There is one cinema gimmick that always works for me and can sometimes lift a movie out of the ordinary and take it somewhere unexpected. This usually occurs when someone either puts on a mask or appears in one. The simple act of doing this immediately brings something theatrical and visually arresting to the scene that taps into our subconscious on an almost primeval level.
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When Otto Preminger announced in 1957 that his next project would be Bonjour Tristesse, based on the best-selling novel by Francoise Sagan, and that it would star Jean Seberg, colleagues and fellow members of the film industry were astonished. After all, his previous film, Saint Joan (1957), which featured Seberg in her film debut, was probably the biggest critical and commercial disaster of Preminger’s career with most of the negative reviews focusing on the inexperienced newcomer whom Preminger had “discovered.” Was Bonjour Tristesse (1958) his attempt to prove to everyone that he was not wrong about Seberg and that her performance in his new movie would validate all the time and effort he had poured into making her an actress? The real reasons, of course, were more complicated than that.
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Among the many anti-marijuana films made over the years, it is generally agreed that the most famous of them all is Reefer Madness (1936), which earned a huge cult following in the 1960s due to its outrageously over-the-top depiction of marijuana use and its effects. Most of the anti-pot movies were false, exaggerated presentations of how the herb turned users into addicts and rivaled heroin as a gateway into sin, debauchery, violence and death. The U.S. was not alone in turning out these anti-drug scare films and one of the lesser known but historically significant releases for its time was Marihuana (U.S. title, The Marihuana Story, 1950), directed by Argentinian filmmaker Leon Klimovsky, who would later relocate to Spain and specialize in horror movies, spaghetti westerns and other low-budget genre efforts.
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When did the immigrant situation become an international crisis? Anyone who follows the news knows that immigration has been on the rise for the last 20 years or more but, beginning in 2020, the number of fleeing people seeking asylum in Europe, the U.S. and other more affluent countries has tripled and is reaching catastrophic proportions. This situation was addressed in a small but personal way back in 2011 by the great Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki in his film Le Havre. Instead of trying to tackle the whole immigration problem, Kaurismaki uses it as the background for a story about Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a young African immigrant, and how his plight spurs a working-class French community to protect and aid him during his journey.
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Some believe “Old Dark House” thrillers began with J.B. Priestley’s 1927 novel Benighted, which was adapted for the screen by James Whale as The Old Dark House in 1932. The reality is that the template had already been created by Mary Roberts Rinehart in her 1908 novel The Circular Staircase, which she reworked into a highly successful 1920 Broadway production entitled The Bat with playwright Avery Hopwood. Author and actor John Willard also had a Broadway smash hit with his 1922 play The Cat and the Canary, which shared a number of familiar horror/mystery elements with Rinehart’s creation, most significantly the gloomy mansion in an isolated setting with a menacing character prowling the corridors.
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In 1969 French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant had three films in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Costa-Garvas’s Z, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Metti, Una Sera a Cena (Love Circle) and Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, with the actor garnering critical praise for his performance in all three movies. When asked by an interviewer how it felt to be a potential prize recipient, Trintignant replied, “I’m not an award winner. I don’t have that affect to win Best Actor. You need a mad scene or a drunken scene or something like that. And in the films selected I don’t have any like that. All these roles are rather underwhelming. They’re ambiguous. They are complex but not remarkable. I’m not remarkable.” Typical of Trintignant, his response was self-deprecating but also shrewdly self-aware. The irony is that he did win Best Actor at Cannes for Z that year for playing the steadfast, non-partisan investigator of a highly political case. In fact, he built a career playing characters who were often hard to read, repressed or quietly self-possessed, and he made them endlessly fascinating for the viewer. This is just one of many insights shared by director Lucie Caries in Trintignant by Trintignant, an intimate documentary portrait of the actor that was made for French television in 2021, the year before he died. Even though the documentary is barely an hour in length, it pulls from more than 70 years of archival material, photos, interviews, TV and film clips and comments by fellow actors and directors to help dissect the enigma that is Jean-Louis Trintignant.
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Cinema Sojourns 