Griffin-Mill Reviews

Summertime (1955)

Mambo Italiano

[10/10 · 2 January 2005]

David Lean's moving, heart-stoppingly gorgeous companion piece to Brief Encounter combines Katharine Hepburn's finest, most human performance with stunning cinematography and a dizzying, romantic screenplay touched with just the right amount of worldly bitterness. Hepburn is continually dazzling and the screenplay is just cynical enough to have the ring of truth.

Funny, beautiful and often heartbreaking, the film is a career peak for Hepburn (even if you find her to be mannered and irritating in other roles, it's difficult not to whole-heartedly sympathize with her here) and one of Lean's finest hours.

Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)

How Low Can Moreau Go?

[9/10 · 25 December 2004]

Luis Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid places a stone-faced Jeanne Moreau in a country house filled with perverts and watches as she drops her moral standards to inconceivable lows. To Moreau's chambermaid, it's better to suppress loathing, keep things neat and support the status quo, even in the face of the worst atrocities in human history, than to take a stand and risk repercussions.

The film begins as a typical Bunuel tale of quirky perverts (Jean Ozenne's foot fetishist, Francoise Lugagne's coldly domineering lady of the house) with a blank at its center, Jeanne Moreau's oblique, vaguely disdainful chambermaid. The cinematography adds to our sense of Moreau's opacity by avoiding closeups of her for the entire film. As Moreau indulges her perverted employers in the interest of self-preservation and personal gain, Bunuel throws successively greater moral hurdles in front of her, culminating in the murder of a child, and she stoops to accept each one.

If you think that overlooking a brutal child murderer is the worst Moreau can do, just wait - the hulking, monstrous Georges Geret's reflexive anti-Semitism, hinted at in earlier dialogue, snaps into focus in the film's final scenes, which directly correlate Moreau's willingness to lower her standards with France's surrender to the genocidal Nazis in World War II.

A chilling and brutal - if emotionally distant - sermon, part anguished howl and part self-satisfied wink, the film is one of Bunuel's very best.

Born Yesterday (1950)

Ms. Dawn Goes To Washington

[9/10 · 25 December 2004]

A brilliant Judy Holliday performance is the main attraction in this witty, brisk adaptation of Garson Kanin's Broadway success. As a gangster's moll who gradually awakens to her civic responsibility, Holliday expands her dumb-broad persona from her previous film with Cukor, Adam's Rib, into a character who's sweet, memorable and surprisingly tough.

Born Yesterday is a suitable companion piece to Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, a much more self-consciously "important" film that imparts similar messages about political corruption and the responsibility of individuals to require ethical governance. The message is arguably more powerfully imparted here - filtered through the perspective of the selfish, spoiled and barely-literate Ms. Dawn - than in the film focused on Jimmy Stewart's eloquent (and intimidatingly ethical) Mr. Smith, an "everyman" who is vastly morally superior to most audience members.

William Holden is relaxed and charming as the Henry Higgins-ish newspaper man tasked with opening Billie's eyes and Broderick Crawford is suitably broad and menacingly raspy as her corrupt, vulgar boyfriend. However, the movie is all Holliday's from the opening scenes, which play on the audience's lack of familiarity with the actress by presenting her as a refined, statuesque beauty in an extended sequence until, at last, she squawks out her first lines in nearly impenetrable, helium-voiced Brooklynese to hilarious effect.

A richly deserved Best Actress Oscar for the newcomer Holliday, despite formidable competition from grande dames Bette Davis (All About Eve) and Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard).