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War , especially global war that engendered the United Nations to resolve International Disputes, is a rite of passage experience for individual participants in a variety of different ways , truly unimaginable ways.This rite is permanently transformative which is the common denominator of the films listed below, classics in their own right. For children who have a blank slate and negligible memory, war is especially a transformative experience for a lifetime. Innocence presents a predicament soon overcome by its loss and often corruptive elements intrude, but not always, often the crucible of war engenders obsession and life long psychoses,and neurotic dilemmas.
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
SYNOPSIS: John le Carré’s acclaimed best-selling novel about a cold-war spy on one final, dangerous mission is every bit as precise and ruthless on-screen in this adaptation directed by Martin Ritt. Richard Burton delivers one of his career-defining performances as Alec Leamas, whose hesitant but deeply felt relationship with a beautiful librarian (Claire Bloom) puts what he hopes will be his last assignment, in East Germany, in jeopardy. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a hard-edged and finally tragic thriller, suffused with the political and social consciousness that defined Ritt’s career.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Alec Leamas
Richard Burton
Nan Perry
Claire Bloom
Fiedler
Oskar Werner
Peters
Sam Wanamaker
East German Defense Attorney
George Voskovec
George Smiley
Rupert Davies
Control
Cyril Cusack
Hans-Dieter Mundt
Peter Van Eyck
Ashe
Michael Hordern
Dick Carlton
Robert Hardy
Patmore
Bernard Lee
Tribunal President
Beatrix Lehmann
Old judge
Esmond Knight
Credits
Director
Martin Ritt
Based on the novel by
John Le Carré
Screenplay
Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper
Cinematography
Oswald Morris
Assistant to the producer
Richard McWhorter
Production design
Tambi Larsen
Music
Sol Kaplan
Editing
Anthony Harvey
Production supervisor
James Ware
Art director
Edward Marshall
Assistant director
Colin Brewer
Disc Features
SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
New video interview with author John le Carré
Selected-scene commentary featuring director of photography Oswald Morris
The Secret Center: John le Carré (2000), a BBC documentary on the author’s extraordinary life and work
A 1967 interview with Richard Burton from the BBC series Acting in the 60’s, conducted by film critic Kenneth Tynan
An audio conversation from 1985 between director Martin Ritt and film historian Patrick McGilligan Gallery of set designs
Theatrical trailer
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Michael Sragow
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:True Ritt
By Michael SragowNovember 09, 2008
Martin Ritt’s 1965 movie of John le Carré’s first great novel (and first best seller), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, declares “a plague on Read more »
Press Notes
Press Notes: Move Over, Bond
November 30, 2008
Leamas, Alec Leamas. Okay, so he might not be as much of a household name as a certain martini-swilling secret agent. But while a new James Bond film is currently Read more »
Martin Ritt’s 1965 movie of John le Carré’s first great novel (and first best seller), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, declares “a plague on all your houses” to capitalists, Communists, and ruthless intelligence operatives. It’s one espionage movie that neither comes on like gangbusters nor sneaks up on you like a cat burglar. Instead, it creates an atmosphere of anguish, fear, and rage that intensifies each pause in the action and gesture of the actors, leaving viewers hanging on every word of the sometimes cryptic, sometimes eloquent dialogue. Le Carré’s book arrived in 1963, at the crest of transatlantic James Bond fever: not only had JFK declared himself an Ian Fleming fan, but the movies Dr. No and From Russia with Love had already delighted series followers, and Goldfinger was right around the corner. Le Carré’s view of espionage as an extension of the ugly, soul-grinding side of cold-war politics was more than a slap at the Bond books’ Byronic derring-do and the movies’ glamour, gimmickry, and jet-setting. It read like an exposé of the spy game’s dirty little secrets, linking the spiritual and emotional calamities of a burned-out fiftysomething British agent to the crises of values that plagued East and West in the mid-twentieth century. Martin Ritt understood le Carré’s vision and was the right director to bring it to the screen. He had come of age in the socially conscious New York theater world of the 1930s and 1940s, including stints in the radical Theater of Action and the Stanislavsky-influenced Group Theater. He served stateside in World War II, mostly in Special Services as an actor and a director, and was working on live TV shows, such as Danger, when in 1952 he was blacklisted from the small and big screens. (“It was known that a lot of my friends leaned toward the left,” he once summarized. “I had a humanistic bias.”) But throughout the mid-1950s, he continued acting and directing in the theater, and when he staged the first production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, he drew the attention of liberal talk show host and film/TV producer David Susskind, who hired him to direct a movie version of Robert Alan Arthur’s 1955 teleplay A Man Is Ten Feet Tall. It came to the big screen as Edge of the City (1957), a rough beauty of a picture about the friendship between a family man (Sidney Poitier) and a drifter (John Cassavetes) in a corrupt and racist pocket of the New York docks.Ritt immediately proved himself the rare American director able to tackle contemporary themes without melodrama or preaching. Indeed, when he made a movie condemning a cynical modern cowboy, Hud (1963), audiences loved the character for his comic bluntness (and for Paul Newman’s dynamite performance). Ritt’s ability to build distinctive atmospheres—and give his characters time to catch their breath in them—made him simpatico with rural, often southern settings. His sureness liberated his actors. It enabled Newman, Patricia Neal, and Melvyn Douglas in Hud, James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander in The Great White Hope, Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson in Sounder, Geraldine Page in Pete ’n’ Tillie, Rip Torn and Alfre Woodard in Cross Creek, James Garner in Murphy’s Romance, Sally Field in Norma Rae, and, of course, Richard Burton in Spy to deliver Oscar®-nominated performances. (Neal, Douglas, and Field won their awards.)
Ritt could at times be heavy-handed, such as in the union-organizing drama Norma Rae. But like his artistic mentor Elia Kazan (with whom, however, he parted ways over Kazan’s willingness to name names during the blacklist), he had a feeling for characterization that imbued his best films with an irreducible individuality. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of them. It follows the eternal question of whether ends can justify means to a nightmare conclusion: here, awful means alter virtuous ends. Ritt’s use of suspense can’t be separated from his underlying humanity. The movie doesn’t chill the soul or paralyze viewers with dread. On the contrary, its unblinking realism heightens our hopes as well as our fears for its characters. Ritt hired three key talents—Burton, Claire Bloom, and the cinematographer Oswald Morris—who had previously worked together on the initial angry-young-man movie, Look Back in Anger (directed by Tony Richardson). Ritt knew he was making an angry-middle-aged-spy movie. He peoples the film with adults who recognize or come to learn that their actions have uneasy consequences.
Burton, as agent Alec Leamas, transforms resignation and ruefulness into something forceful, even magnetic. He uses his stout body and bagged eyes to create a multihued miasma. Cyril Cusack, Oskar Werner, and Bloom nearly match him. Cusack, as Leamas’s boss, “Control,” can give a simple intake of air hidden meanings. Werner brings refreshing jauntiness and a whiplike brilliance to the role of an East German Jewish intelligence officer named Fiedler. Bloom exudes both naïveté and sensuality as Leamas’s British Communist lover, Nan Perry. The director achieves the seedy elegance essential to the intricate story’s impact with the help of his seamless ensemble, Morris’s keenly modulated black-and-white camera work, and the uncluttered, realistic production design of Tambi Larsen and Hal Pereira. reWhat Edmund Wilson wrote about a Raymond Chandler novel applies to this movie: “It is not simply a question here of a puzzle which has been put together but of a malaise conveyed to theader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy.” The Spy Who Came in from the Cold boasts a fire that flickers beneath the malaise. Days after you see it, one of Burton’s distinctive ravaged looks or sardonic verbal turns will surface in your consciousness. (Le Carré himself had a hand in sprucing up the script.) When Burton declares to an East German interrogator, “I’m a man, you fool. Don’t you understand? A plain, simple, muddled, fatheaded human being. We have them in the West, you know,” what he says is profound. Luckily, Ritt has the savvy and the wit to play the movie’s higher meanings close to Leamas’s vest.From the start, when Leamas, head of Berlin operations for British intelligence, waits at Checkpoint Charlie for one of his East German spies to cross over (and defect) to the West, this film’s superficial mysteries unfold with a deceptively formal, easy-to-read clarity that balances the underlying chaos. Morris’s camera makes a geographic survey of official boundaries before settling on the back of Leamas’s head as he stares through binoculars at the East German gate. Leamas responds with contempt to a CIA op who urges him to get some sleep. This weathered Brit views Americans as callow and presumptuous. Without any cheap tricks, Ritt immediately puts viewers on the side of a man of experience who is also, underneath his crust, a man of feeling. Crisp arc lights split the dead of night and mark the way for Leamas’s imperiled agent. Unfortunately, they allow the East German guards a glaring view of him when they realize he’s made a break for freedom. The agent’s bicycle can’t race fast enough to escape their bullets. And the West German soldiers can’t give him protective fire: they can fire back only if they are fired upon. Ritt bookends the film with this tragedy and another. In between he conducts a master class in the vitality of bitterness. Leamas tries to live with his knowledge of the worst humans can do—and his knowledge that he is a part of it.Called back to Britain, Leamas drives into London with a slick young fellow from personnel who hints that a harsh fate awaits him but says Leamas should hear it from Control. The inner workings of the agency, or as le Carré calls it, “the Circus,” really are a game to this boy. Not to Control: when Leamas enters Control’s office, the atmosphere is hushed and momentous, freighted with blandishments and threats. There’s something funny and unsettling about Control’s complaint that a secretary hasn’t warmed the pot when serving tea, just as there’s something empathetic and menacing about Control’s observation, “We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? We can’t do that forever. One can’t stay out of doors all the time. One needs to come in from the cold.” After goading Leamas subtly about giving him a desk job and gauging the fierceness of his reaction, Control says, “I want you to stay out in the cold a little longer.”In the ensuing scenes, those who haven’t read the book must wonder whether Leamas becomes a drunken has-been or is merely playing one to snag the attention of Mundt (Peter van Eyck), his East German opponent. Burton is remarkable in these scenes; he knows that certain kinds of drunks enjoy playing rough and acting supervirile, so it’s hard to know when Leamas is putting everyone on, or where the put-on ends and the real Leamas begins. As the action veers into the Netherlands and East Germany, Burton and Ritt know just when to pull Leamas into focus. Burton’s expressions of irony, pride, disdain, and fright do something rare in a spy movie: they give the film a complicated consciousness. Just as Leamas draws on aspects of himself to create a plausible alter ego for a spy mission, Burton draws on aspects of himself to create a fascinating Leamas. Burton, the Welsh miner’s son with huge appetites for rugby and literature, and Ritt, the Russian-Jewish immigrant’s son with matching appetites for football and literature, should have had some basis for friendship. Instead, they locked horns. The director had been dubbed “the Orson tamer” for reining in Orson Welles on The Long, Hot Summer, Ritt’s first hit. And he appeared to be cracking the whip on Burton, compelling him to work harder to do less, stripping him of his elocutionary flourishes and the larger-than-life celebrity he was just beginning to enjoy. Burton often credited his second wife, Elizabeth Taylor, with teaching him the difference between stage and screen acting. But Taylor’s frequent presence on Ritt’s set contributed to the tensions. Bloom and Burton had been lovers at the Old Vic in the early 1950s and had reconnected during Look Back in Anger (1959), when Bloom, according to her memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, broke off their affair. Yet here was Burton, in the second year of his marriage to Taylor, costarring with Bloom, who was playing his romantic object. As an actor, Burton arrives at a sort of mortified tenderness with Bloom that is unique in his filmography, but the process wasn’t easy. Burton biographer Melvyn Bragg suggests that Ritt became Bloom’s protector in a cold war that developed between her and a closely watched Burton, and in Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress, Bloom hints at this special relationship when she writes that Ritt “was a big help to me.” She also ranks Ritt, Olivier, Richardson, Chaplin, and Cukor as her best directors. And Bloom here, with Ritt’s help, does achieve an artistry that seems artless. She gives Nan a generosity and kindness that are infinitely touching, whether she is reaching for sugar cubes to drop into Leamas’s tea or realizing, with a jolt, that she’s been invited to East Germany not for a comrade exchange program but for a prosecution that involves her lover. Of course, Ritt had reasons closer to home to imbue Bloom’s scenes with an intimate sympathy. The movie’s Nan Perry (Liz Gold in the book) is a sweet-natured librarian who comes to Communism out of youthful idealism—like many of Ritt’s friends, and possibly Ritt and his wife, in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. Ritt may not have consciously seen The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as anything more than a faithful adaptation of le Carré’s novel. But it is a highly personal film. It gets at more complicated issues of secular faith than his blacklist comedy-drama The Front, and in its own restrained way it covers more of the political spectrum. When Fiedler asks Leamas to articulate his philosophy and he responds with “I’m a man, you fool,” or Nan tells him she believes in history and he laughs, the movie resonates with the rueful humor of a director who’s learned to distrust ideology and absolutes.Although never hailed as a visual director, Ritt racked up some mighty achievements with cinematographers like James Wong Howe, on Hud and The Molly Maguires, and John Alonzo, on Sounder and Conrack. With Oswald Morris in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Ritt uses grayness not as murk but as the ideal palette to depict precise shades of moral ambiguity. Within this carefully calibrated range of tones, Ritt achieves a greater variety of astringent comedy and drama than in any other of his works, including a delightful dry satire of the clerking life—Leamas and Nan meet while working in a private library of psychic research. Leamas bullies Ashe (Michael Hordern), the gay Communist who first contacts him and offers money for information, the way Bogart does Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon. The sequences that ensue with a variety of Communist agents escalate into increasingly blatant and absorbing power games, culminating in the arrival of Werner’s always spruce and surprising Fiedler. Burton develops a rapport with Werner that’s comparable to the almost telepathic performing connection he had with Peter O’Toole in Becket. When the two have a talk in the open air, the film itself seems to take a deep breath, before turning into a brisk and unsettling courtroom drama. Ritt may not have loved working with Burton, but as a director he must have loved Burton’s art. Burton’s Leamas is a great characterization that’s also a great star performance. His Leamas is like a Sam Spade who gets soft and goes to seed, a Mr. Rick without a plan to make things right. Burton brings heart as well as brains to Ritt’s most sophisticated movie: here, for one brief shining moment, he became a Bogart for an age of disillusionment.
Night Train to Munich Carol Reed SYNOPSIS: Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich is a twisting, turning, cloak-and-dagger delight, combining comedy, romance, and thrills with the greatest of ease. Paced like an out-of-control locomotive, Night Train takes viewers on a World War II–era journey from Prague to England to the Swiss Alps, as Nazis pursue a Czech scientist and his daughter (Margaret Lockwood), who are being aided by a debonair British undercover agent, played by Rex Harrison. This captivating, long-overlooked adventure—which also features Paul Henreid and a clever screenplay by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, best known for writing Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes—is a deftly concocted spy game that could give the master of suspense a run for his money.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Anna Bomasch
Margaret Lockwood
Gus Bennett
Rex Harrison
Karl Marsen
Paul Henreid
Charters
Basil Radford
Caldicott
Naunton Wayne
Axel Bomasch
James Harcourt
Dr. Fredericks
Felix Aylmer
Credits
Director
Carol Reed
Producer
Edward Black
Based on an original story by
Gordon Wellesley
Screenplay
Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder
Photography
Otto Kanturek
Editing
R. E. Dearling
Disc Features
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
New video conversation between film scholars Peter Evans and Bruce Babington about director Carol Reed, screenwriters Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, and the social and political climatein which Night Train to Munich was made
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Philip Kemp
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Night Train to Munich: A Last Laugh
By Philip KempJune 23, 2010
“Wittily written and spare as a coded message . . . The year’s most perilous ride . . . , we wouldn’t exchange it for a season’s commutation ticket on most Read more »
Features
Notes on Night Train to Munich
By Monte HellmanJune 17, 2010
How do you make a comedy about something as serious as the Nazi threat of world domination—particularly as it is happening? Perhaps there’s something in the Read more »
How do you make a comedy about something as serious as the Nazi threat of world domination—particularly as it is happening? Perhaps there’s something in the English character that allows them to see humor in disaster. Some sort of survival mechanism. It’s not a secret that Outcast of the Islands—perhaps the least known of Reed’s major works—is one of my all-time favorite movies. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve been attracted to spy thrillers, and particularly romantic spy thrillers with comic overtones. So Night Train (as the American release was called) was an early favorite as well, and I’ve revisited it a number of times over the years. I’ve seen it at revival houses, recorded my own VHS copy, and recently even ordered a bad DVD copy from Turkey, where it had originally been sold as a special offer included with a newspaper or magazine.
Reed doesn’t fit well into the auteur theory of directing, having been more interested in telling each story as well as he could, and in testing his mettle on as many genres as he could attract. As a consequence, film history and criticism haven’t treated him as kindly as he deserves.
But I’ve always felt a kinship with him, coming from a similar background in theater, and having started as an actor. And I believe having walked in an actor’s shoes is a tremendous advantage for a director, giving him insight into an actor’s fears and insecurities.
One of the great pleasures for me in Night Train was the discovery of Rex Harrison. He’s such a unique personality, much more “English” in my experience than, say, Laurence Olivier or Robert Donat, with a great comic flair. I don’t remember noticing him again until Anna and the King of Siam, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Unfaithfully Yours, this last a particular delight.
And I admired the way Reed repeatedly set up a dangerous situation, such as the returned phone call from Nazi headquarters to the phone booth, where we expect it to be intercepted by the English comedy team and it’s not, and the note under the doughnut, where we’re afraid it will be intercepted by the villain, Paul Henreid, and it’s not.
The concentration camp sequence is particularly well done, and Henreid is perfectly cast as a faux hero. I was always aware of the movie’s flaws, particularly a kind of imitation-Hollywood cliff-hanger happy ending. It may, however, have been the other way around, with Hollywood imitating Reed, and the familiarity coming only years later, when I first saw Night Train.
Night Train to Munich holds up as a very entertaining movie, beautifully acted with charm and restraint. And it’s a chance to see a great director developing the skills he’ll later use with such brilliance.
Night Train to Munich
Carol Reed
1940
90 min
Black and White
Wittily written and spare as a coded message . . . The year’s most perilous ride . . . , we wouldn’t exchange it for a season’s commutation ticket on most of the similar vehicles running out of Hollywood.” So wrote Theodore Strauss in the New York Times of December 30, 1940. The subject of his rave review was the British movie Night Train to Munich (or Night Train, as it was retitled for the U.S. market), directed by “a brilliant newcomer named Carol Reed.” Strauss wasn’t the only one who loved it—the film ran for fifteen weeks in New York.
Given the film’s warm reception, in Britain as in America, it seems strange that it is now so rarely seen. Strauss’s review hints at the reason: “Written by the same needle-sharp wits that penned The Lady Vanishes,” he noted, “the film is by all odds the swiftest and most harrowing thriller to come out of England since the Hitchcock work.” Almost inevitably, since it shares its screenwriters (Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat), its leading lady (Margaret Lockwood), two of its characters (the comic double act of Charters and Caldicott, played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), and even its subgenre (espionage train thriller) with The Lady Vanishes, Night Train to Munich has often been dismissed as an imitation of Hitchcock’s movie.
The comparison, though, does Reed’s film less than justice. Night Train to Munich is an ingenious, tongue-in-cheek roller coaster of a thriller, neatly balancing its more serious moments (the concentration camp episode) with espionage intrigue, headlong chase sequences, a hint of sexual innuendo, and—not least of its delights—a generous helping of spiritedly played, Nazi-baiting comedy. For Night Train to Munich enjoyed one clear advantage over The Lady Vanishes: since it was released in May 1940, after Britain had entered the war, the baddies could be unequivocally identified—and mocked.
When the film was first being planned, just prior to the outbreak of war in September 1939, its intended tone was altogether more serious. The working title was Gestapo, its source material a serialized novel by the Australian-born writer Gordon Wellesley, Report on a Fugitive, set in the fictitious state of Ironia. (Iron, rather than irony, was presumably the reference.) According to Gilliat, not much of the original survives in the film version: “We used up Gordon’s story in the first ten minutes and invented the rest. Gordon was very amused because he got an Oscar nomination for best original story.”
Launder and Gilliat were then two of Britain’s up-and-coming screenwriters, with a knack for sharp, droll dialogue. They first teamed up as writers for Seven Sinners (another railway-themed thriller) in 1936; two years after Night Train to Munich, they would embark on their thirty-eight-year partnership as joint writers-directors. Once they came on board as writers on Night Train, the film’s tone shifted decisively toward that of a comedy-thriller. If its view of the Third Reich now seems frivolous, not to say naive, it should be remembered that it was made, and released, during the period known as the Phony War—before France fell, the British Army narrowly escaped annihilation at Dunkirk, and the Luftwaffe began to rain bombs on British cities. At that time, with the full horrors of Nazism not yet widely known, Hitler and his storm troopers were often treated as figures of fun (other British films of the period, such as Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband, adopt a similar stance).
Night Train to Munich was produced by the British arm of Twentieth Century-Fox, using the Rank studios at Shepherd’s Bush, but with a team largely recruited from Gainsborough Studios, which had been closed down, since it was feared its tall tower might make it a target for bombing raids. With Hitchcock now in Hollywood, working on his first American film, Rebecca (Night Train “would undoubtedly have been given to Hitchcock had he not left,” according to film historian William K. Everson), Fox offered the assignment to Reed, whose last film, The Stars Look Down (1939), had elevated him to the ranks of Britain’s top directors. The male lead was initially intended for Michael Redgrave, Lockwood’s costar in The Lady Vanishes, but as he was otherwise engaged (singing Macheath in John Gielgud’s production of The Beggar’s Opera at the Haymarket Theatre), the role went to a lesser-known actor, Rex Harrison.
It was the thirty-one-year-old Harrison’s first lead in a major film, and he seized it with delight—not least because it allowed him to masquerade as a Nazi officer. “Rex just loved that uniform,” Gilliat recalled. Harrison’s screen persona—quizzical, witty, dandyish, with a hint of erotic cruelty—fitted him perfectly to play the Pimpernel-like part of Gus Bennett/Dicky Randall/Ulrich Herzoff. In an appreciative article for Films in Review in 1987, Everson savors Harrison’s peerlessly nonchalant way with the dialogue: “Having given the name of another top Nazi as his confederate, his cover is almost blown by a gestapo man who queries suspiciously, ‘But I thought he was doing undercover work in the Balkans?’ ‘And who is not?’ replies Harrison, skating over the thinnest of ice with ease.”
Harrison’s multiple-personality character fits a pattern in Reed’s films, in which duplicitous figures who conceal disruptive or antisocial impulses beneath a veneer of ordinariness crop up time and again. Think of Mr. Radfern (Edmund Gwenn), the respectable suburban bank clerk in Laburnum Grove (1936), who proves to be a successful counterfeiter wanted by Scotland Yard; Baines (Ralph Richardson), the discreet embassy butler in The Fallen Idol (1948), whose air of quiet efficiency masks destructive passions; Ivo Kern (James Mason) in The Man Between (1953), desperately adjusting his persona to fit in on both sides of the iron curtain; Wormold (Alec Guinness) in Our Man in Havana (1959), the self-effacing expatriate who embarks on cloak-and-dagger intrigues; and, of course, Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man (1949), charming, personable—and utterly devoid of scruples.
In Night Train to Munich, the shape-changing Dicky Randall even has a dark counterpart: Karl Marsen, who poses as an anti-Nazi German dissident to gain the confidence of Anna Bomasch (Lockwood), only to be revealed as a Nazi agent. He’s played by Paul von Hernried (as he was then known), a genuine anti-Nazi dissident. Austrian-born (his full name was Paul Georg Julius Hernreid Ritter von Wassel-Waldingau), he left for Hollywood—and lasting fame as Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager and Casablanca—as soon as shooting on Night Train was over, just avoiding internment as an enemy alien. He plays Marsen not unsympathetically, far from the standard ranting Nazi blowhard, and the final shot of him lying wounded and defeated, watching his rival make off with everything, including the girl, even exerts a certain pathos.
Reprising their roles from The Lady Vanishes as the pair of ineffably English buffoons Charters and Caldicott—who of course always turn up trumps in a crisis—Radford and Wayne are given even more scope for comedy in Reed’s film. One running gag concerns a prized set of golf clubs that Charters has left with a friend in Berlin, the loss of which alarms him far more than the imminent outbreak of war; another his dogged attempts to get through Mein Kampf. Their debate over whether their old university chum Dicky Randall could really be a Nazi is couched largely in cricketing terms. “Traitor?” Caldicott protests. “Hardly, old man. Played for the Gentlemen.” “Only once,” Charters responds darkly.
Irene Handl, then at the outset of a long career playing richly comic, idiosyncratic supporting roles in countless British movies, shows up unbilled in a ripe cameo, as a bustling, bossy stationmaster. (“You can’t sit here!” she admonishes Charters and Caldicott. “This truck is required! Come on—off, off, off, off, off, off!”) But ultimately, this is Harrison’s film, even if Lockwood (in the fifth of her six films for Reed) is top-billed. If there’s a slight lack of chemistry between them—Lockwood described Harrison as “just another leading man”—it could be partly because Harrison had just embarked on a torrid affair with the German-born actress Lilli Palmer, who would become his second wife. But his impudent underplaying is one of the film’s chief pleasures, and his scenes with Lockwood are sparky and sharply scripted. “You know, if a woman ever loved you like you love yourself,” she remarks at one point, “it’d be one of the romances of history.”
This isn’t the only line that suggests somebody was poking quiet fun at Harrison. The actor was notoriously vain and, for a time, like Ulrich Herzoff, affected a monocle—at least until Palmer laughed him out of it. He first appears, in his Gus Bennett cover, in a seaside booth, plugging slushy romantic ballads, later explaining to Lockwood, “Nature endowed me with a gift, and I just accepted it.” “It’s a pity it didn’t endow you with a voice,” she retorts. (As My Fair Lady was later to prove, singing was never Harrison’s forte.) It’s tempting to wonder if Reed was surreptitiously getting his own back for an incident some years earlier, when they were both young actors and Harrison, a lifelong philanderer, stole Reed’s girlfriend.
Night Train to Munich’s chief weakness is the blatantly bargain-basement model work, especially the cliff-hanging finale involving cable cars in the Swiss Alps. Reed himself was embarrassed by it: “I remember at the time thinking that the mountains looked like ice cream. But the war was on, Gainsborough had a very small stage—and it was a very bad model.” Still, this perhaps adds to the film’s period charm, and certainly doesn’t detract from one’s enjoyment of Night Train to Munich as a pacy, lively comedy-thriller, as well as an intriguing glimpse into the British psyche in the opening months of World War II. Reed would next return to a wartime subject in The Way Ahead (1944)—not surprisingly, by this stage of the war, an altogether more serious view of the conflict—and to the thriller genre in two of his finest films, Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man, for which Night Train to Munich can be seen as a lighthearted preparatory sketch.
Philip Kemp is a film critic and historian, and a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, Total Film, DVD Review, Times Higher Education, and International Film Guide. He teaches film journalism at the University of Leicester.
Night Train to Munich
Carol Reed
1940
90 min
Black and White
1.33:1
Categories: Film Essays
Posted on June 23, 2010 / 1 Comment
Sat 10 Jul at 07:47 PM
John C
This movie is very entertaining and the print is of good quality. Although there is no audio commentary, it’s not necessary as the featured documentary covers plenty of information to enhance your enjoyment.
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Given the film’s warm reception, in Britain as in America, it seems strange that it is now so rarely seen. Strauss’s review hints at the reason: “Written by the same needle-sharp wits that penned The Lady Vanishes,” he noted, “the film is by all odds the swiftest and most harrowing thriller to come out of England since the Hitchcock work.” Almost inevitably, since it shares its screenwriters (Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat), its leading lady (Margaret Lockwood), two of its characters (the comic double act of Charters and Caldicott, played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), and even its subgenre (espionage train thriller) with The Lady Vanishes, Night Train to Munich has often been dismissed as an imitation of Hitchcock’s movie.
The comparison, though, does Reed’s film less than justice. Night Train to Munich is an ingenious, tongue-in-cheek roller coaster of a thriller, neatly balancing its more serious moments (the concentration camp episode) with espionage intrigue, headlong chase sequences, a hint of sexual innuendo, and—not least of its delights—a generous helping of spiritedly played, Nazi-baiting comedy. For Night Train to Munich enjoyed one clear advantage over The Lady Vanishes: since it was released in May 1940, after Britain had entered the war, the baddies could be unequivocally identified—and mocked.
When the film was first being planned, just prior to the outbreak of war in September 1939, its intended tone was altogether more serious. The working title was Gestapo, its source material a serialized novel by the Australian-born writer Gordon Wellesley, Report on a Fugitive, set in the fictitious state of Ironia. (Iron, rather than irony, was presumably the reference.) According to Gilliat, not much of the original survives in the film version: “We used up Gordon’s story in the first ten minutes and invented the rest. Gordon was very amused because he got an Oscar nomination for best original story.”
Launder and Gilliat were then two of Britain’s up-and-coming screenwriters, with a knack for sharp, droll dialogue. They first teamed up as writers for Seven Sinners (another railway-themed thriller) in 1936; two years after Night Train to Munich, they would embark on their thirty-eight-year partnership as joint writers-directors. Once they came on board as writers on Night Train, the film’s tone shifted decisively toward that of a comedy-thriller. If its view of the Third Reich now seems frivolous, not to say naive, it should be remembered that it was made, and released, during the period known as the Phony War—before France fell, the British Army narrowly escaped annihilation at Dunkirk, and the Luftwaffe began to rain bombs on British cities. At that time, with the full horrors of Nazism not yet widely known, Hitler and his storm troopers were often treated as figures of fun (other British films of the period, such as Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband, adopt a similar stance).
Night Train to Munich was produced by the British arm of Twentieth Century-Fox, using the Rank studios at Shepherd’s Bush, but with a team largely recruited from Gainsborough Studios, which had been closed down, since it was feared its tall tower might make it a target for bombing raids. With Hitchcock now in Hollywood, working on his first American film, Rebecca (Night Train “would undoubtedly have been given to Hitchcock had he not left,” according to film historian William K. Everson), Fox offered the assignment to Reed, whose last film, The Stars Look Down (1939), had elevated him to the ranks of Britain’s top directors. The male lead was initially intended for Michael Redgrave, Lockwood’s costar in The Lady Vanishes, but as he was otherwise engaged (singing Macheath in John Gielgud’s production of The Beggar’s Opera at the Haymarket Theatre), the role went to a lesser-known actor, Rex Harrison.
It was the thirty-one-year-old Harrison’s first lead in a major film, and he seized it with delight—not least because it allowed him to masquerade as a Nazi officer. “Rex just loved that uniform,” Gilliat recalled. Harrison’s screen persona—quizzical, witty, dandyish, with a hint of erotic cruelty—fitted him perfectly to play the Pimpernel-like part of Gus Bennett/Dicky Randall/Ulrich Herzoff. In an appreciative article for Films in Review in 1987, Everson savors Harrison’s peerlessly nonchalant way with the dialogue: “Having given the name of another top Nazi as his confederate, his cover is almost blown by a gestapo man who queries suspiciously, ‘But I thought he was doing undercover work in the Balkans?’ ‘And who is not?’ replies Harrison, skating over the thinnest of ice with ease.”
Harrison’s multiple-personality character fits a pattern in Reed’s films, in which duplicitous figures who conceal disruptive or antisocial impulses beneath a veneer of ordinariness crop up time and again. Think of Mr. Radfern (Edmund Gwenn), the respectable suburban bank clerk in Laburnum Grove (1936), who proves to be a successful counterfeiter wanted by Scotland Yard; Baines (Ralph Richardson), the discreet embassy butler in The Fallen Idol (1948), whose air of quiet efficiency masks destructive passions; Ivo Kern (James Mason) in The Man Between (1953), desperately adjusting his persona to fit in on both sides of the iron curtain; Wormold (Alec Guinness) in Our Man in Havana (1959), the self-effacing expatriate who embarks on cloak-and-dagger intrigues; and, of course, Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man (1949), charming, personable—and utterly devoid of scruples.
In Night Train to Munich, the shape-changing Dicky Randall even has a dark counterpart: Karl Marsen, who poses as an anti-Nazi German dissident to gain the confidence of Anna Bomasch (Lockwood), only to be revealed as a Nazi agent. He’s played by Paul von Hernried (as he was then known), a genuine anti-Nazi dissident. Austrian-born (his full name was Paul Georg Julius Hernreid Ritter von Wassel-Waldingau), he left for Hollywood—and lasting fame as Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager and Casablanca—as soon as shooting on Night Train was over, just avoiding internment as an enemy alien. He plays Marsen not unsympathetically, far from the standard ranting Nazi blowhard, and the final shot of him lying wounded and defeated, watching his rival make off with everything, including the girl, even exerts a certain pathos.
Reprising their roles from The Lady Vanishes as the pair of ineffably English buffoons Charters and Caldicott—who of course always turn up trumps in a crisis—Radford and Wayne are given even more scope for comedy in Reed’s film. One running gag concerns a prized set of golf clubs that Charters has left with a friend in Berlin, the loss of which alarms him far more than the imminent outbreak of war; another his dogged attempts to get through Mein Kampf. Their debate over whether their old university chum Dicky Randall could really be a Nazi is couched largely in cricketing terms. “Traitor?” Caldicott protests. “Hardly, old man. Played for the Gentlemen.” “Only once,” Charters responds darkly.
Irene Handl, then at the outset of a long career playing richly comic, idiosyncratic supporting roles in countless British movies, shows up unbilled in a ripe cameo, as a bustling, bossy stationmaster. (“You can’t sit here!” she admonishes Charters and Caldicott. “This truck is required! Come on—off, off, off, off, off, off!”) But ultimately, this is Harrison’s film, even if Lockwood (in the fifth of her six films for Reed) is top-billed. If there’s a slight lack of chemistry between them—Lockwood described Harrison as “just another leading man”—it could be partly because Harrison had just embarked on a torrid affair with the German-born actress Lilli Palmer, who would become his second wife. But his impudent underplaying is one of the film’s chief pleasures, and his scenes with Lockwood are sparky and sharply scripted. “You know, if a woman ever loved you like you love yourself,” she remarks at one point, “it’d be one of the romances of history.”
This isn’t the only line that suggests somebody was poking quiet fun at Harrison. The actor was notoriously vain and, for a time, like Ulrich Herzoff, affected a monocle—at least until Palmer laughed him out of it. He first appears, in his Gus Bennett cover, in a seaside booth, plugging slushy romantic ballads, later explaining to Lockwood, “Nature endowed me with a gift, and I just accepted it.” “It’s a pity it didn’t endow you with a voice,” she retorts. (As My Fair Lady was later to prove, singing was never Harrison’s forte.) It’s tempting to wonder if Reed was surreptitiously getting his own back for an incident some years earlier, when they were both young actors and Harrison, a lifelong philanderer, stole Reed’s girlfriend.
Night Train to Munich’s chief weakness is the blatantly bargain-basement model work, especially the cliff-hanging finale involving cable cars in the Swiss Alps. Reed himself was embarrassed by it: “I remember at the time thinking that the mountains looked like ice cream. But the war was on, Gainsborough had a very small stage—and it was a very bad model.” Still, this perhaps adds to the film’s period charm, and certainly doesn’t detract from one’s enjoyment of Night Train to Munich as a pacy, lively comedy-thriller, as well as an intriguing glimpse into the British psyche in the opening months of World War II. Reed would next return to a wartime subject in The Way Ahead (1944)—not surprisingly, by this stage of the war, an altogether more serious view of the conflict—and to the thriller genre in two of his finest films, Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man, for which Night Train to Munich can be seen as a lighthearted preparatory sketch.
Philip Kemp is a film critic and historian, and a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, Total Film, DVD Review, Times Higher Education, and International Film Guide. He teaches film journalism at the University of Leicester.
Night Train to Munich
Carol Reed
1940
90 min
Black and White
1.33:1
Categories: Film Essays
Posted on June 23, 2010 / 1 Comment
Sat 10 Jul at 07:47 PM
John C
This movie is very entertaining and the print is of good quality. Although there is no audio commentary, it’s not necessary as the featured documentary covers plenty of information to enhance your enjoyment.
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Rome Open CitySYNOPSIS: This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the other films that would form this trilogy and starring some well-known actors—Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member—Rome Open City (Roma città aperta) is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work garnered awards around the globe and left the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Don Pietro Pellegrini
Aldo Fabrizi
Pina
Anna Magnani
Giorgio Manfredi
Marcello Pagliero
Marcello
Vito Annicchiarico
Agostino
Nando Bruno
Major Bergman
Harry Feist
Ingrid
Giovanna Galletti
Credits
Director
Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay
Sergio Amidei
with the participation of
Federico Fellini
Cinematography
Ubaldo Arata
Editing
Eraldo Da Roma
Art director
Rosario Megna
Music
Renzo Rossellini
Assistant director
Sergio Amidei
Disc Features
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Video introduction by Roberto Rossellini from 1963
Audio commentary featuring film scholar Peter Bondanella
Once Upon a Time . . . “Rome Open City,” a 2006 documentary on the making of this historic film, featuring rare archival material and footage of Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini, Ingrid Bergman, and many others
New video interviews with Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà
Rossellini and the City, a new visual essay by film scholar Mark Shiel (Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City) on Rossellini’s use of the urban landscape in the war trilogy
New video interview with film critic and Rossellini friend Father Virgilio Fantuzzi, who discusses the filmmaker and the role of religion in Rome Open City
New and improved English subtitle translations
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Rome Open City: A Star Is Born
By Irene BignardiJanuary 26, 2010
"All roads lead to Rome Open City,” Jean-Luc Godard once said, playing on the old Italian proverb—and meaning, we can assume, that when thinking about modern Read more »
On Five
Criterion in Bologna
July 07, 2010
Two of Criterion’s 2010 releases were honored at last week’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, organized by the Cineteca di Bologna: By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume Two won Read more »
Clippings
The Trilogy Accordingto John Bailey
June 07, 2010
We’ve drawn your attention before to award-winning DP John Bailey’s informative, entertaining blog on the American Society of Cinematographers website Read more »
Press Notes
Press Notes: Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy
February 01, 2010
The critics agree that Criterion’s release of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy, featuring major restorations of the unassailable landmarks of Italian Read more »
"All roads lead to Rome Open City,” Jean-Luc Godard once said, playing on the old Italian proverb—and meaning, we can assume, that when thinking about modern cinema, one always has to come to terms with Roberto Rossellini’s seminal film. Indeed, Rome Open City is not just a milestone in the history of Italian cinema but possibly, with De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, one of the most influential and symbolic films of its age, a movie about “reality” that has left a trace on every film movement since. It is also the story of a fascinating and atypical adventure in filmmaking, a masterpiece malgré soi, a unique piece of cinema that was the result, in a way, of serendipity.
It all happened in Rome, soon after the liberation of the city by the Americans in 1944, and following the gentle decree by Admiral Ellery W. Stone, heading a commission created to decide the future of the Italian film industry, that since “the so-called Italian cinema was invented by the fascists,” it had to be suppressed. Full stop. Cinecittà, the seat of the best Italian production before the war, was turned into a centro di sfollamento, a homeless camp. The Italian cinema became a desert. It had to begin anew somewhere else. And it did.
Numerous stories about the genesis of Rome Open City have circulated over the years. The screenwriter Ugo Pirro even wrote a novel about the film’s creation. And several documentaries—including one by another master of Italian cinema, Carlo Lizzani—have been made on the subject. In each, the story is different. So let’s try to stick to the few things we know for sure. There is a remarkable director, Roberto Rossellini, who had been making movies for years under the fascist regime but who nevertheless, because of his talent and his attitude, embodied the spirit of the intelligentsia of liberated Italy. There are his friends, the screenwriter Sergio Amidei (“It’s a film we made all together, like when you cook easily,” Amidei said about Rome Open City) and a young, ambitious artist and screenwriter, Federico Fellini, who both took part in the script. There is the real story of Teresa Gullace, a woman killed by the Germans in front of the barracks on viale Giulio Cesare, who inspired the famous scene of the death of Pina, shot down while running after the truck that is abducting her fiancé. There is, in the beginning, the idea of making a documentary on Don Morosini, a priest who was a hero of the resistance. There is a provisional title, Città aperta . . . and no money. Above all, there is a woman, an actress, Anna Magnani—a queen of the cabaret, a star onstage, not a traditional beauty but whose face has an electrifying intensity, and who would become a screen legend, in films all built around her charisma and vernacular charm.
The preparation and development of the project took all summer and autumn of 1944. But according to Amidei, the original script was written in a week in Fellini’s kitchen. Once again, there are different stories. Pirro argued that when Fellini became involved in the writing, the major part of the work had already been done by Amidei, and Fellini provided only dialogue and some gags for Aldo Fabrizi. Rossellini, at one point, even said that he had written the script “with some friends during the German occupation.” In the beginning, the film was to be simply a documentary on Don Morosini. Then, discussion after discussion, new elements were added, like the story of Gullace. But when? There is no written script left, only personal memories. We have to rely on the final movie.
Shooting started on January 18, 1945. The war in the rest of Italy was still on. There was no film stock, and so Rossellini and his team had to use abandoned scraps found here and there. It wasn’t possible to check the rushes. Rossellini, little by little, sold all he owned so that the film could go on. In Italian, as in English, there is the expression “to make a virtue of necessity,” and that’s what Rossellini did here. The result was a new kind of movie, never before seen. Does that explain the whistles—which in Italy express disapproval—on the opening night of September 24, 1945, in front of a group of “friends” and critics? Audiences over the next weeks, however, reacted with enthusiasm, and the movie, which in the meantime was given its final title, became the first hit of the year. If some in the establishment were very severe in their criticism—finding a lack of unity between the first and second halves, for instance—others, including Alberto Moravia, Carlo Lizzani, and Umberto Barbaro, found value in a film born in the spirit of the resistance and from its many voices.
Most of all, it was the people of Italy who were won over, finding in the film the flavor of truth. In Rome Open City, which spoke of men and women in difficult times, tormented, injured, scorned, humiliated, they recognized their own experiences during the years of a tragic, suicidal war. In Magnani, with her feverish face of a woman of the people, with her rough voice, with her natural behavior so far from the phony sophistication of the divas of the fascist cinema, with her passion, they found the truth of an Italy too often forgotten. In the actors taken from the street who surrounded her—not Fabrizi, a famous comic performer turned here into a tragic figure, or the professional Maria Michi, a woman very near the resistance and the Communist Party, but in the real, tormented faces of many of the others—they saw themselves.
It was the beginning of “neorealism”—an opening onto reality, onto the human predicament, which Rossellini would continue with Paisan and Germany Year Zero. And it was the beginning of a new career for Magnani, promoted with this film to the status of icon in the new Italy: a real face, a real woman, a new kind of actress, who would go on to work with Visconti, Renoir, Cukor, Monicelli, Lumet, Pasolini, Fellini. Always in the name of reality. Always with a passion for the truth.
Irene Bignardi was the film critic for the Italian daily La repubblica for fifteen years and later the director of the Locarno Film Festival. She is now critic at large for La repubblica and the author of Memorie estorte a uno smemorato: Vita di Gillo Pontecorvo, Le piccole utopie, and Americani
The Shop on Main StreetSYNOPSIS: An inept Czech peasant is torn between greed and guilt when the Nazi-backed bosses of his town appoint him “Aryan controller” of an old Jewish widow’s button shop. Humor and tragedy fuse in this scathing exploration of one cowardly man’s complicity in the horrors of a totalitarian regime. Made near the height of Soviet oppression in Czechoslovakia, The Shop on Main Street features intense editing and camera work which won it the Academy Award™ for Best Foreign Film in 1965.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Rozalie Lautmann
Ida Kaminská
Tono Brtko
Josef Kroner
Marcus Kikotsky
Frantisek Zvarík
Evelyna Brtková
Hana Slivková
Katz
Martin Gregor
Piti Báci
Adam Matejka
Maian Peter
Mikulás Ladizinsky
Balko Báci
Alojz Kramár
Credits
Director
Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos
Screenplay
L. Grosman, Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos
Producer
Jordan Balurov and Jaromír Lukás
Music
Zdenek Liska
Cinematography
Vladimír Novotny
Editing
Diana Heringová and Jaromír Janácek
Costume design
Marie Rosenfelderová
Production design
Karel Skvor
Sound
Dobroslav Srámek
Disc Features
New digital transfer
U.S. theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
Optimal image quality: RSDL dual-layer edition
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
The Shop on Main Street:Not the Six Million but the One
By Ján KadárSeptember 17, 2001
Of all my films, The Shop on Main Street touches me most closely. Elmar Klos and I usually work as equal partners, but in this case he Read more »
Night and FogSYNOPSIS: Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man’s violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Credits
Director
Alain Resnais
Producer
Anatole Dauman, Samy Halfon and Philippe Lifchitz
Cinematography
Sacha Vierny and Ghislain Cloquet
Text
Jean Cayrol
Screenplay
Chris Marker
Historical consultants
Olga Wormser and Henri Michel
Music
Hanns Eisler
Disc Features
New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image and sound
Excerpts of audio interviews with Alain Resnais from Le Cinéma des cinéastes (1980) and Les Étoiles du cinéma (1994)
New essay about the film by Phillip Lopate
Essay about composer Hanns Eisler by Russell Lack
Crew profiles written by film historian Peter Cowie
Optional music and effects track
New and improved English subtitle translation
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Night and Fog
By Phillip LopateJune 23, 2003
François Truffaut once called Night and Fog “the greatest film ever made.” If you don’t believe me, here is the exact quote: “The effective war film is often the one in which the Read more »
Night and Fog: Origins and Controversy
By Peter CowieJune 23, 2003
It’s a tribute to the clarity and cogency of Night and Fog that Resnais’ masterpiece has not been diminished by time, or displaced by longer and more ambitious Read more »
Related FilmsHiroshima mon amourAlain Resnais La JetéeChris Marker The Shop on Main StreetJán Kadár and Elmar Klos
ExploreDocumentaries War Films Stuart Cooper’s Top 10
KanalSYNOPSIS: “Watch them closely, for these are the last hours of their lives,” announces a narrator, foretelling the tragedy that unfolds as a war-ravaged company of Home Army resistance fighters tries to escape the Nazi onslaught through the sewers of Warsaw. Determined to survive, the men and women slog through the hellish labyrinth, piercing the darkness with the strength of their individual spirits. Based on true events, Kanal was the first film ever made about the Warsaw Uprising and brought director Andrzej Wajda to the attention of international audiences, earning the Special Jury Prize in Cannes in 1957.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Stokrotka (Daisy)
Teresa Izewska
Korab/Jacek
Tadeusz Janczar
Zadra
Wienczyslaw Glinski
Kula (Bullet)
Tadeusz Gwiazdowski
Smukly (Slim)
Stanislaw Mikulski
Madry (Wise)
Emil Karewicz
The composer/Michal
Wladyslaw Sheybal
Halinka
Teresa Berezowska
Credits
Director
Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay
Jerzy Stefan Stawinski
From the short story by
Jerzy Stefan Stawinski
Cinematography
Jerzy Lipman
Camera
Jerzy Wojcik
Second director
Kazimierz Kutz
Assistant directors
Anna Janeczkowa, Janusz Morgenstern, Maria Starzenska and Roman Mann
Production manager
Stanislaw Adler
Sound
Jozef Bartczak
Editing
Halina Nawrocka
Music
Jan Krenz
Disc Features
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Andrzej Wajda: On Kanal, a 27-minute exclusive new interview with the director, assistant director Janusz Morgenstern, and film critic Jerzy Plazewski
Jan Nowak-Jezioranski: Courier from Warsaw, a new 28-minute interview by Wajda of a Warsaw Uprising insider
Rare behind-the-scenes production photos, publicity stills, and posters
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film critic John Simon
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Kanal
By John SimonApril 25, 2005
There was also, let it not be forgotten, a Polish New Wave, even if not so labeled. One of its big billows for our imagination to surf on was Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal, made in 1956 and released Read more »
Kanal By John Simon
There was also, let it not be forgotten, a Polish New Wave, even if not so labeled. One of its big billows for our imagination to surf on was Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal, made in 1956 and released in 1957. It was the centerpiece of the so-called war trilogy, though not too much need be made of that. Almost half a century later, the film is still self-sufficient and unique: an antiwar movie in which we see scarcely a single combat death. But the dark radiance of doom haloes one and all. Most films are about the unexpected; Kanal blends it with the inevitable.
It is September 1944, the fifty-sixth day of the fateful Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupiers. The citizens of Warsaw had begun their rebellion on August 1, and for sixty-three days this Home Army fought valiantly in deadly street combat, hoping that the Russians, by now on the other bank of the Vistula, would come to their aid. Polish bravery is proverbial, but so too, alas, is Polish foolhardiness, whose master image is the cavalry charge of Polish uhlans against German tanks. The Soviets, however, with their anti-Polish agenda—they would have just as gladly annexed all of Poland—were perfectly happy to let as many Poles as possible perish, and even shot down some Western planes carrying desperately needed supplies for the rebels. Such aid, though urged by Churchill, was further curtailed by Roosevelt upon pressure from Stalin. It is against this background that Wajda’s film unfurls.
It begins with a masterly four-minute tracking shot introducing us to a company that, the narrator tells us, three days before numbered seventy, now only forty-three—soon even fewer. The camera catches the principals as they crop up hugging walls and ducking constant enemy fire. Most have noms de guerre that mean something: the humane commanding lieutenant, Zadra (roughly, a vexatious person); his rigorous aide, Madry (Wise); the pretty crop-haired Madonna of a messenger girl, Halinka, no last name. The narrator says she “promised her mother on leaving home to keep warm. They probably all made similar promises. All mothers are the same.” These words convey much of the film’s ambiguous tone: there is something funny and touching about these promises, sweet and melancholy about maternal sameness.
Next come the officious sergeant-major and company record-keeper Kula (Bullet), and the handsome officer-cadet Korab (an archaic word for a ship), followed by his tall, blond aide, Corporal Smukly (Slim), who dreams of someday building airplanes. Lastly, a strange unarmed and unconcerned civilian, with a long face and staring eyes: Michal, a composer who just attached himself to the group. “These,” we hear, “are the heroes of the tragedy. Watch them closely, for these are the last hours of their lives.” So no real suspense, just their—and our—hope against hope.
A departing fellow officer tells Zadra, “They won’t take us alive,” which Zadra calls “the Polish way.” Poles are famous for their hopeless heroism; in a subsequent film, Lotna, Wajda was to celebrate their mythic cavalry charge against German tanks. Now the company mingles with a bunch of wounded, including a girl on a stretcher who once sold Smukly his boots. He asks what her mother said about joining up. After a slight pause—there are many pauses of various sizes in this film—she replies, “She’s dead.” Asked about her wound, the girl says, “It’s nothing.” As they carry her away, the blanket slips from her, revealing a leg amputated above the knee.
Zadra’s unit takes overnight refuge in a well-appointed but semiruinous bourgeois house (“Appalling!” the composer calls its luxury), featuring a Bechstein grand on which he starts to play Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude” before reluctantly switching to a popular tango requested by Madry. Later he improvises; the score by Jan Krenz acquires, as the film progresses, a spooky quality, as of spirit voices groaning. Next morning, Korab chances on Madry and Halinka in bed together. To Korab’s “Hardly the time,” Madry responds with, “Now’s precisely the time for it.”
The composer, with some difficulty, gets through to his wife and small daughter on an army phone line. Just as he receives some reassurance from them, their voices go dead; the Germans have seized them. Even so, the stay in the house is not all bad: Michal gets to leaf through a volume of Botticelli reproductions; Korab finds water and a mirror for a shave. There he is suddenly joined by Stokrotka (Daisy), a blonde good-time girl sweet on him, who claims to be back from safety to be his messenger. The scene is artfully and erotically shot by Wajda, images and words imparting an ironic mixture of insulting insinuations and precipitous love play, cut off suddenly by a close explosion.
This purgatorial interlude is over; now hell begins. At first it is aboveground, with Korab performing a heroic attack on a tank—one of several sinisterly approaching—successful but leaving him wounded. Zadra grudgingly permits the sturdy Stokrotka to be Korab’s support, as what has been reduced to a mere platoon of twenty-six descends into the sewers, through them to reach its next destination, the city center.
Obviously, we understand this as a descent into hell, even without the composer’s quoting appropriate passages from Dante. Altogether, this pied-piperish musician, playing an appropriated ocarina, his demented eyes bulging from shadowy sockets, is the one wrong note running through the film. Enough that the soldiers are now waist-deep in sewage, submerged in a darkness their flashlights barely alleviate; that diverging sewage canals make them lose their way; that they inadvertently splinter into small groups deprived of contact with one another; and that the movie, without being a smellie, lets you sniff the stench.
Two diversely tragic love stories ensue: Korab and Stokrotka’s and Madry and Halinka’s. And also a sort of third: Zadra’s no less shattering love for his troops. There is a cruel, indeed satanic, irony in what follows, which it is not for me to divulge. Even the carefully preserved company records, kept by the frantic Kula, contribute, in the film’s bitterly sardonic concluding shot, a horrible, symbolic joke.
But everything that happens in these flooded, reeking, tentacular corridors is something devils would laugh at while the rest of us shudder. Jerzy Lipman’s expressionist cinematography, wresting a less than realistic chiaroscuro from an infernal pitch darkness, searingly combines the visions of Piranesi and Georges de la Tour. Grotesque absurdity and hideous frustration enmesh the luckless men and women, their very ears assaulted by ghostly sounds spawned on ghastly silences.
Is Kanal, then, all gloom and doom? Not entirely. There is brilliant shot-making, capturing near-superhuman endurance, magisterially enacted profligate heroism to light up the dark—if perhaps no more so than the matches desperately struck by the groping soldiers. Yet how much that little can signify.John Simon is the theater critic for New York Magazine and the music critic for The New Leader. He has published several volumes of film, theater, and literary criticism.
Lacombe LucienLacombe, Lucien By Pauline Kael
From Pauline Kael's 1974 New Yorker review. Reprinted with permission from the New Yorker.
Introducing himself to a delicate, fine-boned parisienne, the farm-boy hero of Louis Malle’s new movie does not give his name as Lucien Lacombe; he gives the bureaucratic designation—Lacombe, Lucien. He presents himself name inverted because he is trying to be formal and proper, as he’s been trained to be at school and at work, sweeping floors at his local, small-town hospital, in southwest France. When he meets the girl, France Horn—and falls in love with her—his new job is hunting down and torturing people for the Gestapo. He likes it a whole lot better than the hospital. The title Lacombe, Lucien refers to the case of a boy of seventeen who doesn’t achieve a fully human identity, a boy who has an empty space where feelings beyond the purely instinctive are expected to be.The time is 1944, after the Normandy landings, and the Nazis and their collaborators won’t be in power long. Lucien doesn’t know that. He had tried to join the Resistance, but the local Resistance leader was his old schoolmaster, who thought him stupid, and Lucien stumbled into a job with the Nazis. Actually, he isn’t stupid; he has the kinds of talents that don’t show at school—he has a country boy’s skills, and he knows how to survive in the wild. The schoolmaster is right, though, in perceiving that Lucien is apolitical and unprincipled—that he just wants some action. Lucien is good to his mother, and in normal circumstances he would work on a farm, taking care of his own and not bothering anybody, and he’d probably be a respected, unconscionably practical member of the community. But in wartime, he’s a perfect candidate for Nazi bullyboy. Malle’s film is a long, close look at the banality of evil; it is—not incidentally—one of the least banal movies ever made. The actions are handled plainly, with restraint—with no attempt to shock anyone, or impress anyone; the actions are what we knew already. There’s no special magic involved in the moviemaking technique—it’s simple, head-on, unforced. The movie is the boy’s face. The magic is in the intense curiosity and intelligence behind the film—in Malle’s perception that the answers to our questions about how people with no interest in politics become active participants in brutal torture are to be found in Lucien’s plump-cheeked, narrow-eyed face, and that showing us what this boy doesn’t react to can be the most telling of all.
Aurore Clément, who plays France Horn, had not acted before; Malle must have selected her for her fair coloring and tall, slim fragility and her ultracivilized, poignant little face. She lacks an actress’s tension, and so at times she seems a passive camera subject, but she gives us the double nature of France’s response to Lucien: her amused derision of his ignorant attempts to play the courtier, and the sensual bond that draws them together. We see, even, that underneath France’s fastidiousness and her sharp sensitivity there’s a practical animal streak. Clément’s beauty is almost prehensile, like the young Nicole Stéphane’s in [Jean-Pierre Melville’s] Les enfants terribles, and maybe it was this extra quality that attracted Malle. Her old-young face is incapable of surprise yet permanently marked by fear, like a doe’s. The French heritage, in all its vaunted refinement, has made her hard in a way that connects with Lucien’s precivilized obtuseness. She doesn’t suffer, as her father does, from the humiliation of their position, and it may be Mr. Horn’s recognition of this that makes him flail about and bicker with her—berating her as a whore and in the next breath begging her pardon. Lucien, we feel, is the last straw for Horn. After the long period of hiding, behaving prudently, and playing by whatever signals the scummy aristocrat sent out, Horn suddenly can’t tolerate the pain of polite self-effacement any longer, and he begins to break. He dresses in his showiest boulevardier’s finery and takes a promenade; he decides he must talk things out with Lucien “man-to-man,” and when Lucien is too busy to talk at home, he strolls over to Gestapo headquarters to wait for him.Throughout the film, this Gestapo hotel-headquarters recalls the hotel gathering places in thirties French films, yet it has an unaccustomed theatricality about it. The collaborators who work there, live there, torture their victims there, and party there, too, have a wide range of motives. Nothing links them but their willingness to serve the Nazi cause, and that willingness is highly variable, since—not much more political than Lucien—they’re primarily serving themselves. There’s a former policeman who was discharged from his post; now a high official, he gets shaved in his office while an adoring, spinsterish secretary reads him the latest letters of denunciation from informers. The group also includes a onetime bicycle-racing champion (a nod, perhaps, to the bicycle champ in The Sorrow and the Pity, who said he “didn’t see any Germans in Clermont-Ferrand”) and a movie starlet, the aristocrat’s girlfriend, waiting for him to gather enough loot so they can take off for Spain. They’re much like the ordinary characters in a French film classic, but they’re running things now. The hotel is almost like a stage, and, wielding power, they’re putting on an act for each other—playing the big time. Nazism itself (and Italian Fascism, too) always had a theatrical flourish, and those drawn into Gestapo work may well have felt that their newfound authority gave them style. The Nazi hotel here represents this troupe’s idea of government. Lucien, the country bumpkin, going into the maid’s room, at her invitation, or peeking through a doorway to see his old schoolmaster, whom he has drunkenly betrayed, being tortured may recall the quite different figure in [Jean Cocteau’s] The Blood of a Poet wandering in the corridors of the Hôtel des Folies-Dramatiques. Like Cocteau’s poet, Lucien has fallen into a dreamworld. And he and the other collaborators have landed on their feet: they have become criminally powerful and can act out their impulses.
Malle’s hero could have been placed almost anywhere, at any time, but it is right for a French artist to place him where Malle did. The director Jean-Pierre Melville, who was himself a member of the Resistance, said in an interview that when he came out of the theater after seeing The Sorrow and the Pity, he saw Roland Petit and Zizi Jeanmaire in the queue waiting for the next performance, and his first reflex was to pretend that he hadn’t seen them—he felt as though he’d been caught coming out from a pornographic film. The pornography of The Sorrow and the Pity is in the shameful ordinariness of the people who betray their fellows. The movies, with their roots in stage melodrama, have conditioned us to look for evil in social deviants and the physically aberrant. The pornography that Malle delves into makes us think back to the protests of innocence by torturers and mass murderers—all those normal-looking people leading normal lives who said they were just doing their job. Without even mentioning the subject of innocence and guilt, Lacombe, Lucien, in its calm, leisurely, dispassionate way, addresses it on a deeper level than any other movie I know.Louis Malle has always been an alert and daring director who doesn’t repeat himself, but in recent years, since he broke with the smooth professionalism and surface sophistication of his early work, and made the series of documentaries that form Phantom India [1969], he appears to have begun anew. The picture he made after that experience, the high comedy Murmur of the Heart [1971], set in 1954, suggested an artist’s autobiographical first work, except that it showed a master’s command of the medium. Now he has gone back further, to the period of his childhood (he was born in 1932), to events he couldn’t make sense of. Lacombe, Lucien is more of a test even than India: Malle could approach India in terms of his own sensibility, but in Lacombe, Lucien, he is trying to seek out and create a sensibility utterly different from his own
Some artists have a natural feeling for the riches of chaos; when they don’t pin things down for us to know exactly what’s going on, we understand that they’re not giving us that kind of meaning—they’re giving us more than that. And Malle achieves that with Lucien, but he isn’t skilled yet at merging scripted scenes with found material, and at times we feel that something has been left out. (What is France doing with those piled-up stones? Has her grandmother died?) In the scene of a Resistance doctor’s arrest, when the doctor’s phlegmatic teenage son shows Lucien his model ship, it looks as if Malle couldn’t control the elements, and chose to retain the scene because of the overtones in the boy’s physical resemblance to Lucien, and despite the boy’s unconvincing lack of interest in his father’s fate. Working with nonprofessionals in the leads and adapting the script to Lucien’s emerging character, Malle probably had to cut scenes he needed that didn’t pan out, but there are ellipses that aren’t easy to account for—principally in Horn’s sudden, suicidal carelessness. Some stages in Horn’s breakdown seem to be missing, and his later scenes are lamely directed. Holger Löwenadler, a distinguished figure in the Swedish theater for over half a century (he appeared in [Ingmar] Bergman’s 1947 film A Ship to India, and in recent years he has toured Europe in Bergman stage productions, playing leads in Ibsen and Strindberg), prepares Horn’s character so carefully in his early scenes that it’s puzzling when the later ones are truncated. We miss Horn’s shift to recklessness, and not enough is made of the moment when he appears all dressed up, his hat tilted rakishly over one eye. Is he deliberately calling attention to himself? There are brilliant ideas, like that “man-to-man” talk Horn wants with Lucien. (How can a Jew talk man-to-man at Gestapo headquarters, and what could Horn and that thug Lucien possibly talk about?) But Horn’s breakdown is too fast, and we can’t perceive why he is doing what he’s doing; this is the wrong place for Malle to stand back and let the story just seem to happen—he has failed to provide the necessary information.The picture is a knockout, and the flaws don’t diminish its stature, so it may appear silly to discuss imperfections—which could be passed over as ambiguities. But it’s because the picture is a major work that it seems necessary to distinguish between the great ambiguities of its theme and the piddling, diversionary gaffes and gaps in its execution. There’s another reason for bringing up the crudenesses: they are the price that Malle the aesthete is willing to pay for discovery. Here is a director who achieved sleek technical perfection in his early, limited films and who is now saying that perfection is cheap and easy (which seems to be true for him). He’s looking for something that he doesn’t have the tools or the temperament to grab hold of, and he’s catching it anyway.Malle’s renunciation of conventional drama—or his new indifference to it—cripples him in places where he still needs it. He hasn’t fully cast off the hard shell of the brilliant young pro who made The Lovers [1958] and Viva Maria! [1965] and Zazie [1960], but he’s lost his slick. He’s in the process of turning himself inside out and reaching into the common experience. Malle isn’t used to playing by ear; he keeps looking at the notes and seeing they’re wrong, revising them and hoping they’re better. Yet somehow, with all the wrong notes he hits, and parts of the bass left out, he gets sounds that nobody’s ever heard before.
Forbidden GamesSYNOPSIS: A timeless evocation of childhood innocence corrupted, René Clément’s Forbidden Games tells the story of a young girl orphaned by war and the farm boy she joins in a fantastical world of macabre play. At once mythical and heartbreakingly real, this unique film features astonishing performances by its child stars and was honored with a special foreign language film Academy Award in 1952.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Paulette
Brigitte Fossey
Michel Dollé
Georges Poujouly
Père Dollé
Lucien Hubert
Mère Dollé
Suzanne Courtal
Georges Dollé
Jacques Marin
Berthe Dollé
Laurence Badie
Père Gouard
André Wasley
Francis Gouard
Amédée
Credits
Director
René Clément
Screenplay
Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost and François Boyer
Dialogue
René Clément, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost
Producer
Robert Dorfmann
Cinematography
Robert Juillard
Editing
Roger Dwyre
From the novel by
François Boyer
Art director
Paul Bertrand
Music
Narcisco Yepes
Sound
Jacques Lébreton
Disc Features
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Collection of new and archival interviews with director René Clément and actress Brigitte Fossey
Alternate opening and ending to the film
Original theatrical trailer
Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
New and improved subtitle translation
A new essay by film scholar Peter Matthews
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Forbidden Games: Death and the Maiden
By Peter MatthewsDecember 05, 2005
Cinema is a photographic trace of life. For that reason, it’s also a perpetual witness to mortality. Georges Poujouly, the child actor who stars, with Brigitte Read more »
Forbidden Games
By David EhrensteinApril 11, 1988
Over the years countless films have been made about war, its horrors and its devastations. Few, however, have been as moving and heartfelt as René Clément’s Forbidden Games Read more »
Before the RainSYNOPSIS: The first film made in the newly independent Republic of Macedonia, Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain crosscuts the stories of an orthodox Christian monk (Grégoire Colin), a British photo agent (Katrin Cartlidge), and a native Macedonian war photographer (Rade Šerbedžija) to paint a portrait of simmering ethnic and religious hatred about to reach its boiling point. Made during the strife of the war-torn Balkan states in the nineties, this gripping triptych of love and violence is also a timeless evocation of the loss of pastoral innocence, and remains one of recent cinema’s most powerful laments on the futility of war.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Anne
Katrin Cartlidge
Aleksander
Rade Šerbedžija
Kiril
Grégoire Colin
Zamira
Labina Mitevska
Credits
Director
Milcho Manchevski
Screenplay
Milcho Manchevski
Producer
Cat Villiers, Sam Taylor, Cedomir Kolar and Judy Counihan
Co-producers
Gorjan Tozija, Frederique Dumas-Zajdela and Marc Baschet
Editing
Nicolas Gaster
Cinematography
Manuel Teran
Music
Anastasia
Disc Features
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Milcho Manchevski
Audio commentary featuring Manchevski and film scholar Annette Insdorf
New video interview with actor Rade Šerbedžija
Behind the Scenes in Macedonia, a short 1993 documentary about the making of Before the Rain
Soundtrack selections, featuring the music of Macedonian band Anastasia
On-set footage, theatrical trailers, and stills galleries of production photos, storyboards, and letters
A selection from Manchevski’s photography collection Street
Manchevski’s award-winning “Tennessee” music video
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Ian Christie
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Before the Rain: Never-Ending Story
By Ian ChristieJune 23, 2008
Before the Rain brought a vision of “Balkan conflict” to the world that caused a sensation in the mid-1990s, winning the Golden Lion in Venice and an Academy Read more »
Ballad of a SoldierSYNOPSIS: Russian soldier Alyosha Skvortsov is granted a visit with his mother after he single-handedly fends off two enemy tanks. As he journeys home, Alyosha encounters the devastation of his war-torn country, witnesses glimmers of hope among the people, and falls in love. With its poetic visual imagery, Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier is an unconventional meditation on the effects of war, and a milestone in Russian cinema.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Alyosha Skvortsov
Vladimir Ivashov
Shura
Zhanna Prokhorenko
The mother
Antonina Maksimova
The general
Nikolai Kryuchkov
Vasya
Yevgeni Urbansky
Credits
Director
Grigori Chukhrai
Screenplay
Grigori Chukhrai and Valentin Ezhov
Producer
M. Chernova
Cinematography
Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savelyeva
Editing
Mariya Timofeyeva
Disc Features
New digital transfer
Interview with director Grigori Chukhrai and stars Vladimir Ivashov and Zhanna Prokhorenko, conducted after a preview screening in New York
New and improved English subtitle translation
Optimal image quality; RSDL dual-layer edition
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Ballad of a Soldier
By Vida JohnsonApril 29, 2002
In 1960, Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier had a triumphant tour of the international festival circuit, garnering many prizes in such far-flung places as Cannes, San Read more »
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Ashes and DiamondsSYNOPSIS: On the last day of World War II in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar. But a mistake stalls his progress and leads him to Krystyna, a beautiful barmaid who gives him a glimpse of what his life could be. Gorgeously photographed and brilliantly performed, Ashes and Diamonds masterfully interweaves the fate of a nation with that of one man, resulting in one of the most important Polish films of all time.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Maciek Chelmicki
Zbigniew Cybulski
Krystyna
Ewa Krzyzewska
Szczuka
Waclaw Zastrzezynski
Andrzej
Adam Pawlikowski
Drewnowski
Bogumil Kobiela
Porter
Jan Ciecierski
Pieniazek
Stanislaw Milski
Kotowicz
Artur Mlodnicki
Mrs. Staniewicz
Halina Kwiatkowska
Major Florian
Ignacy Machowski
Slomka
Zbigniew Skowronski
Stefka
Barbara Krafftowna
Credits
Director
Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay
Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Andrzejewski
Cinematography
Jerzy Wojcik
Editing
Halina Nawrocka
Based on the novel by
Jerzy Andrzejewski
Sound
Bogdan Bienkowski
Music conducted by
Filip Nowak
Production design
Roman Mann
Camera
Krzsztof Winiewicz, Bogdan Myslinski, Jerzy Szurowski, Zygmunt Krusznicki and Wieslaw Zdort
Disc Features
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary by film scholar Annette Insdorf
Andrzej Wajda: On Ashes and Diamonds, a 35-minute exclusive new interview with the director, second director Janusz Morgenstern, and film critic Jerzy Plazewski
Vintage newsreel footage on the making of Ashes and Diamonds
Rare behind-the-scenes production photos, publicity stills, and posters
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Paul Coates
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Ashes and Diamonds
By Paul CoatesApril 15, 2005
Ashes and Diamonds has rightly been lauded as one of the finest of postwar East-Central European films, and the most vital work of the Polish School. It is salutary, however Read more »
Ashes and Diamonds
By Daniel GerouldNovember 15, 1994
Andrzej Wajda’s third full-length film, Ashes and Diamonds (Popiol y diament) established the director as a leader of the new Polish cinema. Set in a provincial town on May Read more »
The Cranes Are flyingSYNOPSIS: Veronica and Boris are blissfully in love, until the eruption of World War II tears them apart. Boris is sent to the front lines…and then communication stops. Meanwhile, Veronica tries to ward off spiritual numbness while Boris’s draft-dodging cousin makes increasingly forceful overtures. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, The Cranes Are Flying is a superbly crafted drama, bolstered by stunning cinematography and impassioned performances.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Veronika
Tatyana Samojlova
Boris
Aleksey Batalov
Fyodor Ivanovich
Vasili Merkuryev
Mark
Aleksandr Shvorin
Irina
Svetlana Kharitonova
Credits
Director
Mikhail Kalatozov
Screenplay
Viktor Rosov
Producer
Mikhail Kalatozov
Music
Moisey Vaynberg
Cinematography
Sergei Urusevsky
Editing
Mariya Timofeyeva
Production design
Yevgeni Svidetelev
Disc Features
New digital transfer
New and improved English subtitle translation
Optimal image quality; RSDL dual-layer edition
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
The Cranes Are Flying
By Chris FujiwaraApril 29, 2002
The Soviet Union lost some ten percent of its prewar population in World War II. For years, Soviet cinema was able to represent this traumatic loss only within strict Read more »
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