Before seeing Johnny Depp as John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s new crime film Public Enemies, we decided to check out an earlier portrayal of the infamous bank robber, Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger. The 1945 picture is a bit disappointing in terms of bank jobs, which are mostly shown in quick succession during a montage. There is one interesting robbery, but technically it’s an armored truck heist (also, having been shot by Fritz Lang for an earlier film, the scene doesn’t quite fit the rest of the movie). From what we hear, the robberies in Public Enemies aren’t that much more memorable, even if they do resemble an MGM musical, which is a shame considering how clever the real Dillinger was.
We definitely prefer a clever criminal and a clever plan when it comes to bank robber movies. Otherwise it’s just yet another taut thriller or slapstick comedy involving a tunnel dig from the bakery/bathhouse/chicken restaurant/luggage store/etc. next door. So we’ve come up with ten favorite bank jobs that involve originality and a successful getaway (a plan isn’t that clever if it doesn’t work). There have been hundreds of bank robberies throughout film history so if we’ve forgotten something really clever, inform/remind us of the movie in the comments. We’ve purposefully excluded armed vehicle, stagecoach and train robberies, though, so stick specifically to internal bank jobs. …Read more
Perhaps Karina gave adequate attention to Jean-Paul Belmondo recently with her review of the Pierrot le FouCriterion DVD (though she mainly focused on Anna Karina), but the actor turns 75 today, and according to David Hudson at GreenCine, he’s not getting enough love on this monumental occasion. So, here’s a fun clip of him duking it out with Alain Delon in Jacques Deray’s Borsalino.
My introduction to Belmondo was with Pierrot, and that is still my favorite of his films (I would love to paint my face blue in his honor today). Yet I chose this scene from the lesser known and lesser regarded film because Belmondo and Delon equally co-represent the epitome of cool in French cinema, but I prefer Belmondo’s more rubber-faced, gangly, comical kind of cool guy. And while the fight ends in a draw, I think Belmondo gets in the better blows.
I watched the new Criterion edition of Pierrot le Fou, a film I’ve seen many times but not once in at least five years, with Glenn Kenny and Nathan Rabin’s wildly divergent reads swirling in my head. I am not in a place in my life where I’m particularly open to romance as either a nostalgic concept or present-day reality, but this recent viewing of a film that I loved long ago left me wondering how it could be received with anything but a swoon. Pierrot le Fou can be distant and opaque, for sure, but necessarily so––it’s about a couple’s inability to overcome the opaque distance that lies between them. More than that, its blend of cinematic Cubism and stylized hyper-realism is deeply evocative of a love that’s literally out to sea. There’s no question that it works as a romance about the death of a romance. In fact, what may be up for debate, is whether it works as anything else at all.
I was nudged down this path of questioning by two elements of Criterion’s special edition package, both of which illuminate Pierrot’s relevance as an extremely thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the disintegration of Jean-Luc Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina. The first is Richard Brody’s liner notes essay, “Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens,” which meticulously breaks down how a film ostensibly based on an American crime novel called Obsession, infused with two Balzac works which Godard conflated into one, became, through a necessity of casting, an accident of timing and a desperate need for catharsis, “an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work.”
Godard, l’amour, la poesie, a documentary on the package’s second disc, doesn’t fully explicate that”destruction”, but it does offer some clues as to the mindset that transposed it into film. Filmmaker Luc Lagier introduces Anna Karina as “a woman to be filmed and loved,” which is our first indication that said accusations towards Karina’s almost mystical-sounding ability to drive Godard to ruin with her love will be taken at face value.
Posting will be light here this afternoon–it’s a slooooooow post-holiday news day, and I’m planning to spend the better part of the afternoon at Film Forum swooning over Jean-Paul Belmondo in a new print of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos. To get into the mood, I went to YouTube and searched for “Belmondo.” I found this trailer for A Woman is A Woman, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 “musical” starring Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy. In it, Godard explains (via wall-to-wall voice over) his Renoir-inspired approach to on-the-set improvisation. It’s semi-NSFW, but considering it’s a beautiful summer Friday afternoon, you’re probably not at work, anyway.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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