A Law Unto Themselves

Indie darling Greta Gerwig makes her solo writing/directorial debut with Lady Bird, a coming of age film that has been building strongly towards the 2017-2018 Awards season. . . earning an almost unheard of rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Many of the plot points will sound familiar when it comes to a coming of age tale – teen angst, strife between mother and daughter, obsession with sex and losing your virginity, first love, applying for colleges, joining the school theatre club, crushes on teachers and other such things; though, it is not these things that are truly important, but rather the honest, realistic voice in which it is told.

Long before Zac Efron and his fraternity bros started terrorizing new parents Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne in the 2014 comedy Neighbors, there was another movie with the same name, a superlative 1920 short from the great Buster Keaton (one of his first four shorts on his own). A tale of star crossed lovers, The Boy (Buster Keaton) and The Girl (Virginia Fox – originally one of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties, she would marry major Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, retiring from the business just a few years later) are madly in love, though the fence that separates their tenement apartments might as well be topped with barbed wire and armed with snipers, as their families despise each other – a feud rivalling the Montague’s and Capulet’s. Both fathers are especially involved in keeping the pair apart, though The Girl’s giant sized Father (Joe Roberts) is a much bigger threat than The Boy’s equally diminutive dad (played by Buster’s own father, Joe). Early each morning, they slip notes through a hole in the fence to communicate.

Landing somewhere in between French New Wave, older classic French features and the grand Hollywood musical, Jacques Demy’s 1964 colourful kaleidoscopic romantic drama, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is most definitely not your typical movie musical. Firstly, there is no dancing (a standard in musicals), rather, Demy orchestrates many lengthy choreographed takes with his camera – it adding the graceful movement that would usually be asked of the actors. But, more importantly, and at greater risk, every single line of dialogue in Cherbourg is sung. Perhaps a bit daunting to movie audiences, it does, in some ways, make sense. I have never bought into the idea that people would just randomly break into song and dance at any given time. . . only a few films giving some sort of reason for this (see Singin’ in the Rain and La La Land), so it is more plausible, in this vividly toned movie landscape, that people naturally sing all the time – this means no distracting breaks between song and talk.

Most of you will have likely picked up on the abbreviated version of the quotation utilized above as the title. . . a reference to the seminal Eagles song ‘Hotel California’, which, in many ways, could be the title track of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 fantastical dramedy The Exterminating Angel. To further my point, look for the italicized text throughout the review, as it will be part of the classic rock tune. From the mind of the master of surrealism comes this, just another one of his mind-benders, a tale that follows a group of extravagant people who come together for a lavish dinner party. And, though the mansion is such a lovely place, the servants who have worked there obediently for many years almost instinctively decide to depart (despite their duties), as the guests arrive. Only the major-domo, that is, the head servant of the household, stays to help.

Uniting a superlative film noir cast, 1946's The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, directed by Lewis Milestone (a two time Academy Award winner, one of which he earned for All Quiet on the Western Front), begins with a triumvirate of childhood friends witnessing a crime which forges a unique bond between them, it informing their respective directions into adulthood. Building off of her performance in Double Indemnity two years earlier, Barbara Stanwyck, playing the title character, once again proves why she is one of the all-time great femme fatales. . . a calm, controlled, ruthless Machiavellian puppet master, she not only pulls the strings of her weak and feeble alcoholic husband Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas in his first film role – and against type from what we would later know) – who truly loves her, but she also has a manipulative control over the entire city in which she lives – owner of the plant that gives its people their jobs, the police that protect it (thanks to her husband, who is the district attorney), and everything else in between.

Talk about an opening hook: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours – or that young couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.” A perfect film noir introduction, the 1953 crime thriller The Hitch-Hiker, co-written and directed by Ida Lupino, is a seventy-one minute ride down a road you most definitely would not want to travel. In a simpler time (when people still picked up hitch-hikers), Emmett Myers (William Talman – best known as District Attorney Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason) utilizes this mode of transportation to evade the police. . . murdering those kind enough to pick him up. Dumping the body (or bodies) and abandoning the car, his thumb then goes up as he plays the stranded traveller – his two newest would-be-victims are Roy Collins (Edmond O’Brien – D.O.A.; White Heat) and Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy – In a Lonely Place; House of Wax).