Although they were not the only names announced as recipients of Honorary Oscars last Tuesday – film historian and documentary filmmaker Kevin Brownlow and actor Eli Wallach were also named – Francis Ford Coppola and Jean-Luc Godard are arguably the most well-known and influential of them (Coppola will receive the Irving Thalberg Award, while Godard will receive the Governor General Award), and also the most contentious. After all, while Brownlow is well-respected in this field, and Wallach has had a distinguished career in film and on stage, while working with some of the best directors, Coppola and Godard each have a vocal set of detractors (as well, of course, as fans) who think their work either fell off after their peak period (Coppola in the 1970′s, Godard in the 60′s), or was never any good at all (to be fair, more people feel that about Godard than Coppola).

At first glance, Coppola and Godard wouldn’t seem to have much in common aside from that fact. After all, Coppola is known for making big-budget films that have been either highly successful (the Godfather movies) or considered flops (One from the Heart, which was the film that bankrupted his fledgling studio Zoetrope). In addition, while he has tried to alternate his big-budget films with more personal films, most of his stories tend to be in the classical tradition of storytelling (with the possible exception of The Conversation), and he’s tackled a wide range of genres within that tradition. Finally, he went through a period in the 80′s and 90′s of taking on projects strictly for hire (such as Gardens of Stone and The Rainmaker), which he has groused about in interviews. Godard, on the other hand, has almost always worked independently (with the exception of Contempt, which was financed by Italian producer Carlo Ponti), and with low budgets. While he has also tackled a wide variety of genres, all of the resulting films have played around radically with the rules of those genres (A Woman is a Woman, for example, is a musical except the characters don’t break out into song). And while he has used such stars as Gerard Depardieu (Oh, Woe is Me), Brigitte Bardot (Contempt), and even Woody Allen (King Lear) and Jane Fonda (Tout Va Bien), he has used them for his purposes, often to subvert the very idea of stardom. Finally, while he has done movies on behalf of certain groups, he has never made a movie strictly for hire. They also both come from different backgrounds – Coppola was born to a creative family, as his father Carmine was a composer and musician, and his mother was an actress, while Godard was born to a physician. And while Coppola went to UCLA film school and apprenticed with Roger Corman, Godard became a filmmaker through his being a critic.

Yet the two of them are more alike than you would think. Even though Coppola is most recognized, as he puts it, for his adaptations (The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now obviously being the most famous of them), he’s always talked about moving towards a more personal type of cinema, which is what Godard has done his entire career. Both have sought to revolutionize cinema, although Godard has sought to change the form and content of film, while Coppola was looking to change the way films were made and distributed. Both essentially believe in the auteur theory of cinema, not only in the sense of believing in a personal cinema, but also in the sense of the director being in charge (though Coppola, to be sure, has a mixed record as a producer in allowing complete directorial control). While Coppola is not as political as Godard is, to put it mildly, both have made films that take on Western society (though Coppola’s films in that regard are less specific) and its ills, and both have complained about the influence of Hollywood (here, the opposite is true; Coppola’s dissatisfaction is more specific than Godard’s). Both of them were somewhat careless about the business aspects of film – ironically, while in Joseph Gelmis’ book The Film Director as Superstar, Coppola would disdain his fellow classmates at UCLA for following Godard’s lead and not thinking about the business end, he of course was known for films with spiraling budgets (as for Godard, he took a big budget for Contempt, but gave his backers – Ponti and American indie producer Joseph E. Levine – an art film instead of an exploitation film with Brigitte Bardot. Also, as it happens, Godard was making his film Passion with Vittorio Storaro on Coppola’s recommendation, but changed his mind and went with his frequent collaborator Raoul Coutard instead). Finally, while Coppola is mostly known for taking years between projects, he has also been able, like Godard, to make movies on the fly (for example, Coppola made Rumble Fish while he was editing The Outsiders, and used many of the same actors and crew).

Over the next several weeks, leading up to the actual Honorary Oscars ceremony, I’ll be taking an in-depth look back at the careers of both directors (while Coppola’s award is for producing, and I will look at that aspect of his career, as well as the few screenplays he wrote that were directed by others, I’ll be focusing on his directing career). Obviously, one can’t write about Coppola without mentioning The Godfather trilogy or Apocalypse Now, and the same goes for Godard and Breathless, and attention will be paid to those films. However, I’d also like to spotlight the lesser known films in each director’s resume, and maybe find some hidden gems underneath (and, of course, films that deserve to be forgotten). I’ll also take a look at what influenced both directors, as well as the directors who have been influenced by them. When a writer/director endeavors to make “personal” films, of course their personal lives must be investigated, but I’ll only deal with that aspect as it relates specifically to their films. Finally, as much as is available, I’ll try to explore how critics have viewed their works, detractors and champions alike (and even those, like Pauline Kael, who have been in both camps). Obviously, I am far from the first writer or critic to take stock of the careers of Coppola and Godard, but I hope to take, if not an original tack, at least an interesting and thought provoking look at these two filmmakers.

Lupino, who came from a showbiz family in Britain (her father was a music hall comedian, while her mother was an actress), wasn’t an easy fit with Hollywood at first. In one of her first movies, Search for Beauty (1934), she’s cast in the ingénue role of an Olympic diver unwittingly being used for immoral purposes (to sell what essentially is a skin magazine), and while she makes her moral stand believable, you can see her struggling with a one-note part. And in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), which casts her as a damsel in distress (and allows her to use her native accent), she brings her trademark intensity to the role, but again, it seems like a poor fit for her.

It was three movies in the early 40’s – They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra and The Sea Wolf (both 1941) – that first showcased her talents. In They Drive by Night, she plays Lana, the bored wife of Ed, who owns a trucking company and is more lower class in manner than she is. She becomes obsessed with Joe (George Raft), a trucker who is already happily involved with a waitress named Cassie (Ann Sheridan). When Joe flatly turns Lana down, she has Ed killed, then claims Joe put her up to it. One of Lupino’s strengths is she could go from blue blood to working class characters and back again, and she not only convinces as someone with aspirations, but also makes Lana’s eventual breakdown credible. By contrast, in High Sierra, which teamed her up with Humphrey Bogart (who had a supporting role in They Drive by Night), she was both tough and vulnerable as a dance hall girl who falls in love with Bogart’s character. She comes off particularly well in the scene where she agonizes over whether or not to betray Bogart to the police. Finally, in The Sea Wolf, she plays an escaped prisoner who ends up on a schooner, and she holds her own against John Garfield (as a tough sailor) and Edward G. Robinson (as the cruel captain of the schooner).

One reason Lupino was compared to Davis, and played similar parts, is they both brought a fiery intensity to their roles. Lupino’s intense nature, however, came off as colder and more brittle than Davis’. This came out in The Hard Way (1943), directed by Vincent Sherman, in a role Davis had turned down. Lupino is Helen, an ambitious woman who sees her talented younger sister Katherine (Joan Leslie), a singer and dancer, as her meal ticket to success. Lupino has to seem genuinely supportive of Katherine’s career and life, while at the same time ambitious enough to deny Katherine anything that might interfere with her own happiness, without letting Katherine know that, of course. Lupino manages to convince on both fronts, as well as when we find out she has secretly been in love with Paul (Dennis Morgan), the singer Katherine loves as well. Lupino won her only film acting award for this role – the New York Film Critics Best Actress Award – and it’s because of her (Leslie is more charming than talented as Katherine) the film still holds up today.

Of course, Lupino didn’t just play cold and brittle. In The Man I Love (1947), which reunited her with director Raoul Walsh (who directed her in both They Drive by Night and High Sierra), she gets to show a more vulnerable side as well, while retaining her toughness. She plays Petey Brown, a nightclub singer who, after a bad love affair, comes back home to stay with her two younger sisters Sally (Andrea King) and Ginny (Martha Vickers), and her brother Joe (Warren Douglas). Both Sally and Joe are working for Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda), a shady nightclub owner, and while Petey gets a job singing there, she not only fends off Nicky’s advances, she also tries to protect Sally and Joe from him. Complications arise when she falls in love with Sam (Bruce Bennett), a pianist who thinks he’s lost his touch. It’s this tempestuous love affair that was a major influence on Martin Scorsese’s musical New York, New York (1977). But Scorsese’s attempt to combine a musical with a dark drama doesn’t work as well as Walsh’s effort here, and Lupino is a large reason the movie works so well (aside from Walsh’s unpretentious but steady direction). She tells Nicky early on, when she applies for a job, “I’m sort of handy to have around.” Petey is obviously someone who “knows the score”, which is why she tries to keep Sally and Joe away from Nicky as much as she can (when Nicky sends over a dress for Sally for Christmas, Petey shows up at his club wearing it). But she can let down her guard for us as well; there’s a scene late in the movie where she sees Sam for the first time in weeks, and is genuinely happy to see him. That happiness starts to ebb away when she realizes Sam is too wrapped up in his own problems to want to stay with her. Lupino suggests all of that just by the expression on her face.

Lupino didn’t use her own voice in The Man I Love (she was dubbed by Peg La Centra, best known for singing with Artie Shaw and for dubbing other Warner Brothers actresses), but she was a capable singer, as she showed in her brief turn in Warner’s all-star for-the-war movie Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), performing two numbers with Olivia de Havilland and veteran character actor George Tobias. She’s also on showcase in Road House (1948), using her own voice as Lily, a torch singer caught between Pete (Cornel Wilde), the manager of the tavern that hires her, and with whom she falls in love, and Jefty (Richard Widmark), the owner of the tavern, who’s obsessed with her. The role is little different from the one she played in The Man I Love (although here, she has no family members to watch over), but she makes it believable and entertaining all the same.

After that, her roles weren’t quite as good, though she did stand out in a few movies. In On Dangerous Ground (1952), she plays the blind sister of a fugitive being tracked down by hard-nosed detective Robert Ryan, and it’s her essential goodness that’s supposed to save Ryan’s soul. However mawkish that sounds, she makes it believable, and her scenes with Ryan are the best in the film. She can’t do much with her part in Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955); the movie is a parable about how Hollywood can crush your dreams (and is inspired in part by an incident that happened to John Huston), with reluctant star Jack Palance being pitted against the smooth menace of Rod Steiger’s studio executive, and as Palance’s estranged wife, Lupino is stuck in the usual “wife/girlfriend” part, and gets some of writer Clifford Odets’ more florid lines in the bargain. And while she’s more suited to the prison superintendent who has it in for inmate Phyllis Thaxter in Women’s Prison, from that same year, it’s a one-note part (though she does get to spar on-screen with her then-husband, Howard Duff, who plays the prison doctor taking Thaxter’s side). She comes off much better in Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps (1956) as a reporter who tries to help colleague George Sanders by flirting shamelessly with another colleague, Dana Andrews. The movie itself is a weird mélange of crime drama (Andrews is hot on the trail of a serial killer, known as the Lipstick Killer) and newspaper comedy, and you wouldn’t think Lupino would have the light touch necessary for the latter part, but she totally sells it.

By this time, Lupino had moved on to directing. Having hung around the sets and asking questions of the studio technicians, she was prepared when Elmer Clifton, the director of Not Wanted (1949), suffered a heart attack, and she took his place. The story became the first of many “woman’s issues” films Lupino went on to tackle as a director, the subject here being the previously taboo subject of babies born out of wedlock. In this movie, she uses mostly unknown actors (though sharp-eyed viewers will recognize Leo Penn, father of Sean Penn, as the piano player who seduces and abandons the female lead (Sally Forrest) who then becomes pregnant with his child), which sometimes means the actors aren’t always able to modulate their performances, but there’s also a raw honesty to them as well. And within the restrictions of the time (we never see Forrest looking pregnant, for one), this is a sensitive look at what has become a familiar subject. Lupino also handles the subject of rape with sensitivity in Outrage (1950). You never see the act performed (although you do see a close-up of the perpetrator’s scar), and there’s never any sense Ann (Mala Powers), the victim, is “asking for it”. Again, Powers’ inexperience does show at times, particularly in the scene when she breaks it off with her fiancé after the rape, but again, there’s a raw honesty to her performance, and Tod Andrews is believable without being bland as the reverend that helps Ann. Hard, Fast & Beautiful (1951) has a similar plot to The Hard Way, except in this case, it’s a mother/daughter relationship, and it’s set in the world of tennis (the alternate title was Mother of a Champion). There’s something particular about the world of sports parents that Lupino is able to capture, even if one has to remember many of the major tournaments at the time were for “amateurs” (this being the pre-Open period), which is similar to what college athletes have to deal with today. The tennis footage does come off a bit stilted by modern standards, but Claire Trevor is excellent as the mother, and Sally Forrest, returning from Not Wanted, is much more polished here, and is also convincing as an athlete. And Lupino and cinematographer Archie Stout (who also shot Outrage) achieve some nice effects, like when Forrest’s boyfriend (Robert Clarke) gives her a necklace with a medal on it, and the camera focuses on the medal as the two of them kiss.

Still, Lupino’s best films as a director are two films she made in 1953, The Bigamist and The Hitch-Hiker, which are very different in tone from each other. With the former, Lupino became the first woman to direct herself in a movie (she made cameo appearances in Outrage and Hard, Fast & Beautiful), which alone would make it a milestone. But she also handles the subject of bigamy in a sensitive matter, without resorting to shock tactics. Like Not Wanted, it’s told in flashback form, as an adoption agent (Edmund Gwenn) interrogates Harry (Edmond O’Brien), a deep freeze salesman, when he discovers Harry is hiding something in his application, and Harry tells how he was married to Eva (Joan Fontaine), an upper-class woman who helped him out with his job, but found he had more in common with Phyllis (Lupino), a waitress, and so married her as well. Lupino refuses to demonize any of the characters (we understand why Harry loves each of his wives, and vice versa), and even brings a sense of humor to the film (there’s an offhand reference to Gwenn’s most famous role, that of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (1947)). With the latter, Lupino teams with O’Brien again to deliver one of the most hard-boiled crime stories in a decade that saw plenty of them, as O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy are fisherman who are menaced by William Talman, a stranded motorist who turns out to be a vicious killer. O’Brien was always good at playing Everyman roles, and he’s particularly good here as someone who wants to act but is paralyzed by fear, and Talman is equally good as the killer.

With the exception of The Trouble with Angels (1966), a nun comedy, Lupino’s remaining output as director would be in television, as would most of her acting career, except for a well-regarded turn as Steve McQueen’s mother in Junior Bonner (1972). But she’s justly remembered today as a pioneer for women directors, and as someone who was well-respected as both that and an actress who was more than just “the poor man’s Bette Davis”.

Today, TCM’s “Star of the Day” in their “Summer Under the Stars” month is Katharine Hepburn, which gives me the perfect excuse to talk about my favorite Katharine Hepburn movie (even though, unfortunately, it isn’t being shown today, though it’s available on DVD). It’s Stage Door, the 1937 film that, despite being nominated for 4 Oscars (Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, and what would now be called Best Adapted Screenplay) and being a critical success, if not a commercial one (it did okay, but Hepburn at the time was considered “box-office poison”), seems to be largely forgotten today. It’s too bad, because not only do I think it’s a highly entertaining and well-made film, but it’s also the rare example of an adaptation that works despite having almost nothing in common with the original work, as well as being more concerned with character and dialogue than story, and the added bonus of offering several good roles for actresses aside from leading lady Hepburn.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YzNMc_aQ_A

The original source for the movie was a play by acclaimed playwright and screenwriter George S. Kaufman, and novelist Edna Ferber, his sometimes collaborator (they also wrote the plays The Royal Family and Dinner at Eight together). Both play and movie are set at the Footlights Club, a boardinghouse for actresses trying to make it on the stage (or in nightclubs), both show those actresses struggling and failing for the most part, and both are comedies with tragic touches. The characters mostly have the same names, like Terry Randall (Hepburn’s role in the movie), Jean Maitland (Ginger Rogers), Linda Shaw (Gail Patrick), and Kaye Hamilton (Andrea Leeds), though Mattie, a stereotypical black maid in the play, is changed to Hattie (Phyllis Kennedy), a white maid who likes to sing a lot). But what director Gregory La Cava and writers Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller did with those characters is markedly different from what happened to them on stage.

In the play, for example, Terry is a struggling actress from a poor family who is loved by almost everyone at the boardinghouse for her support of them, and who is caught between a producer gone Hollywood who wants her in pictures, and a playwright who loves her and wants her to stay but is afraid to say so (Kaufman partly used the play as an attack on Hollywood, so it’s probably of little surprise the film changed that around). In the movie, Terry is still an aspiring actress, but, though no one knows this for sure until the very end, she actually comes from wealth -- her father (Samuel S. Hinds) is known as the Wheat King. Not only that, but her arch manners and naiveté about the way things work (when she initially asks Mrs. Orcutt (Elizabeth Dunn), the landlady, about “accommodations,” as she puts it, she asks for a room with a private bath) make her a figure of derision among the other actresses living there (Jean makes a joke about taking the wolfhounds -- considered a rich person’s dog -- for a stroll). Kaye is still the tragic figure in the movie that she was in the play, but she takes Terry’s place as the one beloved figure at the boardinghouse, and the one considered the most talented (even Terry has seen her on stage and tells her, “You know you’re good”). Jean is no longer the spoiled figure of the play, but someone who can banter with the best of them, and is generally supportive of most of the others, particularly, of course, Kaye (it’s her shoulder Kaye cries on when she can’t get to see Anthony Powell (Adolphe Menjou), the producer of the play Kaye has her heart set on), though she does still retain the wish for a life among the rich. Some of the situations and dialogue involving the characters are the same -- Judith (Lucille Ball) does read a letter from home that proclaims, “Pa got laid off, my sister’s husband has left her, oh yes, one of my brother’s slugged a railroad detective. Anyway, lots of love, could you spare fifty bucks?” Also, she does date lumbermen from Seattle -- but are handled in different ways. In the play, Judith reads that letter with forced cheerfulness, while in the movie, Ball plays it for cheerful resignation. Also, she isn’t unhappy about dating those lumbermen; it’s Jean who hates being roped into it; upon meeting her and Judith’s dates, she mutters, “I thought you said they were dressing”.

But mostly, the film and play differ mostly in the way they tell their stories. Even though the play works hard to create the atmosphere these girls live in, it turns on a classic conundrum; will Terry stay true to her principles even if she doesn’t get to make it as an actress? The movie has plenty of story -- Terry inadvertently gets the part Kaye had pinned her hopes on, which helps lead to the story’s tragedy (unbeknownst to Terry, her father and his lawyer (Pierre Watkin) arrange for Powell to cast her so she’ll learn she’s no good and come back home), Jean and Linda have a running feud throughout, which includes Jean temporarily stepping in Linda’s shoes as Powell’s possible girlfriend (though those hopes are dashed), and as in the play, one of the girls does go off to get married -- but it never seems to rush towards it. The main attraction is watching the characters hang out in the lobby of the boardinghouse, resigned to their fate of not finding much work (when Jean and Ann (Ann Miller, only 14 at the time) do get a job at a nightclub -- at the behest of Powell, unbeknownst to Jean, who initially despises Powell -- Eve (Eve Arden) cracks, “(Jean) hasn’t worked in so long, if she does get the job, it’ll practically amount to a comeback”), but for the most part, refusing to get too upset about it (except, of course, for Kaye). This seemingly blasé attitude is, as Kaye tells Terry, mostly a way to hide their fears, but it bemuses almost every outsider who comes across them, not least of all Terry. The closest she comes to approximating the way they talk is when she admits she’s “not so hot” at their type of slang, and she, along with Miss Luther (Constance Collier), the elderly actress who hopes to make a comeback by being Terry’s acting coach, lecture the others on their lack of education, to which the others, of course, crack wise (when Terry asks rhetorically if it’s against the rules to discuss the classics like Shakespeare, Eve retorts, “Go right ahead. I won’t take my sleeping pill tonight”).

This parade of insults and one-liners could easily have become tiresome, but it never does. Part of that, of course, is due to the performances (see below), but mostly, it’s a tribute to how casually La Cava and collaborators such as Ryskind, Veiller and cinematographer Robert De Grasse handle the story. Although the play has been radically changed, most of the action still takes place at the Footlights Club; the only other places, with the exception of the restaurant Terry and her father have lunch at, are all theater related, such as the nightclub Jean and Ann get work at, the theater where Terry’s play is being put on, and Powell’s office. Convention and the technology at the time probably dictated De Grasse not moving the camera around much, but the result makes things feel more intimate. And it also gives the movie a casual air, making it light on its feet yet feeling true to its characters. Even the tragic element, which deeply affects the other characters, is handled in a non-intrusive way. And even though the characters are all sharply drawn as individuals, even the minor ones (such as Mary Lou (Margaret Early), who cheerfully notes as she goes to Terry’s play, “This will be my 35^th performance as a spectator,” or Olga (Norma Drury), the piano player, who says of everyone’s bantering, “If it’s not food, it’s men -- can’t you talk about anything else?” Judith’s reply, “And what else is there?”), it’s the way all of them live comfortably among each other that makes it all entertaining to watch; even the feud between Jean and Linda never draws blood, and by the end has settled down to rote bantering. Movies such as Rio Bravo and Dazed and Confused are often cited as examples of great movies that aren’t concerned with plot as much as hanging out with their characters, but it seems to me Stage Door got there first.

The best remembered women’s ensemble movie of that period is probably George Cukor’s The Women (1939), which, like Stage Door, was adapted from a hit play (by Clare Boothe Luce), and was a comedy. Unlike Stage Door, it stuck fairly close to its source material, and it had virtually no male characters appearing on-screen (though they were talked about). I have to say I prefer Stage Door quite a bit, because I think The Women celebrates all the stereotypical features of women -- how they’re obsessed with personal appearances, how catty and gossipy they are -- and Stage Door never indulges in that, preferring their women characters to be tough and honest without becoming catty. And while, being an MGM movie, The Women probably had the more high-profile cast -- including Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford and Paulette Goddard -- I think Stage Door has a better one. Rogers is able to play Jean’s toughness and vulnerability well. I’m not a fan of the shows that made Ball and Arden famous -- I Love Lucy and Our Miss Brooks, respectively -- but here, they show crack comic timing. Miller shows the skill of someone much older, and dances well too. And Leeds doesn’t overdo the pathos of the story, and is convincing enough to make you believe she’d be talented and well regarded by the others. But Hepburn is the first among equals here; she makes Terry’s journey from lording of the others to being an equal among them (though not entirely equal; near the end, when the others are doing a routine about Mary Lou’s bit part in a play, she sits to the side, smiling) believable. Stage Door is probably my favorite American movie of the 1930′s, and I hope more people check it out.

Gene Tierney

I recently read for the first time The Star Machine, by film scholar Jeanne Basinger, and it was a sometimes informative, sometimes frustrating book about the studio system of the 30′s and 40′s (though it continued somewhat into the 50′s and 60′s, it was never the same), and specifically the stars who worked within the system, and the ones who made it and the ones who didn’t. I have problems with much of her taste (the fact she prefers, say, Loretta Young over Ida Lupino, even though I agree Young’s pre-Code movies showed she was an interesting actress), but Basinger does get at one salient point, which still holds true today; no matter how much talent, studio backing, or good looks you have, luck and audiences are still the major factors in who makes it and who doesn’t. Also salient; even if you’re not a major star on the level of, back then, Clark Gable or Myrna Loy (who were King and Queen of the Box Office, according to polls), or Leonardo DiCaprio or Sandra Bullock now, you can still make a decent living at it if you find a niche. Three of TCM’s stars of this month – Gene Tierney (August 14^th), Maureen O’Hara (August 17^th) and Ann Sheridan (August 18^th) – were able to make a decent living, even if never considered at the heights, box office or critically, of someone like Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis. And though they each had a niche the studio tried to put them into, as per their nicknames – Sheridan was called the “Oomph Girl,” a nickname she detested, while Tierney and O’Hara, less famously, were known as “The Get Girl” and “The Queen of Technicolor,” respectively – they were able to show some surprising variety within that range.

If audiences remember Tierney today, it’s probably for two deservedly known classics of the 40′s – Laura (1944), a film noir that was the first of four movies she made with Otto Preminger, and Leave Her to Heaven (1945), a soap opera/noir that garnered her only Oscar nomination, for Best Actress (she lost to Joan Crawford for Mildred Pierce). The former casts her in the title role, an advertising executive who is found murdered in her apartment building, and is the object of desire of three men: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), the journalist who promoted her, Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), her fiancé, and Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), the detective investigating her death. Some critics, including Roger Ebert, feel she was too passive in the role, but after all, all the characters are projecting themselves on her, and she suggests enough mystery, intelligence (to attract a snob like Lydecker) and, of course, beauty to make you believe all of these characters would find her memorable. The latter contains what I think is her best performance as Ellen, a socialite whom novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) falls in love with, only to discover she’s incredibly possessive and jealous. Unlike the black-and-white Laura, Leave Her to Heaven is photographed in gorgeous Technicolor. Also, it’s based on a best-selling novel of the time, and directed by John M. Stahl, best known for his “woman’s films” of the 30′s like the original Imitation of Life (1934). Nevertheless, it shares with Laura the noir-ish tone (as well as also having Vincent Price playing Tierney’s fiancé here), and Ellen is certainly like a femme fatale; she starts off projecting love, but jealous and coldness aren’t far from the surface, the latter particularly expressed in the film’s most chilling scene, when she rows a boat while letting Richard’s younger brother Danny (Darryl Hickman) drown.

That coldness and sense of mystery seemed to be her trademark. In Josef Von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941), she’s a spoiled rich woman whom Omar (Victor Mature), an Arab doctor, is drawn to, and she’s best when playing cryptic (when she’s forced to act our her character’s later addictions, she’s forced to go way over the top). And while I’m not fond of Edmund Goulding’s adaptation of The Razor’s Edge (1946) – it’s too much like a packaged literary classic rather than a movie, and Tyrone Power isn’t convincing as a man looking for spiritual meaning – she’s quite good as the woman who still loves Power’s character even though she doesn’t understand his journey, and her coldness comes out in the scene where she explains to the film’s narrator (Herbert Marshall) how she’s going to screw things up for the new woman Power’s character has fallen for (Anne Baxter, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance here). Yet, Tierney could play more than mysterious and cold. In Henry King’s WWII A Bell for Adano (1945), she may not be convincing as a blonde, but she’s good as an Italian peasant woman who falls in love with John Hodiak. And while she didn’t get along with Ernst Lubitsch when he directed her in Heaven Can Wait (1943), the results showed she could keep up with the Lubitsch comedy of manners as Martha, the woman pursued by “womanizer” Henry Van Cleeve (Don Ameche).  After the mid-40′s, aside from The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and two more noirs she did with Preminger, Whirlpool (1949) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), she didn’t get a lot of parts suited to her talents, though she does shine in her few scenes as the girlfriend of Walter Pidgeon’s senator in Advise & Consent (1962), the otherwise flawed movie that was her final collaboration with Preminger.

In her book, Basinger claims O’Hara is remembered today more than most actresses of the time by virtue of her films with John Wayne, particularly The Quiet Man (1952), and because of the holiday perennial Miracle on 34^th Street (1947), as well as appearing in more (relatively) recent movies like Only the Lonely (1991), where she played the overbearing mother of John Candy. Problem is, that condescends to her talent by implying she wouldn’t be well known without those movies. As good as Wayne is in The Quiet Man, as well as their first collaboration, Rio Grande (1950) – and both films were directed by John Ford, whom she also collaborated frequently with – he wouldn’t be nearly as good without O’Hara to stand up to him, and they have great chemistry together. In Rio Grande, the final film in Ford’s cavalry trilogy, she plays Wayne’s estranged wife who’s reunited with him when she comes to take their son (Claude Jarman) our of his command. She’s an aristocrat to Wayne’s more rough-hewn officer, but she displays real tenderness in some of her scenes with Wayne when the two eventually reconcile. By contrast, in The Quiet Man, she’s the fiery-tempered sister of Victor McLaglen, who happens to be Wayne’s rival in purchasing land. It’s not just her temperament here that impresses, it’s also her physicality, whether tending sheep or fighting with Wayne, that gives her character a larger-than-life appearance that’s completely in tune with the fairy tale nature of the story. And it was that spirit and physicality that led her to be cast in so many adventure stories, among them The Black Swan (1942), Tripoli (1950), Flame of Araby (1951), and Against All Flags (1952).

Yet again, she was capable of more than that. Her first major role was in the first sound version of Victor Hugo’s classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as Esmeralda, the gypsy girl who befriends the title character (played by Charles Laughton, who recommended her after working with her on Jamaica Inn earlier that year) when he saves her from being hanged. She’s a good dancer, and she avoids bathos in her scenes with Laughton by playing them simply and directly. She teamed up with Laughton again in Jean Renoir’s This Land is Mine (1943), where they play teachers in an unnamed European country occupied by the Nazis. She plays the only character who isn’t morally compromised in some way – she opposes the Nazis outright – yet her performance is more nuanced than you’d expect from that, as when she finds out her brother (Kent Smith) has been secretly fighting the Nazis, and you can tell from the look on her face as she embraces him that she’s proud of what he did yet afraid for his safety. And in Miracle on 34^th Street, she plays a businesswoman who’s proud of her realistic view of the world, without ever playing the “hard-as-nails” stereotype you see with most woman’s roles like that today.

When you see actors and actresses in older movies, your perception of them is often dictated by what you see them in first. For example, after watching Sheridan play the haughty, vain actress Lorraine Sheldon in the wonderful comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), I assumed that was her usual role. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I checked out some of the more well known, as well as lesser known, Warner Brothers movies of the 30′s and 40′s and discovered Sheridan was their go-to working class woman. She was a teacher who helps by-the-book traffic cop Pat O’Brien see the error of his ways in The Great O’Malley (1937), re-teamed with O’Brien as a singer his prison warden character is in love with in San Quentin that same year (like the previous film, it also co-starred Humphrey Bogart, in their third of five films together; they were also good friends off-screen), ran a boardinghouse and was James Cagney’s childhood playmate in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and probably most memorable of all, a seen-it-all waitress who falls in love with George Raft in They Drive by Night (1940). In those films and others, she is tender and vulnerable where needed, yet also unmistakably street smart. Although not a great musical talent, she could sing and dance fairly well (the latter as demonstrated in City for Conquest (1940), which re-teamed her with Cagney, in It All Came True that same year, an underrated comedy that was her final film with Bogart, and as herself in the all-star war revue Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)). She was paired with many of the tough guys in the studio staple (only O’Brien didn’t quite fit that image), and she always gave as good as she got; I particularly remember in It All Came True where, even though she is love with her songwriter (Jeffrey Lynn), she encourages the attentions of Bogart (a gangster on the lam) in order to make money for herself and Lynn.

All of these movies are contemporary for the time, but again, she could go outside of that. In Errol Flynn’s first Western, Dodge City (1939), she plays a saloon singer, and while she’s the girlfriend of the movies villain (Bruce Cabot), she doesn’t have much to do besides sing, but she fits in surprisingly well. More substantial was her role in Kings Row (1942), based on the notorious novel by Henry Bellamann that aimed to expose the underbelly of small time life, she loses all of the hard edges she’s shown in other roles to play Randy, the level-headed but kindhearted woman who falls in love with Ronald Reagan’s character and takes care of him after he loses his legs (his line in reaction to that event – “Where’s the rest of me?” – became the title of his autobiography). Sheridan didn’t have many roles suitable to her talent after that, though she does spar well with Cary Grant in Howard Hawks’ romantic comedy I Was a Male War Bride (1949). Like Tierney and O’Hara, Sheridan didn’t always get the best roles, but she did well with what she got, and managed to show she could do a variety of things when she got the chance. In the studio system, that was no small thing, and today, when actresses have fewer good roles to compete for, it’s an even more remarkable achievement.

Remembering Patricia Neal

Patricia Neal, the Oscar-winning actress who died on Sunday at the age of 84, may not have had the career she deserved, and was known for her often stormy personal life (an affair with Gary Cooper while they were making of The Fountainhead, a series of strokes she suffered in 1965, and a tumultuous marriage to children’s author Roald Dahl) as her acting. But while she was never considered among the pantheon of great actresses, she was talented, intelligent, and sexy, and made her mark in a number of films.

Neal was known primarily as a stage actress (she won a Tony for her performance in Lillian Hellman’s “Another Part of the Forest”) until 1949. Though she was in three films that year (a supporting role (John Loves Mary) and a leading role (The Hasty Heart) in two Ronald Reagan movies), it was The Fountainhead where she first gained attention. Unless you’re a hardcore Ayn Rand fan, this film adaptation of her novel plays like a baroque fantasy gone terribly wrong, but Neal is able to triumph over the material. She worked steadily in the next few years, but the only films that allowed her to make any kind of impression were The Breaking Point (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Diplomatic Courier (1952). The first film is the second adaptation of Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, and while the result isn’t as good as Hawks’ film version (though it’s closer to the novel), Neal has a great scene where John Garfield asks her where she met a man who stiffed both of them, and she quips, “Sunday School”. The second is deservedly considered one of the best of the 1950′s sci-fi movies, and while her part isn’t large, she does get to utter the film’s signature line, “Klaatu barada nikto!” And while she later said in interviews she didn’t think much of the film at the time, and had no idea it would become a classic, she’s very convincing on screen, especially in the scene where she finds out who Klaatu (Michael Rennie) really is. The third is an okay espionage thriller starring Tyrone Power, and she has a small but enjoyable role as a widow pursuing Power romantically.

After going back to the stage (in a revival of Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour”) and appearing in teleplays (Salome (1955)), she came back to the screen with a memorable performance in A Face in the Crowd (1957). Though Andy Griffith, in his film debut, is the star of this cautionary tale about a bumpkin who becomes a leading TV personality, it’s Neal who’s the audience stand-in. She plays Marcia Jeffries, a radio producer who discovers Lonesome Rhodes (Griffith) and promotes him from a radio personality to a TV personality, until she finds out the power he has is corrupting him. Her journey in the film is as difficult to act as Griffith ‘s, but she handles it with aplomb, especially in the scene where she’s watching Rhodes on TV in a bar, bitter, disillusioned, yet trying to keep a sarcastic front.

At first glance, her role in Hud (1963), which won her that Best Actress Oscar, wouldn’t seem to be much. The film is basically a morality play, with Paul Newman’s amoral title character essentially competing with his estranged but honest father (Melvyn Douglas) for the soul of Hud’s nephew Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde) (in reality, audiences embraced Hud as an anti-hero, thanks to Newman’s sly performance), and Neal merely plays the housekeeper, Alma. But Neal brings genuine heat in her relationship with Newman when they’re at the flirting stage, even when she’s casually dismissive of him (when he propositions her, she shoots him down with, “I’d say I’d been asked with a little more finesse in my time”), as well as a gently teasing relationship with Lonnie (as with the scene where she rests a glass of lemonade on his forehead). As with A Face in the Crowd, the film starts out comic and light before going darker, and Neal is up for that challenge as well.

While she eventually recovered from her stroke in 1967, her career was never the same, though she did give well-regarded performances in The Subject was Roses (1968), an adaptation of Frank D. Gilroy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and in a Christmas episode of The Waltons. My personal favorite performance of hers after her stoke is her small role in Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune (1999). Her title character, the matriarch of a family (including daughters Glenn Close and Julianne Moore, and granddaughter Liv Tyler), misses her husband terribly, but also enjoys a bantering relationship with Willis (Charles Dutton), the sometimes drunken handyman who works at her place. The movie avoids the usual route of Southern melodrama even while it remains elements of it (there are plenty of secrets in Cookie’s family), and Neal is completely in tune with that, being as natural in this movie as she was in her earlier performances. Life may have eventually ground Neal down (as it does Cookie), but it never took away her spirit, and that’s what we’ll miss most about her.

The Curious Case of Warren Beatty (Warning: spoilers ahead)

Every summer, Turner Classic Movies sets aside the month of August for its “Summer of the Stars” series. Every day that month is dedicated to a well-known actor or actress, with all the movies that day featuring that actor or actress. So far this month Greta Garbo, Steve McQueen, Ingrid Bergman and Errol Flynn, among others, have been the stars featured. Few people will dispute their legacies in the film world. However, on August 9th, Warren Beatty is the featured star, and there is a strong contingent who seems to think that not only is he no longer important, but that he never was very important. To me, this is unfortunate.

Not having acted in a movie since the 2001 flop Town & Country, Beatty’s star would definitely seem to be on the wane. Not only that, but since making his film debut in 1961 with Splendor in the Grass, he’s only made 21 movies, directing four of them (by way of comparison, Woody Allen, who, like Beatty, started on TV in the 50′s, and was one of many people with whom Beatty almost worked with but ended up not, has, since his film debut with What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), has starred in over 30 movies, has just finished directing his 40^th, and is working on his next project). These days, Beatty seems best known for his Don Juan reputation before he married Annette Bening (a rep his latest biographer, Peter Biskind, seems gleeful to exploit), for his indecision (William Goldman once joked Beatty never actually officially turned down the male lead in Misery (1990) that eventually went to James Caan), and, along those lines, his reputation as a control freak (in his speech at the AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony honoring Beatty, Don Cheadle, who worked with Beatty on Bulworth (1998), joked Beatty and Clint Eastwood between them averaged 100 takes per scene, with Clint usually averaging two).

And yet, at one time, Beatty seemed as plugged in to popular culture as anybody, even prescient about it. Michael Douglas gets a lot of credit for the movies he’s made that have anticipated major disasters, most famously Three Mile Island taking place not long after The China Syndrome opened, or the  1987 stock market crash before Wall Street came out. However, I think Beatty has him beat with Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which was arguably the first major movie of the time to capture the unrest of the country, even if it was a period piece, The Parallax View (1974), which captured the paranoia and cynicism of the Watergate era, and Shampoo (1975), the best depiction during that time of the sexual revolution sweeping the country.

Besides his indecision and reputation as a control freak, Warren Beatty is also knocked in some quarters for having limited range and being overly obsessed with his image (for the latter, pointing to him not wearing any makeup to look like the title character in Dick Tracy (1990), and for the soft-focus photography to hide his age in the remake of Love Affair (1994)). It is true Beatty hasn’t played a wide variety of roles, and when he’s either merely playing a pretty boy (as in early films like Splendor) or a heroic character (as in Heaven Can Wait), he comes off pretty stiff (the one time he plays against type, as a lovable loser in Ishtar (1987), he doesn’t come off well at all; he’s clearly game, but he’s also flailing around). But there’s one role Beatty, for the most part, has done very well – the sometimes conceited man who thinks he’s in control of his destiny and the situation at hand, only to find out too late he isn’t. This applies to his best work, not just in Bonnie & Clyde, The Parallax View, and Shampoo, but also to McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and to a lesser extent,Bugsy (1991).

However true to life Bonnie & Clyde may have been – among other things, director Arthur Penn or Beatty, depending on who you talk to, changed Clyde’s real-life bisexuality to impotence – it not only reflected the political upheaval at the time (using Clyde telling a customer at the bank his gang is robbing, “We’re here for the bank’s money, not yours,” when in real life, it was Pretty Boy Floyd who said this), but also showed Beatty fully engaged in a role for the fist time in his career. He has Clyde ‘s swagger, physicality, and anger down pat, along with his vulnerability. And even when he’s supposed to be impotent, his scenes with Faye Dunaway as Bonnie have a real sexual charge. As a producer, Beatty also deserves credit for not allowing the final shootout – where Bonnie and Clyde meet a violent end – to be undone by studio interference.

This isn’t the only time Beatty’s characters have met an ugly end. Who can forget in McCabe & Mrs. Miller how his character dies an undignified, and lonely, death in the snow? That the hero of a Western would meet such an end would be unthinkable at the time, but in Robert Altman’s film, it seems perfectly natural. It’s not just the snow, the lack of wide-open spaces, or the avoidance of anything elegiac that shows the contrarian nature of this film, but also in how Beatty’s McCabe, who thinks he’s the real brains behind his tavern/whorehouse operation, ends up underestimating not only his new partner, Constance Miller (Julie Christie), the woman who takes over the whorehouse end of the operation, but also the major corporation that wants to buy him out. He thinks he can just lord over the former (who turns out to have a better head for business than he does) and charm the latter, and fails miserably on both counts. This may not have been an easily reached goal for the film – Altman and Beatty reportedly quarreled throughout – but the results are hard to argue with.

In The Parallax View, he also meets a darker end, but this time on a grander scale; while investigating a corporation he believes is responsible for a conspiracy involving the assassination of a presidential candidate, as well as several witnesses to that slaying, Beatty’s Joe Frody, a reporter, goes undercover inside the corporation, only to find all of his ties to the outside world cut off, including his editor (Hume Cronyn) and an FBI agent who helps him (Kenneth Mars). Not only that, but he is killed by the very assassin he had hoped to stop, and framed for the murder that assassin committed (of another politician). Again, as far as Beatty’s character is concerned, this doesn’t quite come as a surprise; Frody is an alcoholic who seems governed by impulse and has an instinct for getting into trouble. In contrast with Beatty’s glamorous image, Frody is dressed here in mostly casual, unkempt clothes, and cinematographer Gordon Willis, known as the “Prince of Darkness”, often shoots him shadows, or to bring out his unkempt look.

Beatty is shown off to better effect in Shampoo (Laszlo Kovacs shot this film), and gets to live at the end, but it’s a bittersweet ending for him. Developed from an idea Beatty had originally hoped to use for What’s New Pussycat? (a Don Juan figure suspected of being a latent homosexual), the film casts Beatty as George, a hairdresser who is the boyfriend of Jill (Goldie Hawn), an aspiring actress, but who also keeps company with Felicia (Lee Grant), wife of Lester (Jack Warden), the tycoon George hopes will help finance the salon he hopes to open up, and is still in love with ex-girlfriend Jackie (Julie Christie again), who happens to be Jill’s best friend and Lester’s mistress. By the end of the movie, George may have his salon, but all three women have left him, and as the film takes place on election night in 1968, you could see George as representative of an era that is over (though to the film’s credit, the political metaphors are done with a light touch). Beatty isn’t as cocky or abrasive as in his earlier triumphs (he wouldn’t be as appealing to the women he beds if he was), but he thinks he knows them enough to avoid trouble, and once again, he’s wrong.

Beatty returned to playing a real-life gangster with Bugsy, although the circumstances were slightly changed. This time, he was made to look more glamorous, although that was perfectly in tune with Siegel, because he courted Hollywood glamour, specifically in his friend George Raft (Joe Mantegna) and Virginia Hill (Annette Bening), the actress who was the love that drove him crazy, but also in general. Unlike the gangsters he worked with like Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley) and Lucky Luciano (Bill Graham), Siegel courted the spotlight, drew women to him because of his personality as well as his power, and most of all, he didn’t care about money. It was this last part that led to his undoing, for while it was his recklessness that allowed for the creation of the Flamingo Hotel that helped Las Vegas become both the resort town it has stayed to this day and also a foothold for the mob until the 80′s, it initially was a sinkhole, and to his fellow mobsters, this was unforgivable, as was the assumption Virginia Hill helped Siegel scam money from them. This isn’t as strong as the other films discussed here, as director Barry Levinson sometimes can’t decide on a consistent tone for the film, but it contains one of Beatty’s best performances.

In 1981, Beatty directed, co-wrote and starred in Reds, based on John Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World, about the Russian Revolution, Reed’s enthusiasm for it, and his eventual disillusionment. The film was carefully mounted, featured engrossing testimony from witnesses from that time (among them Henry Miller and Rebecca West), and was well cast in all the roles (especially Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill and Maureen Stapleton, in her Oscar-winning performance as Emma Goldman) except, unfortunately, the two leads – Beatty and then-girlfriend Diane Keaton as, respectively, Reed and Louise Bryant never made their characters more than one-dimensional, and the love story never connected to the politics. What’s more, considering how daring it was to even make a movie somewhat sympathetic to Communism in the early years of the Reagan era, the movie felt awfully timid. If nothing else, Bulworth avoids that trap; this feels like a film made by someone with nothing to lose. Instead of trying to hide his age (he was 61 when the movie came out), he makes his character, Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, look tired and broken. Part of that, of course, is because he hasn’t slept or really eaten in a few days, but mostly it’s because, as the opening credits sequence shows, he’s tired of having to spout the same old spiel just to get re-elected. When he makes the deal with a corrupt insurance lobbyist (Paul Sorvino), and another deal to have a hitman kill him while on the campaign, he all of a sudden feels free to speak his mind – to the horror of his campaign manager (Oliver Platt) – and even fall in love with another woman (Halle Barry), though she turns out to not be what she seems.

The love story aspect of Bulworth doesn’t resonate as much as the rest of the film (even though that’s how Beatty was ultimately able to make the film), as it isn’t as well developed. Plus, Beatty does sometimes trip himself up with clumsy scenes (such as the one of him buying ice cream for ghetto kids (although their subsequent confrontation with police is quite funny). Finally, unlike his other death scenes in movies, this one feels somewhat messianic, which dilutes its impact. Still, no Hollywood star before (and few since) has delivered this kind of broadside towards the Democratic party, telling them they need to shape up, and the way things have gone since the making of this film suggests that, with a few exceptions, they haven’t. This is one case I wish he hadn’t been so prescient, but it does show Beatty, at his best, was far from being obsessed with his image, or racked by indecision. He was an artist who both challenged us and entertained us.

In December of 2009, Criterion released a gigantic box set of 25 films of Akira Kurosawa. Most of them had already been released on DVD,  particularly in Criterion editions, but there were a few that had never been released on DVD. (Madadayo, Kurosawa’s final film, had been on DVD before, just not in a Criterion edition).

For those of you who are hardcore Kurosawa fans – and I count myself as one of them – you no longer have to worry about spending $400 just to see those few films. Eclipse, the subsidiary of Criterion, has released a box set called The First Films of Akira Kurosawa, which hits stores on August 3. While none of these films – Sanshiro Sugata and its sequel, The Most Beautiful, and The Men who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail – are anywhere near the level of such Kurosawa masterpieces as The Seven Samurai, High and Low, or Ran, they do show themes and styles that would occur throughout his later films.

Of the many foreign directors who became hits with American critics and audiences in the 1950′s and 60′s, such as Bergman, Fellini, Godard, and Truffaut, Kurosawa has always been considered one of the most accessible to American audiences. This is due not just to the simplicity of his narratives – even a film with as complex a structure as Rashomon is easily explained as a murder told from several points of view – but also because Kurosawa often drew on either American or English language material (High and Low was adapted from an Ed McBain novel, and Yojimbo from a Dashiell Hammett novel) or American influences (Seven Samurai, of course, owes an acknowledged debt to John Ford Westerns). Though the material in this set may be Japanese, and owe a lot to Japanese theatrical traditions, particularly the Noh Theater, you can still see a lot in common with Western traditions as well.

Take Sanshiro Sugata (1943), Kurosawa’s first film as a director after spending six years as an assistant. It’s based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita that Kurosawa had seen advertised in a newspaper. The title character, played by Susumu Fujita, is an immature fighter trying to find a martial arts teacher to hone his skills. Sugata, of course, must not only learn fighting skills, as he fights a judo master (played by Takashi Shimura, in the first of 19 films he went on to make with Kurosawa) and a bully (Yoshio Kosugi), but also self-awareness and maturity. There’s also a subplot about Sugata falling in love with Shimura’s daughter (Yukiko Todoroki). All of which should sound familiar to anyone who watched The Karate Kid or similar-themed high school movies, or Westerns (in another familiar trope, Kosugi, the villain, wears darker clothes than the hero; as a way of placating Japanese censors, he ended up wearing American-style clothes).

It’s hard to judge the film not just because of those familiar stories, but because 17 minutes of the film were lost during WWII, which makes the film seem somewhat choppy and stilted at times. And the fight over which martial arts “style” is better, judo or jujitsu, may seem a little silly today.  Nevertheless, you can see Kurosawa’s skill in staging the fight scenes, particularly the final battle between Fujita and Kosugi, which takes place in a wind-swept field. Sanshiro Sugata Part 2 (1945), the sequel Kurosawa made at the behest of Toho, the distributor, and the Japanese government, has even more in common with American westerns, as Sugata just wants to be left alone, but is targeted by those who want him to prove how tough he is, as well as by the brothers of Kosugi (who has reformed since the fight), who seek revenge for Kosugi’s humiliation in the first film. This is considered the weakest of Kurosawa’s films, and indeed, except for the film’s climactic fight, which takes place in a snowstorm, and Sugata’s earlier fight with an American boxer (another sop to the Japanese government), there’s little to recommend here.

By far the most unusual film among the quartet is The Most Beautiful (1944), the film Kurosawa made after Sanshiro Sugata. It’s the only film Kurosawa made where women are front and center, as opposed to being supporting characters or, occasionally, the second lead (as with One Wonderful Sunday). Set in a lens factory during WWII, it follows the women workers (led by Tsuru (Yoko Yaguchi, who would later become Kurosawa’s wife)) as they try to meet production values, and try and sacrifice their personal problems for the common good, such as the young woman who tries to hide a fever so she can keep working. In that sense, it has a lot in common with American war films of the time, whether set on the battlefield or the home front. The main difference, of course, is it’s told from the Japanese perspective here, and viewers might find it a little disconcerting to hear the women exhorting Japanese soldiers to crush the Americans (although, to be fair, there are no ethnic slurs of the type you might here in Hollywood propaganda films). Still, while the story is simple-minded, Kurosawa’s work with actors (he made all the women live together and learn how to use the equipment they were acting with, and it shows) and his visual techniques, particularly in a scene where the women play volleyball together, make it worthwhile viewing – Kurosawa himself once called it his favorite of all his films.

Still, probably the best film in the set is The Men Who Tread On The Tiger’s Tail (1945). Originally, Kurosawa was going to make a film based on material he would later use for Kagemusha, his 1980 epic, but when lack of funds prevented that, he instead adapted a Noh Theater play (as well as a Kabuki play), and filmed it entirely on one set. It tells the story of a lord in 12^th century Japan who is fleeing, along with several soldiers loyal to him, from his brother, who is out to capture them. It’s told from the point of view of a bumbling porter (Kenichi Enomoto, who was considered Japan’s equivalent to American comic actors such as Joe E. Brown and Stan Laurel), who stumbles upon the group (who have disguised themselves as priests) and becomes complicit in keeping their secret. This device – a commoner character who stumbles upon the main story – is one Kurosawa returned, to greater effect, in The Hidden Fortress (and, of course, was used by George Lucas for Star Wars), but, in its relatively short time frame (60 minutes), it still works here. The most unusual part of the film is there aren’t any battle scenes; instead, the climax of the film has the lord’s main bodyguard (Denjiro Okochi) trying to bluff his way past the border, guarded by a warlord (Susumu Fujita again) sympathetic to the lord’s brother. Is Fujita fooled by the ruse, or is he merely impressed by how clever it is? Kurosawa never tries to answer that, which may be more ambiguous than an American audience would expect, but again, it seems similar in style to a comic Western. And again, even though this is well before Kurosawa made the films that first brought him to America’s attention (as well as the rest of the world), this box set is a chance to see how it all began.