On the Big Screen: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017)

After an unlikely period as a director of high-profile tentpole pictures -- Thor, Jack Ryan, Cinderella -- Kenneth Branagh returns to more personal filmmaking with this new adaptation of Agatha Christie's beloved novel, previously filmed to great effect by Sidney Lumet in 1974. It's a more personal picture this time because, unlike those recent efforts, this one stars Kenneth Branagh, following in the prominent footsteps of Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov, and the deeper tracks of David Suchet, by taking on the role of Christie's fussy Belgian, Hercule Poirot. For that you need an accent and a moustache. Branagh's Poirot accent -- I don't know whether it can be described accurately as a Belgian accent -- is at least superior to his attempts at an American accent; he's one of the few British actors who can't really do that well. It's with the moustache that Branagh really tries to differentiate himself from past Poirots. Certainly the preemptive favorite for the Best Moustache Oscar, should that category suddenly come into being, it's big, brown and bristly where the typical Poirot look is small, black and oily. As the years tell on the former boy-wonder actor-director, you wonder sometimes whether this is a Poirot mystery or The Sam Elliott Story. Ultimately, however, there's no mistaking the familiar story of a murder with a seemingly ever-expanding number of likely suspects, and if you've seen the Lumet movie (I have) or read the Christie original (I haven't) the only suspense the new film offers is whether Branagh's writer, Michael Green -- who was very busy this year with Wolverine, Alien and Blade Runner sequels -- would dare change Christie's ending. Spoiler alert: he doesn't.

That leaves it up to Branagh and his cast of actors to make the story fresh in other ways. There are some stabs at progressive casting that let Penelope Cruz and Leslie Odom Jr. into the picture, but only Willem Dafoe as the Pinkerton man (with an extra level of imposture) is arguably an improvement over his 1974 predecessor. The other actors aren't bad, though Michelle Pfeiffer goes maybe too far over the top, but as a director of actors Branagh, for all his Shakespearean experience, is no Sidney Lumet. He proves that further by indulging in overblown camera movements in an effort to give what should be an economically staged story -- apart from the Orient Express's necessarily luxurious furnishings -- a quasi-epic feel. If two characters are chatting in a boxcar, he'll have the camera hovering at some distance, and then he'll have it rise from below, or descend from above. Toward the end he rolls out a long shot following Poirot through a number of train cars, but it only reminds you that he'd done a much more impressive tracking shot in his debut film, Henry V, nearly thirty years ago. He even gives Poirot a Bond-style prologue as a mystery-solving peacemaker in the Old City of Jerusalem, and for all we know, given the nod toward Death on the Nile at the very end, he may have a franchise in mind, if audiences demand it. The theater where I saw the film is a neighborhood arthouse where the audience skews older, and there was a healthy crowd for a second matinee on a cold November afternoon, but I doubt the houses will look the same at the multiplexes. If he wants and gets another chance at Poirot I'd recommend that Branagh not go for the pre-sold titles but look for stories that have not been filmed as theatrical features. His Murder is not a bad film by any means, but in the end it did nothing to make me forget the Lumet film or what I knew to expect from the Christie mystery. But as someone who remembers a 43 year old movie fondly, perhaps I wasn't this film's target audience. Maybe those who know nothing of Agatha Christie or Sidney Lumet are the ones who'll rightly decide this film or this franchise's fate.

Pre-Code Parade: THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER (1933)

 

Pre-Code pictures from Columbia Pictures are still a rarity even on Turner Classic Movies, so I shouldn't kick if Roy William Neill's mystery movie turns out to be a sequel. It's the second and last film in which Adolphe Menjou plays Thatcher Colt, a New York City police commissioner who solves mysteries on his own. Colt was the creation of Anthony Abbott, and Abbott himself was the creation of Fulton Oursler, the author and editor best known under his own name as the modest writer of The Greatest Story Ever Told, his novelization of the Gospels. His Abbott books about Thatcher Colt were popular enough for Columbia to adapt The Night Club Lady in 1932, and that was promising enough to get us to The Circus Queen Murder. Neill didn't direct the first Colt picture, but for me, knowing nothing about Thatcher Colt, the director was the most promising feature of Circus Queen. He was one of Columbia's secret weapons, amid all the acclaim for Frank Capra, and responsible for two of the studio's most successful 1930s experiments in horror, the voodoo thriller Black Moon and the Karloff twin act The Black Room. For Circus Queen Neill got to work with Dwight Frye, who here gets one of the biggest roles of his career. Whatever Circus Queen's flaws it's a must for fans of Frye, because it gives him a chance to play the villain of the piece -- not a stooge, not a red herring, but the actual villain, the one who dunnit.

The problem with the picture is that there isn't really any mystery about who dunnit. For it's first half, Circus Queen is more of a who'll do it picture. It opens with Colt deciding he needs a vacation from crime and reporters. Throwing a knife at his map of New York State, the commissioner decides to take his vacation in the town of Gilead ("There is balm in Gilead," he recites hopefully), with his faithful secretary Miss Kelly (Ruthelma Stevens, returning from Night Club Lady) in tow. They arrive in town at the same time as a circus and watch the parade through Gilead. Colt has been teaching Kelly lip reading, and as the parade passes by she notices star aerialist Flandrin (Frye) arguing with his wife, fellow aerialist Josie La Tour (Greta Nissen). She makes out that Flandrin is threatening to "kill both of you," moments before a burst balloon spooks Josie's horse, forcing Flandrin to rescue her. Turns out that Josie's been cheating on Flandrin with a third aerialist, the Great Sebastian. Sebastian is no Cornel Wilde, however. Rather, he's played by that seductive devil, Donald Cook. If you remember Cook as Jimmy Cagney's semi-shellshocked, self-righteous brother from The Public Enemy, you may be wondering about that "seductive devil" idea, but remember: he's competing with Dwight Frye! 

Once it comes out that several circus performers have received death threats, Colt reluctantly gets involved in the local investigation, but no one will listen to his advice to cancel performances. Surprisingly, Flandrin appears to be the first victim, suddenly disappearing with only bloody clothes left behind in his wagon. Suspicion focuses on a troupe of "Congo cannibals" who double as circus musicians; there's some confusion over whether they started with thirteen or fourteen men, but there's only thirteen now, and people worry about number fourteen. For your information, these aren't just a gang of American blacks in costumes; we're to understand that they're all authentic Africans, and I learn that Oursler/Abbott treats them more sympathetically in his novel than they're treated here. On film they seem about as authentic as the wheezy man in the gorilla suit portraying a caged brute in one scene. In any event, they're a bunch of black herrings.

Thatcher Colt's gimmick was that he used modern scientific police methods to solve crimes, the Abbott novels being proto-procedurals. In the movie, Colt quickly figures out that Flandrin has faked his death, planting animal blood (from his wife's murdered dog) to fool the marks. Colt also deduces that Flandrin spent a night in blackface among the cannibals, having counted fourteen rather than thirteen men in their tent. The problem is that Flandrin hasn't committed any crime yet -- it can't even be proven that he killed the dog. All Colt can do is try to keep an eye out for Flandrin, the man having taken his leave of the cannibals, and again urge the circus to cancel the next show. Nothing doing on that front; this is a movie, after all.

You'll notice that the newspaper ad above informs us that we can't guess how Josie La Tour is going to die. Don't you believe it. We see a shadowy figure climb the outside of the big top, with no one watching while the show is on. This is Flandrin, who watches from the literal big top as Sebastian narrowly escapes a sabotaged trapeze. As Josie starts her act, Colt is caught up in the paranoia over the cannibals. As they play while she performs, Colt notices that their reed instruments could pass for blow guns, the recognized cannibal weapons, and are aimed right at the aerialist. Not that he tries to stop them, of course. Meanwhile, Flandrin continues to watch from above, and I guess we're not supposed to notice him blow his wife a fatally pointed, poisoned kiss with his own weapon. Neill builds up some decent suspense in this sequence, but it dissipates with the hero's utter failure to discover or thwart the real threat.

In fact, Miss Kelly is the only person who seems to notice a shadow crawling down the tent. She leaves the tent to investigate, but that only sets up the final confrontation, as Flandrin takes her hostage to force Colt to give him a free shot at Sebastian. Flandrin has nothing to lose and tells Colt he plans to kill himself afterward, so the real mystery is how Colt can get Kelly out of his mess. That I won't spoil in case someone wants to see this for Frye's sake. He's in sullen, surly mode, more like his Wilmer Cook in the original Maltese Falcon movie than his Universal hysterics, and his glowering resentment actually makes him an effective menace. The one thing the story does well is establish Flandrin as a single-minded yet unpredictable loose cannon, and Frye lives up to the opportunity. By contrast, Menjou practically sleepwalks through his bland hero role, though his innate charisma remains irrepressible. Overall, Circus Queen Murder goes out of its way to alienate the audience. 1933 moviegoers may have been practiced lip-readers from the silent era, but I suck at it and had no idea what Menjou and Stevens were saying silently to each other in their early practice. On top of that, Josie and Sebastian play one scene out in German, apparently only so Colt can demonstrate that he also knows the language. Maybe these scenes make the movie a mystery, since they're the most effective at leaving us utterly baffled about what's going on. At least it all looks good. Columbia Pre-Codes are strong on cinematography, and Joseph August (who worked with Neill on Black Moon) works the contrasts quite nicely.  He helps make a pleasantly dumb picture that much more pleasant to watch. I recommend it for the star turns, Frye's especially. He didn't get that many chances in the spotlight like this, so you may as well enjoy it.

DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME (2010)

Di Renjie was not unknown to the West before Tsui Hark's cinematic extravaganza appeared. Called "Detective Dee" here, he is better known as "Judge Dee" in a series of mystery novels and a 1970s American TV-movie based on Chinese fictions that are themselves based on the exploits of a real person from 7th century China. With Tsui Hark, one of the vanguard figures of the action-film revival that gives "Hong Kong cinema" its current global meaning, directing this latest revival of the popular character, comparisons with Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies are inevitable, and a blurb on the DVD box even more inevitably calls Detective Dee a blend of the Ritchie film and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But you can hardly blame the blurb writer, since that's pretty much what Dee is. It's also another Chinese spectacle with an intriguingly ambivalent attitude toward political power.

Mystery of the Phantom Flame is set during the reign of Empress Wu (Carina Lau), the usurping regent preparing for her coronation as Emperor of China. Wu has surrounded herself with female retainers, and her "favorite" is Shangguan Jing'er (Li Bingbing), a formidable whip-wielding official loosely based on a real female official in Wu's court. Work is underway for a massive ceremony, to be presided over by a colossal statue of the Buddha -- but someone seems to be sabotaging the project. Bureaucrats overseeing the work are spontaneously bursting into flames. Only one mind in all China is thought capable of getting to the bottom of this mystery, but Di Renjie (Andy Lau) is stewing in prison for his role in a rebellion against Wu years ago. That soon changes, and with Jing'er and pale-faced bureaucrat Pei Donglai (Chao Deng) as minders, Dee is on the case. There are plenty of potential masterminds to probe, including Jing'er and Donglai themselves. There is the mystical influence of the Imperial Chaplain, who sends magical deer to speak for him, to consider. There are dead-ender dissidents whose reservations about Wu Dee himself still shares. To make matters more difficult, in this fantasy China people can "transfigure" themselves with acupuncture so that no one is necessarily who he or she seems. And there's a lot of leaping, ducking, punching and kicking to do before Dee tracks down the true culprit -- and then the question becomes whether a ruthless usurper and tyrant like Wu should rule China.

Detective Dee (Andy Lau, above) is freed from prison to serve the Empress (Carina Lau, below) he once opposed and may still oppose.

Ever since Hero, I've noticed an interesting commentary on tyranny in Chinese movies. Films produced under the rule of the Communist Party don't need to idealize emperors or empresses, but government people would be kidding themselves if they didn't see these imperial epics as allegories of present-day China. These movies, or at least the ones I've seen, make no bones about rulers being bloodstained tyrants. But while the American imagination always sees a good ruler waiting in the wings, if not an end to old-style rulership, Chinese heroes find themselves stuck with a stark choice between tyranny and chaos. In Hero the Jet Li character steps back from assassinating Qin Shihuang once he realizes the necessity of the unification of China that Qin alone can achieve, no matter what the human cost. In Detective Dee the title character sees no viable alternative to Empress Wu, even though she's guilty of just about every offense he ever accused her of. But in a manner reminiscent for me of Anthony Mann's El Cid Dee confronts the tyrant and browbeats her into ruling more justly and accepting a kind of term limit on her power. In history, at least according to Wikipedia, Wu was forced off the throne by a palace coup. But in the translated epilogue to Detective Dee we're told that Wu abdicated voluntarily in fulfillment of a promise made to Dee. That's an interesting change to history in light of the current policy of term limits for Communist Party leaders,  -- as if that makes the party monopoly on power okay because it isn't a personal tyranny anymore -- but I'm not sure what Chinese audiences would read into the film's finish -- though I can't help wondering.

Two views of the Empress's colossus, from the outside and the inside.

Most people probably see Detective Dee as pure spectacle, and it's often quite pictorially dazzling. Oddly, I found myself reminded more sometimes of western artists like Maxfield Parrish than of anything distinctively Chinese in the production design; CGI may yet make all world cinema look more alike than it ever did before. Likewise, the climactic image of the colossal sabotaged Buddha collapsing is evocative of everything from September 11, 2001 to Samson and Delilah, but that only underscores a certain unoriginality to the idea. Sammo Hung did the fight choreography but there's really nothing new here. It's mostly the sort of stunts and gags that directors like Tsui Hark were filming 20 years ago, now augmented by CGI so that Dee can brawl in mid-air with angry leaping magical deer, among other antagonists. There is a fight scene arguably inspired by Ritchie's Holmes in which Dee instructs a blind man where exactly to strike to hit his antagonist, but all the fighting took second place, as far as I was concerned, to the eccentric mystery of the spontaneous combustions and the allegorical potential of all the political intrigues. It's in those areas that Detective Dee stands out as a distinctly Chinese epic, regardless of all efforts to sell the film as an action movie with global appeal. Those parts really make the film worth seeing.

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2009)

Overshadowed by a higher-profile project, a quasi-remake of The Bad Lieutenant, this is Werner Herzog's other American film of 2009, and a David Lynch production at that. It pretty much delivers on whatever expectations might come with that combination. It's "inspired by a true story," and in an interview included on the DVD Herzog expands on the meaning of that term. There is a true story of an acting student who played mythical matricide Orestes and then killed his own mother. Herzog and co-writer Herbert Golder, who initiated the project, used that incident and some of the personal details of the killer's life as a framework for their own speculations on the factors driving a man to murder. The killer is a free man today and Herzog met him; he relates feeling acute disquiet on discovering that the man had an Aguirre: The Wrath of God poster in his trailer-park home. That discovery may have inspired the director to film part of the new picture back on some old Aguirre locations in Peru, once he decided that Pakistan, where the real killer had a deformative experience, was just slightly too dangerous for location shooting. As if to compensate for that compromise, Herzog, along with star Michael Shannon and producer Eric Bassett, decided to do some clandestine filming in the volatile Uighur region of China. That footage also serves, arguably, as an intrusion of the real killer's madness on the fictional madness of Brad McCullum, Shannon's character. It's unclear whether the fictional character is ever supposed to have been in a Muslim country, though he tells his doomed kayaking buddies in Peru that he intends to become a Muslim as a way to stunt his internal development. The Uighur footage could easily represent the killer's pilgrimage to an Islam of his own imagination, though his practice seems to extend only to occasionally calling himself "Farouk." Otherwise, he has a fraught relationship with God, whose face he sees on a Puritan Oatmeal can and whose voice he hears on a recording of "I Was Born to Preach the Gospel And I Sure Do Love My Job."

"Some people act a role; I play a part." Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) muses on matricide on stage (above) and at his flamingo-cluttered home.

The film's tag is "The Mystery Isn't Who, But Why," but don't let that leave you thinking the mystery gets solved. Instead, Herzog's point seems to be the irreducibility of a madman's mind to one decisive influence, a key to all the mysteries in his head. There's no Rosebud to help us here. We can see an apparently obvious influence of the Orestes myth, which is instantly complicated by Brad's girlfriend (Chloe Sevigny) taking the role of Clytemnestra, Orestes's mother. But Orestes isn't quite a perfect fit. Brad insists on wearing an inappropriate poncho-like garment he picked up in Peru that actually makes him look more Biblical than Greek. Considering his role in a fatherless household and his problematic relationship with God, Brad could be a Jesus figure in some neglected nook of his noodle. That possibility emerges most alarmingly when he invades a naval hospital, desiring to visit "the sick in general." On the other hand, he may also see himself as a baby ostrich like the birds his homophobic uncle (Brad Dourif) raises. Flightless or ungainly birds are the dominant animal motif of the picture, as both Brad and his suffocating mother (Grace Zabriskie) are obsessed with flamingos. Something can be read into everything shown here, but too much shouldn't be read into anything. Everything's a factor for such a vulnerable mind, but such a mind isn't the sort of puzzle where all the pieces fit.

My Son, My Son, is the pilgrimage of a wandering mind to Peru, China and points unknown.

Without a single Rosebud and the closure such a key would promise, My Son could well be a frustrating experience for many viewers. The police procedural framework, with Willem Dafoe as the straight man in charge of negotiations, creates dramatic expectations that the eventual anticlimax probably deliberately disappoints. Almost by nature, given the collaborators, the film is digressive and gratuitous, and some of Herzog's gimmicks, like making characters stand still instead of freeze-framing to represent time standing still for Brad, simply don't work. The coda, in which a small boy discovers some of Brad's legacy, clarifies matters not a bit, nor is it meant to. The best I can suggest is that the peculiar discovery begs interpretation by the boy himself, and could mark the beginning of an accumulation of mental associations that might leave the boy as mad as Brad someday. Or it could mean no such thing. This is a movie that insists on each viewer drawing his own conclusions. That may be unsatisfactory, but I was stimulated by the challenge, at least, and I found Herzog's imagined reconstruction of the clutter of a deranged mind somewhat convincing.

* * *

An interesting accompaniment to Herzog's study of symbolism and psychosis on the First Look DVD is Ramin Bahrani's short exercise in anthropomorphism, Plastic Bag, for which Herzog voices the title character. Strange as it may sound, this narrative of the endless life and adventures of a creature separated from and searching for its "Maker" would make an even better companion piece for Toy Story 3. As Herzog drones on teutonically bemoaning his plight (had he directed this himself, only Kinski could have done the voice), Bahrani dares you to disbelieve, but his epic visuals tell a different, eloquently more plausible story. The one-two punch of Plastic Bag and My Son, My Son makes this DVD, at the very least, one of the most interesting things you could watch this year.

On the Big Screen: THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2009)

The Academy Award for Best Foreign Film has never been a reliable indicator of the actual best film made outside the Anglophone world in a given year. The nomination process, each country choosing one representative film and the Academy nominating five from the whole, inevitably excludes many worthy contenders. Sometimes the award is a consolation prize for a film also nominated for Best Picture (Life is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). Much of the time having something to do with the Holocaust guarantees a victory. Sometimes the Academy makes an inspired choice. For 2006, for instance, I assumed that Pan's Labyrinth would win easily, and was shocked to see the Oscar go to The Lives of Others. Once I finally saw the latter film, however, I conceded that the better film, by a small margin, had won.

I didn't see any of the 2009 foreign film nominees until the weekend before the Oscar telecast. The night before, I saw Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and acquired a rooting interest in it. A few weeks later the French nominee, Un Prophete, came to town and impressed me nearly as much. By then, of course, I knew that both formidable films had been outvoted by an Argentine mystery directed by a veteran of American TV dramas. From the description, El Secreto de sus Ojos didn't seem in the same league as the other two movies. But remembering my experience with Lives of Others, I resolved to see it when it finally reached Albany.

The film is set in 1999, 25 years after the brutal rape and murder of a young woman. A retired detective, Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), is struggling to write a novel based on the case and the loose ends lingering after a quarter-century. One of those is his relationship with his superior, Irene Hastings (Soledad Villamil), now the district attorney. Another is the fact that the murderer was caught, had confessed, but was set free by a shady government which had black ops work for him. His whereabouts remain unknown as Esposito writes. He has a personal stake in the story because either the killer or his black-ops cronies murdered Esposito's partner, the lovable alcoholic Sandoval (Guillermo Francella).

Until the halfway point, there was little about El Secreto to distinguish it from the sort of TV fare director Juan Jose Campanella specializes in. There was some stylization at the start as we see scenes from Esposito's novel drafts, which we'll later see as scenes from his life, as if through filters, murkily. There's also some now-conventional non-linearity as the film switches back and forth from present to past and/or novel. But the story itself seemed like the stuff of television until it opened up in dramatic fashion. Sandoval has an insight on the murder suspect based on references in his letters: the man's a fan of a particular futbol team. This sets up an awesomely scaled CGI-assisted tracking shot that starts high above the city and descends into the bowl of the futbol stadium, swooping into the stands to identify Esposito and Sandoval in the middle of a massive crowd, searching for their suspect. Against all odds, they find him, setting off a spectacular foot chase, filmed mostly with hand-held cameras in long takes, with a semicomic detour into a men's room and a climax that takes the action onto the pitch in the middle of the game. It's at least the best cinematic use of a soccer stadium since Jafar Panahi's Offside and it brought the Argentine film to life for me.

Campanella follows up with a sequence that takes him back into TV territory, as Esposito and Hastings try to psyche the suspect into confessing. The opportunity here is to take the action to a level TV doesn't allow. Hastings plays the "bad cop" with reverse psychology, questioning his guilt by belittling his manhood, taunting him as a "pygmy" endowed with no more than a "peanut." You know you're not on TV anymore when the enraged suspect jumps up, unzips, and displays the total package to refute the prosecutor's claims before admitting his crime and punching her in the face. Javier Godino as the murderer nearly steals the movie in this single scene as he progresses from plausible protests of innocence to viciously defensive machismo under constant prodding.

For me, these scenes were the peak of the film. They seemed to point toward more sinister developments once the government springs Godino, but a scene in which he makes an intimidating display of a gun while sharing an elevator with our hero and heroine is practically his last appearance in the movie. He remains an implicit menace almost until the end, but his story resolves itself in a manner almost too Gothic to take seriously. But solving the mystery of what happened to the man gives Esposito a fresh chance to take the chance he couldn't bring himself to take back in the Seventies with Irene Hastings, who fortunately seems still willing after all those years.

This time around the Academy showed no special insight. El Secreto is not in the same league as White Ribbon or Un Prophete. It wasn't a bad film at all, but I ought to be able to say something better about a film now deemed the Best in its class. If you watch it you will most likely be entertained, but beyond that I can't make any claims for its greatness.

THE SPHINX (1933)

A janitor thinks he's by himself in an office building after hours when through a door steps Lionel Atwill, one of the leading horror men of the early 1930s, but the janitor doesn't know that. He's just a fictional character and wants to know what the stranger is doing in a closed building. The stranger doesn't answer, but asks for a light and the proper time before leaving. He's left a door open and there's a light on in the office of Mr. Garfield, a stockbroker. The janitor goes inside and finds Mr. Garfield, a corpse. He takes a stiff drink and calls the cops.

As the cops converge, reporter Jack Burton arrives on the scene. He's a typical B-movie reporter hero, i.e. a big smartass with little or no respect for the police. How did you know this was a murder, one flatfoot inquires. "Easy," Burton answers, "I made a quick check-up of the population of the city and found out we were one short."

"Yeah, but if you don't get out of here we're gonna be two short." the copper retorts. But Burton manages to bulldoze his way into the dead man's office and openly mocks the lead inspector. "You know I always tag along on all your unsolved murders," he says, "I just thought I'd come along and see you didn't break the record." But he also has an insight.

"Has the fact taken residence in your cranium that Garfield was a stockbroker?" he asks, "And that the other three victims of the recent murder cases were also stockbrokers?" So why not investigate clients of the dead brokers?

"If we're going to suspect everybody in this country who's sore on stockbrokers, we're gonna be getting out indictments for half the population of the United States." Detective Terrence Aloysius Hogan answers.

Theodore Newton (left, on loan from Warner Bros.) plays Jack Burton the reporter, while Paul Hurst portrays the vaguely Fieldsian Detective Hogan.

Welcome to 1933 and the relentless irreverence of Depression-era B movies. The Sphinx isn't an all-out pre-Code spectacle by the standard of 21st century expectations, since there isn't much sexual content or subtext. But Albert DeMond's insolent script and that crack about stockbrokers mark it as a product of its time, something we might not have seen or heard just a few years later.

I was watching it for Lionel Atwill, hoping it would be more of a "Forgotten Horror" than it proved to be. The Sphinx seems like it was meant as an acting challenge for Atwill that actually comes closer to wasting his skills. Here's how: that janitor gives a description of the stranger and presumed murderer that matches one Jerome Breen, an eminent philanthropist who's promptly arrested. But there's a big hole in the case against Breen. The janitor (and the viewer) distinctly recalls the stranger speaking to him, but Breen has been mute since birth due to defective vocal chords. An independent medical exam by the prosecution confirms this, and Breen is acquitted after a trial that humiliates both the police and Burton, who had publicized Breen as the killer. It also humiliates Burton in front of his girlfriend, society reporter Jerry Crane (Sheila Terry), who develops a soft spot for Breen and decides to write his life story. So Atwill has to play mute as the "sphinx" of the title. He learned some sign language, or faked some, but otherwise depended on his eyes and a kind of glazed smile to create an image of dull benevolence. But that guy we saw talking to the janitor in the office building was clearly Lionel Atwill. So what's up?

Things get more suspicious after a stockbroker's clerk starts playing a double game, blackmailing Breen while angling for a $5,000 reward offered by Burton's paper. He has Breen over to his mother's house to negotiate, and the good man makes his mute greeting to the old woman before going upstairs. Upon coming downstairs again, he vocally asks her for the correct time. This simple request sends the poor crone into a swoon. This is a kind of testament that Atwill's menace really does come largely from his voice, which the story has barely allowed him to use. But in any event, the situation has repeated itself. The would-be blackmailer has been strangled, but the killer can't be Breen, despite appearances, because he spoke to someone.

Actually, only one solution is possible for this puzzle, as some of you have probably figured out already. I'll preserve the mystery for the rest of you and reserve my criticism for an especially dumb plot device from later in the film. Needless to say, Burton and the cops are back breathing down Breen's neck after the latest murder, but he remains unperturbed, even when Hogan fires a gun in an effort to prove that Breen isn't really deaf. Moments later, however, Breen appears startled when Burton plays some idle high notes on his piano. Why does a deaf guy have a piano? As Breen's interpreter explains, it's there for the entertainment of his guests. But we later learn that the final key on the board activates a secret passage in a nearby wall. Breen hadn't actually heard Burton play, but was worried that he would hit the crucial key and open the passage. There'll be more suspense later in the picture as different people play that piano, until any rational mind must ask: if you have a secret passage in your house, and you don't want strangers opening it, why on earth do you wire the entrance up to a piano that you've put there for the entertainment of your guests???

Atwill shows what he thinks of my critique of the whole piano business.

So let's face it: The Sphinx is a dumb movie, but I can't help liking it for its hard-boiled irreverence and wiseass ball-busting patter, for lines like, "Say, Sherlock, I can write all you found out on a postage stamp and still have room on it to do a jigsaw puzzle;" or "As for what he was wearing, he was just wearing on everyone;" or "I don't know what this country's coming to when a guy can't get a drink in a police station." You might laugh or you might groan, but you've got to love a world where people talk like that -- except for poor Atwill, most of the time. You could do worse with an hour or so of your time.

Now, for a limited time, The Sphinx comes with bonus Lionel Atwill!

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961)

Don't expect me to solve Alain Resnais' famous time-and-memory puzzle; I'm not sure if it has an actual solution. The truth of whether Delphine Seyrig's character actually met Giorgio Albertazzi's protagonist at the resort hotel the year before is less important to Resnais or writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, I suspect, than the process by which the man attempts to force his memory upon the woman, or the fact of the man's confusion. You might even ask whether the "this year" of the narrative is taking place at the real Marienbad or in a memory palace in the man's mind. We know he is a creature of repetitive routine. He hits all the resorts every year. He is as much a spectator as an active personality. Given all that, it's just as possible that the man has lost himself in the collective consciousness that converges annually at Marienbad and other places.

We know he's lost something. He is, in fact, a chronic loser, always being beaten in the peculiar game he plays repeatedly with Sacha Pitoeff's character. That guy's invincibility tempts me to view him symbolically, but I catch myself when I start wondering whether he's Death or not, because then I know that I'm confusing L'Annee derniere a Marienbad with its nearly-coincidental counterpart, Herk Harvey's indie one-off wonder of 1962, Carnival of Souls. I'm not the first person to see and hear similarities (architecture, organ music, dancing), and I agree with those who doubt whether Harvey had a chance to see the Resnais before starting his own film.

Four faces of future Daughter of Darkness Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad.

Instead, the two films seem to stem from a common zeitgeist stirring in western civ which seems to equate a compulsive sociability with at least a kind of death which the occasional alienated consciousness struggles to comprehend. Also, I'm tempted to think of death because of the double meaning of the English word "Last" as "final" as well as "previous." I don't know if "derniere" has the same ambiguity, but if so perhaps Marienbad might be seen as some kind of actual limbo instead of a figurative one.

Marienbad: the architecture of Hell? It looks like a helluva place to visit.

I think that's enough to suggest that Marienbad will give food for thought to any viewer who can stand being disappointed by a lack of straight answers. The producers promoted it as a puzzle film in which each viewer would collaborate in constructing the "real" narrative, so it really is up to each of us to figure the thing out for ourselves. All I can say definitively is that Marienbad is one of the ultimate expressions of black-and-white cinema, a spectacle of art direction that demands attention and rewards it even if you can't quite determine what's going on. If that's the same way I feel after watching some Italian gialli, that's probably no accident, since I can see Marienbad's influence on that genre (as well as on Kubrick's The Shining, I might add). Resnais's film is a textbook example of one in which style is substance, and anyone who honors cinema as a visual art owes it a look someday.

The original French trailer, with English subtitles, was uploaded to YouTube by shihlunTW

ECOUTE LE TEMPS (Fissures, 2007)

The French title basically means "listen to time," and while that makes sense the international title is just as valid while doing more justice to the multiplicity of fissures that emerge in Alante Kavaite's writing-directing debut. Watching it, I felt that an American remake is inevitable, though it would probably more overwrought and even busier in plot terms than the original. It has a high concept that falls somewhere between science fiction and horror wrapped inside a murder mystery with twists for the unwary, not to mention a starring role that I imagine lots of American actresses would kill for.

The main character is Charlotte, a movie sound technician. She goes out on locations and records live sound for use in nature documentary. After an opening bit that shows her on a drive with her mother in which they hit a deer, we see Charlotte at work recording sounds bubbling from a fissure in the earth. Then she gets the news that her mother has been murdered. Her mission of mourning returns her to her old home town, where she isn't especially welcome and her mother isn't particularly missed by some people. "I'd thought we'd seen the back of that witch," someone grumbles, and that's not that broad a metaphor. Among other things, Charlotte's mom did a variation on tarot readings using a pack of rune cards. When they hit the deer, we learn, she felt it was a bad omen, and her instincts seem to have been correct.

But whodunit? A number of candidates emerge, the most likely being Jerome, a local simpleton who masturbates to a photo of Charlotte and Mom, and M. Bourmel, the town's mayor, who's feuding with organic farmers (led by handsome Julien, who seems to have had a fling with the mom before the end) who oppose the area's fertilizer industry. The mayor links the dead mother to the green hippies by scoffing, "It's organic tomatoes one day, a black mass the next." He wants to buy mom's house, and discouraging Charlotte from keeping it because "there are a lot of holes" on the land. We can eventually infer that he wants the land to dump toxic waste in. To add to suspicions, there's a second mystery, the fate of a missing boy that may be linked to the murder.

Genre fans may recognize Emilie Dequenne from Brotherhood of the Wolf. Here she is alongside an (alternatively) titular fissure in Ecoute le Temps.

To be honest, Mom's house isn't in good shape. The walls are cracking everywhere. To lighten her mood, Charlotte decides to record the fissures in the walls and the settling of the floors. To her surprise, she picks up what some might call EVPs, only much clearer and more distinct than anything you ever hear on Ghost Hunters. It's her own mother's voice, and in some places her own. Her microphone and equipment are picking up sounds of the past. Over time, she can map out places where she can hear certain times, turning the main room into a kind of giant cat's cradle. Some of these phenomena date back to her childhood. Others are ominously more recent. Once this all sinks in, Charlotte realizes that she might be able to listen in on her mother's death and hear who did it. The challenge will be to crack the mystery before the house comes crashing down around her, or before anyone decides that she suddenly knows too much....

How is this happening? Had Charlotte's Mom tapped into real magic that is somehow leaking out of the house? Could the toxic waste leeching into the soil have something to do with this mutant phenomena? Could there simply be fissures in time the way there are fissures in the earth? Kavaite wisely leaves the why question unanswered, opting for a vague yet progressively more creepy sense of uncanny dread. The movie ultimately comes down on the horror side of the equation, I think, as the house deteriorates more rapidly the closer Charlotte comes to discovering the moment of death. The payoff is a reasonably effective scare scene, but some viewers might think that Kavaite didn't exploit every opportunity available in this story. In an American version, I'd suppose, there'd be someone trying to kill Charlotte, possibly in the house at the climactic moment, but Kavaite saw no need for that extra suspense. Once Charlotte learns the truth, the story resolves itself with little added drama. Hollywood, by comparison, often assumes that someone who has killed is capable of killing again at any moment. To be fair, that's a common assumption of the exploitation mentality around the world, which only proves that Ecoute le Temps, for all its genre trappings, is no exploitation film. But that's all right, because it works as a low-key independent film with a major gimme lurking inside. I was lucky enough to borrow it from the Albany Public Library, but it might be worth it even if you have to go to a little more trouble.

Here's the trailer with English captions and subtitles, uploaded by dogwoof