Summer Film Roundup, Part 2: Masterpieces and Missed Opportunities

Throne of Blood (1957)

Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth might be the most watchable film version of Shakespeare ever made. The film discards Shakespeare's poetry (admittedly a loss for those of us who still thrill to Macbeth's bitter words, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," despite Shakespeare's erroneous use of "that" instead of the grammatically correct "who") and substitutes striking visualisations which carry the story forward with both beauty and irresistible thrust.  Kurosawa drew on certain conventions of the Japanese Noh plays in his compositions and in the facial expressions of the actors, which resemble drozen masks while still remaining very naturalistic.  Obviously the great Toshiro Mifune's riveting performance as the Macbeth character is at the heart of the film: this murderous Scottish King  may not be able to spout poetry  in either English or Japanese translation,  but his  actions and physical bearing give life to the sound and fury of Shakespeare's verse.  And the actress who plays the Japanese version of Lady Macbeth is truly chilling.  All in all, a better film than the 1948 Welles Macbeth, though I'm still fond of Polanski's early 1970s version which keeps the poetry and all the violence Shakespeare kept discreetly off-stage gorily front and center.  When one of the arrows Macbeth's enemies her let him in such profusion suddenly pierces the left side of his neck and emerges out the right side (a startling visual effect done simply by  stopping the camera and applying the two sides of the arrow  two  Mifune's neck; the speed of the arrows flying around him help the view or believe an arrow has actually shot through him before our eyes)  And speaking of eyes: Mifune's enormous eyes instantly open even wider with the realization that he has been killed and that his death truly signifies nothing at all.  His hour of strutting on the stage is over.

Throne of Blood is an unforgettable portrait of bloodthirsty ambition, and you can't help but think that Kurosawa was reflecting on his own country's actions of only a dozen years before.  Not only one of the best Japanese movies ever made, but one of the gretatest films of world cinema.

The Picasso Summer (1969)

Wouldn't most of us have liked to meet Picasso?  In 1969, when this film was made, it was still possible. And fewer people then were aware of what most of us know now: thatt Picasso may have been a brilliant artist but he was a pretty awful human being.  Ray Bradbury wrote a beautiful short story about a young American couple in the south of France  who have an encounter with of sorts with Picasso. This dreadful film adaptation of Bradbury's story  pads  it out to feature film length and in the process completely destroys what was  so moving about  the original work.  I knew Bradbury was displeased by the final result, not only because it's so self-evidently bad, but because one of the listed screenwriters is "Douglas Spaulding," the name of the protagonist of one of Bradbury's novels.  Clearly Bradbury wanted his name taken off this disaster, so he sent a message to his fans via the pseudonym, just as Harlan Ellison has frequently removed his name from television shows he's written when the finished product ("product" and "finished" are particularly apt in these cases) dismays him, employing the name "Cordwainer Bird" in the credits in place of his own

Much like the far better film Two for the Road, Albert Finney is again an architect traveling in the south of France with his wife, this time Yvette Mimieux instead of Audrey Hepburn.  Milieu lacks  Hepburn's emotional vulnerability  though there's no denying she looks good in a bikini. Finney has gotten it into his head to track down Picasso to thank him for all the joy his art has given him. There are several lengthy sequences in the film which are animated versions of Picasso's paintings, and are alternately interesting and garish.  Robert Sallin's genuinely awful direction relies heavily on flash cuts and zooms all over the place, plus endless shots of the couple bicycling and holding hands in beautiful locations with Michel Legrand's music pour over every scene like maple syrup that's much too sweet. Do the couple ever get to meet Picasso? You'll have to endure the film to find out. The distributor thought it was so bad that it was never released in theaters but pops up on TV now and then. This was the first film that Robert Sallin directed -- and the last. What a disastrous adaptation of one of Bradbury's best stories.

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

While ostensibly based on Irwin Shaw's novel of the same name, this Vincente Minnelli film fashions itself as a kind of "sequel" to the far better The Bad and the Beautiful, directed by Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas in 1952.  Two Weeks in Another Town reunites Minelli with Douglas and composer David Raksin in a story about the movie business in the early 1960s. Douglas is a washed-up film actor and Robinson is a washed-up film director, and both wind up working on a low-budget film in Italy, which leads me to suspect Godard was somewhat inspired by this film when he made Contempt a year later, though it's somewhat difficult to imagine anyone being inspired by this film in any way at all.  The characters  in this story are different from the ones in the 1952 film,  but the connection to the earlier Minnelli film is underscored when the leads are all in a screening room in Rome watching one of the great films the Robinson character directed in his heyday ten years earlier.  The scene, of course, is one with Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner from The Bad and The Beautiful.   and acting are locked into the style of Hollywood from a decade before, and you can't help thinking how hopelessly old-fashioned this movie must have seemed compared to the cutting-edge new films being made by Antonioni and Fellini in Italy at the same time.  

Nonetheless, the camera compositions and rich palette are pure Minnelli and a delight to the eye, and Douglas's scenes with Robinson, though wildly overheated, are almost worth the price of admission.  But ultimately  one remembers David Raksin's score: a bit too lush, perhaps, but suffused with a melancholy that suggests everyone concerned with this film knows that the age of Minnelli is passing while the age of Scorsese and the film school generation is waiting in the wings.