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“One man’s loss”, as they say, “is another man’s gain”. George Raft refused a number of roles that he must have rued in hindsight, as they were immortalized by Humphrey Bogart. High Sierra might not have given Bogart such an iconic role as in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon – some of the now-famous roles that Raft turned down, but it sure kick-started Bogart’s journey as a lead, even if it had its fair share of melodrama and shallowness that could have been avoided. Therefore, at the end of the day, the movie turned out to be a one-man show of sorts, with Bogart playing the role of a middle-aged, recently paroled gangster, planning his last caper. Though seemingly a son-of-a-gun, he is an old-timer when it comes to emotions, and his life arc turns out to of a the proportion of Greek tragedy. Bogart did an exceptional job as Roy Earle, the tough yet painfully solitary gangster, and Ida Lupino, was commendable as his unlikely fiancé. The movie’s pacing is a mixture of fast-paced sequences and moments of deliberation, and is a concoction of a variety of genre conventions – consequently it’s anything but archetypal mobster movie. Further, even thematically is a mixture of crime and punishment, life on the road, unrequited love, to name a few, and thus at the end it has presented a pretty complex tapestry despite not being as tough a movie as one might expect it to be.
p.s. High Sierra is part of Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection, a wonderful boxset release by Warner Bros.
Director: Raoul Walsh
Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster Film/Romance/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: US
Edgar G. Ulmer’s B-Noir classic Detour had one of the most alluring and “noirish” premises of all noir films, and that’s saying a lot given the number of incredible masterpieces belonging to this distinctive school of 40’s and 50’s American filmmaking. Roberts, a washed out honky-tonk player, while hitchhiking his way from New York to Los Angeles to meet his girlfriend, is given a ride by a friendly gambler. However, when he suddenly drops dead for no reason, Roberts gets rid of the body and starts driving the car impersonating as the dead man. But luck runs only so far for him as he inadvertently offers ride to a mysterious wild-cat of a lady who suddenly blurts out, “What did you do with the body?”, and blackmails him into trying to rob the dead gambler’s rich, aged father. As any noir-lover worth his two cents would know, things can only go downhill thereon for our hapless protagonist. Shot in a mere 6 days, the movie’s collar-grabbing storyboard was unfortunately largely undone by the largely unimpressive performances of its two leads. The shabby production design too hurts the eyes, though they do add to the inherent sleaziness of the proceedings. What thus really gets the interest going is the sense of fatalism that pervades nearly every single frame right till the bleak climax – the film, like every noir worth watching, remains an apotheosis of Murky’s Law and the kind of irony it embodies.
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Genre: Crime Drama/Film Noir/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: US
In July is at complete odds with such deadly serious movies like Head-On and The Edge of Heaven that Fatih Akin is renowned for. The only commonality it has with his body of work is where capturing both German and Turkish diaspora and people goes; otherwise, the film seems something of an aberration. A light-hearted, whimsical and charming rom-com and a breezy road movie, it is filled with simple character sketches and idiosyncratic scenarios, is shot in resplendent colours, and is bereft of any socio-political commentary. A shy German teacher (Moritz Blebitreu), convinced that the pretty Turkish girl he has befriended by chance is the girl he’s destined to be with, plunges head long into an adventure road trip that doesn’t just require him to do stuff beyond his wildest imaginations, but also brings him closer to the girl who indirectly kick-started this odyssey of his. And this girl, a good-natured Bohemian lady who’s been holding a candle for him for long, also happens to be, through a stroke of coincidence, his partner in his crazy journey from Hamburg, across Europe, to Istanbul, silently wishing he realizes her feelings for him. Look out for an interesting cameo by the director as a corrupt Romanian border police.
Director: Fatih Akin
Genre: Romantic Comedy/Road Movie
Language: German
Country: Germany
Jason Reitman attained instant popularity with Thank You for Smoking and widespread acclaim with Juno, but if you really think of it, Up in the Air might just be his most matured movie to date. Not that the other two weren’t good, in fact they were just as engrossing; just that his latest flick has a far more palpable soul than them. The movie starts off in the neat satirical tone that just grabs you by the neck and makes you pay attention to Ryan Bingham, a high-flying hatchet man whose job it is to aid in the downsizing of companies, who spends more time on the flight and elsewhere, and who is really happy with his isolated, detached existence. But then he ends up striking a casual conversation with a fellow traveler, and even though they end up in bed in real quick time, he finds himself slowly and surely falling in love with the lady. With the terrible recession as its backdrop, the movie is an affecting picture of the existential crises and loneliness of jet-setters with six-figure salaries. The shift in tone from satire to drama has been handled very well, and the performances of the two leads, George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, especially the wonderful chemistry they share, go a long way in making this movie a brisk, enchanting and warm-hearted tale of our troubled times.
Director: Jason Reitman
Genre: Comedy/Existential Drama/Social Satire/Romance/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: US
Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut feature Ratcatcher, a hauntingly beautiful, intensely moody (even angry, if you will) and highly visceral poetry on celluloid. Only that, unlike the latter, lyricism has been replaced with a more grimy approach, thus making watching the movie a strangely liberating, albeit claustrophobic experience. Morvern Caller (played with astounding subtlety, maturity and fearlessness by Samantha Morton), is a working-class girl who, one not-so-fine day, wakes up in her apartment to find that her boyfriend has slit his wrists and is lying in a pool of blood. However, contrary to how one would expect her to act a situation such as this, in a case of reverse nervous breakdown, she decides to start “living” her life by going on a vacation with her best friend to Spain, and even decides to pass off her beau’s unpublished novel as her own. Ramsay has displayed tremendous confidence in her ability as a visual storyteller by presenting the disquieting and emotionally naked tale of existential grief and angst with a barrage of psychedelic images and lighting, sprayed with an intoxicating expressionistic splash, which in turn have been aided by a superb hip-punk soundtrack.
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: UK (Scotland)
Lots of great movies get made, but few manage to attain iconic status such that they linger in public conscience long after their sell by dates in theatres. Easy examples of such movies would be Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Easy Rider, Breathless, Sholay or perhaps even Jaws; Bonnie and Clyde is easily part of that elite group. The real-life tale of two lovers – Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow – hitting on a cross-country crime spree, happened to be Warren Beaty’s pet subject, and under Arthur Penn’s hands the movie went on to achieve stratospheric popularity despite the initial criticism it had to face because of its then-graphic depiction of crime, violence, lawlessness and the characters’ notorious detachments where things concerning morality and ethics were concerned. Played with amazing charm and skill by Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway, two actors who would go on to achieve great glory in their respective careers, their terrific screen chemistry is stuff that legends are made of. Though I feel the movie hasn’t dated well – the acting of the supporting characters (including Gene Hackman, and especially the lady who played his wife) seemed way over the top to me, the attempts at humour were a tad lame, and the plot too at times seems not tight enough, but there’s no denying the movie’s place in cinematic folklore. And the fact that it has inspired such famous inspirations like Terrence Mallick’s lyrical Badlands and Oliver Stone’s hyper-violent Natural Born Killers, makes its claim to fame that much more strong.
Director: Arthur Penn
Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster Film/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: US
Contemporary Bengali humorist, satirist, songwriter and cinephile Chandril Bhattacharya composed a tribute song on Jean-Luc Godard a couple of years back, and Pierrot Le Fou, along with its lead actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina featured prominently in it – such is the movie’s popularity among Godard aficionados. It is a loose (and perhaps a deliberate) companion piece to his groundbreaking first feature Breathless. However, though it still was a pastiche to American B-movies and film noirs, and the basic plot may be encapsulated with the phrase ‘love on the run’, in place of the lighthearted and freewheeling dynamism of Breathless and even his Band a Part, the structure here is far more complex and intellectual. Filled with references that range from literary to pop culture to political, this is less about its plot (hell, Godard didn’t even have a script to start with), and more about the French iconoclast’s opinionated musings. And the chemistry that Belmondo shares with Karina might not be as crackling as the one with Jean Seberg, but is no less irreverent and breezy. Interestingly, the movie has two lovely impromptu songs and a memorable cameo by iconic American director Samuel Fuller.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Genre: Romantic Drama/Road Movie/Avante-Garde/Experimental
Language: French
Country: France
Broken Flowers, whose simple exterior belies its profound depth, is a contemplative dramedy from indie legend Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch once stated that he is rather “interested in the non-dramatic moments in life”; this low-key comedy managed to emphasize essentially that. Starring Bill Murray, the uncrowned king of deadpan emoting, the movie is about a rich, bored and emotionally detached middle-aged man, who one fine day, after his latest girlfriend (Julie Delpy) leaves him, is informed by an anonymous letter that he has a son. That, and his neighbour’s coercive persistence, forces him to look up all his old flames to determine who might be the mother of his son. The quasi-mystery nature of the plot, however, is in complete to what the movie actually is – right from its minimalist composition to its subtle character study of a man who was once a modern day Casanova (his name Don Johnston is a play on Don Juan) – after all he had to be one in order to successfully woo a stunner like Sharon Stone, that too in her prime. This is a nice movie that has relied more on silences than on words to communicate the various shades of Murray’s character to us.
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Genre: Drama/Comedy/Social Satire/Psychological Drama/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: US
The Darjeeling Limited is the kind of movie the world wouldn’t rant over, yet this underrated gem from Wes Anderson has the strange ability to endear itself to the viewers without much of a hullabaloo. Nearly every aspect of the movie – direction, acting, screenplay, story, music, characters et al – may be described by the epithet ‘quirky’ or any of its synonyms. The film is about three semi-lunatic brothers – played superbly by Owen Wilson (he is especially brilliant), Adrian Brody and Jason Schwartzman – belonging to one hell of a dysfunctional family, taking a trip across India to bridge their love-hate relationships, and to undergo some sort of quasi-spiritual awakening. The delectably comic script, with terrific aid from the equally mad-cap style of camera work, managed to make this a bittersweet, humorous, whimsical, colourful, satirical and intelligent comedy, with a subtle layer of poignancy just beneath the surface. And the most interesting aspect about the movie is that, its background score is filled with, among others, music from various Satyajit Ray movies (for those uninitiated, barring his first few films, music for most of his movies were composed by the great man himself).
Director: Wes Anderson
Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: US
My Blueberry Nights, the latest from acclaimed Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai (i.e. if you don’t take into account the redux version of his Ashes of Time), is his first movie with English as the spoken language. Grammy winner Norah Jones starred as heartbroken young woman who sets off on a cross-country road journey across the US, and in the process befriends a motley of distinctive characters – an introverted café owner (Jude Law) who serves her blueberry pie for free, a lovelorn cop who has taken to alcohol to get over the memories of her ravishing albeit philandering wife (Rachel Weisz), and a cocky but fragile compulsive gambler with demons of her own (played exquisitely by Natalie Portman). The movie has all the hallmarks of the director – dazzling visual beauty, existentialist theme, rambling narrative, an array of lost souls, and a beautiful soundtrack that kept growing on me. However despite all his signature touches and the soothing flow, it somehow lacked that extra spark present in his masterpieces like Chungking Express and 2046. Consequently, I liked the movie, but it failed to stay with me.
Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Existentialist Drama/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: China (Hong Kong)
Thelma and Louise, in the great tradition of revisionist genre movies, did exactly what Ridley Scott perhaps intended – by having two working-class women as its protagonists instead of rugged, disillusioned men, it forever demythologized the very masculine concept of “hitting the road”. In that sense, it may be put on par with Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s classic revisionist Western that erased the elements of romanticism from the much loved all-American genre. Geena Davis, as an overtly naïve housewife who is treated like a piece of furniture by her supercilious husband, and Susan Sarandon, as a free-spirited lady with a loving if commitment-phobic fiancé (played with casual élan by Michael Madsen), form the eponymous all-girl couple who hit the road on a beaut of a beast – a Thunderbird convertible – to get away from ’em all. However, what was supposed to be a few days of fun and freedom turns ugly, and the two find themselves on the run from the law. Spectacular panoramic photography, snazzy soundtracks, smart screenplay that ensures smooth yet memorable development of the two principal characters, a scintillating car chase sequence, and an unforgettable climax (the final freeze frame is one for the ages), completely masked the somewhat B-grade look of the film and the not so inspired turns by the two ladies. Watch out for Harvey Keitel as a sympathetic cop and a young Brad Pitt as a glibly opportunistic small-time crook.
Director: Ridley Scott
Genre: Drama/Crime Drama/Road Movie/Buddy Film
Language: English
Country: US
Terrence Malick made his debut feature Badlands on a shoestring budget; yet, as many before him (e.g. Satyajit Ray) and since (e.g. Jim Jarmusch) have proved, a great work of art depends only so much on the thickness of the producer’s wallet. One of the finest depictions of how crime lurks in every nook and corner of human society, the movie has two absolutely mundane characters become partners in crime as they leave a trail of bodies from the idyllic South Dakota to the “badlands of Montana.” The movie’s sparse treatment, backed by a haunting score, suffused a deep poetic realism in the tale of ennui and casual violence, and made the movie a lyrical ode to the aimless journey of the two lost souls and their killing spree which turned them into icons. Both Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek (who also happens to be the story’s narrator) managed to put in natural performances. The most definitive aspect of this movie, in fact, lay in its lush photography. The stunning yet bleak panoramic visuals of the vast barren spaces in the Midwest didn’t just make for a near hypnotic viewing experience, but also made the theme that much more fatalistic, disturbing, complex.
Director: Terrence Malick
Genre: Drama/Crime Drama/Existential Drama/Road Movie/Americana
Language: English
Country: US
Sean Penn, like a number of his contemporaries, is a sterling example of a revered actor who has effortlessly managed to make the transition to the director’s chair, and Into the Wild is arguably Penn the director’s magnum opus. Based on real events, the movie is an attempt, and an astounding one at that, to recreate the complex, eventful and life altering journey of a young wanderlust who leaves his dysfunctional family and hits the road in his search of truth and bliss – those magnetic yet eternally elusive things that are supposed to lie at the end of every great odyssey. Aided by a terrific soundtrack comprising of an array of beautiful country songs, and soothing camera work that lovingly explores beauty in America’s vast wilderness and her colourful locals, the movie manages to make an immediate impression. Add to that Emile Hirsch’s astonishingly “real” portrayal of a journey that isn’t just excruciatingly physical but also disturbingly psychological, and equally memorable turns by the supporting cast, and you have a movie that isn’t just exhilarating to watch, but also has the ability to make one ponder over issue ranging from life to death, and all that lies in between.
Director: Sean Penn
Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Psychological Drama/Adventure/Docu-fiction/Biopic
Language: English
Country: US
Paris, Texas ranks as the best film by celebrated German filmmaker Wim Wenders, and is often counted among the finest movies ever made. This is a marvelous road movie that delves into spiritual, post-modernist and psycho-analytical issues. The vast American landscape with its neon billboards, long uninterrupted highways and vast uncharted territories has been wonderfully employed to depict human alienation where communication has become a difficult parameter. Right from its lazily captivating opening sequence, where a mysterious looking man without any name or identity is seen wandering about the Texan deserts, the director keeps us enthralled. Soon we come to know that he has been missing for the last four years and has a young son who is being looked after by his thoroughly Americanized brother and his wife. But the reasons for his sudden disappearance are revealed only at the end through the now legendary one-way glass monologue. Like Alice in the Cities, another majestic road movie by Wenders, here too the complex relationship between a disenchanted adult and an exuberant child plays at the forefront of the movie. Harry Dean Stanton, as the melancholic, taciturn and deeply human protagonist Travis, is brilliant in his understated portrayal; and so is the performance of the kid who plays his young son slowly getting to connect with his father. The long, evocative camera shots and the minimalist acoustic guitar riffs play vital roles in presenting a poetic tale of loneliness, lost love and home-coming.
Director: Wim Wenders
Genre: Drama/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: Germany/US
