Criterion Month Day 8: The Executioner

The Executioner (1963)

How does one make a great film while living under a fascist dictatorship? It’s not a question that Hollywood filmmakers are quite having to ask themselves yet, but it’s something that director Luis García Berlanga had to navigate during the majority of his career working in the Spanish film industry under Franco’s rule. The truly amazing thing is that The Executioner in many ways comments on Franco’s government, as its main character works for the state, doing its most unseemly business of carrying out the death penalty. Yet somehow, the film managed to weave its way around the censors while wringing some dark laughs out of the material and commenting on how society forces all of us into doing its dirty work. Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 7: The Silence

The Silence (1963)

In my neck of the woods, we have a little thing called the “Seattle Freeze.” What this means is that when reacting to out-of-towners, Seattleites are often perceived as cold, detached, and emotionally distant. This phenomenon, if you choose to believe it, is said to have been inherited from Scandinavian settlers, who prefer small, close-knit circles as opposed to 200 friends.

Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 6: Big Deal on Madonna Street

Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958)

I had kind of a depressing thought while watching 1958’s Big Deal on Madonna Street: am I still capable of being blown away by the crime genre? It has been a little while since I’ve watched a crime movie for the first time that really made me reconsider the genre, which is a little sad for me personally because the crime genre was really my gateway to film geekery. From gangster movies to film noir to capers-gone-wrong like this one, it’s a genre that can contain the most exciting elements of storytelling and ways in which to use a camera. And yet, at this point, it’s a genre I fear doesn’t have all that much to say about the world as I perceive it, which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of exciting and visually inventive moments in today’s film. Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 5: The Lovers

The Lovers (1958)

“I know it when I see it,” chances are good you’ve heard this infamous quote regarding pornography before. The quote comes from former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in regards to the 1964 case “Jacobellis vs. Ohio”. Nico Jacobellis was a theater owner who was charged in 1960 with possessing and exhibiting pornography when he decided to screen Louis Malle’s 1958 erotic/drama The Lovers at the theater he managed in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Jacobellis’ conviction was upheld by both the Ohio Court of Appeals and the Ohio Supreme Court, but was overruled in a 6-3 vote by the U.S. Supreme Court. The majority found that the film did not meet the legal definition of obscenity (no shit dude, you barely see a nipple). Though when it came to defining pornography, the judges were divided.

Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 4: Sweet Smell of Success

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Who doesn’t love some juicy gossip? For as long as we’ve had famous people, we’ve had other, lesser people starting some shit about them. Nonetheless, and rather inexplicably, the jury’s still out on whether that’s a good thing or not. Mostly you’d think we’d condemn the rumor mill for appealing to our basic bitch jealousy and false sense of superiority, but what about the ever-important gossip whispers that have snowballed into the social outcries that exposed and kinda, a little bit brought down evil men like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein? In the era of #MeToo and Instagram followers and Yelp ratings and Uber ratings and Letterboxd ratings, maybe we’re actually living through peak gossip right now? Or maybe it was the late 1950s, when Sweet Smell of Success came out?

Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 3: Summertime

Summertime (1955)

On the surface, I thought I’d be walking into familiar territory with 1955’s Summertime, since its basic plot does bear some resemblance to my last movie, Now, Voyager. This is another story about a lonely woman going on a vacation in the hopes of finding herself and some peace of mind, set during a time when female independence was a bit of a rarity. But as this film shows, there are many ways to tell a similar story, as the more somber tone of Now, Voyager is miles away from the picturesque, unabashedly romantic mood of Summertime, which revels in the rebirth that a trip abroad can bring, even if such things are never meant to last. Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 2: Now, Voyager

Now, Voyager (1942)

Most years, I start my Criterion Months somewhere in the depths of the golden era of Hollywood’s studio system, and this year is no exception. Though this year I’m starting with one of that era’s genres that sometimes gets overlooked in the grand scheme of film history and serious critical analysis, most likely due to filmmaking’s old friend, sexism. This genre would be the reductively-named “women’s picture”, which were a certain type of melodrama, typically revolving around a female character’s personal journey. One of the great stars of this genre (along with her nemesis Joan Crawford) was Bette Davis, and Now, Voyager has been regarded as one of the best examples of Davis’s work in this genre, which I found to be very much a product of its time, but also felt very unique in its depiction of mental health struggles. Continue reading →