DVR Diary: A LADY WITHOUT PASSPORT (1950)

 

We see the action through the window of a car as the vehicle pulls up to nab an illegal immigrant. We remain in the car as the suspect breaks loose; the camera pans inside the car so we can look out the back window as he runs into the street and is hit -- in our plain view -- by a car. This is a Joseph H. Lewis film, his first after his sleeper hit and noir classic Gun Crazy, in which he had filmed a bank robbery and getaway from inside the crooks' car. Now he was working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and while the budget may have been small by that studio's standards Lewis must have felt like he was in the big leagues, with all the toys that come with that. He's clearly more interested in the technical and atmospheric effects he can pull off than in the noir-exotic melodrama. Judged by its set-pieces, Lady Without Passport stands comparison with the twin peaks of Lewis's career, Gun Crazy and The Big Combo. But without as potent a story to hold them together, the set-pieces mostly have more technical than dramatic interest.

The story is that INS agent Pete Karczag (John Hodiak) must go undercover in Cuba to investigate a people-smuggling ring, led by a hairdyed George Macready, who'd brought that hapless fugitive from the first scene to America. On location, Pete falls for one of Macready's clients, Holocaust survivor Marianne (Hedy Lamarr, whose recent role in the blockbuster Samson and Delilah was this film's main selling point). That's our triangle, which Pete hopes to break up by convincing Marianne to stay in Cuba rather than pay Macready in the only coin she can afford. Pete's willing to give up his career to keep her in Cuba and stay with her, but our villain figures out Pete's real business and blabs to Marianne to alienate her from him. Now Pete and his INS buddies have to try to catch Marianne and the other illegals as Macready flies them into the U.S. This sets the stage for a setpiece that's at once spectacular and anticlimactic as the smugglers crash-land their plane in the Everglades, after which Macready, his pilot and Marianne hit the water in the only life-raft, after Macready drives away the other illegals with his gun. Lewis films all of this from far above, from the perspective of a government plane. I wasn't sure whether the plane crash was done for real or with models, and I suppose that's a credit to the M-G-M effects department either way. The breakout immediately afterward has newsreel-like immediacy and verisimilitude, since there's no way the actors can play to the camera so far above, but Lewis's staging also leeches the drama (or at least the melodrama) out of one of the big moments of the story. The real dramatic climax comes after Macready has ditched his snake-bit pilot and, with Marianne still in tow, confronts Pete, who has caught up with him finally. The moment is tense and literally atmospheric with expressionistic swamp mist, but it's again kind of anticlimactic, since Macready simply pulls a gun on Hodiak and commandeers his boat, giving up Marianne in the bargain. The punch line is that our hero emptied most of the fuel tank so that the villain will be dead in the water and easily caught, but we don't get to see that. Lewis (or the studio) seems to think the real story is the romance, but John Hodiak simply isn't much of a romantic hero. That leaves Lady Without Passport lacking the heart it wants and the heart of darkness that keeps Lewis's best noirs alive, but it's still a treat to look at just to see a clever, confident director showing off.

THE ITALIAN (1914)

Part of my real-life job is a 100-years-ago-today column. Reading my local papers from the early 20th century, I've noticed something about their crime reporting. If immigrants were involved in a crime, especially a violent one, editors would let you know in the headline. Crime was identified with ethnicity in a manner that wouldn't be accepted today. One day you might see, "ITALIANS IN STABBING AFFRAY" or "ITALIAN SOUGHT IN MURDER" or similar variations on the same motif. The papers in my town probably weren't exceptional about this. That kind of reporting probably created a certain expectation when Reginald Barker's early feature film, co-written by Thomas H. Ince and distributed by the fledgling Paramount company, arrived in theaters nearly 96 years ago, in January 1915.

The Italian is a star vehicle for its lead actor, George Beban. "GEORGE BEBAN in THE ITALIAN" headlines every title card, and Barker introduces the actor before the story actually begins with some self-conscious theatricality. After the credits run, a curtain parts to let us into Beban's study, where the actor is looking for something to read. He finds a novelization of the film we've already begun to watch and settles down to peruse it. At first, this seems like a quaint gimmick, but when we return to the framing device at the end of the picture, we realize that Barker and Beban have a point to make. We're invited to see the actual story as Beban's imagination of the story he's reading, inserting himself into the narrative in the title role. Without a word, he's inviting us to walk a few miles with him in an Italian immigrant's shoes. He's inviting his audience to empathize with the Italian.

In the narrative, Beban plays Beppo Donnetti, a Venetian gondolier in love. He may be poor, but he enjoys life and enjoys the land he lives in. The first surprise for the original audience may have been the extent to which Barker idealizes Italy. He emphasizes the beauty of the landscape, admittedly enhanced by the presence of a pretty girl, with a quality of cloudscape cinematography I hadn't thought possible in 1914. Throughout the picture, Barker's direction has a fluency in framing, staging and editing that makes even D. W. Griffith look crude. His Italy may be romanticized, but the point seems to be to refute nativist notions that immigrants living in American poverty and squalor must have brought a squalid lifestyle with them from the old country. Not so: Beppo could well have stayed in Italy and lived a happy life, except for romantic complications. His girlfriend's father wants to marry her off to a crabby old merchant. Dad wants a son-in-law who can provide for his daughter. Beppo can't compete with a merchant on a gondolier's wages, but the father is willing to give him a chance -- a year, actually, -- to prove that he can make good enough for the girl. For Beppo, America is the land of quick opportunity, or so he hopes.

Barker makes clear that immigrants can make princely sums in America by the standards of their home countries. A little patronage doesn't hurt, either. Beppo has no real prospects when he arrives in New York, but he happens to pick a lucky corner to start out as a bootblack. One of his regular patrons is the local ward boss, who decides that Beppo is someone who could help get out the vote for his candidate. Between what he makes shining shoes and whatever he gets to keep from the walking-around money, Beppo can afford to send his girl a ticket for passage to America well in advance of her father's deadline. He may not have made his fortune yet, but he's won his girl -- though you wonder what she thinks she's won when she sets up housekeeping in a filthy ghetto tenement that makes her dad's place look like a gingerbread house by comparison.

One artistic flub in The Italian is the fact that, while the New York part of the story covers at least two years, the advertising art at Beppo's bootblack station never changes.

Things go downhill from here. Mr. and Mrs. Beppo have a baby, but the baby sickens on unpasteurized milk. Unsanitary conditions in their flat obviously didn't help. A doctor tells Beppo that his baby's life depends on buying pasteurized milk, but he gets mugged on the way to the market. Desperate now, he begs the ward boss for money, but the pol isn't interested. In a melodramatic touch (and an impressive stunt) Beppo clings to the door of the moving car, imploring the boss until he's kicked into the street and into the path of traffic. After a lucky escape, he confronts the muggers and fights to reclaim his money, but when a cop arrives Beppo is arrested for disorderly conduct. A contemptuous cop crumples up the note he scribbles to his wife, so that she has no idea where Beppo is as the crisis comes for her son. By the time he's released a few days (or weeks?) later, we've already seen a grim funeral procession, a little casket being taken from the flat to a hearse.

One bad day can have terrible consequences, as Beppo is about to learn.

Some time later, an embittered Beppo reads that the boss's child is gravely ill with "brain fever." Blaming the boss's neglect for his own boy's death, Beppo plots revenge. With perhaps unlikely stealth he sneaks into the boss's home just as the doctor tells the boss that the sick child must have complete isolation and silence if he's to recover. Beppo slips into the child's room and is about to stave its skull in with a lampshade when he notices that the kid sleeps with his little fist tucked beneath his chin. Just as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers remembers the way he lifted little Debbie when she was an innocent child and cannot kill the grown squaw, Beppo remembers that his own child slept just this way. Overwhelmed with empathy, he can't carry out his revenge. We last see him mourning anew at his boy's grave...and here George Beban closes his book, stares at the ceiling and sighs as the curtains close.

William K. Everson first tipped me off to the existence of The Italian in his great history American Silent Film. It's been released on DVD on a twin bill with the 1913 Traffic in Souls as Perils of the New Land. That disc is a recent acquisition of the Albany Public Library. Everson touted Barker's film as a recently-rediscovered masterpiece. Judging The Italian by the standards of its time, he did not exaggerate. It's the earliest American feature film that I've seen that I can call a classic.

On the Big Screen: MACHETE (2010)

I owed it to Robert Rodriguez to give his new film a chance, since Machete is the nearest thing we may ever see to a sequel to Grindhouse, one of my favorite productions of the past decade. While I didn't think that Quentin Tarantino held up his end with the too-gabby Death Proof, Rodriguez's Planet Terror was a masterpiece of genre pastiche, its distressed look (recreated in the new film's prologue) as much a triumph of style as the more vaunted Sin City. Machete, of course, was promised as a coming attraction during Grindhouse, but there was no more reason to expect it to actually open than there was to expect Don't! or Werewolf Women of the SS -- though Thanksgiving may yet see life. The fact that Rodriguez went on to make it did not guarantee that it'd be as good as Planet Terror. Rodriguez has a profoundly mixed record in my book. The aforementioned Sin City, for instance, was one of the most misguided movies of the millennium so far. I paid my matinee money this afternoon knowing that I had rolled the dice.

Fortunately, Machete is a triumph in its category, a riot of outrageousness and provocation with its heart in the right place. Yes, it does have a heart, and it bleeds. Don't watch this film if you intend on taking its message seriously or disagree with it in advance, because Rodriguez's sympathies are entirely with illegal immigrants as the downtrodden proletariat of our time. They are persecuted by a vast conspiracy of racist vigilantes, cynical politicians, and Mexican drug lords, not to mention Jessica Alba's well-meaning but naive ICE agent, but defended by The Network run by the not-so-mysterious "She" and later by Machete (Danny Trejo), himself an illegal driven from Mexico by the head drug lord, the monster who murdered his wife and may have done worse with his daughter. When I say monster I mean it: the drug lord is played by Steven Seagal, the one man of his kind allegedly not invited to be in The Expendables. More on him later, but his co-villains include Robert De Niro as an ersatz Texan politician, Jeff Fahey as his fixer and Don Johnson as a more-murderous version of the border Minuteman. Rodriguez's pop-paranoid premise is that all of these evils are in cahoots, all poised to benefit from the economic pressures to be imposed by stricter restrictions on the immigration that gives Texas a cheap labor supply. However that strikes you as political analysis, it provides our hero with plenty of enemies to fight.

The film must conform to the trailer by putting Machete to work for Fahey as a dupe assassin who must go on the run to clear his name and destroy the conspiracy of oppressors. He must have the help of Cheech Marin as the federale turned priest who will tell an enemy, "God has mercy; I don't." He must somehow fly through the air on a motorcycle rigged with machine guns, and he must ultimately rally a crowd of machete-wielding followers to prove that the enemy has fucked with the wrong Mexican. But Rodriguez has left himself lots of room to embellish, until toward the end he seemed to run out of room, or time. The film is full of eccentric characters and running gags as well as spectacular and gruesome stunts. It's the sort of film that convinces you, once a doctor talks about the length of the large intestine, that Machete is destined to use one (not his own, of course) as an escape tool. The violence is pitched at sight-gag level; you're supposed to laugh or simply admire the director's inventiveness. If you're appalled or disgusted you probably shouldn't have gone to the show. Machete's rightful audience is the people who experience a mild epiphany upon seeing Alba square off with a luchador-masked assassin armed only with red high-heeled shoes, or upon seeing a vengeful Lindsay Lohan in a nun's habit spraying a crowd with machine-gun fire, or a different though related sensation after Machete is momentarily defeated by a naked woman who removes her cellphone from a naughty hiding place.

Like many a comedy, Machete is a hit-or-miss exercise in constant invention. Some things didn't work for me. I could never tell whether the elderly hero's success with women (Machete is Trejo's own age: 66!) was a swaggering assertion of Mexican machismo or a jokey attempt to turn Trejo into a Hispanic Dolemite. The movie's climax is a mess, as Rodriguez clumsily arranges for all the major characters (and many minor ones) to converge on one location for an over-extended battle scene. His need to keep track of so many people and plotlines bogs the battle down so that it becomes less than the sum of its moments. But I'd rather see a director of this sort of film err on the side of excess, even if that means he drops some of the balls he's juggling, than have not enough going on at the climax.

Excess is the point of Machete, but there are also occasional grace notes. For all that Machete is built up as a sex machine, he can also be a gentleman, refusing to take advantage of a drunken Alba even when she invites him to lay with her. He can also be reticent with enemies, as proven in his several encounters with Fahey's likably dumb bodyguards. They don't really want to risk their lives against Machete, and he doesn't really need to kill them. He can taunt them with a weedwhacker or trap one's neck between the blades of hedge clippers, but he doesn't spoil the joke of their cowardice with supergratuitous killing. Along with Rodriguez's social consciousness, which is straight out of 1930s Warner Bros. (while Machete's final answer when asked where he's going -- "Everywhere," -- struck me as straight out of Tom Joad), these bits mark Machete as the bloodbath with a heart. The film might be inflammatory if played straighter, especially in its portrayal of an illegal army ready to wage war on border vigilantes, but Rodriguez may hope that if he directs a race war as farce the first time out, it won't have to be repeated as tragedy.

Danny Trejo makes the most of a role tailored personally for him. Machete might be a Dolemite in the sack, but he's also a more conventionally stoic and laconic hero whose sense of justice is only heightened by his agenda of vengeance. None of the villains are all they can be, since Rodriguez seems to lose track occasionally of which one's the big bad, but all are entertaining. Fairness requires me to give Steven Seagal credit for being a good sport here. His part requires little more than his own natural thuggishness, but his apparent enjoyment of the job makes him seem livelier than he's been in his own recent straight-to-DVD star vehicles. I suspect that he made some stipulation regarding the manner of his demise, but the result is a gloriously silly face-saving final speech that's hard to resent. Lindsay Lohan's presence as Fahey's druggy, slutty daughter sometimes seems like an afterthought, but the incest triangle Rodriguez concocts for her (Dad lusts after her, but she seems set to shoot a sex tape with Mom!) shows his afterthoughts to be those of an exploitation genius.

The finale promises a trilogy, the current film to be followed by Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again. Accordingly, Machete leaves a few loose ends. Our hero presumably has a score to settle with Tom Savini, while a young border vigilante who survives the final battle has learned not to puke at the sight of death and may be a menace for the future. In any event, there's lots of injustice in the world, and a lot of unjust laws made by unjust men. Since we can't have the man himself cutting through all the red tape, we may as well have more Machete movies. Here's hoping.

For historical purposes, here's the original Grindhouse trailer for Machete from 2007, as preserved on YouTube by TauHeel05.

THE GLASS WALL (1953)

If there were eight million stories in the naked city by the conventional reckoning of 1953, Maxwell Shane's film tells the 8,000,001st. It's the story of Peter Kuban (Vittorio Gassman), a Hungarian refugee seeking political asylum in the United States. He's gone about it the wrong way, though, by stowing away aboard a ship carrying documented refugees and displaced persons. He speaks good English and tries to explain to the immigration authorities that he's spent most of the past ten years in camps and could end up in another, or worse, if he's sent back to his homeland. He claims that a New Yorker can vouch for him: a paratrooper he knows only as Tom whom he rescued from the Germans. All Peter knows about Tom is that he plays the clarinet and lives in New York. That's not specific enough for the feds, who keep him confined on board ship until it heads back across the Atlantic.

Overnight, however, someone does a very strange thing. Whoever it is talks to a reporter for the New York Daily News, and the next morning, for some reason, Peter's face is on the front page. A sailor tells him that this could work in his favor, as women will feel sorry for him and people in general will want the government to give him a break. But Peter's not taking chances. He overpowers the sailor and manages to leave the ship, but not without breaking a rib along the way. From there he hops on a truck that takes him all the way to Times Square, which is where he expects to find Tom the clarinetist. As the feds warned him, that's not as easy as he supposed. The futile searching through streets and jazz clubs gets to him, as illustrated in a classic Hollywood montage of delirious symbolism.

Peter has to take a break in a cafeteria, and there he meets our Bad Girl of Film Noir for tonight. It's Gloria Grahame, just off winning an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful, playing Maggie Summers. Shane introduces us to Maggie in a scene of almost Chaplinesque poverty. She fills a teacup with hot water, then heads to a table where a man has left behind a half-eaten donut. She discreetly eases the remnant over to her side of the table, then daintily extracts a used tea bag from her change purse to dunk in the hot water. This is poverty, folks, of the kind I didn't think people saw much of in Fifties movies, and the next thing you know Maggie's bolting out the door with somebody else's coat. This is where Peter's chivalry kicks in, as he uses his refugee skills (the man escaped from Auschwitz single-handedly) to help her evade the cops in a park.

"Did you ever put tips on shoelaces?" Gloria Grahame demonstrates.

Maggie lives in an attic hovel and has to endure a hag of a landlady and the romantic attentions of her gorilla of a son. She's late with her rent and the hag wants it now. Maggie has nothing, but Peter hands her his last $7 to keep the hag at bay. He wants to go on his way, but passes out from his injury. Maggie keeps him overnight and bares her soul (at least) to him. She lost her awful job in a shoelace factory after falling ill and hasn't found work since. This news rather clouds Peter's vision of America as a land of unanimous prosperity, but he still intends to stay. But the hag and the gorilla are on to him and finally drive both him and Maggie out. Now they have to fend for themselves on the streets. For Maggie that means having to steal two dimes from a couple of busking children as Peter looks on in horror. But that change will get them onto the subway, where they can ride all night and get some sleep -- except for the fact that the cops recognize Peter from the papers and give chase, nabbing Maggie in the process. He barely escapes by dashing across the tracks just before a train plows through.

The cops aren't the only ones looking for Peter by now, because none other than Tom the clarinetist (Jerry Paris)has seen this morning's News and recognized his erstwhile wartime buddy. He wants to contact the immigration people, but this is the night of his big live audition with the Jack Teagarden Orchestra, and his girlfriend pressures him to keep a date that can make his career. As soon as the set is over, however, Tom makes a beeline for the authorities. Once he vouches for Peter, the manhunt becomes a race against the legal clock. With Tom's good word the feds will let Peter stay here, but they have to bring him back into custody before the ship he came in on leaves New York, or else he'll be permanently ineligible. There's also the matter of his broken rib and potential complications....

The Glass Wall is the final film in Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's Bad Girls of Film Noir Vol. 1 collection. As the previous film I reviewed, Two of a Kind, demonstrated, the films from the Columbia Pictures library have been selected mainly on the name value of their female leads: Evelyn Keyes in one, Lizabeth Scott in two, and Grahame here. Two of a Kind had a lot of the right ingredients but lacked the spirit of a true noir, while the film I won't bother reviewing, Irving Rapper's Bad For Each Other, is little more than a class-anxiety soap opera with a lot of people arguing with each other for no good reason. So how does Glass Wall rate on the noir meter?

Judging by looks alone, it'd be a noir. Columbia sent cinematographer Joseph Biroc back to New York (he'd done The Killer That Stalked New York) for some impressive nighttime footage of Times Square and early morning midtown footage. Sometimes the footage is used in process shots when it's time for Gassman's close-up, but the Italian actor is actually at the Crossroads of the World and appears to try to catch some Zs in a real penny arcade at one point. Some of his Times Square scenes appear to have been shot with a handheld camera to avoid public attention to the shoot, while the morning scenes are shot on largely empty but clearly real streets and are impressively composed. There are other moments, whether shot on set or location, that look and feel like echt noir. In story terms, there's also a social realism and attention to poverty and low life that argue for the film's noir standing.

Location, location,...location? Joseph Biroc's cinematography is excellent regardless.

But if anything disqualifies Glass Wall from noirdom, it's the fact that Peter Kuban is an unambiguous good guy. Given the time period, you might have suspected the writers to tease that Peter might actually be a fugitive from justice or a Commie spy, but our hero has nothing on his conscience except his failure to go through proper channels to enter the country. It's entirely appropriate for him to get a happy ending (though we may ask how he intends to support himself and, one presumes, Maggie), but it's so thoroughly deserved that there's no room for the moral ambiguity that often defines noir.

Now ask me if it's a good film. It certainly is, and I'm inclined to call it the best film in the set. While the whole newspaper business is a contrivance to make it easy for Tom to get into the story, The Glass Wall is otherwise constantly inventive, throwing important new characters into the mix quite late in the game, as when a Hungarian-born stripper ("She's Atomic!") befriends Peter and decides to shield him from the law at a point when he most needs the law to find him. This causes a scene when the stripper's criminal brother (Joseph Turkel) finds out about the fugitive and makes a loud case for turning him in that only earns him slaps in the face from sister and mother. Turkel, later of Paths of Glory and Blade Runner fame, storms through his one scene as if he's out to steal the whole movie, and he helps keep the film fresh as it heads into the homestretch. Glass Wall is close to being one of those "night from hell" movies that became fashionable decades later, and those films could be seen as evolutionary offshoots from film noir. In general, it may be best to say that noir is a subcategory of a larger genre of socially-conscious lowlife dramas to which Shane's film also belongs -- hence the resemblances. Grahame is effortlessly good here, and Gassman nails the desperation of many a noir hero even if he isn't one exactly. This film was his introduction to American movie audiences, but the trailer (currently unavailable online) undercuts him a bit by emphasizing first and foremost that he was then Shelley Winters's husband. He went on to have a distinguished international career but could have had a stronger Hollywood sojourn on the strength of this effort, which was regrettably released in most places, from what I could tell, as a second feature on double bills. It deserved better than that.

Along with all the features I've mentioned in the previous posts, Bad Girls of Film Noir Vol. 1 has one more extra that makes a nice square-up for viewers disappointed in the films' noir content. "The Payoff" is a half-hour episode of the anthology series All Star Theater (aka The Ford Television Theater minus the ads) starring Howard Duff as a private eye hired to receive a mysterious envelope at a boxing card. It's written by Blake Edwards (just prior to Peter Gunn) and proves a quite entertaining case of who's double-crossing who. It's another detail that persuades me to give Volume 1 a recommendation for old-movie fans in general, if not necessarily for noir specialists. I'm just about persuaded to give Vol. 2 a shot as well.

PALERMO ODER WOLFSBURG (1980)

I was up for a challenge this weekend and I accepted more than one. Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Spectrum Theater for a double-feature (interrupted by lunch) of Shutter Island and The White Ribbon -- more on those films later. The Albany Public Library issued a different kind of challenge. Among their new arrivals in the foreign-film section was the co-winner of the 1980 Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, a 175-minute saga of a hapless gastarbeiter from Sicily who meets misadventure at the Volkswagen factory town. I was game and I think I'm better for the challenge.

Werner Schroeter's name meant nothing to me before this, but he's a figure in the "New German Cinema" movement of the 1970s, one who's still active today. He cast a non-actor, Nicola Zarbo, as a poor Sicilian named Nicola Zarbo who follows a trail blazed by fellow Sicilians to Wolfsburg, where he hopes to raise money for his family with a job at Volkswagen. His father is a drunk, demoralized by the fact that the local landlord arbitrarily raised the asking price for a piece of land that Dad had been saving for for many years. This first of three roughly equal episodes is effortlessly picturesque, Schroeter and cinematographer Thomas Mauch (a frequent collaborator of Werner Herzog) showing a strong eye for the landscape and the dessicated architecture of the island. He has no illusions about the quality of material life there -- Nicola must emigrate to find a decent-paying job, after all, -- but he seems to see Sicily as the site of an authentic, humane culture, if only to set it up for a favorable contrast with a soulless bourgeois utilitarian Germany. His Sicily is a place where people really do burst into song nearly all the time, albeit not in musical-comedy fashion. This is not a musical, and if anything the Sicilian section is an exercise in neo-neorealism, but Schroeter (an opera director on the side) wants to show that Sicily has a music in its soul that has, presumably, gone silent in his own homeland.

Nicola reaches Wolfsburg without having secured a job, knowing only that he has a cousin living there already. But the cousin's German wife won't have relatives flopping in her apartment. The best the man can do is hand Nicola 20 marks and tell him to head for a hostel that other Italians had already recommended to him. But our hero has no idea of how to get there in the dark, and our first hint of how alarmingly unworldly he is comes when he spends the night in some bushes and idly burns the money, just to watch it burn. Come the morning, he falls in love at first sight with Brigitte Hahn (Brigitte Tilg, another first-and-only time actor), a teenage mechanic who steers him to a nearby pub run by an Italian woman, Giovanna (professional thespian Ida di Benedetto). She doesn't take scheissen from bigoted Germans, including an old boyfriend of Brigitte's, and she'll enforce discipline with a broken bottle if necessary.

Above, Brigitte mimes "Sicily" in an effort to communicate with Nicola. Below, their date at the amusement park.

Joanna not only runs her own pub; she's her own bouncer, too.

Nicola does land a job at VW, but has a hard time learning German. He regards Brigitte as his girlfriend, and even writes home claiming that he's engaged to her, but she's only using him to make her old boyfriend jealous. It works, but it results badly for him and his pal, because by the time they cross his path again he's feeling pretty jealous himself. This segment ends with an anarchist pal of Nicola's messing with a crime scene to help him set up a self-defense claim.

The final hour of the film is Nicola's trial for double murder. It comes with a drastic shift in style to illustrate the protagonist's disorientation amid the German babble and rapid-fire Italian translation, and his incomprehension of the local legal process. Social realism yields to surrealism and subjectivity. It leaves you wondering how much is playing out in Nicola's crumbling mind and how much is the director's objective absurdity. But it actually fits in with the clips from an amateur Passion Play we keep cutting back to throughout the picture. I've read a review that accuses Schroeter of making Nicola into a Christ figure, but I think the director only means that this is how Nicola has come to see himself, as a martyr if not a messiah. In fact, his isn't a Christlike fate. He's actually on the brink of acquittal when he suddenly claims responsibility for the crimes, as if grown sick and tired of efforts by defense attorney and witnesses like Joanna to portray him as a victim of German society or larger economic forces. This third episode skirts the edge of over the top, but it's really a smart ploy by Schroeter to freshen up his audience for the last long haul of the show.

Schroeter's title seems to force a choice on viewers: the soulful, intimate poverty of Sicily or what Joanna describes at the trial as "this land without light, without sun, without song, without chatter." But she seems finally to protest too much, and one sympathizes slightly with the prosecutor who says we're due to hear some German emotion after all the Italian emotion expressed already. Schroeter makes it clear that anti-Italian bigotry is rife in his country, not to mention patronizing minstrel-show like representations of Italian culture like the song a woman sings at an amusement-park talent contest. His main point, I think, is not to say that Palermo is better than Wolfsburg, but to say that the cultures are simply incompatible, a state of affairs exacerbated by the economic circumstances that bring Sicilians like Nicola to Germany. Nicola may have been deranged by his time in Wolfsburg, but the derangement began back at home.

From the length alone, maybe, you can tell that Palermo Oder Wolfsburg is a hugely ambitious film, and this is one of those cases where the ambition alone may justify cinema buffs in giving Schroeter three hours of their time. Whether you decide that he jumps the shark during the trial or not, you'll see some remarkable images and performances in a vivid document of its time in two nations.

There's no trailer available, but http://www.ovguide.com/ claims that you can watch the film free on its site.

LORNA'S SILENCE (2008)

These days people are pretty desperate to live in Belgium. I suppose it depends on where you start life. Lorna, for instance, is an Albanian -- from the country, not the city in New York where I live. Some of us Albanians might want to move to Belgium, too, but Lorna's the one with the system. To be more accurate, she's a cog in the system. Here's how it works. The local mafia makes a deal with a native Belgian, paying him to marry Lorna. They stay married long enough to not look suspicious, then they break up. By then, Lorna has a Belgian passport. Now she can marry some guy from the east and get him Belgian citizenship. Pretty efficient.

The complication, in this particular case, is what to do with the first husband, the Belgian. Lorna has married Claudy Moreau, known to most of her associates as "the junky." And that about sums it up -- except that he's trying to kick the habit. A deep, aching emotional neediness emerges as he embarks upon the ordeal. While Lorna prefers to deal with her husband on a purely transactional basis, he desperately needs her to be near him, to talk to or play cards with. She's the one constant in his life, someone he can set goals around to structure his time and keep his mind off the junk. But she'd rather keep her distance. It's a marriage in name only, of course; Claudy sleeps in the living room on a mattress Lorna keeps stuck between her mattresses during the day. She resents his neediness, especially when it means calling her home from her laundry job on some feeble pretext or another. But despite all the annoyances and her desire to hook up eventually with her Albanian boyfriend Sokol, she can't help pitying Claudy, especially when she realizes that the people who placed her with him specifically matched her with a junky because it'd be easy to make her a widow by arranging an overdose. His resolution to clean up complicates their plans, especially since Lorna's next husband, "the Russian," is on his way to Belgium. They want to be rid of Claudy as soon as possible, but Lorna would rather he didn't die.

So she tries to arrange a divorce to let Claudy can get away clean, even though her handlers claim that a quickie divorce would look suspicious. Her idea is to claim abuse and to get Claudy to hit her. But as she's discovered compassion, he's discovered honor. He doesn't want to go on public record as a violent case. Lorna thinks he owes it to her to clobber her because she stood by him during his withdrawal, but the best he can manage is a tepid slap. She has to bruise herself and bash her head against a wall to make it more convincing. The irony of the situation is that she's trying to save his life, but he feels that she's abandoning him, and that drives him to the brink of falling off the wagon. Lorna realizes suddenly that she can't let that happen. Her solution is to offer herself, naked, to him, abruptly redeeming their parody of a marriage.

This is probably the happiest moment for our main charcters, but things change fast.

This takes us to the halfway point of Le Silence de Lorna, but it becomes hard to describe it further without diluting the shock value of subsequent story twists. But I think I've described enough to get fans of crime cinema interested. This is definitely a crime movie, but of a subset that might be described as lowlife pathos, dealing with the desperate struggles and sorrows of the little people at the bottom of the food chain. It's a mode the Dardenne brothers have worked in before, particularly in the only other film of theirs that I've seen, The Child. They practice a kind of ragamuffin romanticism in naturalistic style and have won awards doing so. Their films (co-written and co-directed) look lived-in rather than art-directed, which is entirely right for their subject matter. In tone they're the opposite of hard-boiled. I call theirs crime films but they're not gangster movies and have nothing to do with fantasies of power or violence. The Dardennes do crime movies, I suppose, because crime is what the people at the bottom are reduced to. But they're an exception to the generic rule because compassion rather than cynicism is their object.

In Lorna's Silence the Dardennes have teamed a genuine Albanian actress of limited experience, Arta Dobroshi, with one of their favorite actors, Jeremie Renier. While their sudden burst of sexual passion is really a little hard to believe, the two performers do have a chemistry that makes the characters' evolving relationship emotionally convincing. In the second half of the film the spotlight is really on Dobroshi, who must leave you guessing whether she's having a moral epiphany or has just gone mad. The movie itself lets you keep on guessing, and Dobroshi gives you good reason to guess either way. The film ends sort of in medias res in a way that leaves you guessing, perhaps for the wrong reasons, but as a whole it's an eye-opening window into a Euro underworld, the humanity of which can't be denied.

Here's the trailer, uploaded to YouTube by moviestride: