The Rashomon Moment: Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival

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Bob Dylan performs for the crowd in Murray Lerner’s excellent 2007 documentary on the musician at the Newport Jazz Festival – THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR: BOB DYLAN AT THE NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL, 1963-1965.

In the winter of 2007 moviegoers were given a choice to see numerous impersonations of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a semi-experimental biopic or experience the living legend in concert at the Newport Folk Festival circa 1963. The former was Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There featuring several faux-Dylans portrayed by Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere and others in a dramatic attempt to capture the many phases and contradictions in the musician’s life. The latter was Murray Lerner’s riveting time capsule, The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965. The strange thing is that Lerner’s documentary featuring the real deal vanished after a brief theatrical run while Haynes’s film continues to enjoy wide exposure thanks to its release on DVD. I don’t know if this meant that the younger movie-going audience is more interested in popular actors playing Bob Dylan or that they have little interest in the sixties folk music scene that Dylan revitalized with his spectacular entry into it. 

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Wolves, Pigs and Men

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The Japanese film poster for WOLVES, PIGS AND MEN (1964).

Among the many post-WW2 Japanese filmmakers who emerged in the 1960s and hit their stride in the seventies, Kinji Fukasaku was one of the most prominent and critically acclaimed directors in his own country but didn’t start to acquire a growing fan base in the U.S. until after 2000 when some of his masterworks began to appear on DVD such as the yakuza epic Battles Without Honor and Humanity aka The Yakuza Papers (1973), which launched a five-film franchise, and Battle Royale (2000), a controversial futuristic fable about institutionalized violence against problem teenagers. Over the years, Fukasaku has dabbled in numerous film genres from historical drama (Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, 1972) to sci-fi (Message from Space, 1978) and comedy (Fall Guy, 1982), but he is best known from his crime dramas, especially those which popularized the jitsuroku eiga genre. His documentary-like dramatizations based on real crimes often depicted yakuza figures as ruthless men operating without “honor and humanity” (in the title words of his breakthrough film). Even prior to his trend-setting crime thrillers of the mid-seventies, Fukasaku was turning out edgy, innovative work and Okami to Buta to Ningen (English title: Wolves, Pigs and Men) from 1964 is an explosive, nihilistic tale which qualifies as a rough-hewn, early masterpiece.

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Playing the Odds

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During his years as a contract director at Warner Bros., William Wellman made his mark early with the influential gangster drama The Public Enemy (1931) but didn’t have another major box office success until after he left the studio and directed A Star Is Born (1937), produced by David O. Selznick and distributed by United Artists. Yet, during his tenure with First National Pictures/Warner Bros., Wellman churned out a number of energetic, fast-paced entertainments which are often overlooked by admirers of his work but stand out from the assembly-line programmers they were intended to be. Among the highlights from this early period are Night Nurse (1931) with Barbara Stanwyck, the grim Pre-Code drama Safe in Hell (1931) and Love Is a Racket (1932) starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as a newspaper columnist working the Broadway beat. The latter film is not only a fascinating time capsule of its era, with glimpses of then-popular New York City nightspots such as Sardi’s, but also presents an unapologetic, cynical view of reporters who often resort to any means necessary to score a front-page story.

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Break Up the Dance and Other Film Shorts from Poland

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Polish film director Roman Polanski during his student years at the Lodz Film School.

At an early age Roman Polanski began to realize his true ambition to be a filmmaker with a series of short films which were made during his time as a student at Poland’s prestigious National Film School at Lodz. His debut film Morderstwo [English title, Murder aka The Crime, 1957] – a three minute short without dialogue about a senseless murder – and the one that followed it, the three-minute Usmiech Zebiczny [English title: Teeth Smile aka A Toothful Smile, 1957], about a peeping tom, were atmospheric studies in violence and voyeurism that disturbed his fellow filmmakers and raised speculations about the young filmmaker’s dark side. His third short, Rozbijemy Zabawe… [English title: Break Up the Party, 1957], however, aroused considerably more controversy over his directorial methods. 

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Expect the Unexpected

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The French film poster for EVERYONE WANTS TO KILL ME (1957), directed by Henri Decoin.

When a movie refuses to fit snugly into a specific genre, that could be a sign that the filmmakers were either unable to capture the desired approach and tone or that the story/screenplay dictated a less conventional approach to the narrative. I suspect that the latter reason is why Tous Peuvent Me Tuer (English title, Everyone Wants to Kill Me, 1957), directed by Henri Decoin, is hard to place into any specific film category. If you were to watch the movie with the sound turned off, you would probably classify it as a brooding French noir. Yet, if you add in the music score and the animated performances, it comes across as an almost lighthearted crime caper flick. Add to this a segue into prison melodrama which soon becomes a whodunit murder mystery. And just to keep things off balance, stir in a romance, some comic relief and a wrap-up that positions the entire affair as a morality play. 

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The Education of Miss Blum

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Karla (Jutta Hoffmann) has some doubts about her effectiveness as a teacher in the East Germany drama KARLA (1965), which was banned for many years.

There have been enough movies about teachers facing challenging classroom situations and unsympathetic staff and school board members to comprise a film genre of its own. And it is not limited to just classic flicks from Hollywood like Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Bright Road (1953) The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Up the Down Staircase (1967), To Sir, With Love (1967), Stand and Deliver (1988) and Dead Poets’ Society (1989). Other countries have produced their own cinematic touchstones on the subject such as the U.K. (The Browning Version [1951], If… [1968], The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [1969]), France (Zero for Conduct [1933], The Class [2008]), Japan (Twenty-Four Eyes [1955] or Russia (Village Teacher [1947]). All of these address numerous issues like juvenile delinquency, racism, illiteracy and the value of mentorship but few, if any, have presented the complex problems facing Karla, the heroine of Herrmann Zschoche’s 1965 East German drama which was extremely controversial in its day.

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Monster Mash

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During the 1930’s and early forties, Universal Studios rode the crest of a horror film craze that made them rich and famously established them as the home of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy and other screen monsters. But the fear factor was lost over time as their signature creatures were paraded through a series of inferior B-movie sequels. And in the minds of some horror film fans, the genre hit rock bottom with the release of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948. Once capable of terrifying their audiences, the Universal monsters were now reduced to playing “straight men” to Abbott and Costello’s slapstick antics. Who could ever take them seriously again? Yet, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is both a first-rate horror-comedy that ranks as one of the comedy team’s finest efforts (and most profitable) and an affectionate homage to the screen horrors who gave us nightmares as kids.  

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Senilità aka Careless (1962)

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Anthony Franciosa plays a frustrated office worker pushing forty who develops an obsessive love for a young woman in SENILITA (1962), directed by Mauro Bolognini.

Italian novelist Italo Svevo was the pseudonym for Ettore Schmitz, a novelist and short story writer who was born in Trieste in 1861. After publishing two unsuccessful novels, he gave up writing until his English tutor James Joyce encouraged him to continue and he wrote a third novel in 1823, Confessions of Zeno (considered his masterpiece) and several short stories which were not published until after his early death from an automobile accident in 1928. Svevo never received the acclaim he deserved during his own lifetime but now he is considered one of Italy’s most famous authors and a pioneer of the psychoanalytical novel. His novels and some of his short stories were later adapted for film and television productions but the first one to hit the screen was Senelita (aka Careless, 1962), based on his second novel. The story of an insecure, self-absorbed office worker approaching forty who develops an obsessive love for a beautiful working class girl, the film was an impressive early masterwork for director Mauro Bolognini and helped launch Claudia Cardinale as an international star (The following year she appeared in Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and made her American film debut in The Pink Panther). 

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The Black Sheep of the Family

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A relic from an earlier era when gothic Victorian melodramas were all the rage, Uncle Silas (1947, released in the U.S. as The Inheritance) is an adaptation of Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel which was actually an elaboration of his 1851 short story, “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess.” As you can surmise from the title, Le Fanu’s story was an earlier form of the Harlequin romance genre, steeped in an atmosphere of old dark houses, decadent aristocrats and mysterious locked rooms. Le Fanu is best known for his vampire novella, Camilla, which has enjoyed numerous film adaptations, but Uncle Silas (published in 1864) was a popular page-turner for its era.

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To Dream is To Fly

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The international film poster for the Nicaragua feature film ALSINO AND THE CONDOR (1982).

In 1979, the Somoza dictatorship of Nicaragua was overthrown by the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) and it led to a decades long war with the country’s National Guard and the U.S. backed Contras aligned against the left wing Sandinista forces. The conflict raged until 1990 and it was a terrible time for the people of Nicaragua, especially the peasants and native communities like the Miskito in rural areas. Although several documentaries have been made on the subject over the years such as Werner Herzog’s Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984), there have been few high-profile dramatic features about the conflict. One of the rare exceptions is Under Fire (1983), Roger Spottiswoode’s intense drama about three journalists (Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Joanna Cassidy) covering the final days of the corrupt Somoza regime. Another worthy contender is Alsino and the Condor (1982), directed by Miguel Littin, which was filmed on location in Nicaragua and was Oscar nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film. Unlike the more realistic approach of Under Fire, Alsino and the Condor functions more as an allegory and was loosely based on Pedro Prado’s famous 1920 novel Alsino about a young boy who dreams of flying like a bird.

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