Nest of the Gentry (1969)

“Is it true that I’m home at last?”

The Soviet film,  A Nest of the Gentry (Dvoryanskoe Gnezdo) is based on the novel by Ivan Turgenev. It’s the story of the return home of disillusioned Lavretsky (Leonid Kulagin) after he separates from his wife, Varvara (Beata Tyszkiewicz) in Paris. While the beautiful, elegant Varvara is the toast of Paris, Lavretsky is sadly out-of-place in the salon society, and after learning of his wife’s affair with another man, Lavretsky decided to return to his country estate in Russia. During his long absence, the estate has fallen into a state of decay, and during the film’s first scenes, Lavretsky wanders through the house with a loyal serf by his side. Everywhere he looks, things are falling apart–from the broken frames of portraits to the cobwebs flung across unused rooms.

Lavretsky has returned to the refuge of his long-unappreciated estate to “plough the land” and he very soon reconnects with long-time acquaintances–the Kalitins. The oldest girl of the family, Liza (Irina Kupchenko), catches his eye, but she already has a suitor, the dilettante Panshin (Viktor Sergachyov), a government official who comes by to lay siege to Liza on a daily basis. Liza’s mother encourages the match, and it’s one of those situations where the mother is enamoured with the daughter’s beau and arranges the match through a sort of thwarted desire. Liza, who’s a deeply religious girl, is ambivalent about Panshin, but not rebellious enough to openly disobey her mother’s wish. So it seems as though the match will take place as Panshin’s courtship extends through the long summer days.

Lavretsky’s arrival upsets all these matchmaking plans, and as he continues to visits the Kalitins, he falls in love with Liza and his feelings are reciprocated. Lavretsky is tied in marriage, but then the news comes that his wife is dead….

The film includes flashbacks of Lavretsky’s life in Paris, although his wife is a screaming success in the salons of Paris, Lavretsky seems out-of-place, superfluous, and even in the way as Varvara glitters and glides through the elegant company. But somehow Lavretsky is equally out of place in his dilapidated country estate.

Nest of the Gentry is a difficult novel to translate to the screen as a large portion of the novel is spent explaining Lavretsky’s background and his hideous education at the hands of his “anglomaniac” father. While Turgenev’s novel explains the idea of the ’superfluous man’–an upper class man divorced from Russian culture, these portions of the novel are mostly absent from the film, and that’s unfortunate as these sections underscore the Russian upper class divorcement from their own culture. Lavretsky’s background, and the fact that his mother was a serf is only briefly mention. Several scenes, however, underscore the idea of French decadence and artificiality in direct contrast to the gorgeous summer scenes in the Russian countryside. There’s one great scene of the idle rich lounge by the river’s edge while in the background serfs sing as they slave on the estate.

The film is also quite gentle in its treatment of Panshin, and while the novel spends pages on Panshin’s egoism, the film, apart from sticking Panshin in the clothes of a dandy, doesn’t address his character or his desire to ‘westernize” Russia.

The film also ends inconclusively, and somewhat unsatisfyingly with the characters’ fates still up in the air. Those complaints aside, Nest of the Gentry is a gorgeous adaptation that should please fans of Russian literature and/or Soviet cinema, but a mini series format would perhaps effectively capture the details of the novel that this film missed. From director Andrei Konchal

Noir Quotes–Naked Alibi (1954)

“Stinking cops. Nobody socks me around like that. Nobody. I get even. I always do.” (Gene Barry as Al Willis)

“I don’t want to go downtown. They’ll beat me.” (Gene Barry as Al Willis)

“Shooting off at the mouth is one thing and killing a guy is something else.” (Gene Barry as Al Willis)

“They’ll get you copper. One of those trigger-happy bulls you used to boss around is going to blow your head off.” (Gene Barry as Al Willis)

“Make believe it’s another business trip.” (Gene Barry as Al Willis to his wife)

Today We Live (1933)

“It’s worth a World War to get a uniform like that.”

Today We Live is a weepy melodrama set in WWI–notable for its cast: Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone, and Robert Young. Directed by Howard Hawks and based on a William Faulkner novel, it’s the story of four characters and one love triangle set against the backdrop of WWI bravado.

The film begins with an American, Bogard (Gary Cooper) arriving in Britain. It’s 1916 and it’s the middle of WWI, but Bogard declares himself “neutral.” He plans to rent a country home in Kent from a British family, and he travels to the house just as Diana (Joan Crawford) the daughter of the house discovers that her father, a British army captain, has been killed in action. Bogard moves in and Diana moves into the gardener’s cottage.

Diana’s brother, Ronnie (Franchot Tone) and their life-long friend, Claude (Robert Young) arrive with just a few hours to spare before shipping out. This interlude confirms Diana’s romance with Claude and she agrees to wait for him. That leaves her alone with Bogard, and they fall in love.

Today We Live is a peculiar film. For a start, three of the main characters: Diana (Joan Crawford), her brother Ronnie (Franchot Tone), and their childhood friend, Claude (Robert Young) are supposed to be British but of course, they are all American. This leaves Crawford hard-pressed to deliver the fake accent, and as a result, her voice seems to come from somewhere at the back of her throat, and the lines with their long vowels are accompanied by little facial expression (apart from tears)–it’s as though Crawford puts all of her effort into the accent.

While it’s supposed to be 1916, some of Crawford’s costumes (before she runs off to join the war) are much too ‘modern’–take the number she wears when she first meets Bogard. It looks like something Lt. Uhura would wear. But frankly, all these quibbles aside, it’s the horrible script that sinks this film.

Today We Live is a tearjerker based on the premise that war is noble, calls for great sacrifices and that the best way to approach the war is to pretend it isn’t happening. This works for some scenes but not others. For example, when Ronnie and Claude visit Diana for a few hours before they ship out, the atmosphere is deliberately gay and carefree. It works. But when Ronnie and Claude visit the WWI memorial to the dead, look at the names, and see Ronnie’s father’s name as the latest addition, they are positively glowing. 

Diana and Bogard fall in love–it seems–after a short bike ride–another problem. If a film is a tearjerker, it should allow the audience to wallow in it, and this film doesn’t. There’s another scene with Claude acting as a turret gunner and mouthing “sorry” as he shoots Germans down.

But ultimately it’s the film’s dialogue that drove me around the bend. In what seems to be an attempt to show suppressed emotion, the film’s clipped dialogue is absurd:

“Wasn’t killed. Mistake. Met him in the hospital.”

“Been waiting. Getting worried.”

“Can’t help it. Tried. Tried terribly.”

Now while perhaps we could argue that it’s a brother-sister language (and the film indicates that Ronnie drives the ‘no emotion’ stance), Claude speaks it too: 

“See. See better now. See lots of things.”

With dialogue like that, the characters begin to seem like foreigners who haven’t yet mastered things like pronouns and articles. Makes me think of those Hollywood films where they have Americans dressed up as Chinese, let’s say, and the authenticity is supposed to come from perfectly pronounced words that are delivered in clipped sentences.

On the positive side, Roscoe Karns as Bogard’s sidekick McGinnis steals the film. McGinnis is the only sensible character in the bunch. And it is great to see the dewy-eyed Crawford before she developed that hard look that carried her through Mildred Pierce. Crawford met Franchot Tone on the set of Today We Live and they later married in 1935. Tone, of course, had a real-life love triangle of his own involving Barbara Payton and Tom Neal.

A Virus Has No Morals (1986)

“Mother, what are you doing here? You were always a bit eccentric, but I didn’t realise that you were so perverse.”

A son meets his mother in a public toilet. Nurses on the graveyard shift throw the dice to see which AIDS patient will die next. A virologist uses dildos to demonstrate the effects of AIDS. This all happens in A Virus Has No Morals (AKA Ein Virus Kennt Keine Moral), Rosa von Praunheim’s satire about AIDS. A satire about AIDS!!!! Yes, you read that correctly. There are probably only a handful of directors who could pull this off successfully (John Waters leaps to mind). Rosa von Praunheim is a renegade German director who’s made a number of documentaries about AIDS, and his gay activism brought him death threats in his native Germany. Only someone with von Praunheim’s reputation as a fierce, unrelenting defender of gay rights could make this film and get away with it.

As its title suggests, A Virus Has No Morals argues that AIDS does not discriminate when it comes to infection (i.e. it’s not sent by some deity as a punishment). But when the film begins, we see several moral authorities who have various twisted beliefs about AIDS. The film’s moral authorities include: virologist, Dr. Blood, a therapist (Regina Rudnick) who believes that AIDS is psychosomatic, and a reporter (Eva Kurz) for the sleazy tabloid Purple Pages. Of course, their smug attitudes grant them a certain comfort. After all, if they are fine, upstanding, moral people, then they can’t have anything to worry about….

On the other side of the fence, in the face of infection, there are many who still think they are invulnerable–including a sauna owner (played by von Praunheim). He sees AIDS as detrimental to business, and he tries to dream up social events to encourage business.

By showing the entire spectrum of those involved one way or another with AIDS, von Praunheim illustrates the social dynamic of the disease. There are those who make money off of AIDS by sensationalizing it (the Purple Pagesreporter), and those who promise ‘cures’ (the therapist). Outraged by the “fascist medical regime,” a caring nurse forms a revolutionary group called AIDS (Angry, Sick, and Impotent Direct Action). Meanwhile as paranoia runs unchecked in the country, the Minister of Health draws up plans to start shipping AIDS patients to “ideal isolation” on an island for Quarantine. here AIDS patients will exist in a “post modern viral infection park,” with its own condom factory.

A Virus Has No Morals isn’t von Praunheim’s best film (my favourites are Neurosia and Anita: Dances of Vice), but it is typical von Praunheim fare–very colourful outrageous, and complete with a savage, riotous wit. Somehow, when I watch his films, I have the sensation that the situation is barely under control, but at the same time, it’s obvious that von Praunheim is having a great time making his films. Take for example, the sequences of von Praunheim’s version of Masque of the Red Death, scenes that are interjected into the middle of the film. It’s all von Praunheim madness and marvellous mayhem, and if you are a von Praunheim fan, you won’t mind a bit.

Noir Quotes-Dead Reckoning (1947)

“Right now the cops are after me. Not that I’ve done anything wrong, father.” (Bogart/Murdock to priest)

“If I can’t work this out, I want somebody to know what happened.” (Bogart as Murdock to priest)

“Didn’t I tell you, all females are the same with their faces washed.” (Murdock to Sgt Drake)

“Stalled again like a jeep on synthetic gas.” (Murdock voiceover)

“He’s as crisp as bacon.” (Copper to Murdock in morgue)

“Not doing much business for the one cool spot in town.” (Murdock to copper in morgue)

“All that’s missing is the sledgehammer highball and a pair of snake-eye dice.” (Murdock voiceover)

“Think I fell for that fancy tripe? Let’s have a new story, baby.” (Murdoch to Coral Chandler)

“I’m not the type tears do anything to.” (Murdock to Coral Chandler)

“I never think when I gamble. I just feel and I feel snake eyes.” (Murdock)

“Keep the motor running and the headlights on.” (Murdock to Coral Chandler)

“As a good last gesture, just shoot straight and make it fast, will you?” (Martinelli to Murdock)

“All mushy outside and hard at the core, eh?” (Murdock to Coral Chandler)

“When a guy’s pal is killed, he ought to do something about it.” (Murdock)

“Here’s a little melody for you. One of my favourite tunes.” (Murdock KOs Krause)

Hold Your Man (1933)

“You know you wouldn’t be a bad-looking dame, if it wasn’t for your face.”

Set during the depression, the 1933 film Hold Your Man from director Sam Wood begins by focusing on the feet that pass by on a street corner. A wallet lands in the middle of the feet and two men begin to argue about who found it. This scene is the introduction to the film’s rogue with the “crooked smile,” Eddie Hall (Clark Gable).

On the lam from the police, ladies’ man and smooth-talking grifter, Eddie Hall meets wise-cracking, tough-as-nails, good-time-girl Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow). The sparks fly between these two major Hollywood stars as they verbally spar back-and-forth in Ruby’s apartment, and although they both try to come out on top from the exchange, it’s a draw. Eddie’s good looks and charm don’t get him far with this dame, and Ruby makes it clear that she’s not a sap to be taken advantage of. Inside Ruby’s apartment, Eddie catches sight of a photo from one of her male admirers, but then as he walks around, he sees a large collection of photos of men all signed with good wishes. The implication is clear: Ruby has been around. Eddie and Ruby meet once again at the Elite Club. Ruby is there on a date with the aim of getting some money for her pain and suffering. While she’s  obviously bored to tears by her date, Ruby comes to life when Eddie shows up masquerading as an old friend. The film’s best, witty scenes occur early in the film as the two main characters get to know each other.

The film sinks after the second half as the plot morphs into a maudlin tale of redemption. The script, written by Anita Loos, sparkles for the first half, but then the dialogue loses its pep and slides into the ordinary with the result that the film’s great first half was as funny as its second half was disappointing. Ruby’s image of the wise-cracking dame fades rapidly just as it seems she needed her claws the most, and the tale’s conclusion comes wrapped up tightly with a conventional, saccharine-sweet final scene.

Hold Your Man is one of six films made by Gable and Harlow, and it follows on the tail of Red Dust. While the first half of Hold Your Man matches Red Dust for entertainment value, the second half did not. This is not Harlow’s best by any means as she just doesn’t make a very good victim and she’s at her tenacious best when unleashed in a role that’s worthy of her.  Hold Your Man, by the way, is a pre-code film. The Hays code wasn’t enforced until 1934, but even so the redemptive ending and conversion by domesticity really smacks of someone trying to keep those censors happy.

Megan Abbott’s Favourite Noir Film List

 Megan Abbott, author of Die a Little, The Song is You, Queenpin and Bury Me Deep graciously sent me a list of her all-time favourite noir films, and here they are:

 1. In a Lonely Place

2. Kiss Me Deadly

3. Sweet Smell of Success

4. Naked Kiss

5. Double Indemnity

6. Sunset Boulevard

7. Laura

8. The Killing

9. Fallen Angel

10. DOA

11. The Locket

12. Phantom Lady

A Month By the Lake (1995)

Fans of British films set in the picturesque tourist destinations of Italy should really enjoy the engaging and highly entertaining film, A Month By the Lake from director John Irvin and based on a story by H.E.Bates. And while nothing much really happens in the film it’s an enjoyable romp, thanks mainly to the talents of the film’s leading actors Vanessa Redgrave and James Fox.

One of the unspoken rules in films that depict the British abroad, is that away from the damp and the fog of their native land, they tend to drop inhibitions and go just a little crazy as they engage in activities and relationships they wouldn’t dream of indulging in in their native land. Take Shirley Valentine and Where Angels Fear To Tread–just two of dozen of titles that explore the behaviour of the British abroad.

A Month By the Lake begins with Miss Bentley (veteran actress Vanessa Redgrave) striding up the steps of an elegant lakeside Italian villa. This is the Lake Como resort Miss Bentley has visited every year for 16 years, but this is the first time she’s come alone. Although her father has recently died, Miss Bentley returns alone to the resort as she loves Lake Como and has made firm friends amongst the other guests. This is, we are told via voice over narration, that last glorious summer before the war.

But while rumours of war grumble in the background, the action focuses on the villa and its guests. There are a couple of middle-aged American women there and also the solitary retired British Major Wilshaw (James Fox). Lonely Miss Bentley is attracted to Major Wilshaw on the very first day, and while circumstances throw them together upon occasion, he’s beguiled by the saucy, young American governess, Miss Beaumont (Uma Thurman) who has charge of two little Italian girls.

This gentle romance follows the trials and tribulations of Wilshaw’s courtship, and while the film could so easily have become cliched and like a million other films on the same subject, A Month By the Lake is saved by its wry humour and sly look at the many foibles of human behaviour–vanity, willfulness, boredom and loneliness all gilded with the fact that these characters are far away from home and the repercussions of their behaviour may not wash ashore on their doorsteps.

The film keeps the shadows of impending war in the background, but the sense remains that so much is on the brink of loss and destruction. Vanessa Redgrave steals the film as the buoyant Miss Bentley, so easy to underestimate and designate as “spinster” while underneath passion and an irrepressible zest for life longs to burst free

Slave of Love (1976)

“Our life is like a house where the children have been forgotten.”

Nikita Mikhalkov’s film  Slave of Love (Raba Lyubvi)  is loosely based on the last days of silent film actress Vera Kholodnaya. Kholodnaya rose to prominence during WWI, starring in a succession of box-office hits, but when the Russian revolution arrived, and the Bolsheviks began to influence the film industry, Kholodnaya moved to Odessa. And there she died in 1919. Officially a victim of the Spanish flu, rumours persisted that Kholodnaya was murdered.

Slave of Love is an artistic interpretation of Kholodnaya’s story. In the film, the actress is Olga Nikolayevna Voznesenskaya  (Yelena Solovey), a young widow with two children who is in Crimea making yet another film, following her last film triumph, Slave of Love.The film crew expects the imminent arrival of another actor, Maksakov, from Moscow, and he’s to play the male lead opposite Olga. In the meantime, the harried director shoots the scenes that don’t require Maksakov, and the crew are often unsettled by visits from the local White Russian, Chief of Counterintelligence, Fedotov (Konstantin Grigororyev), an ardent fan of Olga.

 In Crimea, the film crew are enjoying a different world, sweet sunny days and plenty of food, but there’s the sense that this time is fleeting, and that  this summer will be the last. It will be just a matter of time before the revolution sweeps through the Crimea–the last stronghold of the White Russians.

In between shoots for the film, Olga has a friendship with the cameraman, Victor Pototsky (Rodion Nahapetov), and they spend many idyllic afternoons driving around the countryside, and these glorious times are in contrast to tales of war and revolution. The war seems far away, but there are cracks in this fragile, ephemeral life. There’s one scene in which Olga and her ever-present mother are in the hotel with Olga’s children. They note the continual whimpering of a dog abandoned in the apartment underneath. While the women realize that the dog has “been abandoned” while its “owners went overseas,”  there’s no attempt to rescue the dog or even to discuss what exactly ‘going overseas’ meant–clearly the dog’s owners were fleeing the Bolsheviks and escaping the country while they still can.

Olga is unconcerned about politics. Instead she’s driven by fame and vanity and consumed with her stage persona. Although Olga manages fairly effectively to ignore the war, she is forced to confront it when the train arrives from Moscow full of friends and family of the crew, but the actor Maksakov is absent. He’s become a Bolshevik and has decided to remain behind. While Olga brushes off the tales of horror and deprivation told by the newcomers, she takes Maksakov’s action as a personal betrayal.  There’s one scene when Olga is railing against Maksakov, and she storms over to a local cinema where one of his films is playing and begins a rant against Maksakov, but she’s quickly distracted when the crowd recognises her. Her quest against Maksakov becomes a performance, a period of fan adoration, and she’s entirely distracted from her mission–yet ironically she achieves what she set out to do in the process. But like most actresses, she is always playing a role–from her posing as a tragic figure to a screen idol, it’s difficult to tell if there’s a real Olga underneath the lightening periods of effervescence and hysteria.

As Olga’s relationship with Victor intensifies, magnified by the facts that they are thrown together by circumstance, Olga gradually learns that Victor is a Bolshevik and determined to leak vital photographic evidence of White Russian atrocities back to the Bolsheviks. Victor knows that the White Russians are considered the ‘good guys’ while “Europe screams about the Bolshevik atrocities,” so he’s fully aware of the stakes involved in his task. Desperate, he enlists the help of Olga arguing that her special status as a star places her “above suspicion.”

Olga’s epiphany arrives when she sees footage of White atrocities exacted against the local population, and so she decides to help the Bolshevik cause–no matter the cost.  But how much does Olga really grasp? She tends to see real-life in terms of sets and film-making, and the final scenes underscores Olga’s problematic perceptions of reality by bringing The Perils of Pauline to mind.

Slave of Love is an absolutely superb Soviet film, tragically under-viewed. The film is crafted to emphasize silent film, some scenes are without speech while other scenes are in black and white. The camera frequently focuses on Olga’s expressive face as she struggles through various scenes of the film she is making and as she suffers tragically through events. Yelena Solovey plays the role of Olga with delicate sensibility.

On a final note, I read a few reviews that dismissed Slave of Love as Soviet propaganda, and that is an abysmally naive comment that slights an excellent film. There’s a lingering romanticism about the White Russians, probably because they stood up to the Bolshies, but Admiral Kolchak, commander of the White Russians really was a piece of work. And after his armies finished with an area, peasants who previously cared nothing about politics ran to the Bolsheviks. There were atrocities on both sides–The Red and The White, and to think otherwise or to malign the film because of that, is naive at best.

Heart of a Dog (1988)

“If you care about your digestion, my advice is: don’t talk about Bolshevism or medicine at the table and god forbid, never read Soviet newspapers before dinner.”

If you are a fan of Bulgakov’s satire Heart of a Dog, or if you just want to watch a fantastic film produced right at the tail end of the Soviet Union, then do whatever you can to watch Vladimir Bortko’s 1988 film,  The Heart of a Dog (Sobachye Serdtse). Faithful to the novel and lovingly transferred to the screen, the film is a hilarious attack on the New Soviet Man.  The film is set in 1924-1925 during the NEP. NEP (an acronym for New Economic Period, 1921-1928), allowed small businesses to open and operate for profit. This was an in-between phase in a country still in a state of flux–after the massive blood-spilling from the years of Revolution, and before Stalin came to power and systematically arranged for the murders and starvation of millions of Soviet citizens.

The film begins with a snow scene in the streets of Moscow and a voice-over narration by a stray dog as he wanders aimlessly looking for food. The dog’s thoughts are bleak and point towards a painful death–after all with people starving what are the chances that he’s going to be fed. The dog walks past lines of people waiting for food and he encounters gratuitous cruelty at the hands of passers by.

But then the dog has a stroke of luck when he’s found and adopted by a kindly, elderly doctor, Professor Preobrazhensky (Yevgeniy Yevstineyev) who takes the dog back home to his large apartment which also functions as a surgery. He names the dog Sharik and insists that his servants treat the dog kindly. Sharik seems to have landed on his feet.

But the Professor is a quack, and he’s patronized by the wealthy and powerful to combat the effects of aging through preposterous operations–for example, for a middle-aged patient with a young lover, he operates to implant monkey ovaries. All this quackery serves the Professor well. He has a great reputation, a young admiring assistant, Dr. Bormental (Boris Plotnikov), and a 7-room apartment in a large house. The Professor enjoys a good life, ignoring the Bolshevik Revolution and concentrating on art, food and comfort.

But the Revolution has not forgotten the Professor, and the resident House Committee arrives one day to oversee the “reallocation of living space.” Members of the House Committee share the house with the Professor, and these Bolsheviks don’t understand how the revolution can have taken place while men like the professor still commandeer positions of privilege. But while the proletariat argue with the Professor about whether or not he will give up one of his seven rooms, the Professor simply gets on the phone with a patient who is a leading Commissar, threatens to cease his operations, and The House Committee is forced to back off.

With his surgery suite intact, the Professor moves ahead with his plans, and he operates on Sharik, implanting the pituitary gland and testicles of a dead troublemaker. The dog survives, and the Professor proudly announces his ‘miracle operation,’  which he claims is a “revolution in medicine.” The results are both hilarious and unforeseen as the dog becomes more and more human. But once human, Sharik starts exhibiting some unfortunate characteristics. The Professor’s quiet orderly life is in chaos as the brutish Sharik renames himself Poligraf Poligrafovich, starts taking Bolshevik lessons and then begins demanding his rights.

Heart of a Dog is one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen, and the humour occurs on multiple levels: here’s the Professor who thumbs his nose at the Revolution and is able to ignore it, creating a safe, sumptuous refuge for himself in his home. The most annoying reminder of the revolution is the fact that the Professor is forced to be a neighbour to the noisy proletariat who insist on singing party songs all hours of the day and night, and who leave muddy footprints on the floors. But then ambition and his absurd quackery cause the Professor to experiment, and the result is that he creates an uncouth, coarse, smelly, scratching, cat-killer member of the Proletariat, and in the process, the Professor brings the Revolution into his home with catastrophic results.

The film also raises some interesting moral questions: has the dog become a ‘real’ human? What rights does he have? Can he be evicted or euthanized? All these questions are wrapped up in some of the funniest cinema ever created, and while the story may seem absurd, it works, and it works brilliantly.

The film is in black and white and its grainy look gives the sensation that the film is much older than it actually is. The acting is uniformly superb. If you enjoy Soviet cinema or love Bulgakov’s novel, then you will not be disappointed in this wonderful adaptation.