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Reviews
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Failed On the Premises
Not since the Big Sleep has a plot line taken more shots. Film is about character, and character is about action. The final scene is when Ed Bell's wife is blandly looking over the table at him, brings down the curtain. He is all out of action. The action figures in the story,(plot integrity is unessential) have played their hands, and there is no where to go; like Steinbeck's case for "westering", after the men came to the edge and ran out of land, or Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show talking about the land, or like the hired killer in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, when the victim offers to pay him "more" than the man who hired him. The killer takes the money and kills the man anyway because he always "finishes the job." There are long quiet spaces punctuated by gunfire, Sergio Leone-like. The characters are a mix of gods and demigods. The more mortal you are the more tenuous your place. I would have had Carla Jean shoot Chigurh, just for laughs. Not enough laughs in this picture for all the process, tent poles and hiding the bag of money, and the transponders wrapped in a wad of one dollar bills? Remember process in Night and Fog? That had more laughs.
Des gens sans importance (1956)
Working Class Film
This is a working class picture, and films about labor and the labor struggle, deserve a separate category from working class films. The mass of working class literature and film deal primarily with families of the workers. The genre has evolved more recently, to include realistic (and entertaining) depictions of the working conditions in offices, and businesses. By the definition of a working class film, this one is ahead of it's time.
Viard is trying to use his skills at the highest level of his ability. He turns down a temporary job. He also asserts his right to decide which routes he deserves. This is not management/labor in an either or dialectic struggle, this is the labor management partnership which came out of WWII when industry needed more sophisticated, and skilled workers.
The title reflects the needs of working class people to achieve that level of importance. Viard jumps into the generation gap, when his daughter cruelly mocks him. This is a man torn up by the changes in society, who accepts his fate (somewhat) stoically. He is a real hero, in that sense of the term.
Gabin captures the physicality of the Viard, a man defined by his occupation, a man who puts more into his job, than merely his back. His romance is part fatherly, although Clothilde is closer to his daughters' age, she respects him. The respect she shows Viard, is more important than her physical relationship with the middle-aged man.
He then risks his job to be closer to her, to the source of that respect, again not out of vanity, but a sense of completion she provides, and he ultimately proves to be her undoing. Great stuff.
Ryan's Daughter (1970)
Half a view onward
In retrospect the problems in this film grow larger than they were at the time. Though Mitchum plays the passionless schoolmaster, in real life he was said to have a low or average libido. (Some said because of marijuana, for which he was arrested) It was not long after that at Cannes that he staged the famous topless shot with an actress, perhaps to put his female admirers more at ease, that the sexy leading man lived up to the billing.
The wedding night scene in this picture then becomes an incredibly bad inside joke. What curious casting, Mitchum, who looks every bit a man, plays the mooshy schoolmaster, and Jones, a pale flower of a man, can barely stand up, exudes the passion Rosy is seeking.
Then of course Sarah Miles was an actress whose reputation tended to proceed her. Audiences looking at this in retrospect are laughing at her school girl shtick. Trevor Howard gave one of his most awkward performances. John Mills served to provide the cutaways whenever the action grew too tense, (not often). I saw one shot in the film which made sense, the Major looks out the window of the lorry at the Irish coastline, and Lean gives us a shot of his view, the light off the ocean, a small island, the view of a military man thinking about the land as an obstacle, an impediment. Good counterpoint.
Like Kipling's Light Brigade, this film rode into the valley of film death. I turned it off rather than watch the carnage.