A pleasant surprise. I hadn't seen much of anything from Villeneuve so the subtlety with which he presented his ideas and the detail with which he created the tone and atmosphere really caught me by surprise. It's been a while since I've seen an alien film that's as much about "us" as it is about "them."
A beautiful and heart-warming film from Tourneur. Joel McCrea is great as Pastor Josiah Grey, a minister and a civil war vet who arrives in a small town to start a new life but has to deal with a variety of obstacles along the way. The film is reminiscent of other civil rights era films except that it gets a head start on some of the issues those films dealt with. I won't deny that it becomes a little too simplistic and preachy at times but on the whole this is yet another solid effort by the director of Out of the Past and Cat People.
A film laden with grand ideas and themes - with a vision to match. Yet it's never self-serving; it's self-conscious enough to be humbled by its own perspective in the presence of both the existential and the spiritual. A rare film that recognizes not only the potential but also the limitations of cinema. No film about death has ever felt more alive.
If you've watched a more beautiful B&W film than this then consider yourself very lucky. The cinematography in The Cranes Are Flying is the heart and soul of the movie but it'd also be unfair to not acknowledge the timeless and moving love story it captures along with Tatiana Samoilova great performance. This really should be on the syllabus of all film classes.
