Classe Tous Risques: Claude Sautet’s 1960 gangster thriller couldn’t have come at a worse time in a worse place: critics demolished and dismissed it at the height of the French New Wave, resigning it to relative obscurity for half a century. It isn’t revolutionary or experimental but expertly crafted and conventionally told—completely uncool, even suspicious, 64 years ago. Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo hurl themselves through gunfights, back-stabbings, and narrow escapes, told tight and deftly scored by Georges Delerue. The creeping opening theme only plays over a gray card, yet its intensity matches the first chase, a remarkable piece that sets a high bar for the rest of the film. For as many men that are shot in the back or blown up, Classe Tous Risques keeps its steady and deadly pace throughout, exclaiming with snap zooms spread across its 108 minutes. Lee Gardner’s notes for the Charles Theatre revival are dead on: we must fix Sautet and this movie’s reputation.
An American Werewolf in Paris: An awkwardly-paced bore with a good opening 10 minutes and an astounding ending set in Piccadilly Circus: bodies and cars thrown and thrashed about, thrown into walls, buildings, decapitated and shot and mutilated and burned and killed in quick comic succession. The rest of the film is a drag, mostly because it stars David Naughton. David Naughton doesn’t have it. He drags this movie down, he drags down one of Paul Bartel’s better movies (Not for Publication), and his role should’ve been played by co-star Griffin Dunne.
He plays Naughton’s friend in the beginning; they get lost backpacking in rural England, and seeking refuge in a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, they inadvertently piss of the local werewolf community, and Dunne ends up attacked and killed—Naughton’s only bitten. He’s become the American Werewolf in London, and Dunne is just a ghost, decomposing through the rest of the movie. It was Dunne’s first movie, but that doesn’t matter, he should’ve led it, because Naughton doesn’t have it, he’s hammy and mugging and bad, while the camera loves Dunne and he’s a natural: charming, witty, sweet but suspicious. He’s an interesting person to look at—that’s not something you can work on.
Reservoir Dogs: My least favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, still full of great scenes. Pulp Fiction is a perfect movie, and a quantum leap from Reservoir Dogs, which is only as good as its most iconic scenes. An older couple behind me on the way out talked about how they only remembered the beginning, ending, and the ear-cutting; when I revisited it for the first time in a while a few years ago, I didn’t remember whole chunks either, like Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) preparing undercover in a diner and on his roof, or his “commode story;” all of this is distinct from the rest of Tarantino’s work because it feels so much like “the real world,” in other words, other movies. Once they’re in the warehouse, or sitting around the dinner table talking about Madonna and tipping, or running around Los Angeles shooting cops and stealing cars, it’s all good (and of course Mr. Orange bleeding out in Mr. White’s backseat).
The Small Back Room: Another Powell & Pressburger film restored and supervised by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker; from 1949, The Small Back Room is a WWII thriller starring David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Jack Hawkins, Leslie Banks, and Cyril Cusack. The movie follows a government bomb squad, but it’s really more of an addiction drama. Farrar and others are working on new weapons during the war, and while bombs are defused and people are killed, it’s all about the melancholy of late-middle age, alcohol and opiate addiction, and the shame of a disability. Farrar has a prosthetic leg, and while this movie takes place during the fight to defeat the Nazis, that prosthetic leg is the enemy, and when Farrar successfully defuses a tough bomb on a beach at the end, he regains his will to live. It’s a beautiful, sad film; even as Farrar and Byron survive, better off at the end, it’s obvious this peace is precarious; a film full of sorrow, never entirely resolved.
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