Two films are currently showing on Portland screens, and I will review one of them.
Not Wolfman. This film was screened only for The Oregonian, and we were not invited. This happens several times a year. And Shawn Levy is not to blame, nor is the paper. Shawn didn't like the film much, and neither did anyone else as far as I can see. Studios will occasionally not screen films for critics, always a bad sign, but selective screenings mystify me. Why not let us all see the film?
Now, I don't get paid to review films for KBOO, and I do get in free for press screenings. I will pay to see a movie from time to time if I miss the screening, but not this one. Listeners to Movie Talk should be well aware of my prejudices by now. No stupid action films, no awful romantic comedies (hard to find a good one, nowadays), no Anime (I just don't get it), no horror porn, no "feel good" movies, few sports films. (I love baseball. Sue me.)
My advice is to rent the original Wolfman (Universal, 1941), with Lon Chaney, Jr. and Claude Rains. Chaney always lived in the shadow of his father, one of the great stars of silent film (Phantom of ther Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame) and known as the Man of a Thousand Faces. This is Junior's masterpiece, a man driven to savage acts of murder by forces he can't control, and horrified by his condition.
Good movie, and one of the classic Universal horror films.
The Third Man, at Cinema 21, is a classic by any standard. Carol Reed, the director, was achieving his greatest work, both esthetically and as a craftsman. The screenplay was written by the sardonic Graham Greene, and the photography, production design and music were brilliant.
The music was played on a zither, a strange folk instrument that sounds like the demented offspring of a steel guitar and a harpsichord. It was perfect, a sound of hollow gaiety.
And, Reed got Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten to act in the film.
The Third Man limns the state of the world, at least in war-ravaged Europe, after the cessation of open hostilities. The movie’s message to me was that there was no hope in a world where World War II was possible. You do what you can to survive, and the other guy does the same.
People have value to the extent that they can assist your survival. Love means nothing beyond transitory pleasure, and doesn’t count for anything when your balls are on the anvil.
Welles’ character, Harry Lime, is presented to us as a kind of eternal frat boy: a happy, drunk, hail-fellow-well-met. Holly Martins, Lime’s best friend, is a hack writer on hard times, who is called to Vienna for a possible job with Lime.
Martins, the naive, still-optimistic American, is sucked into a murder mystery, deceived by everyone, even those who wish him well, and finally winds up as a despairing stool pigeon. (It seems, in a small way, a prophecy for the McCarthy era.) The source of Martins’ despair is that his friend has become a vicious criminal, a corrupt dealer in black-market penicillin, diluted to the point where it was ineffective against infection. Many suffered and died at Lime’s hands.
Welles-as-Lime shows up late in the film, in a brilliant entrance. Martins spends the rest of the movie trying to meet with Lime, and avoiding the police and Lime’s henchmen.
In the movie’s most famous scene, and one of the most famous in film history, they meet next to the Prater Wheel, an enormous Ferris Wheel whose cars are the size of small rooms. They take a ride, for privacy. Martins confronts Lime with his crimes, and Lime justifies himself to his friend with an oration of the deepest amorality, lapsing into true evil, and culminating in a speech written by Welles.
Lime tells his friend, “You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
It is hard to admit that as a young man I practically memorized the scene, and believed far too much of it. It makes my blood curdle to hear it now.
The final scene, with Cotten and the wonderful Alida Valli, who played Lime's loyal girl friend, is so beloved among film freaks, that the Coen brothers reproduced it practically shot for shot at the end of Miller's Crossing, with Gabriel Byrne and Marcia Gay Harden.
Go see this movie on the big screen.