SUNFLOWER - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written in 2008 for DVDTalk.com.

Sophia Loren made three films with Italian Neorealist pioneer Vittorio De Sica and a whopping thirteen with co-star Marcello Mastroianni. 1970's Sunflower, a romantic drama set in World War II, is the kind of sweeping love story that could be pretentious and overdone in most hands, but De Sica brings his usual humanity to the project and, as a result, brings out two very down-to-earth performances from his stars, both of whom can play it much bigger than allowed.

Loren plays Giovanna, a simple Neapolitan girl who engages in a little fun with a soldier, Antonio (Mastroianni), on the eve of his going to war. On a lark, the two get married so he can score twelve days leave for his honeymoon, and they end up falling in love with each other. The actors appear to be having fun together, and their very real chemistry makes their passion and affection absolutely convincing. The couple can only hold off the army for so long, however, and Antonio is shipped off to the Russian front, where he goes missing, failing to return with the rest of the troops when the war ends.

Sunflower is told in a flip-flop fashion, starting with Giovanna's hunt for her lost husband and jumping back in time to show us how they came together, fell in love, and how Antonio was lost. The battle sequences using archival footage are elegantly done, De Sica superimposing the red flag of war over the fighting. As a director, he is just as facile with the bigger moments as he is with the smaller ones, and this goes a long way to making Sunflower (Italan title: I Girasoli) another winner in the set. As a more mature actress, Sophia Loren is more comfortable on screen here than in many earlier films, and she seems absolutely confident with her age, once more proving her appeal comes from within at least as much as it does from her appearance.

TONI - #1040

Toni is the 1935 drama from revered French director Jean Renoir. By his own admission (as seen in the intro included on this disc), Toni was Renoir’s attempt at Neorealism--though well before such a term existed. A story based in fact, shot in the town where the event happened, using people from the region--it’s not as raw as De Sica or Rossellini, but it is different from your classic Renoir. It’s sharper, less adorned, and more candidly honest about the lives it depicts. 

The titular Toni, as played by Charles Blavette, is an Italian who has come to a remote French community that is home to many migrant workers. Toni works in the quarry, has an affair with the woman running his boarding house (Marie, played by Jenny Hélia), and lusts after the sexy farm girl Josefa (Celia Montlaván). Toni has big romantic notions, but more along the lines of his own success than of the lovemaking kind. Sure, he imagines a future with Josefa, but it’s also part of his bigger plan to take over the quarry and improve his status. This takes on an even more macho cadence when his rival Albert (Max Dalban) also decides to pursue both tgose things. A scant few minutes separate Albert’s encounter with Josefa and Toni’s arrival, enough time for Albert to force his affections on her. Disheartened, Toni marries Marie, leaving Josefa to a less-than-ideal union with Albert. 

But, of course, it doesn’t end there. Josefa’s uncle ties Toni to his niece further by insisting he be the godfather to her child. The twists and tangles this causes marginalizes Marie, exposes Albert’s greed, and basically turns Toni into a weird white-knight stalker.

 

It’s interesting to consider this material and how Renoir might have approached Toni at a different time. This is really a melodrama in Neorealist clothing. Yet, instead of milking the script for the big emotion, Renoir’s mission aesthetic strips the story of its grandiosity and gets down to the nitty gritty of human desire and selfishness. Toni is no hero, and Josefa is no princess waiting to be rescued. If she has any real affection for either man, it’s never stated. And that kid that Toni is so concerned about protecting? You never really see it. 

Renoir seems fascinated by these sordid affairs. It’s like he’s wound up all these toys just to watch them go. And he inserts innocent bystanders like Toni’s older pal Fernand (Édouard Delmont) to play a little bit of devil’s advocate, to probe on behalf of the filmmaker and his audience, and be a voice of reason when Toni offers none; also, there is a Greek chorus of traveling minstrels reminding us of the macabre ballads that told these stories once upon a time. There is an even keel to the proceedings, the laser focus of Toni’s mission not really allowing for bigger swings, he’s all about what he can make his own. Even Marie’s bold decision in the final third is absent of any exaggeration. She is just as determined as the man who spurned her, and Toni’s heart rate only rises after he realizes the truth too late. (Though, really, it’s Fernand, who himself loves Marie, that pieces it together.) 

This seems by design. By going small, somehow things feel big. One love triangle crumbles, workers disappear, and a new train pulls into the station, unloading those that will come next, to either repeat this squalid history or make their own. The human tide beats on. 

 The new 4K restoration on Toni brings Renoir’s intentions to life, delivering a crisp black-and-white picture that gives sharp life to Claude Renoir’s photography. The location shooting looks amazing in this format, adding to the realism that the cameraman’s father was aiming for.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for the purposes of review.

THE KID WITH A BIKE - #646

There’s a scene near the very end of The Kid With aBike where the titular kid, Cyril (Thomas Doret), is riding side by side with his unexpected guardian, Samantha (Cécile de France, Mesrine [review], The Young Pope), and he asks her what gear she is pedaling in. Samantha has no idea, and only can guess looking at the gauges and levers on the handlebars. Her ignorance amuses the boy.

It also reminds me of my own biking experiences. Near the end of junior high, a few years before I could drive, I was given a ten-speed bike. It was probably nine speeds too many. No one ever explained to me what the different gears meant, much less how to shift into them. I found a setting where I could pedal comfortably, and then never touched the gears again.

The anecdote itself is completely irrelevant to examining this 2011 film from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and yet it is also everything. The pleasure of watching The Kid With a Bike [also on Filmstruck] and, in fact, all Dardenne films is the attention to personal details. Everything that happens matters to the person it happens to, and the specificity is exactly why audiences around the world, be they in the Dardenne Brothers’ native Belgium or here in the United States, identify with their stories. It’s the bigger things that separate us, and the day-to-day that proves we are all basically the same.

I don’t identify with the love of the bike that the kid has, but I identify with his willful ignorance, his refusal to let go of an idea. In this case, that his father, Guy (Dardennes-regular Jérémie Renier, Summer Hours [review]), will come back and take him out of the group home and put their lives back together. The bike becomes a symbol of that. Cyril’s father would have never gone away without giving him his beloved bike. When Samantha brings it to him and tells him she had bought it off someone who bought it from Cyril’s dad, the boy refuses to believe her.

We should all hope for angels in our life like Samantha. She only meets Cyril by chance, while going to an appointment in a medical clinic in the building where Cyril’s father was last known to live. The boy runs away from school and goes there looking for Guy, and when they try to drag him back, he literally grabs on to Samantha and won’t let go. What this sparks in her, we’ll never know. A Good Samaritan streak? A motherly instinct? Samantha agrees to take Cyril on the weekends, which proves tougher than expected when he falls in with a bad crowd. But then, Samantha is tougher than just about anybody. She stands up to the boy’s father and makes him relate his own bad news; she dumps her boyfriend when he delivers her an ultimatum about her new ward; she refuses to give up on the kid even after he’s stepped over a very dangerous line. Cécile de France is a remarkably versatile actor. In any role, be it the gangster’s moll or the public relations woman or the simple hairdresser looking for love, she is always present in the moment. She’s one of those performers that each time you see her, she seems transformed, sending you scrambling to IMDB to see why she looks familiar.

Watching The Kid With a Bike, you’ll want to knock some sense into Cyril more than once. Hell, not only because he refuses to listen, but after the second time his bike gets stolen because he didn’t lock it up, you just want to smack him upsdie the head. (I joked the movie could alternately be called The Persuasive Argument For My Vasectomy.) I don’t know where the Dardennes found Thomas Doret, but he’s excellent. The young actor has a laser-like focus and maintains his mission at all times. Cyril will not be dissuaded.

It’s nearly impossible to not think of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves [review] when examining The Kid With a Bike. It’s not just the father/son story revolving around a two-wheeler, but also the fact that moral questions are raised over the need for the bike. Cyril faces a choice, and though less motivated by self-preservation than the desperate man of De Sica’s film, to a young mind it would be just as important. Wes (Egon Di Mateo), the Fagin of Samantha’s neighborhood, offers him the kind of masculine reinforcement that Cyril seeks, and so he makes doing bad look very good. And hell, if you can’t trust your father to come through the way he’s supposed to, common rules no longer seem valid.

Additionally, the Dardennes work in a similar style to De Sica. The young actor, the real locations, the simple plot, the lack of melodrama--this 2011 Belgian film is very much in line with the 1948 Italian film’s aesthetics. Collaborating as usual with cinematographer Alain Marcoen, the Dardennes make no move that calls attention to itself. There are no tricky shots, no daring overheads, they maintain a grounded vantage point, which ultimately proves to be more immersive than some glossier fictional efforts, in that The Kid With a Bike is far more persuasive as a believable narrative. It is being lived, not choreographed.

Once upon a time when I was editing the Kitchen Sink-style comics of British cartoonist Andi Watson, we received a review that contended “nothing happened” in an issue. Of course, this was not true, we could outline many emotional twists and turns in the comic book, many actual events that the characters had to contend with. It just was lacking in “action.” As Andi quipped, just because someone didn’t get punched, it doesn’t mean nothing happened. And while there is violence in The Kid With a Bike, it is story driven, not plot driven, which is a big difference. Some might say the core scenario is very little to hang an entire film on, but the Dardennes make something grand from it.

One last anecdote that came to mind while watching The Kid With a Bike: when I was in grade school I had a brown Huffy that I was pretty keen on. That is, until I got to school and was ridiculed because it had a banana seat and no crossbar on the handle. I was told this made it a girl’s bike.  A girl’s bike befitting a boy with a girl’s name, I guess. While I didn’t come to blows with any of the kids the way that Cyril did (at least not over the bike), it did still come to represent a kind of rebellion for me--I rode it regardless of others’ taunts--and provided my personal freedom. I could go all over town on it, much faster and with more ease than on two feet. In other words, it could get me away from those other boys whom I didn’t want to hang out with anyway. Looking back, I guess it did carry a comparable power to the bike in the movie. It maybe wasn’t about my father’s love, but then, ultimately that’s not what Cyril’s represents. It’s about having a vehicle to be who we are and get us to where we feel safe.

THE PLAYER - #812

My thing about movies that are about movies is that the good ones make me want to watch other movies. If I watch The Bad and the Beautiful, for instance, I’m going to want to chase it with Cat People. Who didn’t watch the opening of The Player back when it was released in 1992 and not immediately go view--or even re-view--Touch ofEvil? Or how about pairing it up with Bicycle Thieves [review]? Better yet, another movie about movies, based on a book about movies, Elia Kazan’s vastly underrated adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Monroe Stahr, the movie mogul in The Last Tycoon, was modeled after Irving Thalberg, whom surely director Robert Altman and writer Michael Tolkin had in mind when they created Griffin Mill, their motion picture wunderkind, as played by Tim Robbins.

And it’s not just that The Player is about movies, it’s utterly in love with them. You get that right from the virtuoso opening shot, which runs without cutting for 8 1/2 minutes (certainly no coincidence), referencing not just Touch of Evil, but The Sheltering Sky and Rope and a couple of other films that pulled off similar feats (this was pre-Tarantino, mind you). There are easter eggs throughout this thing, and not just the cameos by then au currant celebs, but jokes and winks and the careful placement of other films and filmmakers to cue the audience to what is coming next. Be it Griffin walking under a movie marquee as the lights go out on The Bicycle Thief to signal his own oncoming moral dilemma, or the fake-out of Lyle Lovett walking by a Hitchcock photo as an indicator of suspense and a deep visual pun about “the wrong man.” The murder victim declares, “See you in the next reel, pal,” ironic last words befitting the noir plot Griffin Mill will find himself in, as predicted by the posters in his office.

If you’re a cinephile, you’re going to eat this stuff up.

If you’re not, if you’re just a casual movie fan, then no worries, you’re going to dig The Player, too. It’s more than a collection of in jokes and elbowing Hollywood in the ribs. Altman and Tolkin bring an honest-to-goodness murder plot along with all the references. The Player is a movie that aims to be as good as all the other movies it emulates.

In terms of story, it’s simple. Griffin Mill is a hotshot Hollywood producer who appears to be going cold. In the midst of his concerns that his boss is bringing in his replacement (Peter Gallagher), he’s also getting harassing post cards from an anonymous writer that he never called back. When the threats turn scary, Griffin tries to figure out who it is, settling on one writer in particular, David Kahane (played by a young, nearly unrecognizable Vincent D’Onofrio). Griffin tracks Kahane to a revival screening of the Neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (or Bicycle Thieves) and tries to reason with him. Only, Kahane isn’t the guy--even if he hates Griffin all the same. Accusations cause tempers to flare and a scuffle ensues, leading to the writer ending up dead and Griffin trying to make it look like a robbery.

And he’s successful for the most part. The only problem is, someone saw the two of them together, and the cops (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett) think it’s suspicious that the movie exec was somehow randomly the last person to see a no-name scribe alive. This line of thinking is only heightened when Griffin starts dating the deceased’s girlfriend (Greta Scacchi). In any conventional script, Griffin would certainly look guilty.

Which, of course, we know he is, but that’s immaterial. The question that lingers, what will he do to get out of it? That’s what any good suspense movie is about. Plus, we know that the real stalker is still out there, and he could strike at any minute. Somehow these things have to converge, right? That’s what the rules of screenwriting have taught us. Not to mention that the fake moviemakers in the movie we are watching keep harping on the need for a happy ending. Griffin Mill has to find his way out of it, or The Player will fail.

That might actually be The Player’s most ingenious bit, how Tolkin builds in all this conventional wisdom about what makes a successful movie--twists, turns, sex, surprising rescues, happy endings--and then delivers on each. It’s the artiest of blockbusters, The Player is. Like if the Kaufman Brothers in Adaptation cracked the code and managed to sincerely make it work. (Which, let’s be honest, it works in Adaptation; as soon as Donald takes over, the film becomes a crowdpleaser.)

Tim Robbins brings an interesting energy to his performance. He is both slimy and trustworthy, at times believably dim and yet otherwise extremely cagey. It’s excellent casting, how we feel about Griffin is probably how a lot of people feel about Robbins, who himself can be seen as a little pretentious and also a bit of a windbag due to his openness about his politics. Yet, he also always seems like a decent guy, he’d probably be pretty nice in person. We like him, but we want to hate him, too.

Fans of Hollywood lore will see other nods to history in The Player, perhaps most deftly in Fred Ward’s fixer character, which resembles MGM’s Eddie Mannix, immortalized in both the films Hollywoodland and more recently Hail, Caesar! There is also some amusing commentary about television actors wanting to be in movies, which seems only ironic and outdated given how so much and so many have shifted from the big screen to cable television for better opportunities in recent years. Tim Robbins himself was last seen on HBO in a bad Dr. Strangelove rip-off.

Television may be the current perceived assassin of big studio pictures, but moviemakers have had many threats before this one--including TV, which was originally supposed to be the death knell of the moviegoing experience back in the 1950s. Most would say the changing of the guard in the 1960s was the true end of Golden Age Hollywood--which is largely what Altman is paying tribute to here. His movie studio resembles the classic system as much as it does the bloated 1980s version he’s critiquing. The Player actually came at a time when independent films were having their heyday, and the Sundance crowd was moving in. I guess these things are cyclical. If the auteurs of the 1960s and 1970s gave birth to the blockbuster, then the indie scene of the 1990s gave us the mega blockbuster. Would there even be a Griffin Mill now, or would he just be a collection of stockholders?

I guess it doesn’t really matter. All we can say for sure is that he’d still be getting away with it. Now more than ever.

Tim Robbins, Sydney Pollack, and Robert Altman on set.

KENJI MIZOGUCHI'S FALLEN WOMEN: WOMEN OF THE NIGHT - ECLIPSE SERIES 13

Okay, so maybe Kenji Mizoguchi's 1948 drama Women of the Night wasn't the best choice for a Saturday evening's entertainment. Particularly since I hadn't even started drinking. Correcting that now.

The third film in the Eclipse set Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women has some years distance from the previous entry in the box, 1936's Sisters of the Gion. Damn, a whole war actually happened during the time from one production to the next, so it's fairly understandable that Women of the Night would be so tragic and bleak. The director kept making movies in that time, including his masterwork The 47 Ronin, but Women of the Night is his first significant return to the theme explored in this collection.

World War II informs everything about the drama of Women of the Night, which was based on a contemporary novel about life in Japan at the time. Though, unlike the post-War films of Seijun Suzuki, Mizoguchi never addresses the problem of occupying U.S. troops, the effects of the combat are both felt and seen in the rubble and poverty that pushes his characters to the brink. Fusako (Kinuyo Tanaka) is struggling to get by and hoping her husband will return from Korea. She lives with her mother-in-law and tries to care for her sick child. The only man we see in this early portion is her alcoholic brother-in-law, who did return from service and does not like what he did or the outcome. His little sister Kumiko (Tomie Tsunoda) lost her husband to the fighting, as did many other women her age.

Fusako has been selling clothes to make ends meet, and though the red light district is just around the corner, refuses to degrade herself. She suffers the one-two punch of finding out her husband is dead and finally losing her son to illness, but she maintains her dignity and even manages to secure a job with her husband's former boss. In fact, things are looking up when she is reunited with her own younger sister, Natsuko (Sanae Takasugi), who she thought lost. Natsuko has returned from Korea a widow, and she bears her own scars from the fighting. Currently, she works as a hostess in a dance club.

The good times don't last. Natsuko and Fusako both strike up an affair with Fusako's boss, and when the older sister finds out, she leaves home and becomes a prostitute with the intent of punishing all men by spreading sin and disease. She believes that the men of Japan are seeking to destroy her and all women like her, so why not pre-emptively take advantage of their base desires? Her point of view is a little hard to argue with. The boss man turns out to be less than a stand-up guy, and when Kumiko tries to leave home to make her way in the world, she is taken advantage of by young male pretending to want to help. The naïve girl is deceived, raped, and pushed into prostitution herself.

Apparently Kenji Mizoguchi had been inspired by the movies that began coming out of Italy after WWII, and there is a definite influence of the Neorealist movement in evidence in Women of the Night. The choice between honest work and dishonest gain is not that far off from De Sica's father/son drama Bicycle Thieves [review], and much like similar ruins set the scene for Rossellini's Germany Year Zero [review], Japan's war-ravaged landscape provides a perfect backdrop for Mizoguchi's cautionary tale. Civilization has been ruined, and with it, any balance of right and wrong. The ladies in the movie will suffer all manner of humiliation and loss. Gone is any whiff of the hypocritical judgment of the common populace that made the struggles of the characters in Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion [review] so difficult to traverse; replacing it is a moral obligation to set things right, one that few engage with, and those who do seem inconsequential in the face of so much decay.

Mizoguchi's cast is excellent. They play their characters with nuance and, even in the worst cases, empathy. They appear to be more than simple "types," regardless of how insignificant their function in the narrative. Of particular note is the obvious divide between the sisters. Fusako is more compassionate at the start of the film, making her rejection of her previous life all the more drastic. Kinuyo Tanaka, whom Mizoguchi would use again in both Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, could have easily resorted to a cartoonish transformation. There are plenty of examples of how she might have made Fusako less sympathetic; most of the other prostitutes look like the prototype for bad girls in 1950s juvenile delinquent exploitation pictures. Instead, Tanaka relies on weariness and disappointment more than bravado. She plays Fusako as a woman who has given up, and her whole demeanor changes as a result--she goes from humbly slumping in deference to her social betters to defiantly displaying who she is.

Sanae Takasugi is equally as good when it comes to establishing the subtle distinctions between Fusako and Natsuko. Despite the hardships she has already endured, Natsuko has not given in to despair; rather, she has gotten crafty and she masks her troubles with an erudite manner. She is a woman that is used to being taken care of and having things paid for. Takasugi (who later worked with both Ozu and Ichikawa) plays her as borderline haughty. She carries herself differently than the actress playing her sister. Again, you can make out their approach to life just in how they present themselves, and by the end of the film, their stance has pretty much swapped. For all her good posture, however, things don't go much better for Natsuko. There are no good choices left for these ladies.

Women of the Night is an unrelenting tragedy. The downward spiral of its main characters is both dizzying and deep. Unfortunately, I think Mizoguchi tips the balance too far. In its final 20 minutes or so, Women of the Night becomes comically overwrought. Everything goes wrong, and instead of just letting the bad stuff happen, Mizoguchi and his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda, inflate the aforementioned moralizing, however flailing it might be, and resort to cornball histrionics. Fusako and Kumiko are reunited in a bombed-out Christian church, complete with stained-glass windows depicting the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus. A brawl breaks out amidst the rubble, as prostitutes who are angry that Fusako would try to rescue herself and her friend from this way of life descend on them in a frenzy of violence. It might have actually worked had Mizoguchi just let them take their beatings. Instead, Fusako's protests move her attackers to tears, and the film ends with labored wailing and cries to the heavens. It's a bit much. The director seems to have lost his restraint in direct proportion to his main characters' loss of dignity.

Goddammit, pour me another drink.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 10-11/11

Wow, I have been so out of it in November, I never even posted a list of movies I reviewed in October! My apologies for being drag-ass this past month, it's been a weird time. I am getting on track, though, and hope to catch up through December.

In the meantime, my non-Criterion movies...

IN THEATRES...

* The Big Year, it's called birding, not birdwatching, and it's awful either way. Wilson, Black, Martin--the new comedy nightmare team.

* The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a documentary showing a certain portion of history through a different lens.

* The Descendants, George Clooney starring in a new film from Alexander Payne.

* The Ides of March, a political drama from he-that-can-do-no-wrong, George Clooney. Starring Ryan Gosling.

* Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's documentary on the death penalty in Texas. Very human, very scary.

* J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood continues his trend of almost delivering in this biopic with Leonardo DiCaprio as the legendary lawman.

* Like Crazy, love a la modern cinema verite. Starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones.

* Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst at the end of the world, courtesy of Lars von Trier.

* The Mill and the Cross, Rutger Hauer stars as Pieter Bruegel preparing his painting The Procession to Calvary in Lech Majewski's deconstruction of the masterpiece.

* Restless, Gus Van Sant's latest attempt to go back to high school. Insert words "emo" and "twee" now.

* The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson returns to moviemaking for a somewhat disappointing Hunter S. Thompson movie with Johnny Depp.

* The Skin I Live In, the disturbing new horror drama from Pedro Almodovar.

* Take Shelter, the movie where Michael Shannon goes crazy and the world seemingly follows his lead.

ON DVD/BD...

* Bad Teacher: Unrated Edition, a superb cast can't prevent this from being one of the least funny movies you'll see this (or any) year.

* Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, the story about the influential rap group is also the best music documentary in a long, long time.

* Bellflower, the cult indie strikes me as empty for all the wrong reasons.


* Bored to Death: The Complete Second Season, the continuing adventures of Jason Schwarztman as the pulpy, humorous avatar of author Jonathan Ames.

* Buster Keaton - Short Films Collection: 1920-1923, 19 comedy gems on three discs.

* Cape Fear, Scorsese's potent remake with Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte.

* Dumbo: The 70th Anniversary Edition, the stellar new upgrade for the little elephant that could.

* Great Italian Directors Collection, a boxed set of three films, including the first by Antonioni, a mid-60s Monicelli, and the anthology film Boccaccio '70.

* His Way, a breezy documentary about music promoter/movie producer Jerry Weintraub.

* I'm a Cyborg, But Thats OK, an inconsistent oddity from Park Chan-wook.

* Miss Nobody, an indie black comedy starring Leslie Bibb.

* My Fair Lady, another Audrey Hepburn movie comes to Blu-Ray. (What is that? Three now? Hurry up, Hollywood!)

* Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a black action comedy. The true Santa Claus returns!

* Rescue Me: The Sixth Season and the Last Season, the fire fighter bromance ends.

* Tomorrow is Forever, a post-war snooze with Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert doing their best to be mellow in all the drama.

* True Adolescents, a surprising indie comedy starring Mark Duplass as the cliche 30s rocker on his last legs.

* Water for Elephants, a film even a pachyderm would endeavor to forget.

* The White Bus, a short film written by the recently deceased Shelagh Delaney and directed by Lindsay Anderson.

Lindsay Anderson directing

RAFFAELLO MATARAZZO'S RUNAWAY MELODRAMAS - ECLIPSE SERIES 27

When Criterion was releasing their most recent Eclipse set, Raffaelo Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas, a fellow Portland-based film critic, Shawn Levy, was wondering aloud about this relatively obscure filmmaker. Shawn tweeted, "Matarazzo gets one sentence each in Shipman's 'Story of Cinema' and Bondanella's 'Italian Cinema,' and four paragraphs in Liehm's 'Passion and Defiance.'" The implication is that, in all of cinema history, Matarazzo is little more than a footnote. Neither this assessment nor Shawn's posting is a dismissal, but a curious inquiry. Who was this mid-century Italian director that we were all about to be (re)introduced to?

According to the liner notes that accompany the set, Matarazzo was a journeyman filmmaker with a long line of mid-range studio pictures under his belt but little by way of mainstream success when he shifted gears in the late 1940s. Following the Neorealist remodel, Matarazzo dismantled and rebuilt his approach, marrying old-school sensibilities with new-school technique. Having helmed a lot of literary adaptations prior, the director decided to take the stuffy strictures of traditional melodrama and shoot them in the more naturalistic manner that De Sica and Rossellini were popularizing in post-War Italy.

How this all turned out is...well, it's interesting. Some of the tell-tale signs of the Neorealist style are immediately apparent, but so are the tropes and traditions of the dramatic format, including all the narrative coincidences and overwrought emotions that practically made "melodrama" a dirty word in the last couple of decades. Matarazzo's films work both sides of the class divide, and he shoots the upper classes and the lower in the same light. Sure, the rich stepmother in Tormento may live in a large apartment, but in keeping with the modern aesthetic, the director doesn't dress it up further, using instead the space as it is. He works out in the open, which allows him to circle and photograph life from its varying angles. He takes no real allegiance with one side or another, at least not as determined by social standing. His characters are more clearly defined by actions: good is good, and bad is bad.

The watershed movie for Matarazzo was 1949's Chains (Catene) (94 mins.) , which teamed him with the Titanus studios and actors Yvonne Sanson and Amedeo Nazzari. Sanson in particular was a revelation, a new find whose sensuality and beauty is immediately striking, and yet who fits easily into the roles of mother and devoted wife. In Chains, she plays Rosa, and Nazzari is her husband Guglielmo, a mechanic who owns his own shop and is looking to expand. They have two children, a young daughter named Angelina (Rosalia Randazzo) and a growing boy eager to be a man, Tonino (Gianfranco Magalotti). They are the typical working class nuclear family, the core unit of the decade to come.

Things change for the worse for them overnight, however, and the clan finds themselves stuck in a plot straight out of a pulp magazine. A car thief having engine trouble parks in Guglielmo's garage. His partner Emilio (Aldo Nicodemi) turns out to be Rosa's former fiancé, who went to war and as far as she knew, never came back. Seeing each other again awakens old feelings, and Emilio sticks around, insinuating himself into Guglielmo's business in hopes of getting Rosa back in his arms.

Matarazzo reveals himself master of the slow burn in Chains. Emotions simmer before they boil, and though his pacing is perhaps too languid at times, it does have its payoffs. A particularly powerful scene comes midway when Tonino sees hands clasped under a table and realizes that maybe his mother is up to no good. Matarazzo doesn't crank the emotion here, he just lets it settle. The boy watches, the reality of the scenario sinks in, the feeling takes root. The director uses "live" music to underscore this scene, as he does throughout the film. Neapolitan ballads are full of stories of lost love and pain, and Matarazzo isn't afraid to choose a number with obvious parallels to his story. Later in Chains, after Guglielmo has found himself in legal hot water, a Christmas Eve crooner hits the fugitive father right in the heart with his overwrought lyrics.

Music serves a similar role in Matarazzo's follow-up film, Tormento (1950; 98 minutes). In this feature, Roberto Murolo plays a singer who re-enters the heroine's life midway through the story, and his songs unknowingly detail every heartbreak and sacrifice she has to make in the film. Yvonne Sanson stars again, this time as Anna, a loving daughter and mother who has been victimized for years by her cartoonishly evil stepmother (Tina Lattanzi). After her husband-to-be (Nazzari again) is falsely convicted of a crime, Anna must take care of their child on her own. On his deathbed, her father (Annibale Betrone) makes his wife swear to take care of his granddaughter, but the mean old witch will only do so if Anna locks herself away in a home for wayward women. Like her husband, Anna is innocent of any sin, much less a crime--she doesn't even cheat with the musician, and loses her job because she won't bend over for her boss (Nicodemi)--but the young girl's failing health takes precedence over her reputation.

A theme of compromised piety and female sacrifice emerges in Matarazzo's work in both of these films. In Chains, Sanson's character can save her husband by accepting charges of adultery; in Tormento, she acquiesces to the stepmother's lies to give her daughter a better life. Matarazzo's technique, it seems, is to bring his heroine as low as he can, letting the audience suffer with her and testing our expectations, seeing how far he can strain our belief that things will turn out all right in the end. This, of course, only increases the relief when they do. It's a move that works better in the earlier film; the back half of Chains is full of predictable, yet tantalizing, plot machinations, whereas Tormento is more plodding, full of hand wringing and cruel proclamations. The coincidences pile on one after the other, including a well-timed heart attack that strikes like lightning. It's the kind of storytelling that can be delicious fun when given a more feverish tone, but Tormento is too restrained. When the dirty deeds are slowed down this much, it's hard not to note how overdone it all is. Tormento borders on self-parody.

Things move from the city to the country in 1952's Nobody's Children (I figli di nessuno) (96 mins.), and it's best to know going in that it and the last film in Runaway Melodramas, 1955's The White Angel (100 mins.), form a two-part epic of misery and heartbreak. This helps some of the storytelling leaps in Nobody's Children make sense--though others really are just jumpy moves from one plot point to the next without much in between. Of the quartet presented in this box, Nobody's Children has the choppiest third act.

Nobody's Children is set in a quarry owned by the Canali family. Countess Elisabeth (Francoise Rosay) has been running the family business since becoming a widow, though her son Count Guido (Nazzari) will take over one day. Not soon enough for him. He wants to change the poor conditions and replace the outmoded equipment, but the foreman Anselmo (Folco Lulli) is in the way. To keep his hold on everything, Anselmo interferes with more than just business life: he rats out Guido for having a love affair with Luisa (Sanson), the daughter of the quarry's security guard. Behind-the-scenes scheming to separate them works, and on the Countess' orders, Anselmo even kidnaps the baby that Guido knows nothing about--only for the house Luisa was hiding in to burn down, too, and compel Luisa to think the child died. Oh, and did I also mention that she has already faked her own suicide? Following the child's death, she becomes a nun, one cruelly assigned to serve in the town where her life went so wrong.

This is the most fevered set-up so far, and Nazzari and Sanson slip comfortably into their expected roles: he is arch and unyielding, she is constantly at her wit's end. The quarry backdrop makes the human foibles on display seem all the more primitive, though some of the interior sets look fake compared to the craggy exteriors. Folco Lulli makes for a particularly slimy villain, giving Matarazzo his most believable threat so far. Anselmo's greed even transcends class barriers: he inadvertently provides the link between the trod-upon miners and the benevolent boss, because as the middle man, Anselmo does the trodding. It's bizarre social commentary. We could all get together, regardless of position, but the rats among us keep us separated.

The second half of the film focuses on Bruno (Enrico Olivieri), the kidnapped child. Guido's mother has been paying for his boarding school tuition. As Bruno gets older, he begins to wonder about his past; the headmaster tells him he's an orphan, but the other kids tease him for being a bastard, and he wants to know who his secret benefactor is. He runs away to find Anselmo after discovering the crook's address and starts working in the quarry, right under his real family's nose. And since this is Matarazzo, his journey to his hometown is soundtracked by a troubadour with a guitar!

The script for Nobody's Children grows pretty convoluted, though the protracted, tense climax more than makes up for it. It's true cinema cliché: Bruno rushes to stop some dynamite from detonating while Anselmo and Guido wrestle in the dirt down below. It adds a ticking-clock element to Matarazzo's work that we haven't seen before, while also setting him up for the weepy sickbed scenes he loves so much. The concluding scenes are also a bit of a curveball, as they don't deliver what we might usually expect from this kind of picture. Then again, there is a sequel...

Note: It's pretty much impossible to write about the next film without giving away at least something about what happens in Nobody's Children. If you are the type that gets queasy and/or senstivie about spoilers, you might want to go pour yourself some milk and come back later.

The White Angel picks up the story by repeating the final scene of Nobody's Children. Distraught over Bruno's tragic fate, Luisa has transferred to another convent, leaving no forwarding address, while Guido is angry about the role his wife (Enrica Dyrell) played in the deception. Wanting to erase all reminders of the past, Guido dissolves his marriage and is about to get rid of the quarry, too, when another tragic twist forces him to get himself back together. While away on business, he spots a woman in the train across from his and runs to meet her. She is a showgirl named Lina, and she is a dead ringer for Luisa. (She should be, she's also played by Yvonne Sanson.) Guido strikes up a tenuous relationship with her, and narrowly avoids being conned by the girl and her rotten boyfriend (Philippe Hersent).

The plot takes a surprising turn when Lina is sent to prison for holding on to her boyfriend's counterfeit money. In jail, she has a pretty bad time of it, especially after she runs afoul of the sexy head prisoner (Flora Lillo). Matarazzo isn't above a little behind-bars lady fighting. Lina begins to see the light after her beatdown, and it's revealed she is pregnant with Guido's baby. Adding to the weirdness, the doctor who comes to take care of her works in the same church as Luisa and is taken aback by the resemblance. Knowing this is why Guido liked her, Lina asks to see her twin so that she can tell the nun her story.

The White Angel is probably the best movie in the box, and it provides the set with the appropriate closure. Not only does it circle back to the beginning by embracing the same pulpy plot style as Chains, but it provides the most believable transformation and sets things right in Guido and Luisa's world. Throughout the Runaway Melodramas set, Yvonne Sanson's characters have been striving for atonement, often seeking it through religious conversion and an affirmation of family. Though The White Angel would make no sense if its lovers came back together in the finale--Luisa is a nun, after all--where they end up is perfectly logical and also extremely satisfying. One could even interpret the situation as the man finally having to accept responsibility for his sins and do the right thing. The women no longer need to carry the burden unfairly.

It probably doesn't hurt that Matarazzo goes for broke in this last entry, either. He has shed most of the Neorealist clothes he had put on previously, and The White Angel is at his most "Hollywood." Brooding lovers, flamboyant criminals, heavy consequences, and a tone of swelling, heaving orchestration to carry it along. Speedboats crash in brutal storms, fires get started during daring prison escapes, and despite all the talk of God and Catholicism, yet another infant is born out of wedlock. (For four movies that lack any onscreen sex, there sure are a lot of babies!) It's still not as great as, say, a Douglas Sirk or Vincent Minnelli movie, but few are, really. Raffaelo Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas ends better than it starts, and that in itself is its own kind of atonement.

Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas, the 27th entry in Criterion's long-running Eclipse series, gives us four obscure, little-seen films from a six-year span in one Italian director's career. Though the movies here sometimes suffer from convenient plotting and other shaky storytelling choices, the presence of two strong lead actors, and in particular Yvonne Sanson, keeps the drama riding high. In fact, keeping a core team throughout means we get to watch the filmmakers build something, honing their craft until they get it exactly right. The set particularly gets good the more scandalous the scripting, and fans of overwrought love stories will dig seeing these well-made Runaway Melodramas hit the familiar genre buttons.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 6/11

There was no post here on the blog last week, so I have fallen a bit behind again. As you'll see in the monthly round-up, it's not for lack of work; on the contrary, it's been too much work, I've been reviewing a lot. All I need to do is double up one week, though, and I'm back on track--and that should hopefully be easy, since I have four new releases (two Louis Malle, a Satyajit Ray, and the most recent Eclipse set) waiting to be watched. Comic Con is also coming, so you may see me scrambling yet again in not too long. Who all is going to the big show this year? Be sure to stop by Tr!ckster, there is much to be done and seen, including a Criterion sponsored event celebrating Kurosawa and raising money for relief in Japan. I'll also be part of Symposium 5, a ticketed event, so plan on going to that now!

IN THEATRES...

* 13 Assassins, samurai slaughter from Takashi Miike.

* Beginners, Mike Mills' exploration of mortality, love, and depression will catch you off guard. Naturally quirky and moving, it stars Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, and Melanie Laurent.

* Green Lantern. You will believe that space can be realllllly boring. And Earth. And everything else.

* Larry Crowne. This weekend, you can watch cars transform into robots, or you can let Tom Hanks transform your cold, dead heart into something living again. Your call.

* Midnight in Paris, everything old is new again in Woody Allen's delightful return to form.

* Submarine, a quirky, heartfelt coming-of-age drama set in Wales.

* The Tree of Life, in which Terrence Malick wrestles with the universe, the All Father, and all fathers.

* The Trip, Steve Coogan on a very funny roadtrip with his pal Rob Brydon. Directed by Michael Winterbottom.

* X-Men: First Class: Hey, man, that's a groovy mutation, but the movie's kind of a piece of crap.

ON DVD/BD...

* BLAST!, a science documentary about sending a telescope up into the sky on a balloon to look at the stars.

* Carancho, an Argentinian twist on crime and romance, from the people who brought us Lion's Den.

* The Cocoanuts, yuck it up with Los Bros. Marx in their 1929 debut.

* Despair, a Vladimir Nabokov adaptation from writer Tom Stoppard and director Rainer Werner Fassbender, starring Dirk Bogarde. And it's as weird as that combination would suggest.

* Eight Iron Men, a WWII variation on the "chamber room drama" that never quite takes off. From Edward Dmytryk and Stanley Kramer.

* The Goddess, Paddy Chayefsky wrote this thinly veiled portrait of a Marilyn Monroe-type actress, played by Kim Stanley. Interesting, if not entirely successful.

* Laila, a silent Norwegian epic from 1929.

* Man from Del Rio, starring Antony Quinn as a Mexican sheriff in a racially progressive 1950s western.

* The Man in the Net, starring Alan Ladd, directed by Michael Curtiz. Read the review that one fan called "a classic example of...uninformed arrogance" and inspired him to suggest I "take up something else to while away your time or attend a junior college film class."

* Marriage Italian Style, a strangely dark, yet intriguing, romantic "comedy" from Vittorio De Sica, reteaming Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

* Never Apologize, Malcolm McDowell's one-man show in remembrence of director Lindsay Anderson.

* New York, New York, Martin Scorsese's notorious 1977 musical mash-up of new and old styles, starring De Niro and Minnelli.

* Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese's documentary about author Fran Lebowitz. Engaging and funny.

* The Romantic Englishwoman, Joseph Losey directing a Tom Stoppard script about Glenda Jackson's aching loins. And Michael Caine yells a lot.

* The Sacrifice, a beautifully remastered new edition of Andrei Tarkovsky's final film.

* Spectacle: Elvis Costello with...Season 2, a second go-around with the maestro.

* Vera Cruz, Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper shoot up Mexico in a film by Robert Aldrich.

* Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour, a concert documentary about the influential feminist punk band. The DVD includes a ton of great bonus features.

* Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a trio of themed stories from director Vittorio De Sica and actors Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 5/11

A round-up of my reviews for non-Criterion movies in the past month.

IN THEATRES...

* The Beaver, Jodie Foster directs Mel Gibson, who talks through a beaver puppet. Yes, it's pretty crazy.

* Bridesmaids, this Kristen Wiig-led comedy is a real winner. Funny and heartfelt. And next time someone asks if Bridesmaids is a chick version of The Hangover, ask them if that's a stupid person's version of a smart question.

* Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's 3D documentary about the Chauvet Caves. My favorite movie of the year so far.

* Everything Must Go, in which Will Ferrell drinks some sad beer, channels Raymond Carver, and is pretty good at doing it.

* Hesher, Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as the title character. Hit an open chord, take off your shirt, and be a teenage dirtbag, baby.

* Thor, another winner from Marvel. Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of the comic is mighty fun.

* True Legend, a disappointing new action flick from the awesome martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping. Lame story, too much CGI.

The NW Film Center in Portland also had a festival of twelve films starring Catherine Deneuve. I picked some of my favorites for the Portland Mercury. Read "The Two Faces of Deneuve."

I also wrote blurbs for older movies doing the revival rounds:

* Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin
* Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

ON DVD/BD...

* Araya, Margot Benacerraf's 1959 blending of fact and fiction on the salt marshes of Venezuela.

* Bananas!*, a documentary about the fight against Dole Fruit, accused of poisoning Nicaraguan workers in the 1970s.

* The Captive City, Robert Wise's by-numbers anti-crime PSA from the 1950s.

* Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, an intriguing mash-up of classic indie cinema and classic movie musicals.

* Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, a stupendous documentary sifting through the remains of the Diabolique-director's unfinished would-be masterpiece.

* Hold On!, Herman's Hermits come to America, join the space race, play some music, pitch some woo.

* The Misfits, John Huston directs Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in their final screen roles. Also stars Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift, in a script by Arthur Miller.

* Not as a Stranger, starring Robert Mitchum as a doctor who can heal anything but his own bad impulses. Directed by Stanley Kramer.

* Shoeshine, a Neorealist classic from Vittorio De Sica, released 1946.

* The Unloved, Samantha Morton's softly rendered, heartfelt directorial debut.

UMBERTO D. - #201

I'm a cat person. Anyone who knows me will tell you. Hell, anyone who has read my fiction can tell you, too. Only my odd little book I Was Someone Dead has a dog in it. Almost all my other books feature a cat in some kind of major role. Even my crime graphic novel.

I don't trust dogs. My foundation for this? Because I was once told if I had a pet dog, he or she wouldn't eat me after I'm dead, whereas if I breathed my last here in the apartment, Sadie would feast on my corpse if she got hungry during the considerable wait before someone finally realized I'd succumbed. There is something more honest about that, I think. (Pardon me if I've used that line before...sometimes I can't remember if my jokes are ones I tell, or ones I've written down once upon a time.) Dogs are sneaky creatures. It's all about approval ratings. Their insistence that you must like them, that you will pay attention and be their friend, is their sneakiest move. It's like the pretty girl that gets you to buy her drinks and dinner, and then leaves without giving you her number; they know it will work, they know you will succumb. Cats let you know where they stand; dogs pretend not to be self-serving as a method of enslavement.

And no, I'm not immune. Case in point: Boss.

Boss is a pug who belongs to a friend of mine. That's him and me there. I'm the one with the shiny forehead. He looks like Wilford Brimley and goddamn if I wouldn't buy a bowl of oatmeal from that little jerk. People I know have seen me walking him in the neighborhood, and they usually do a double-take. My regular excuse is that he's a chick magnet (which is true, he is), but the real story is that he conned his way into my heart and we're pals. I even walked him tonight, jumped at the chance when my friend called and asked if I'd have time.

Pet love is universal, regardless of the species. I am only on this dog tangent because Vittorio De Sica's 1952 drama Umberto D. is about an old man and his dog. Umberto Domenico Ferrari, as played by Carlo Battisti, and Flike, as played by Napoleone. Harlan Ellison wrote a famous novella called "A Boy and His Dog," about a guy who survives the nuclear apocalypse with his faithful pooch. Though it doesn't have nuclear war or mutants, De Sica and Cesare Zavattini's script for Umberto D. is built on the same principle: man's best friend can make anything bearable.

Old Umberto is a retiree who is having trouble making ends meet on his pension. Behind on his rent, he is at odds with his exasperated landlady (Lina Gennari), who is ready to kick her tenant of twenty years to the curb. Desperate to save cash and get ahead, Umberto manages to get a bed in the public hospital and weasel an extended stay. When he finally leaves, however, he returns home to find Flike gone and the rooming house being remodeled. Though he finds Flike again, he can't do anything about the fact that the walls of his tiny room are being torn down. Umberto needs another solution.

Make a movie about a dog, and it's almost guaranteed to be schmaltzy. There's no quicker way to pull the heartstrings right out of their sockets than get a cute dog to look sad and whimper. Beasts of Burden, a recent comic book series by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, uses dogs and cats rather effectively to tell old school ghost stories, and I wondered while reading it if I would have cared as much about what was happening if they had used humans instead. Their furry monster fighters came without the human baggage, and the quick emotional connection I made to the characters made the spooky stories all the more harrowing. Is it possible that slasher flicks have immunized me so much, that had the legion of ghostly puppies in the second issue actually been the specters of a bunch of dead kids, I wouldn't have gotten as choked up when they cried for justice?

Put a story about a pet in the hands of accomplished artists, such as Dorkin or Thompson, and they can manage to tell a sentimental yarn without making it overly sentimental. I know that sentiment is an icky thing in most critical playbooks, but it's kind of a fake pose. Sentimentality is not inherently evil unto itself. Like most things, it's excess that makes sentimentality bad, or going straight for the easy tears without really earning it. You're not going to find a more delicate hand than that of Vittorio De Sica, particularly at this stage of his career. It would have been easy to go over the top with any number of scenes in Umberto D. The old man looking for his pup at the pound, for instance, the way he sees other dogs being wheeled into the abattoir--this could have been an awfully trite sequence in any other movie. De Sica, in his quest for naturalism and adherence to the Neorealist credo, underplays everything. When an event is as naturally dramatic as this one, there is no need to pile anything on top of it.

Working with a combination of non-actors and seasoned professionals, De Sica creates a world that resembles reality yet toys with the idea of performance. Sensing there is already a natural divide in his story, that between the poor people like Umberto and the maid Maria (Maria Pia Casilio) and the ones with money, such as the landlady, the director playfully adds artificial divisions, as well. The landlady, for instance, sits in her boudoir analyzing music with her snooty friends--they are all performers, or at the very least, wannabes--and she is going to move up in the world by marrying a cinema owner. Miniature soap operas play out in her social circle, as well, like the two lovers Umberto and Maria spy through the keyhole. How far away the cheating wife's predicament is from the more critical crisis of the maid, who is pregnant, unsure of who the father is, and convinced that she will lose her job once the landlady discovers she's with child.

It's all these tiny dramas that make the world of Umberto D.. Whole lives are being lived in stairwells, whole stories being told on the street. The cheating wife shows up more than once, ashamed and nervous to be seen by the old man who knows her secret (even if he barely seems to remember; his spying on her through the keyhole has a sort of visual rhyme in us spying on him through the gaping hole put in his wall). There are the tales the beggars tell to manipulate passersby into giving them money (stand-ins for those falsifying, overly sentimental filmmakers, one could say), and there is even the political foundation De Sica lays at the start of the picture. Umberto is one amongst a crowd of old men who have taken to the streets to protest unfair pension policies, only to be chased by policemen in jeeps. The world is unfair and uncaring. The ornate, towering city in ruins buries its older citizens, makes them small (particularly the way De Sica frames them).

Carlo Battisti plays Umberto as a quiet, proud man. He is a man who wants to raise his fist in the air and shake it, but he's more likely to do it standing behind a door than out in the open. The only time he really gets heated up is after he finds Flike again, and he confronts his landlady to her face. Flike is the one thing he cares about, and that's because he knows Flike cares about him. The third act of Umberto D. takes a dark turn, when Umberto's despair becomes so great, he considers ending it all. The only thing stopping him is the dog. He can't leave Flike without someone to care for him. He considers boarding the animal but doesn't like the look of the lodgings. He tries to give Flike to a little girl, but her nanny reinforces the notion that modern society is cynical and uncaring, she believes there must be a catch. Umberto tries to run, but Flike finds him.

This relationship puts me in mind of my father and his relationship with his dog Shep. It's actually in tribute to that friendship that I put the dog Gus into I Was Someone Dead; it may be no small coincidence that Vittorio De Sica dedicated Umberto D. to his father. No one else in my family really liked Shep. He was an Australian Shepherd, a slightly large dog, and too dumb to realize his own size. He was also usually pretty filthy. My dad loved him. As he explained it, Shep never cared what kind of day he had, what he did or did not accomplish, the pup always greeted my pop the same way whenever he got home. Eventually Shep got sick and had to be put to sleep, and my father, who has not always been prone to personal expressions, still tears up more than ten years later when he talks about having had to make that decision. You'd be hard-pressed to get a single drop out of him in regards to an ex-wife.

There is nearly half a century between Shep and Flike, but again, such is the commonality of having pets. Flike gives Umberto a reason to go on, and his friendly, nonjudgmental gaze compels Umberto to maintain his dignity. Innocence is a mirror in which we see our own guilt. At one point, Umberto considers panhandling, but he can't bring himself to carry it through. Instead, he has Flike sit on the sidewalk holding his hat. When someone they know comes by, I get the sense that Umberto is more ashamed that he made Flike do his dirty work than he would have been had the colleague caught him begging on his own.

When it comes down to it, the relationship between Umberto and Flike is a replay of the relationship between the father and son in De Sica's Bicycle Thieves. In both, daddy is going to have to do some bad things that he wishes his child was not around to see, but he can envision no other option. The difference here is that the child does not have the capacity to protest or for the most part even understand what is wrong. This makes it all the more gutwrenching when Umberto makes a decision that actually affects the animal, so much so that Flike runs from him and is reluctant to let his old pal back into his good graces. It's another mini drama, but this time with the central characters, a micro narrative that provides Umberto the way to redemption. It's Abraham and Isaac, but Isaac is both the sacrificial lamb and the angel that stays his master's hand.

Flike gives in kind of easy, if you ask me. A cat would have held out for much longer, made the old goat suffer, and then got a special treat out of it, sentimental finales be damned.

Yesterday's EmiTown was coincidentally appropos of this topic.