Movies

    Powerful 13-minute short about a man who spoke up (and one who didn’t) during an unexpected ID check to filter out ostensible enemies on a train stopped by armed Serbs in Štrpci, Bosnia, on February 27, 1993: “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent” (Croatia, 2024), youtu.be…. 📽️

    📽️ I distracted myself from contemporary authoritarianism with the wonderful 1954 Italian film “Chronicle of Poor Lovers” (Cronache di poveri amanti). It takes place in Florence in the mid 1920s and focuses on the lives of people in the Via del Corno. Everybody seems to know everyone else’s business in this street, and life seems pretty normal, even good, despite material privations. But there are also the whispers and occasional off-key tones of a few fascists. Then comes a brutal beating and later the work of a death squad, with individual residents among the murderers and the murdered. The film’s title references the young couples that are broken up and formed in the course of this adversity.

    Film screen capture of esidents of the street looking out of second- and third-floor windows to hear a very loud argument in one of the other rooms.

    📽️ “The Murderers Are Among Us” (Die Mörder sind unter uns), dir. Wolfgang Staudte (DEFA, 1946), is streaming on Arte. Filmed in the rubble of early postwar Berlin, it represents an important attempt to come to terms with Germany’s immediate past and to see a way through the present.

    Film still: The faces of actors Hildegard Knef and Wilhelm Borchert looking outside through the broken glass of the apartment they share in the film.

    Hildegard Knef and Wilhelm Borchert

    📽️ Watched a silly, but enjoyable comedy called “The Assassination Bureau” (Paramount, 1969), starring Diana Rigg, Oliver Reed, amd Telly Savalas.

    screenshot of scene near end of movie, to the left a burning dirigible, to the right a man hanging from a balloon segment that the man managed to escape the dirigible in.

    Prophetic Comedy

    RAPTURE-PALOOZA poster with Anna Kendrick and Craig Robinson, A MATCH MADE IN HELL.

    A prophetic comedy for these upside-down times: "Rapture-Palooza" (Lionsgate, 2013). Also foundational: "Idiocracy" (20th Century Fox, 2006).

    “Overlooked No More: Ethel Lina White, Master of Suspense Who Inspired Hitchcock” by Sarah Weinman, New York Times, April 17, 2025, archive.ph….

    White was a powerhouse of the genre in the 1930s, publishing more than 100 short stories and 17 novels, three of which were adapted into films, most notably Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” (1938).…

    “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” dir. George Clooney (Miramax, 2002), is absolutely bonkers (in a good way). Sam Rockwell does not disappoint. 📽️

    The night shots of the Kennedy Center in the closing sequence of the movie “Ghosted” (Apple, 2023) show it lit up in the national colors of Ukraine. I like that. 🇺🇦

    I saw the first hour of Fritz Lang’s “Hangmen also Die” (United Artists, 1943) tonight. The story, inspired by Reinhard Heydrich’s shooting in Prague in 1942, was a collaboration between Lang and Bertolt Brecht. The film is good, but 135 minutes of wartime stereotypes is a lot. 📽️

    📽️ I enjoyed “The Cape Town Affair” (South Africa, 1967), starring Claire Trevor, James Brolin, and Jacquelin Bisset. I’ve never been to that part of the world, so seeing the city in this period was doubly interesting. The level of segregation, however, stood out, as did the unsettling naturalness of its portrayal.

    The film is a spy story involving mainly white people of different social classes and ages. The one exception is the Communist ringleader, who appears only two or three times and presents as East Asian. This world of espionage inadvertently becomes entangled with less reputable characters who live by their own, less unsavory codes.

    The film is a remake of the New York City noir “Pickup on South Street” (USA, 1953), which I haven’t seen.

    📽️ Watched “Affair in Trinidad” (Columbia Pictures, 1952), a murder–spy story starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Was fun despite the usual noir gender normativity. Also interesting to see the early fictional appearance of a ballistic missile threat in the Caribbean.

    📽️ The last time I saw “Three Days of the Condor,” dir. Sydney Pollack (Paramount, 1975), was long enough ago that I didn’t get as much out of its mid-seventies paranoia about the CIA as I did this time around. Or maybe it just didn’t gnaw away at me like it’s doing now. I grew up in a small rural town, but the grit in that movie pervaded a lot of popular television culture. I also heard my fair share of conspiracy-theory talk during my teens. Besides, the CIA was in the news.

    I’m still not sure what to make of the mentality expressed in this film. It’s interesting, in any case, to speculate about how anti-establishment images and paranoia from the period have mapped onto both ends of our political spectrum.

    A few lines from the movie

    "Maybe there's another CIA inside the CIA."

    "Oil fields."

    "We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do."

    "How do you know they'll print it?"

    📽️ Am watching “So Ends Our Night,” dir. John Cromwell (United Artists, 1941), a “story of people without passports” based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1939 novel Flotsam.

    A great line early on spoken by an Austrian police officer sending two stateless Germans across the border to Czechoslovakia in 1937:

    You refugees! It’s not like handling a first-class criminal. You’re detracting from the dignity of my profession.

    📽️ Watched a post–Cold War episode to the Harry Palmer films, “Bullet to Beijing” (1995). Michael Caine, the lead in the 1960s films, plays an agent pushed into early retirement who freelances for a Russian oligarch-mobster. It was interesting to revisit the period’s pop cultural images of Russia.

    📽️ This evening I saw “Secret Agent,” dir. Alfred Hitchcock (UK, 1936). It was a box office hit in its time, but for me it’s less compelling than “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (1936) and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934). The cinematography and moments of suspense were nonetheless entertaining and characteristically Hitchcock.

    Unlike the protagonists in the other two movies, who become involved in espionage by chance and are clearly the good guys, the protagonists in this film play morally ambiguous roles. Their mission is to locate an enemy agent in Switzerland and assassinate him before he can carry British military secrets to the Ottomans. Only the playful, but dark character played by Peter Lorre enjoys the necessary close-up work of killing.

    Silhouettes of hanged spies out a train window on the way through enemy territory underline the ultimate personal price during war, if caught. A Swiss hotel and casino serves as a glamorous counterpoint, with social banter, dress, and flirting more in line with the 1930s than 1916. That means viewers are treated to Madeleine Carroll’s bare shoulders while she is wrapped in a towel that covers the rest of her body in a scene with two men in full dress.

    Black and white illustration of a woman in an elegant dress pointing a pistol at someone. Background color of full page ad is magenta.

    Distributor advertisement targeting cinema owners in The Film Daily, June 23, 1936, p. 3, via Internet Archive.

    📽️ I watched “The King’s Speech” (2010) for the first time. It certainly lives up to all the praise it received 15 years ago.

    📽️ Just watched “Berlin Correspondent,” dir. Eugene Forde (20th Century Fox, 1942). It’s not so much about a reporter as it is about the Gestapo’s efforts to uncover his spying and then beat his escapes. Interesting to me were the overt references to euthanasia or “mercy killings” in the film.

    Here, though, the commander of such a facility jokes about Germany soon being “100% insanity free”—nice irony for a wartime U.S. audience, but maybe less funny to 21st-century ears. In any case, the quick-thinking American journalist outwits the Gestapo. The tone doesn’t feel too far removed from the 1960s TV sitcom, “Hogan’s Heroes” (1965–71).

    📽️ For thievery and spying escapades set in the Blitz, “Counter-Espionage” (aka “The Lone Wolf in Scotland Yard”) dir. Edward Dmytryk (Columbia Pictures, 1942), isn’t bad. If its light tone, despite its air raids and bombs, seems out of place, it was produced for a wartime public in need of good tales.

    By the way, the film has an odd science fiction component to it, though I have no idea how believable it would have been to the audience. First, there were plans for a lethal blue ray contraption (military figures in Berlin spoke of directional rays). Second, the spy ring transmitted information to Berlin with a large device that more or less functioned like a wireless fax. Finally, these people communicated between London and Berlin over the radio by voice.

    📽️ I enjoyed “Diplomatic Courier,” dir. Henry Hathaway (20th Century Fox, 1952) this evening, available at archive.org… and youtu.be…. There were airplanes, trains, and cars from Washington to Salzburg to Trieste. One interesting twist for me: One of the leads was Hildegard Knef, who starred in the 1946 DEFA film “Die Mörder sind unter uns” (The Murderers Are Among Us).

    📽️ After watching Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 “Rome Open City” (Roma città aperta) this weekend, I’ve started on his “Paisan” (1946). This is only the second time I’ve seen this remarkable collection of six stories about soldiers and civilians during the Allied liberation of Italy, and it feels raw.

    Killing and Fueling Hatred

    We Germans refuse to believe that people want to be free.… All we’re good at is killing, killing, killing! We’ve strewn all of Europe with corpses, and from their graves rises up an unquenchable hatred. Hatred… hatred everywhere! That hatred will devour us.

    These words are the subtitle translations of lines spoken in the famous early postwar film, “Rome Open City,” dir. Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1945). They issue from the mouth of a drunk German officer to his Gestapo commander, who was sure he could make a staunch Italian partisan talk that same night.

    The scene reminds me of assertions by Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince (1532): It is better to be feared than loved because fear is something the ruler can control. But the ruler should avoid awaking the hatred of his subjects because that emotion could prove fatal to him (chaps. 17 and 19).

    For Machiavelli, hatred resulted from a ruler taking the property and women of his subjects. For the drunk officer in “Rome Open City,” the German masters' attacks on honor, dignity, and human life inspired deep hatred, but the Gestapo officer denied that emotion’s power.

    In our own time, Putin seems to appreciate the personal danger that he is in. He likely doesn’t blame himself for this circumstance, but he knows that his system of rule will continue to demand political assassinations, the ruthless suppression of free speech, and predatory corruption.

    His war against Ukraine helps him legitimize his tyranny inside Russia, but he seems incapable of grasping that he will never bend Ukraine itself to his will. No matter how much property he destroys, no matter how many bodies and lives he disfigures or ends, Ukrainians refuse to surrender their personhood, nationhood, and dignity. If anything, Putin has turned this European neighbor into a formidable enemy. The hatred he fuels as he robs Ukrainians of their children and other loved ones cannot be overstated.

    📽️ Watched “Il conformista” [The Conformist], dir. Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1970). The first half stitches together vignettes to make the character who joined the secret police. Then we see him on a job in interwar France. The denouement comes after Mussolini’s dismissal is announced on the radio.

    🇺🇦 Friends of Ukraine might learn something from how the Second World War was portrayed in American movie theaters before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Britain and its friends did important publicity work to open Americans' eyes and to counter the poison of the fascist German American Bund.

Older Posts →