their list of the best baddies, and rightly so. He is pure evil, but believably pure evil, which is difficult to achieve.

(They also put Schindler in the hero list, above such icons as Han Solo, Superman and Batman.)

The double act of Schindler and Göth, of Neeson and Fiennes, is integral to the film, but it's also worth noting Ben Kingsley's performance. A masterful actor who often turns up in utter shite, his barely contained look of fear throughout the film is impressive. Embeth Davidzt is also compelling, in a role that gets somewhat lost in the atrocity of it all.

I was pretty sure it was against the law to say bad things about Schindler's List; like it was some kind of cinematic blasphemy, but while researching this review, I discovered that criticising Schindler's List is reasonably common. Seems like a bunch of edgelord hipster bullshit to me. Schindler's List stares into the the darkest cesspit of humanity - the absolute worst shit orchestrated by people in the past century - and feels around to find a glimmer of hope. It does so in a very human, honourable, respectful, and sensitive way.

Spielberg best film is Raiders Of The Lost Ark (I'm with The Incredible Suit on this), but Schindler's List is his most important film. If you had to pick one perfect film to represent the very best and the very worst that humanity is capable of, Schindler's List is hard to go past. It deserves respect, accolades, and to be bowed down to.

AFI #7: Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on May 15, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(M) ★★★★★

Director: David Lean

Cast: Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quinn, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, I. S. Johar, John Dimech, Zia Mohyeddin, José Ferrer.

"Shit, it's the cops."

I'm only seven films into my journey through the American Film Institute's top 100 films and the common thread I'm noticing in the best films is complex characters. Most main protagonists have been painted in shades of grey, not black and white, and are all the more fascinating for their flaws.

(The only exceptions so fair in the countdown have been the all-singin', all-dancin' protagonists of Singin' In The Rain, which has lots of other great things going on, and Raging Bull's Jake LaMotta (controversial, I know), who is just plain dumb, violent, misogynistic, and lacks any real nuance, and thus (in my book) is boring and uninteresting (tell me why I'm wrong in the comments).)

Which brings us to T.E. Lawrence, as portrayed by Peter O'Toole with a career-making and career-defining performance. Lawrence is one of cinema's most fascinatingly complex characters, and Lawrence Of Arabia is an enigmatic portrait of an historical figure who was reportedly as mysterious in real life as he is portrayed here.

After witnessing his ho-hum death, we learn about him first through off-hand comments from mourners at his funeral, and then through his own strangeness as we see him work a lowly position with the British army in Cairo, circa WWI. He talks in riddles, calls people by their full names, and puts out a match with his bare fingers, revealing the trick to be "not minding that it hurts".

If you're hoping Lawrence will make more sense as the story progresses, then I have bad news; he only gets more puzzling as the film progresses. Why is he doing the things he's doing? Is it purely ego, or does he genuinely think he's doing good?

These questions are the driving force of the film. Lawrence is both warrior and philosopher, cruel and kind, violent and meditative, egomaniacal and humble, mere mortal and wannabe messiah. The contradictions are captivating, as is his slow downward spiral toward the nastier sides of his duelling traits. As Empire's Kim Newman wrote, Lawrence seesaws "between inspired romantic rebel and traumatised psychopath; a magnificent Kane-like enigma at the heart of a film that never takes the easy way out by 'explaining' the hero's contradictory character".

As Lawrence creeps toward godhood, saviour and messiah, he is often framed as a small figure against a vast expanse of sand and sky. The desert is as much a character in the film as Lawrence, and it's one he battles and tries to tame. He wars with the elements, and with every victory, he is seen as a miracle worker, and increasingly starts to believe his own bullshit.

"They can only kill me with a golden bullet," he says at one point, and it's intended as a joke, but you sense he secretly believes it. It's one of the many magical moments in O'Toole performance, which is never short of riveting. His comfort in the desert, his ill-at-ease demeanour when he returns to "civilisation", his increasing bravado, his bloodlust - O'Toole and his piercing blue eyes are in sterling form. In Allan Hunter's Book of Movie Classic's, he marvels how the inexperienced O'Toole's "performance of riveting intensity holds the film together".

Other great star here is director David Lean, who captures the desert unlike any other director before or since. Shot on Super Panavision, he paints glorious widescreen vistas, using long, slow wide shots taken from a huge distance away to emphasise the scale of the place and the insignificance of the people in it.

Lawrence Of Arabia is ballsy, bravura film making on a scale rarely seen at the time. The battle of Aqaba is the astonishing centrepiece, but there are numerous times where you have to marvel at the insane logistics behind what you're seeing on the screen. Steven Spielberg, who called the film " a miracle" and helped restore it for its 2000 DVD release, estimated the film would cost $285 million to make in 2000 - inflation puts that figure above $435 million in 2020.

For all its cast-of-thousands staging and crazy battles, it's also artful and shows Lean's genius. Watching Omar Sharif materialise out of the heat haze, or see a lit match cut to a sunrise are examples of an artist at work. 

On top of this we have Maurice Jarre's dune-inducing strings, Robert Bolt's literary script, Omar Sharif playing a brilliant second fiddle to O'Toole, Anthony Quinn's wonderful brashness, Alec Guinness bringing dignity to some unfortunate brownface, the always welcome Claude Rains, and a story that encompasses both the arrogance of colonialism and the best and worst of individuals.

Despite winning seven Oscars at the time, Lawrence Of Arabia's greatest triumph came in 1989 when Lean restored it to its original length and inadvertently restored his career in the process. After the failures of Lean's later films, Lawrence rode out of the desert once more to save the day, elevating its director and this sandswept epic to its rightful place among the great epics of cinema.

AFI #6: Gone With The Wind (1939)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on May 15, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: Victor Fleming.

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Hattie McDaniel, Harry Davenport, Thomas Mitchell, Barbara O'Neil, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Rutherford, Oscar Polk, Butterfly McQueen, Everett Brown, Alicia Rhett, Rand Brooks, Carroll Nye, Laura Hope Crews, Cammie King Conlon.

Never smoke in bed.

Gone With The Wind is the cinematic personification of America. It's the biggest of big - it's over-the-top, bombastic and often melodramatic. And if you scratch the surface, it's deeply problematic, full of troublesome history, and all the heroes/heroines are horribly flawed.

Leaving aside the awkward analogy, Gone With The Wind is also fascinating, surprisingly funny, entertaining, and impressive. It's soooooo long but it's engrossing across its various chapters. Yes, some of its film making techniques have aged as poorly as its politics, but in the context of the time it was made and what it was trying to represent, it's a towering achievement.

It's hard to recommend this film to people. "Hey kids, wanna watch a four-hour-long romantic melodrama, told from the sympathetic perspective of the racist slave owners who lost the Civil War?"

But Gone With The Wind is good stuff. The love quadrangle of Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, Melanie Hamilton and Ashley Wilkes, set against the backdrop of their world literally burning to the ground, is riveting stuff.

When I first watched this some 20-ish years ago as a 17-year-old, it didn't impress me - Scarlett O'Hara was like nails down a chalkboard. But rewatching this two decades later, it's hard to look away from her. She's pathetic and pouty, but she's also independent and fiery. She's a childish sociopath, but also a strong-willed individual who regularly gives zero fucks about what's expected of her by society. She's manipulative and money-hungry, but also unrelenting and driven. She's delusional and self-destructive, but also has the capacity to do incredible things, including dragging her family out of the ashes of a post-Civil War Deep South. That Vivien Leigh can bring all these components into one character is a triumph.

Equally as engrossing is Rhett Butler, who is like a more self-aware version of Scarlett. He's as deeply flawed, but he understands, accepts and even embraces his flaws. He sees himself and Scarlett as kindred spirits that deserve each other and belong together. He's also the first in a long-line of louche anti-heroes that continues to this day - without Clark Gable's smirking selfishness, there would be no Han Solo, to name but one obvious descendant.

Watching Rhett and Scarlett circle each other, then seemingly connect, then fall apart is fascinating, hilarious, but ultimately devastating. All the while, the angelic Melanie hovers nearby, as her husband Ashley flits in and out of the picture. Despite being less interesting, Melanie and Ashley still intrigue. Ashley is easily the most boring character in the film but also the most potent symbol. He represents the Old South, but also inspires some of Scarlett's pettiest attributes - she wants him not out of love but a mix of spite, nostalgia and self-delusion.

These compelling characters are all the more compelling for their context. You'd struggle to get a film made these days with a sympathetic view of the South in the Civil War, but it's a world that's engrossing, even for all its historical whitewashing. The burning of Atlanta and the famous shot showing the town square filled with wounded soldiers are stunning moments, amid some truly huge scenes in the classic "cast of thousands" style.

"Frankly my dear, that is a gun in my pocket."

Yes, bits haven't aged well (and, yes, that's an understatment). Its portrayal of black people is problematic, but Hattie McDaniel's Oscar-winning performance as Mammy is one for the ages, as is her clapback to African Americans who dubbed her an Uncle Tom - "I'd rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one". And just as there are perhaps equal arguments about whether or not her performance and its accompanying Academy Award advanced or set back the cause of black actors, it's undeniable that her final monologue to Melanie has they ascend the stairs of Scarlett and Rhett's sombre home is heartbreaking and artfully delivered.

Some of its mattes, rear projections and additional dialogue recording have aged about as well as its obvious affection for the South and glossing over of slavery. Its regular melodrama - in particular Scarlett's "God as my witness" speech just prior to intermission, and Ashley and Melanie's reunion - also feel as dated as its politics and its brushing-off of Rhett's misogyny, domestic violence, and marital rape. Many pages have been devoted to this latter elements, and for good reason, and I'm not here to excuse them, merely to examine them as part of the rich tapestry of the story and the complexities of its protagonists.

Gone With The Wind remains a snapshot of Hollywood at perhaps its most successfully ambitious - it is the first peak of Hollywood's Golden Age. It's sprawling storytelling, and it boasts some of the richest characters in the classic cinema handbook, with no small thanks owed to Margaret Mitchell's source material.

It also features the great kiss-off of all time, and a last line up there with Casablanca's. No wonder so many people give a damn.

AFI #5: Singin' In The Rain (1952)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on May 1, 2020, and ABC Radio Bendigo on June 15, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as updated in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(G) ★★★★★

Director: Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen.

Cast: Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor, Jean Hagen, Millard Mitchell, Douglas Fowley, Cyd Charisse, Rita Moreno.

"Mister won't you please help my pony?/He's over there behind the tree..."

Is Singin' In The Rain the greatest musical of all time? The AFI would have us believe so, but I would place another film higher (spoiler alert: it's The Wizard Of Oz), if only because Gene Kelly's magnum opus has one song too many (more on this later).

Singin' In The Rain is almost perfect. Aside from featuring a handful of the greatest song-and-dance routines in Hollywood history, it's also a clever satire of the film industry, as well as being a jovial comedy and a charming love letter to cinema's ungainly transition from silent to sound.

Right from start, the film gently prods at Tinsel Town with a knowing nudge and a cheeky wink. A red-carpet premiere and post-screening party show off the weirdos, fake marriages, gold-diggers, brown-nosers, ridiculous excess, fickle fans and false facade of publicity. Don Lockwood (Kelly) offers a heartfelt tale of privilege to a reporter on the red carpet, but it's hilariously contradicted by a montage detailing the actual hard road he and Cosmo Brown (O'Connor) travelled to reach their respective rungs on the Hollywood ladder. Nothing in this town is as it seems - just like the movies they make here. But hey, that's entertainment.

Hollywood loves films about Hollywood, which has no doubt helped maintain Singin' In The Rain's reputation. It offers a peek behind the curtains, regaling us with in-jokes and early silver screen stereotypes - crazy directors, hard-luck stuntmen, egomaniac divas, and clueless producers. Hilariously, one of Lockwood's run-of-the-mill silent swashbucklers features almost-out-of-shot stage hands grabbing at a stunt performer and very obvious 'safety dirt' placed for a safe landing.

But it all comes from the heart. Singin' In The Rain's key plot-driving moment is the release of the original talkie, The Jazz Singer, and as a result there is a nostalgic warmth to the film, which was made a quarter of a century after The Jazz Singer. Singin' In The Rain salutes the first talkie's innovation, and also shares an affection for the vaudevillian song-and-dance routines that predate "moving pictures", as well as the many movie musicals that went before it.

Aftter all, Singin' In The Rain, if it were released today, would probably be labelled a jukebox musical. Only two of its songs were written for the film - the rest were well known numbers from films released between 1929 and 1939. Among these songs are highlights we now associate with Singin' In The Rain, and not the films that originally launched them, which means Singin' In The Rain is Natalie Imbruglia's Torn, and all those previous musicals are the original version of Torn that no one knows.

(I can guarantee this is the only review of Singin' In The Rain that references Natalie Imbruglia's Torn.)

But we need to talk about Gene Kelly. This is the peak of his career, coming a year after he received an honorary Oscar (for An American In Paris). He would go on to be a Golden Globe-nominated director, and give well-received turns in dramatic films, but as the thing he is best known as - a song and dance man - this is his Everest.

Alongside co-director Donen, he gives every routine its own feel, its own cinematic style. The manic pratfall energy of Make 'Em Laugh, the dance-around-the-house charm of Good Morning, and the title number's effortless joy are the moments that help define Singin' In The Rain as a benchmark in movie musicals and Kelly's career.

The showstopper - in both the positive and negative potential of the word - is the climactic Broadway Melody set-piece. This is the aforementioned "one song too many". It's a 14-minute-long vanity piece for Kelly that would otherwise be okay if wasn't dropped right at the start of the final act. The story grinds to a halt as Kelly does his thing, apropos of nothing much.

But this is part of the reason Singin' In The Rain is so well regarded - it's as much about Kelly doing his thing as it is anything else, so critics and film students are happy to let him throw the plot aside and indulge his every song-and-dance fantasy in what amounts to an out-of-nowhere dream sequence. It's nicely staged, beautifully filmed, and impressive in its attempts to push the movie musical into the realm of high art, so despite it being wholly unnecessary and even detrimental to the storytelling, it gets a pass. It also sets up a great meta-gag, which helps. 

Kelly is only one part of a triple threat of triple threats that ensure the film isn't merely humming in the drizzle. Donald O'Connor's Make 'Em Dance routine is a masterpiece and his classic vaudeville gags are classics for a reason (sample: "Cosmo, call me a cab"... "Ok, you're a cab"). Debbie Reynolds, who was half Kelly's age when she played his lover, does a fantastic job in Good Morning despite not being a trained dancer (Fred Astaire helped her prepare), but she also brings piles of charm and verve to the film.

But the secret weapon of Singin' In The Rain is Jean Hagen. Her Oscar-nominated turn is great comedy acting from an under-rated actor. The broad nasal Noo Yawk accent is not her real voice and never wavers, and her comic timing is impeccable. She even manages to make Lina Lamont pitiable, despite her being the villain of the piece. We never truly despise Lina, probably because she's too unwittingly hilarious and daffy.

You could cynically suggest that Hollywood loves Hollywood, which is possibly part of why Singin' In The Rain has endured. But realistically it represents a highwater mark in the dance-driven musical. It nostalgically champions the music and movies that came before it, but also dares to push the art form to new heights. Its three best songs (all of which appear on this AFI list) are three of the best song-and-dance sequences ever committed to film, but more than that, it's a sharp satire and wonderfully warm and funny comedy. No other film can brag of being all these things, making Singin' In The Rain a real one-of-a-kind experience.