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"There's something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated."

Watching Black Narcissus, staring deeply into its luminously filtered, Oscar-winning Technicolor palette, I get the sense of filmmakers (and to some extent) an audience just bursting to get something out that recent history and the circumstances of their times had all but directly forbade. The film is full of allusions, meaningful gazes, innuendos and subliminal suggestions that build and build over the course of an hour and a half, finally becoming too much to contain and culminating in one of the most memorable "snap and meltdown" sequences of its era. Though the movie is probably most famous for its final sequence, from start to finish it's full of wonderful scenes, performances and most astonishingly, gorgeous cinematography that conjures up colors and images capable of burning themselves quickly into the mind's eye of anyone who views them in a highly receptive state of mind.

Our subject is another masterpiece from Powell and Pressburger, a.k.a. The Archers, that prolific writing/producing/directing team that's already been amply represented here in the Criterion Collection (and we're not close to being done with them yet.) They continued to sur themselves with each release, though I feel like I'm missing a big piece of their development since I've never viewed the film they made between I Know Where I'm Going! and this one: A Matter of Life and Death (released in the USA as Stairway to Heaven) which I suppose Criterion may want to release someday if they ever acquire the rights. I've watched a couple of YouTube clips to get a sense of what it's like but that's just not the same as seeing the whole thing. Ordinarily I don't think I'd make a big deal out of skipping an entry in a director's filmography as I work through this series, but I've heard a lot of good things about AMOLAD and figured I should mention it here. So I have and now I'm ready to move on.

Black Narcissus is the story of a small group of British nuns who receive an assignment to open a convent, medical dispensary and school in Mopu, the cliff-top fortress of a deceased Indian aristocrat who used the forbidding location as a kind of pleasure palace for his concubines. The exotic remoteness and sensuous history of the place have thus far proven to be unsuitable for other purposes, but the heir of the property has made it available to the Order of the Servants of Mary, based in Calcutta so another effort is made to domesticate the place, now known as St. Faith, and by extension, the mountain peasants who live in this distant outpost, "at the back of beyond."

Sister Clodagh (played by Deborah Kerr, who I last saw take on three roles in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) becomes the youngest Mother Superior in the order, and is given charge over four other nuns, including one Sister Ruth who seems to be shunted off her way because she's become too troublesome to the rest of her sisters at the main branch. As we learn over the course of the film, Clodagh has mixed motives for taking on the vocation of a nun, and she's not alone in this. A reasonable assumption is subtly delivered that the women each took on this unnatural discipline of life in response to their own individual crisis, and the drama largely consists of watching how they respond to the ordeal of trying to overcome the powerful cultural and natural forces that confront them at Mopu.

For culture, we have not merely an ancient rustic way of life favored by the inhabitants of this Himalayan valley, but also the powerful allure of its pagan alternative to the Anglo-Catholic disciplines that Clodagh seeks to impose (as a woman under orders and out to prove her own worthiness, of course.) The palace is decked in lavish erotic artworks, too valuable to destroy or paint over, but still a reproach to the new standards of modesty. A few choice pans of the paintings, suggestive but not explicit about the sort of things that used to go on there in the old days, were obviously the only way to get so many boobies on the screen in 1947 and they serve to turn up the heat just fine, given the situation.

On top of that (literally), a blissed-out, loincloth-clad holy man sits in a seemingly endless trance above the palace, staring across the valley at the mountain known in the native tongue as "the Bare Goddess." And to reach a slow simmer, we have Mr. Dean, an Englishman who favors short-shorts, miniature ponies, strong drink and ample exposure of chest hair, serving as agent to the General who invited the sisters in. Dean has carved out his own niche in local society and remains skeptical of the convent's chance of success and the mission that motivates their efforts. He's not a religious believer, seems uninterested in forging any closer relational commitments and has already seen a few previous failed experiments at redeeming the Mopu property. Quickly sizing up the dilemma that Clodagh and her nuns face, he situates himself saucily in between them and the bewildering influences they seek to master. He knows that he's their go-to guy, given the lack of any other reliable choice, and he exploits the opportunity to suit his own inscrutable purposes.

Thus the plot tension is set-up to deliver a challenging and provocative nudge to postwar Brits as they addressed the problem of what to do with their old empire. Increasingly costly and difficult to maintain as the UK continued to rebuild, and lacking in moral justification when compared and contrasted with the world-domination schemes of , Japan and past imperialisms, Black Narcissus can be read as an allegory of sorts for the futility and ethical bankruptcy of Western efforts to subjugate and dominate "the Orient." Some of the paternalistic, patronizing assumptions about the "child-like" natives are put in the mouths of characters, neither blatantly offensive nor in an overtly spoonfeeding fashion. It's quite possible that someone who holds to a benign condescending view of non-Western cultures might miss the analogy altogether and simply read this as a story of women too hard-pressed by the elements and their own infirmities to have a successful go at it when it comes to the demanding task of missionary work. Likewise, it's possible to just be enchanted by the colors and the strangeness of all that goes on here and find one's entertainment satisfaction in that. There's plenty of that to be found here in the abundant artistic superiority put forth by the Archers.

As I watched it last night, one of my sons was impressed by the visuals he saw, ing the film near its conclusion, as characters danced along the cliff's edge. He asked if they shot it on location and I was pleased to inform him that we were watching a wonder of studio-crafted artifice. Everything was filmed in England, using matte paintings, miniatures and a huge artificial set in London's Pinewood Studios, along with a few outdoor garden shots for the exterior sequences. As impressed as I am when I think of lugging all that equipment halfway around the world back in the day, I'm no less awed by what the filmmakers were able to achieve here in creating a truly otherworldly atmosphere. The decorations provide the background of course, but it's the characters who bring it all to life.

And it's a great cast. Esmond Knight as the Old General adds another role to his list of quirky eccentrics. Jean Simmons, fresh from playing the foxy young Estella in Great Expectations, darkens up her skin, grows up a bit and does a nice turn with a hankie dance as native orphan girl Kanchi, and it's fun to see her flirt with The Thief of Bagdad's Sabu, come into young adulthood as the Young General, the only post-adolescent male student in the school who naively provides some surprisingly incisive dialog on the encounter between Christianity and Indian religious traditions. Their enactment of the tale of The Prince and the Beggarmaid mirrors in a way the overall theme of ancient simplicity disarming the conventional powers of this world. And the old crone Ayah serves as a wizened court jester and provides some good laughs.

The standouts here though are Deborah Kerr, who has to convey a lot of repressed tension as she comes to grips with the pressures that she's taken onto herself and the act of self-denial (self-betrayal?) that got her into this predicament, and Kathleen Byron as the fragile, erratic, hyper-aroused Sister Ruth, who gets to light up most of the fireworks herself, especially in the last five minutes of the film.

The film's title, by the way, has nothing to do with an exotic breed of flower or the psychological quality of narcissism (well, let me ponder that one for awhile before I rule it out entirely!) It's simply the name of a cologne, imported ironically from London, favored by the Young General. With a wave of his handkerchief, he casually unleashes it in class, disrupting things a bit and setting off a chain of events that seals his own fate and indirectly contributes to the collapse of the St. Faith convent. A nice metaphor for the small choices we make in life that go on to have big consequences. "Oh Sister, don't you think it's rather common to smell of ourselves?"

"Scarce a night went by without my falling asleep with the image of her pretty face before my eyes."

At the risk of giving short shrift to a film that's probably worthy of closer reflection and more deeply considered analysis, I'm going to make quick work of this entry on David Lean's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. No disrespect intended, it's just one of those films that doesn't leave me with a whole lot to say. I've seen this film, and other renditions of the story, several times over the years. I gave it another look over the weekend, and my first, simplest summary of the movie would be something along the lines of "very well crafted, technically proficient, a textbook case of how to transfer a beloved and familiar classic novel to the big screen in a version made to serve as the go-to reference for decades to come."

Press me a bit harder on the issue and I'll say this: David Lean's follow up to Brief Encounter shows him beginning the stylistic transformation that will eventually lead to the production of three-hour-plus mega-epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Great Expectations still clocks in at just under two hours, but as anyone who's read the Dickens original knows (and others who haven't read it can still sense from watching how swiftly the plot jumps along,) Lean had to do a lot of streamlining here. I got the sense as I watched that he might have been straining under the limitations of keeping it within that 120-minute time frame.

With just a few significant but dramatically justifiable changes to the story of Pip, an English orphan who comes into a surprising fortune and lives much of his life misinformed as to the source of his happiness, the production aims squarely for the heart of middlebrow respectability and hits its target with consistent efficiency. Over the course of the story, we're treated to Pip's emergence from childhood hardship into improbably prosperous young adulthood and his acquisition of manners. Just when I was thinking to myself that the middle third's dandified daintiness was slowing things down more than I'd like, the screenwriters thought the same thing and reintroduced the scowling presence of Finley Currie (the crusty old seaman from I Know Where I'm Going!) back into the narrative, gritting things up just in the nick of time. Pip goes on to learn his life lessons about the illusory nature of wealth and prestige, but hangs on to a hopelessly romantic case of the mopes for Estella before finally getting his chance to let the sunshine in at story's end.

The earlier sequences of Pip as a boy are by general consensus regarded as the most effective and influential of the film. The image Criterion used for the DVD cover, of Pip standing over his mother's grave in a churchyard, occurs less than three minutes into the film, and his famous encounter with the escaped convict Magwitch serves as archetypal jump scene when the two first meet. Images of him running in silhouette through fog-shrouded marshes conjure up that haunted feeling evoked by classic surrealist paintings of being utterly alone and lost in an eerie, indifferent world. This avenue into Pip's story works effectively in getting us to care about what happens to him as he grows up, and the intrigue only deepens when, after offering naive but generous assistance to the runaway prisoner, he is then invited to be the playmate of a cruel young beauty, Estella, who resides in the decrepit mansion owned by mad Miss Haversham. Jean Simmons plays the young Estella and it's kind of a shame that they couldn't have kept her in that role because the actress who portrays her as an adult, Valerie Hobson, turns in a bland performance. Simmons, a real teenager at the time, had both charm and menace, whereas Hobson had neither and we are left to just interpret the words she speaks in order to believe that she's cold-hearted and incapable of returning the love that Pip wants to share with her.

Likewise, the casting of John Mills, nearly 40 years old at the time, as a young adult Pip, has drawn scorn that seems well-enough deserved. Some commenters would have preferred Alec Guinness, who plays Pocket, Pip's sidekick, in that role, and I think it might have worked, though Guinness didn't fit the kind of leading man conventions that the producers probably had in mind. Mills, like Hobson, is bland but adequate - not really capable of making us care more deeply about Pip than his circumstances and the puzzle of his unexpected wealth already have. The strength of the film, and our conduit to happily settle into its milieu, is found more in the cinematic qualities - dramatic lighting, convincing period sets, sharply cast ing actors - rather than the lead performers on screen. The most memorable characters make their appearance, with figures like Pumblechook, Wemmick and his "aged P," Estella's suitor Bentley Drummle and others popping in and out more like stage props at times than as real people, though they provide fine amusement.

Because the task of filming a long, sprawling novel like Great Expectations demanded such condensation before the advent of the TV mini-series, and because this particular story was so well known to its audience, Lean had both the benefit and the burden of having to capture its essence in memorable scenes, tastefully produced and photographed. At this task, he succeeded quite irably. Great Expectations reaped rewards and established it's "all time great" reputation on technical merits and on its shrewd ability to avoid committing any egregious faux pas in its handling of revered source material. Charles Dickens at the time was regarded as the world's greatest storyteller, yet no successful adaptations of his novels had lived up to the "great expectations" that accompanied an association with his name. David Lean showed the world how to do the job.

The Criterion DVD is one of their earlier efforts, with a nice transfer (though there's a bit in the second half of the film where some truly ghastly scratches mar the image) and theatrical trailer, but nothing else to offer in the way of "goodies." I'm fine with that - this is a film that maybe benefits more from just being what it is on its own , a well-financed, competently-delivered crowd pleaser that leaves its viewers feeling literarily informed as well. Pip learned his lessons by wrestling with his conscience and slowly waking up to the illusions that others cast around him and he eagerly embraced, without the need for over-extended exploration or explanation of what it all was supposed to mean. You probably know the story and its moral by now, but I can't help but wonder how many of us would really be willing to give away a savory pork pie and a dram of brandy to any old runaway jailbird we ran into out on the marsh?

"The mere thought of losing you drives me absolutely dotty."

Green For Danger is the kind of film that's pretty easy to overlook and thereby underestimate among the towering artistic achievements scattered so liberally throughout the Criterion Collection. It's not directed by one of the classic auteurs - an English film, there's no Hitchcock, Powell & Pressburger or David Lean credit attached to the project (though director Sidney Gilliat has a connection to Hitchcock as co-screenwriter for The Lady Vanishes.) The casting is good, but Laurence Olivier wasn't involved and Alec Guiness was just getting started. Though well-crafted on its own , it's not regarded as particularly innovative or influential in its overall impact on the development of cinema. It's a genre picture, a classic British murder mystery in a medical/wartime setting, which in some circles seems to reduce the overall significance of a motion picture. Over on the Criterion fan-site theauteurs.com, Green For Danger doesn't appear to have generated much interest, with only 23 listing it among their favorites, compared to over 200 for a pair of films associated with it, the aforementioned The Lady Vanishes and Brief Encounter. All in all, a relatively minor film in the canon, and even as a DVD product, it doesn't really stand out. Though it's priced in the upper tier ($40 MSRP) it's only a single disc set with basic liner notes, a somewhat dated and pedantic commentary track from 1993 (brought over from Criterion's original laserdisc release of this film) and a brief video interview tossed in to provide at least one supplemental feature. And that's it! At least we get cool graphic artwork on the cover... and it did make a nice pairing when released by Criterion in 2007 in conjunction with 49th Parallel: bookend British films from the beginning and end of the Second World War.

But at the risk of having already underwhelmed your expectations, please don't take any of that as discouragement from me about watching this movie! I've seen it several times now and with the last elements of mystery and surprise pretty much exhausted on my end, it still provides ample entertainment value. Green For Danger is a tightly constructed, briskly paced adaptation of a popular novel of its time that puts us squarely into the psychological space occupied by English citizens in the waning days of World War II. After spending the previous week pondering the timeless, mythical setting of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, I enjoyed the switch over to the tangible specificity of Green For Danger's setting: a rural English hospital in mid-August 1944 - a particular moment in time when England was dealing with one of 's last gasp assaults of the war, the V-1 bomb attacks which launched drone aircraft in the general vicinity of British cities that would crash and explode whenever and wherever they ran out of gas. The random nature of the bombings introduced a new level of stress on the populace, for a time anyway, until the British civil defence systems figured out that the V-1's were relatively easy to spot and shoot down harmlessly by surface to air cannons and airborne fighters. That process took a few weeks to manage, and Green For Danger is set precisely in that window of time. It was a bit of a risk for the filmmakers to set their story in such recent events and release the film at a time when the popular demand was more toward escapist fare and veering away from memories and experiences that many in the audience would just as soon forget. But the film did go on to achieve some success in its original release and maintains a loyal audience of irers to this day.

So besides the usual intricate plotting and evidence-planting mechanics that go into the assembly of a suspenseful mystery story, whether on film or in print, what stands out to me is the peculiar set of circumstances that the characters in the film were dealing with and how that stress influenced and in some cases provoked certain behaviors. Given the nature of my professional work (in social services and mental health,) I'm always inclined toward a psychological interpretation of what's going on in that part of their lives when I enter these cinematic worlds. And here I see a lot of stuff tilting the diagnosis toward Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which of course was not recognized as such at this time. A couple of characters here manifest some symptoms pretty overtly; the others appear to be coping with the disruption of their ordinary lives by falling back on characteristic behaviors. There's the prosperous womanizer Mr. Eden whose prowess at smooth-talking the ladies provides ample distraction from the loss of fortune and social comforts that the war's toll has exerted. And how about Dr. Barnes, easily driven into fits of anger whenever he perceives a slight, whether its from the pretty Nurse Linley that he thinks he has claim to or from Mr. Purdy, the new hospital whose moralistic homilies on the power of Positive Thinking mask a manipulative cowardice that seeks to have others take the fall in order to "salvage" his own reputation. Even the blunt, straight-talking Nurse Woods, who seems on the surface to have her head on relatively straight, seems to have overly immersed herself in her work and shielded herself from intimate socializing as a way of avoiding the negative implications of a closely-guarded family secret.

Into this hothouse of simmering emotional pressures, something like a stiff-upper-lip forerunner of M*A*S*H, strolls one Inspector Cockrill, summoned from Scotland Yard when one of the nurses announces dramatically at a hospital social event that a recently deceased patient was MURDERED while in surgery! When that nurse herself winds up dead shortly after making the announcement, an investigation is launched that inevitably catches the rest of us into its net as we too want to figure out, who done it?

It's the sheer solidity and quality at all levels of production that makes this film highly successful, in my opinion. A few performances stand out, first and foremost Alistair Sim, whose turn as Inspector Cockrill adds twists of acidic, dry humor to the proceedings. His memorable screen entrance, about five minutes into the above clip, echoes a few more times as he punctuates the narrative with amusing encounters with the menacing doodlebugs - and his investigative manner incorporates marvelous cognitive incision with disarming pseudo-naivete. During a scene in which Mr. Eden and Dr. Barnes lose their cool and engage in a brawl, Cockrill lets the fight proceed without intervention, observing whatever clues might emerge from the skirmish with a gleefully sadistic grin on his face.

As I watched, I thought to myself, where have I seen that expression before? And it occurred to me that the same grin was plastered across the mug of Walter Huston as Old Scratch in The Devil and Daniel Webster (a.k.a. All That Money Can Buy)!

Trevor Howard, who we last saw as a doctor in Brief Encounter, here plays another medical professional, and it's tempting to think of his character here as that same love-lorn doctor from pre-war London, now run off here to the English countryside under an assumed identity, still prone to swooning emotions that run faster than he can control, transformed by one bitter heartbreak into the jealous, self-centered hothead Dr. Barnes.

And Sally Gray, as Nurse Linley, the muddled object of affection at the heart of Barnes' and Eden's conflict, actually had top billing in the film publicity, even though she's probably not so well known today. Purely from the looks of things, I can understand why - she's gorgeous! Even though she spends a fair amount of time on-screen locked up in a surgical mask. And on top of her pretty face and stylish blonde 'do, she possesses a sexy, sultry voice, a pitch lower than she probably would have had if she'd been an American actress at the time. Several years after completing this film, Ms. Gray married and became Constance Vera Browne, Baroness Oranmore and Browne (the Irish baron's third wife.)

As a mystery-thriller, Green For Danger does require the usual suspension of disbelief. The ending is implausible on several levels, but according to the rules of this game, still es muster and delivers satisfaction if one accepts the game to begin with. Just don't expect a life-changing, soul-shaking encounter with Ultimate Truth here - this ain't one of those Criterions.

"Once upon a time..."

This entry to the series has turned into the most vexing effort yet for me to complete! I first ran into a serious case of writer's block, probably as a result of over-thinking what I wanted to say, and then decided to take a different approach to it by attempting to create my first video blog - before running into some technical snags that caused me to just bag that idea for now so that I can get back on pace here.

So let me make the points that I had in mind for the video essay I intended to put together. Jean Cocteau's presentation of Beauty and the Beast is one of my very favorite films in the Criterion Collection, a disc I've owned for a few years now and one of several that seriously turned me on to further explorations of what this wonderful library has to offer. Having raised a family through the 1990s, it's hard for me to hear the phrase "Beauty and the Beast" without the Disney soundtrack going through my mind, but I can at least give Cocteau's version the upper hand when it comes to how I visualize the tale. Its dreamlike qualities and luminous imagery immediately grab most viewers right off the bat, and I've become ever more fascinated by the way Cocteau used symbols throughout the story with repeated exposure and prolonged attention to the finer elements of this film. But my main focus here, since I don't aim to write an exhaustive treatise on the film, is the wonderful performance by Josette Day, who portrays Belle with grace, elegance and precision. As amazing as it is to watch Jean Marais in his elaborate mask/make-up as the Beast (and the two other roles he takes on,) Belle is the focal point of this film: we are observing Beauty here, from a masculine point of view, as she es from subservient, well-mannered "girlhood" to emergence at the end of the story as a sensual woman with thoughts and desires of her own.

Ms. Day was already over 30 years old when the filming began, which in some sense presented a challenge to the conventional notions of Belle being a teenager or young adult, the typical age of female fairytale protagonists. With mature, elegant facial features and a statuesque physique, Day had to convey Belle's youthful innocence and naivete while disguising or distracting the viewer from realizing that they were watching a worldly adult woman acting on screen. She and Cocteau struck the right balance, in my opinion, by having her avoid overtly girlish attitudes and gestures, a la the Disney version and countless others, while also avoiding the overbearing moralism of the literary source that the film otherwise adhered to very closely. Here, Belle is always dignified, very serious, highly modest, humble and subservient. She is, in brief, the ideal specimen of a girl who's been raised right, but whose virtuous fidelity and self-denial, if not overthrown by some intrusive force, threaten to bottle her up in an emotional dead end.

Our first, very brief glimpse of Belle shows her in a servant-like role, attending to her sister.

The image would hardly lead us to think of them as siblings at all - Belle looks more like a maid here. We don't discover the nature of the relationship until a short while later, after her brother Ludovic and his friend Avenant make their way upstairs after accidentally shooting an arrow into the room occupied by the three sisters.

This next image shows Belle at work, polishing the wooden floor to such a luster that her reflection shines forth - obviously a special effect, but a striking way to give us our first direct encounter with Belle as "Beauty." Note also the shaft of the arrow that crosses her visage - surely not an accidental placement of this symbolic object.

We see how Avenant, the virile, aggressive suitor for Belle's affections uses the arrow here to cage Belle within his grasp.

And when his words and gestures fail to persuade her to accept his advances, we see him lose composure and try to force himself on her in an rather beastly way!

Belle's problem is that she's refusing to grow up and get on with her life. And why should she, having learned the skills necessary for approval and success in the role she's occupied to this point?

She seems to like being Daddy's girl.

But when Father's fortune is lost, her sisters take it hard, because they know their social standing and prospects for a rich husband will vanish as well. The old merchant sets off on a quest to claim one last shipment of goods that will save the family from ruin. While the sisters ask their father to return with gifts that fuel their vanity, Belle requests only a simple rose. However, that rose belongs to the Beast and when Father picks it, all sorts of trouble ensues. The old man must return within a few weeks, or send one of his daughters in his place. Intending to return himself, the father relishes these last opportunities to see his family before facing his doom.

Notice how Belle recoils from the gift of the rose - what she had asked for, but now seems reluctant to receive. Is that reluctance based on guilt for the chain of events she helped set in motion... or from an intuitive understanding that receiving it will put her customary way of life in irrevocable danger?

Throughout the film, Belle strikes a number of memorable, evocative poses that she holds long enough to ensure they're noticed by all but the most inattentive viewers. Some of them are best observed in full, fluid, flotation-like motion, but the stills make for some pretty pictures as well.

Cocteau also weaves in some mild fetishism throughout the film. Here's Belle hovering over her enchanted mirror, which at first serves as a portal for observing her old life from a distance, and later becomes a means for her own self-discovery as she awakens to the inevitable age that her encounter with the Beast necessitates.

Belle begins the film as a largely ive figure, doing simply what's asked or expected of her, never truly asserting herself except to renounce any comfort or privilege that might be extended her way. She enters her first encounter with the Beast fully expecting to be ravished, and faints when that prospect seems just about imminent. However, the Beast turns out to have a more tender side than she (or maybe even he?) expected.

Here's our first full-fledged, sustained close-up of Belle, in pristine perfection, unconscious, vulnerable and beautiful in her immaculate princess gown.

She awakes and is horrified! Yet, she lives!

Now we see her in the early stages of the Beast's courtship, struggling to accept her fate, still anxiously dreading the moment when he unleashes his fury upon her.

But with time, she becomes accustomed to his presence and begins to find some degree of comfort in his attention, even though he still prevents her from returning home.

Belle becomes more relaxed and begins exploring the strange chambers and secrets of the Beast's lair.

Over time, she begins to see and appreciate the that there is more to the Beast than his hideous outward
appearance. A bond begins to form.

And yet, what is to become of this unnatural companionship?

One day, seeing the Beast at his most animalistic, lapping up water from a small pond, she takes pity, shows trust, allows him to drink from her hands.

And in response to the trust she's shown him, the Beast grants her a measure of his strength, giving her the key that guards the secret of his power, and his glove that allows her to move magically through space.

She uses those gifts to at last returned to her beloved father and home, and for the first time in the film, we see her smile - a very short smile, and from a distance... but she is at last happy for a moment, as her loved ones behold her as they never have before.

But look, just a short while after returning home, and she's once again dressed in her familiar drab working clothes. Her sisters manipulate her through forced tears to avoid returning to the Beast, knowing that if they can get Belle to stay, her prospects would be ruined and they'd have a chance to claim the monster's riches for themselves.

Belle struggles with the magnitude of her dilemma but realizes that she really can't go home again. Things will never be the same.

Meanwhile, the Beast obsesses over Belle's furry bedspread.

Sensing his yearning, she returns to the Beast, frantic with the knowledge that she's stayed too long - ostensibly for the sake of her family, but now realizing that her primary relationship can no longer be with them.

Tragically late, in terrible danger of acquiring unforgiveable guilt, she tries her best to revive the dying Beast, but her efforts are of no avail. Just as she needs to separate from her past life, so too the Beast has to die.

The death of the Beast is more complicated than you might think though, and I don't want to blow that element of surprise for anyone who hasn't seen the film, because Cocteau has some fun with it. But I don't think it's spoiling anything to say that Prince Charming does, at last, reveal himself at the end of the film - much to Belle's surprise!

And here's where my close observation of Josette Day's performance paid dividends (imo, anyway!)

Consider the nearly mask-like stoicism of her expressions up to this point in the film (with the one exception that proves the rule of her brief smile when she first came home.) And now look at how her eyes and mouth reveal nuances of insight and self-assertion, an awakening of desire you could say, as she comes into fuller realization of just what kind of possibilities lie before her in this new relationship with a man who is not her father!

Prince Charming now has his bride, and carries her discreetly off screen for a moment, until the moment comes for them to depart in an ending so exaggeratedly fabulous that it falls just shy of flat-
out parody.

Just one sweet kiss before disappearing into the clouds of "happily ever after" and "they had many children!"

So I've presented a lot of still images (in my original blog post, which I recommend you look up using the search "Criterion Reflections Beauty Beast") and I hope they serve to refresh your acquaintance with the film if you've seen it before, or entice you to find a copy and watch it for yourself if you haven't. A filmmaker takes a big risk, it seems to me, trying to put these kinds of stories on the screen without overt irony or sarcasm, especially in live action. Cocteau's great achievement in Beauty and the Beast was to evoke that sense of timelessness in which all one's interpretive and emotional preferences can arise naturally, without the need for either heavy-handed explanations of what it's all supposed to mean or self-indulgent lampoonery along the lines of what what we see in latter day rip-offs like Shrek, Hoodwinked or even The Princess Bride. (Not that I disliked those movies for what they were, mind you. They just don't rise to this level of art. But oh well...)

"Don't ask a dying man to lie his soul into Hell!"

In 1946, Hollywood recognized that the movie-going audience was now packed with men who had gone off to war, laid their lives on the line, fought hard, done deeds that they would never forget but seldom feel like talking about. They returned a different bunch than the idealistic, winsomely innocent strapping young lads and working stiffs who'd shipped out to fight for Uncle Sam, now transformed into battle-hardened scrappers who saw first-hand how short and fleeting life's pleasures, and life itself, could be. Most did their best to resume their former routines and many successfully in returning to family life and a steady job. But even those who coped and made the necessary adjustments had a hard time accepting the old verities that separated hero from villain, good guys from bad. Tales that wound up too happily ever after just didn't sit right anymore. Or at least, they weren't worth the time or dime they cost to sit down and watch. These guys wanted something with grit and pep, spicy and action-packed. Conventional plotlines and moral clarity were easily exchanged for a piercing glimpse into the seamier side of American life, with the sharpest contrasts being reserved for the memorable black and white images now burned into our cultural consciousness as film noir.

The Killers delivers on its promise of Tense! Taut! Terrific! entertainment and stands to this day as a milestone, a foundational document even, of the noir genre that had been developing in the USA and Europe for the preceding decade or even longer. For my money, it delivers as well as any Hollywood film I've seen in this series, in of the pleasure I get from just watching the thing unfold before me. I've viewed it several times now over the past year or so and it never fails to engage and impress me, whether through the beauty of crisp cinematic compositions, impeccably choreographed long-takes, the non-stop flow of snappy banter or the attractive performances of lead actors Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Those two supply the eye candy and the ing cast hits all its marks in making this tale of intrigue, double-crosses and clutching-at-air futility serve as both a vintage classic on its own and a nice disc to pop in for the general subtitle-shy viewer who wants to know what this Criterion Collection thing is all about.

That's how I watched The Killers a couple Fridays ago, inviting a friend over to view whatever he chose out of my vast and ever growing collection. After first taking in the impressive scope and variety of my home video library, he mentioned his interest in learning more about film noir. With that being said, I figured there's no better place to start than here, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story written at the height of the Roaring 20s. The film begins with a very faithful recreation of the source material, even quoting original dialog, pretty unusual for its time, but effective. Two moody mugs saunter into a diner near sundown and immediately make their menacing intentions known: "I'll tell you what we're going to do, we're going to kill the Swede!" They have no personal grudge or particular feelings about the guy. To them it's just a job they took on, a favor they're doing a friend... because they're killers!

When the toughs realize that their target isn't going to show up, they head out of the diner, figuring they'll track him down at the boarding house where he stays. Nick Adams, a young customer in the diner who happens to be a friend of Swede's, takes a shortcut, blazes a path to his door and beats the hit-men to their goal. But when he warns Swede of their approach, Swede just lays ively in his bed, thanks him for the tip and sends him on his way. Moments later, Swede gets it, leaving Nick and a few other interested parties scratching their head as to why a man who knew his life was on the line would just sit back quietly and let fate have its way with him.

That's where the Hemingway story ends and the scriptwriters take over with an ingeniously plotted narrative that rewards close attention and multiple viewings. Somehow the facts just don't add up. Why would a down'n'out, unmarried filling station pump boy carry a life insurance policy payable to a woman who barely knew him? Why would this small-town nobody merit the use of paid assassins who came into town just to rub him out? His case draws the interest of a zealous insurance investigator, Reardon, whose pursuit of clues generates a multi-level timeline not unlike that of Citizen Kane. With each witness and acquaintance he tracks down, another piece of the puzzle falls into place and we're drawn that much further into figuring out the mystery of why the Swede would let himself lay down and die.

I won't give away too much here but some of the pointers are obvious enough. As Swede himself says when Nick asks "why," he did something wrong... once. That something wrong, predictably, involved mixing it up with the wrong guy, and even more predictably, the wrong dame. That dame is the ravishing Ava Gardner. I as a kid hearing my grandmother talk about some of the screen beauties she ired from her youth, and Ava along with Rita Hayworth are the two names I recall hearing the most. (And in my opinion, Grandma bore more than a ing resemblance to Ms. Gardner, or at least styled herself that way to the best of her ability!) A clip embedded in my original review (this is a repost from my old blog) captures Ms. Gardner at her most sultry, and that is very alluring indeed. The situation is recounted by the wife of a police detective who was once Swede's gal pal, sticking with her man even after his boxing career had fizzled in the aftermath of a hand injury. She tells how Swede one evening lost interest in her as he fell helplessly into the web of Miss Kitty Collins, a most definitive femme fatale...

Ava turns in an impressive bit of work there, and Burt Lancaster, in his film debut, isn't bad either as the big lug who has no idea of the mess he just stepped into, and who can blame him? They both get chances to turn up the heat in their respective ways, with Burt making a fine turn in a wife-beater shirt as he staggers despairingly across the floor of his trashed hotel room.

That friend with whom I watched The Killers also happens to work for an insurance company, in their filings division, dealing mainly with the paperwork/legal side of things. He knows how real insurance investigators operate though and he got a lot of laughs imagining his co-workers grabbing the bull by the horns the way that Reardon, the heat-packin' disciple of Humphrey Bogart, did as he went about his work. There's a bit of a Walter Mitty thing going on here, I think, as actor Edmund O'Brien serves the function of the Everyman we're meant to identify with. He's not that physically imposing and continually teeters on the brink of getting in over his head as he descends deeper into the underworld of hoodlums and racketeers in his quest for truth. But he has his wits about him and he's not afraid to draw his weapon on a bum if that's what it takes to get the straight scoop. And when he takes his lumps, he takes 'em like a man - no whining, no excuses.

Really, that's about all I have to say about the movie at this time. There's a lot to like here for the pizzazz factor, but I'd be careful about drawing too much of a philosophical or moral point from it all. The Killers went about their business with brutal finesse, and when asked what Swede had ever done to them to deserve being killed, their only reply was a wisecrack. "He never had a chance to do anything to us. He never even seen us!" says one. "He'll see us once," his accomplice mutters. For a generation of returning warriors who'd seen their friends and enemies alike die with chilling randomness, that explanation probably made as much sense as any.

Watched on Saturday April 12, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 11, 2025.

I watched this mainly to see the Lynch segment in its original context and found it both interesting and enjoyable. A fun time capsule of mid-90s famous and forgotten art house directors, mostly but not all European (actually, they do a commendable job getting the camera to quite a few locations around the globe), each taking a <1 minute turn using a restored cinematographe, the original motion picture camera used by the Lumiere brothers after whom the film is named. I've had this film on an old VHS tape I bought from a Blockbuster clearance bin probably not that long after the tape was released once it had concluded what must have been a very short run on the "new release" shelf. Weirdly ironic to be watching a movie using ancient cinematic tech on a format that hasn't aged well, rendering images in faded and fuzzy resolution. I'd like to see what the short segments look like when projected, but I don't expect I'll ever get that chance.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 5, 2025.

Updated on 5/30/2025 - A list, arranged in order of original release, of all films associated with the Criterion Collection, including laserdiscs, DVDs, Blu-rays, Essential Arthouse, Eclipse Series, Janus Contemporaries, the Merchant Ivory Collection and past/current streaming services (Hulu Plus, FilmStruck, The Criterion Channel), including both their permanent library and limited engagements. The list also include films found as supplemental features in the Criterion packages. To the best of my ability, and with only a few exceptions (e.g. when a release has been significantly delayed due to censorship, as is the case with Ivan the Terrible Part 2), I have listed them all in order of chronological release, according to IMDb. Films listed there but without exact release dates are listed as the last day of the month, if a month is indicated, or 12/31 of the year in which the film made its debut if only the year of the release is known. Corrections are welcome! Please leave a comment to let me know of any discrepancies you may find. Also, I created a separate version of this list that only includes films released by Criterion in disc format (LD, DVD and Blu-ray).

1. The Pillar of Fire

   "Georges Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color" - Criterion Channel

2. Massacre of the Christians by the Chinese

   "Hollywood Chinese" - Criterion Channel

3. Joan of Arc

   "Georges Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color" - Criterion Channel

4. A Trip to the Moon

   "Georges Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color" - Criterion Channel

5. Miss Dundee and Her Performing Dogs

   Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology - Criterion Channel

6. Robinson Crusoe

   "Georges Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color" - Criterion Channel

7. The Kingdom of the Fairies

   "Georges Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color" - Criterion Channel

8. The Infernal Cauldron

   "Georges Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color" - Criterion Channel

9. The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers

   "Hollywood Chinese" - Criterion Channel

10. The Impossible Voyage

    "Georges Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color" - Criterion Channel

...plus 7294 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Updated 5/28/2025 - A list, arranged in order of original release, of all films published on physical media by the Criterion Collection, including laserdiscs, DVDs, Blu-rays, Janus Contemporaries, Essential Art House, Eclipse Series, and the Merchant Ivory Collection. The list also include films found as supplemental features in the Criterion packages. To the best of my ability, and with only a few exceptions (e.g. when a release has been significantly delayed due to censorship, as is the case with Ivan the Terrible Part 2), I have listed them all in order of chronological release, according to IMDb. Films listed there but without exact release dates are listed as the last day of the month, if a month is indicated, or 12/31 of the year in which the film made its debut if only the year of the release is known. Corrections are welcome! Please leave a comment to let me know of any discrepancies you may find. Also, I created a separate version of this list that also includes films released by Criterion on various streaming services (including Hulu Plus, FilmStruck and The Criterion Channel.) That list is called The Complete Criterion Chronology.

1. The Champion

   Supplement on City Lights - Spine 680

2. Pool Sharks

   W.C. Fields - Six Short Films - Spine 79

3. A Night in the Show

   Supplement on Limelight - Spine 756

4. The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris

   Supplement on Irma Vep - Spine 1074

5. Pinkus's Shoe Palace

   Supplement on To Be Or Not To Be - Spine 670

6. The Bandit's Wager

   Supplement on My Darling Clementine - Spine 732

7. The Rink

   Supplement on Modern Times - Spine 543

8. The Immigrant

   Supplement on Au revoir les enfants - Spine 330

9. Over the Fence

   Supplement on The Kid Brother - Spine 964

10. The Merry Jail

    Supplement on Trouble in Paradise - Spine 170

...plus 2464 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is a list of movies that I've reviewed in years past through my old Criterion Reflections blog, which is still online and hosted by Google's Blogger.com platform. In those old posts, I had a practice of inserting links and embedding video clips and posters of the films being discussed, but none of that carries over here (and most of the video links are now broken anyway.) But since old movie blogs don't get much traffic these days (other than occasional links left by spambots in the comments), I want to make that material available for readers on this site who are looking for more information on these films and might appreciate my insights from past decades. For the most part, I've just copied and pasted the reviews as is, with a little editing here and there to delete references to videos or other extraneous comments. I may go back at some point to tighten up the essays as I kind of wince at some of my naive enthusiasm or overly long explications of certain details, as if I was the first to discover something interesting about these movies that I'm eager to proclaim to the rest of the world. And some of the reviews are just too long for contemporary attention spans.

At this point, the list just contains films that I reviewed from January - July 2009, but I will keep pecking away at it and eventually include all my stuff from Criterion Reflections. Eventually I will add posts I made as part of my Journey Through the Eclipse Series, which I published on CriterionCast.com from 2010-15. After that, I may also add other miscellaneous reviews I've written, but that won't be for several months at the earliest, probably longer.

ABOUT CRITERION REFLECTIONS (The Blog):

At the beginning of 2009 I started a series of blog posts that aimed to cover all of the films released by the Criterion Collection in chronological order of their original theatrical release. By that time, I had amassed a pretty impressive home video library of CC titles and wanted to create some kind of lasting record of the impressions that the films made on me. One of my major influences steering me toward this effort was Matthew Dessem's "Criterion Contraption" blog, in which he worked his way through the collection in spine number order. I didn't want to mimic his approach, and to this day I don't think spine order is a useful method for reviewing the films. But the chronological scheme worked great for me as a self-paced in-depth study of cinema history as curated by the good folks at Criterion. As you'll see, my initial pace was highly prolific as I posted reviews pretty quickly, several per week for a while, before the pace eventually slowed and I felt more obliged to take my time, rewatch the film, take in all the supplements, read what others had to say, and generally take a more thoughtful approach before committing my thoughts to words. After several years, when I reached 1969 in my sequence, I switched over to the podcast format, which is where I'm still at, kind of stalled out in 1973 for reasons I won't go into here (though I do have a new episode that is nearly ready to record).

• Nanook of the North
• Häxan
• Body and Soul
• The King of Kings
• The ion of Joan of Arc
• Pandora's Box
• Under the Roofs of Paris
• The Blood of a Poet
• Borderline
• The 3 Penny Opera

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films I've seen starring Brigitte Bardot. I've been working my way through her career after my Criterion Reflections project landed on her final starring role: Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman. Since that was her farewell to being a movie star, I became curious to know more about the path she traveled to get to that point. So I put together a watchlist of what seem to be her most significant roles from the 47 or so features she appeared in.

I consider Bardot to be a most interesting cultural figure of the mid-20th century, whose impact and influence are more pervasive than she gets credit for. I really enjoyed my survey of her work and would like to continue learning more about her, even seek out a few other titles that don't seem readily available. Of course I'm aware of her regrettable embrace and expression of bigoted far-right politics in recent decades. I don't think that her post-celebrity career tarnishes our ability to enjoy her performances and appreciate what she accomplished on screen .

• That Naughty Girl

  I watched this as part of a 5-Film DVD collection published by StudioCanal in 2008.

• Plucking the Daisy

  Watched on the Criterion Channel

• ...And God Created Woman

  Watched on Criterion DVD and the Criterion Channel.

• La Parisienne

  Watched on the Criterion Channel

• The Night Heaven Fell

  Watched on the Criterion Channel

• Come Dance with Me!

  I watched this as part of a 5-Film DVD collection published by StudioCanal in 2008.

• The Truth

  Watched on Criterion Blu-ray

• Please, Not Now!

  Watched on Kino Lorber Blu-ray

• Love on a Pillow

  I watched this as part of a 5-Film DVD collection published by StudioCanal in 2008.

• Contempt

  Watched on OOP StudioCanal Blu-ray and OOP Criterion DVD

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of films referenced in J. Hoberman's book, published in 2003, a cultural history of "the decade when politics and pop culture became one." The book actually covers the late 1950s up until the inauguration and attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. It's a fascinating study and in my opinion, an essential key to understanding so much of what's happening in contemporary American politics in the Trump era.

This list is structured in two parts. All of the films from Spartacus to Blow Out are given more in-depth treatment, from a few paragraphs to several pages, in the book, whereas the films starting with The Next Voice You Here... until the end are more like footnotes or casual references - mentioned more as citations than as central examples of the author's main thesis.

• Spartacus
• The Alamo
• The Magnificent Seven
• Primary
• Advise & Consent
• Dr. No
• PT 109
• The Manchurian Candidate
• Fail Safe
• A Gathering of Eagles

...plus 115 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.