Murder on the Orient Express (1974) [PG] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert for rogerebert.com on January 1, 1974.

There is a cry of alarm, some muffled French, a coming and going in the corridor. Hercule Poirot, Adjusting the devices that keep his hair slicked down and his mustache curled up, pauses for a moment in his train compartment. He lifts an eyebrow. He looks out into the hallway. He shrugs. The next morning, it’s revealed that Ratchett, the hateful American millionaire, has been stabbed to death in his sleep. This is the quite obviously a case for Hercule Poirot, the most famous detective in the world, and, over breakfast, he agrees to accept it. The list of suspects is long, but limited: It includes everybody on board the crack Orient Express, enroute from Istanbul to Calais, and currently brought to a standstill by an avalanche of snow that has fallen across the track. Poirot arranges to begin a series of interviews and plunges himself (and the rest of us) into a net of intrigue so deep, so deceptive, and so labyrinthine that only Agatha Christie would have woven it.

Murder on the Orient Express is a splendidly entertaining movie of the sort that isn’t made anymore: It’s a classical whodunit, with all the clues planted and all of them visible, and it’s peopled with a large and expensive collection of stars. Albert Finney, who plays Poirot, is the most impressive, largely because we can never for a moment believe that he is Finney. His hair is slicked down to a patent-leather shine, his eyes have somehow become beady and suspicious, his French mustache is constantly quivering with alarm (real and pretend), and he scurries up and down the train like a paranoid crab. The performance is brilliant, and it’s high comedy.

So is the movie, although it’s careful never to make its essentially comic intentions get in the way of Miss Christie’s well-oiled mystery. This isn’t a thriller, because we’re not thrilled, or scared-only amused. The murder itself has a certain antiseptic, ritualistic quality, and the investigation is an exercise in sophisticated cross-examination and sputters of indignation. What I liked best about this movie is its style, both the deliberately old-fashioned visual strategies used by director Sidney Lumet, and the cheerful overacting of the dozen or more suspects.

They form a suitably bizarre menagerie and at first glance have nothing in common with one another. Bear with me please, and I’ll work my way through the all-stars: Lauren Bacall is a particularly obnoxious American, Ingrid Bergman is an African missionary, Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset are Hungarian royalty, Jean-Pierre Cassel is the conductor, Sean Connery is an English officer returning from India, Vanessa Redgrave is his constant companion, Sir John Gielgud is a very, very proper manservant to millionaire Richard Widmark, Wendy Hiller is an aloof Russian aristocrat, Anthony Perkins is Widmark’s secretary, Rachel Roberts is a neo-Nazi ladies’ maid, Martin Balsam is a director of the railroad line, and there are, believe it or not, others also under suspicion.

There are obviously big technical problems here: More than a dozen characters have to be introduced and kept alive, a very complicated plot has to be unraveled, and everything must take place within the claustrophobic confines of the railway car. Lumet overcomes his difficulties in great style, and we’re never for a moment confused (except when we’re supposed to be, which is most of the time).

There is hardly anything more I can tell you, or even hint, about the plot, except that nothing is as it seems (and you knew that already about a movie based on an Agatha Christie book). The movie provides a good time, high style, a loving salute to an earlier period of filmmaking, and an unexpected bonus: It ends with a very long scene in which Poirot asks everyone to be silent, please, while he explains his various theories of the case. He does so in great detail, and it’s fun of a rather malicious sort watching a dozen high-priced stars keep their mouths shut and just listen while Finney masterfully dominates the scene. [Ebert’s rating: *** out of 4 stars]

Labels: crime, drama, Ingrid Bergman, mystery, period

Internet Movie Database 7.3/10 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=74, viewers=72) 

Blu-ray

Come See the Paradise (1990) [R] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert on January 18, 1991.

Here is a film about people who insist they are Americans, even when small and evil-minded people in power would treat them as if they were not. Most of the characters in Come See the Paradise are Japanese-Americans who were thrown into prison camps at the outset of World War II, even though there was no evidence that they were less patriotic, less American, than members of other ethnic groups such as the Germans or the Italians. Their imprisonment was essentially racist, translating into laws that said they were not entitled to the same constitutional rights as their fellow citizens.

Another character in the film is an Irish-American who is a left-wing labor organizer. He gets involved in a stupid and illegal action against a movie theater chain, flees from the East Coast to the West Coast, and changes his name. But he cannot change his ideas, and after he gets a job in a fish cannery he is soon supporting the right of his fellow workers to strike. That means he, too, is not an American - at least not in the eyes of the company goons.

Although we make much of our tradition of freedom in this country, we are not so clever at understanding what freedom really means. Even our president, for example, cannot understand that among the rights symbolized by the American flag is the right to burn it - or honor it, if that is our choice. I have always wondered why the people who call themselves American most loudly are often the ones with the least understanding of the freedoms that word should represent.

When the country is threatened, our civil liberties are among the first casualties - as if we can fight the enemy by taking away our own freedoms before the enemy has a chance to. That is what happened in the early days of World War II, when a wave of racism swept the Japanese-Americans out of their homes and businesses, confiscated their savings and investments, and shipped them away in prison trains to concentration camps that were sometimes no more than barns and stables. Later on some of these same Japanese-Americans fought with valor in the same war, perhaps because they understood better than their captors what they were fighting for.

Come See the Paradise tells a story of this period in terms of a romance between the labor organizer and a young Japanese-American woman. Her name is Lily Yuriko Kawamura (Tamlyn Tomita), and she is the daughter of a businessman who runs a little chain of Japanese-language movie theaters. When the Irishman, Jack McGurn (Dennis Quaid), flees to San Francisco after getting in trouble in New York, he finds a job as a projectionist in one of the theaters, and then he meets the daughter and they fall in love with each other almost immediately. (On their first date, he leans across the table and asks to kiss her, and she gives permission. It's a sweet scene, reminiscent of some of the Hollywood movies being made at about the same time.) Lily's father, of course, opposes the marriage. Jack goes to confront him, in one of the movie's strongest scenes, and when the old man remains inflexible the two young people run away to get married out of state (marriages between members of different races were illegal in California at the time). In a scene that is gloriously romantic and highly improbable, they find themselves at someone else's wedding party, where they dance the night away.

Then Pearl Harbor is attacked and war is declared. By executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt, Lily, her family and everyone they know find themselves herded away to prison camps. One of her brothers later volunteers for the U.S. Army and another becomes militantly pro-Japanese, but the saddest figure is the father, who is accused by his own people of being a spy, and literally fades away into death, sitting sadly in a chair and gazing at nothing.

Lily and Jack have had a daughter, who goes into the camp with her mother, while Jack goes into the Army, but not before one of the most lacerating scenes in the film, when Jack takes his little daughter to meet Santa Claus, and Santa refuses to let the child sit on his lap. She's an American, Jack informs Santa, grabbing him, and you will sit here and listen to what she wants for Christmas or I will kill you. Come See the Paradise has been criticized in a few places because it uses a technique that is common in movies about minority groups: A convenient Caucasian provides the point of view, so that the audience will have someone to identify with. I didn't appreciate that approach in Glory - why couldn't the story of these black Civil War soldiers be seen through their own eyes, rather than through the eyes of their white commanding officer? But with Come See the Paradise, the introduction of the Quaid character seemed somewhat less contrived, because the film's director, Alan Parker, is making a statement not limited to the story of his Japanese-American characters. The theme of the whole film is that all of its characters are Americans, too. That people of various colors and political beliefs are all equally Americans, and if there is not room for them here then there is no purpose for this society. By adding the Quaid character, he is able to show in one story how eager we sometimes are to deprive people of their rights for both racial and political reasons.

The story itself is rather sweet, when it is not angry. It's told in a flashback from shortly after the war, when Lily is describing the events of those days to her daughter, now just barely old enough to ask questions. The love affair between Jack and Lily is tender and romantic, and if Lily's father dies after he loses all pride and self-esteem, at least her mother lives long enough to finally accept and embrace her little half-Japanese granddaughter.

Come See the Paradise is a fable to remind us of how easily we can surrender our liberties, and how much we need them. [Ebert’s rating: 3 stars out of 4 = 75%]

Blogger’s comment: This is a heartfelt, passionate romance with an uplifting ending, but the process of getting there is not an easy one. Nevertheless it is worth watching. Filmed in Aug. – Nov. 1989 it was released the following year. Thirteen years later (Nov. 2002 – Oct. 2003) Dennis Quaid and Tamlyn Tomita would be together in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) as Jack Hall and Janet Tokada.

I can just imagine this conversation:

DENNIS: Damn, Tamlyn, you're as beautiful as you were thirteen years ago. How is that possible?
TAMLYN: Just good genes, Dennis. It's too bad you didn't notice me then. You know I really wanted you to.
DENNIS: What was I doing in 1989?
TAMLYN: I think you were chasing Meg Ryan.

Labels: drama, romance, WWII
IMDb 67/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=55, viewers=74)
Roger Ebert’s review 

 

Cactus Flower (1969) [M] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert for rogerebert.com on December 29, 1969.

The movie press agents have a theory that critics shouldn't be allowed to see a comedy in a screening room. Unless they can hear the people laughing, the theory goes, they won't know the movie's funny.

I don't know if there's anything to this or not (usually not, I guess), but it was a pleasure to catch the Saturday matinee of Cactus Flower at the State Lake. The audience didn't merely like it; it reveled in it. Here's one kind of comedy that inspires raucous laughter, such as The Producers (1968), and another, like this one, where the audience laughs under its breath because it doesn't want to miss the lines.

It's not exactly that the lines mean anything; it's more that the three central performances (by Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and - wow! - Goldie Hawn) are so engaging that we find ourselves, despite ourselves, involved in their story.

They work together. The chemistry works. When Pauline Kael observes that The Scalphunters, not a very good movie, becomes enjoyable because of the sparks that Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis strike in their scenes together, I know what she means. Goldie Hawn and Walter Matthau have that happening in Cactus Flower, and Ingrid Bergman moves between them with absolute serenity.

The story should be familiar by now; the play ran forever at the Blackstone. It's about a middle-aged dentist, his nurse, and his 21-year-old mistress. He tells the girl he's married, because he doesn't want to get involved. But then he does get involved, and can't figure out how to confess his deception. So he gets the nurse to pretend to be his wife. But then the girl becomes sympathetic to the poor, abandoned wife - and then there's the problem of the hairy young playwright who lives next door.

All of this is the basic stuff of stage comedy. In Cactus Flower, just as in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895, or in She Stoops to Conquer in 1773, the plot depends upon a romance developed through mistaken identity. So Abe Burrows wasn't inventing anything new when he wrote the play.

What usually happens is that hit Broadway comedies have a long run in New York, and then they tour the provinces forever, and then a couple of big-name movie stars are substituted in the key roles, and then an expensive production is launched to support the comedy (which is the most fragile of art forms), and by the time the movie finally turns up, four years later, nobody could care less. That's exactly what happened with Cactus Flower, of course - except, paradoxically, that the movie is better than the play.

I wonder whether a lot of the credit doesn't belong to I.A.L. Diamond, who wrote the screenplay. Diamond is a master of light comedy, who has mostly collaborated lately with Billy Wilder (on The Apartment, The Fortune Cookie, etc.). Diamond's screenplay successfully opens up the play, breaking it loose from the confines of the stage without seeming to.

This has previously been a weak spot in the films of director Gene Saks, whose Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple were both terribly tied to one set. By widening the background, Diamond (or somebody) has managed to really convince us that Cactus Flower does take place now (or about now) in a real city - New York. That contributes a lot to the performances they seem more real because they're not stuck in phony sets. But in the last analysis, it really is Matthau, Miss Bergman and (with a marvelously expressive face) Miss Hawn who make Cactus Flower a success. [Ebert’s rating: *** ½ out of 4 stars]

Labels: comedy, Ingrid Bergman, romance, Sixties

Internet Movie Database 7.2/10 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=71, viewers=74) 

The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964) [UR] ****

A film review by Jeffrey Kauffman for DVDTalk.com on January 27, 2009.

Director Anthony Asquith and playwright/screenwriter Terence Rattigan knew upper crust British society from the inside out. Asquith's father had been Prime Minister of the UK in the early 20th century, and Rattigan was a diplomat's son. The two forged a long and largely successful collaboration, with Asquith bringing two of Rattigan's best known plays, The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy, to the screen. The two brought big budget soap opera to the screen with 1963's The V.I.P.s, a sort of Grand Hotel at Heathrow airport (in fact the film is also known as Hotel International), with various glamorous folk, and the occasional comedy relief (Margaret Rutherford in her Oscar winning role) trying to outwait the fog and various personal trials. A year later they brought the same all-star ethos to a more unique property, The Yellow Rolls-Royce, a triptych of stories built around the eponymous car whose ownership passes to three disparate people over the course of several decades.

Perhaps because of their intimate knowledge of the British ruling class, there's an air of authenticity, if also stodginess, to the first episode, featuring Rex Harrison as a diplomat and Jeanne Moreau as his wife who is enjoying a dalliance with Edmund Purdom. Harrison buys the Rolls as a belated anniversary gift for Moreau, setting the car off on a multi-decade journey of its own. Harrison isn't quite as diffident as he usually was at this stage in his career, and manages to craft a detached, yet completely sympathetic and surprisingly vulnerable, character. Moreau, perhaps because she's working in English, is halting at times, but manages to convey some nuance with an almost silent film technique of sideways glances and other furtive looks. It's fun to see Edmund Purdom finally out of the historical costume melodramas like The Egyptian that first brought him to fame, and he, in fact, is the most compelling character, if far from the most likable, in this brief opening episode.

We then find ourselves some years later in Italy, where gangster George C. Scott buys the slightly used vehicle to impress his moll, Shirley MacLaine. Art Carney is literally along for the ride as Scott's henchman and MacLaine's chauffeur, and Alain Delon enters the picture as an enterprising photographer who strikes up a fleeting romance with MacLaine when Scott leaves to kill a rival gangster. It's somewhat strange that this should be the longest of the three segments of The Yellow Rolls Royce, as it's obviously the furthest from Rattigan and Asquith's personal experience (or at least one would hope). There's an air of artificiality that hangs over this central episode even more than the two bookends (the entire film is not exactly a model of cinema verite, but most people are going to know that going in). Scott does OK as the gangster, and MacLaine is not exactly stretching in a floozy role that seemed to mark a lot of her late 1950s through late 1960s work. Carney, much like supporting actor Purdom in the first go-'round, is by far the best thing here, bringing his down to earth simplicity to an underwritten role. Delon is fine as the putative love interest for MacLaine, who shows her that she needn't settle for someone of Scott's bullying tendencies. It's high gloss fluff, with perfectly made up tears streaking MacLaine's face in the climactic showdown with Delon and then Scott.

What really sets the central episode apart is the absolutely stunning location photography in Italy. This is no mere second unit stuff--that's obviously, for example, MacLaine, Scott and Carney standing in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (though there are some brief rear projection shots, mostly of Carney driving the car). While the hidden sea cavern into which Delon lures MacLaine is obviously a soundstage, the bulk of this episode features one lovely location after another, well filmed by Asquith and DP Jack Hildyard. If only the story could support the incredible visuals.

Last up is perhaps the oddest coupling of the film, Ingrid Bergman as a feisty expatriate American finding herself in Yugoslavia in 1941 just as the Nazis are invading. She hooks up with freedom fighter Omar Sharif, who convinces her to drive him and his fellow underground operatives into the occupied territory. Of course love ensues, as patently bizarre as it seems between Bergman and Sharif. This is prime Rattigan, with a mismatched pair playing out their amorous intrigues against world shaking events. While this segment also features some lovely location shots, it's less of a travelogue than the MacLaine-Scott segment, choosing instead to focus largely on the personal story, despite the occasional strafing attack of Nazi warplanes.

The Yellow Rolls-Royce is an interesting, if never emotionally compelling, film. First of all the central conceit of focusing on an object as it passes from owner to owner (something utilized over the years in such disparate pieces as TV movie The Gun, to the Oscar winning The Red Violin, to Susan Vreeland's novel The Girl in Hyacinth Blue) is a fascinating diversionary technique that never completely distracts us from the fact that none of these stories is very involving. That said, The Yellow Rolls-Royce is mid-1960s star power, and international star power at that, at its finest, with the sheen of craftsmanship that M-G-M's imprimatur guaranteed a decade or two earlier. The film is more or less a series of tableaux, luscious and perfectly arranged, but emotionally distant and at times more than a bit silly.

The film benefits from an immensely enjoyable score by Riz Ortolani, highlighted by a regal theme for the Rolls itself and one of the greatest mid-1960s song to not receive an Oscar nomination, Forget Domani. Hildyard's cinematography is up to his usual exceptional standards, with sweeping shots of gorgeous vistas and a typical Hollywood aura surrounding the main stars. The Yellow Rolls-Royce really never goes anywhere, despite its title car traveling thousands of miles through three very different owners. Still and all, it's a glamorous journey. Like a lot of trips, it may be best to ignore the tourists and simply concentrate on the scenery.

Labels: comedy, drama, Ingrid Bergman, period, romance, WWII

Internet Movie Database 6.6/10 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=xx, viewers=68) 

Goodbye Again (1961) [NR] ****

Based on the best-selling novel Aimez-vous Brahms? (Do You Like Brahms?) by Françoise Sagan, and directed by Anatole Litvak, Goodbye Again is a poignant, bittersweet romantic drama about the tragedy of impossible relationships and unrequited love.

Paula Tessier (Ingrid Bergman) is a forty-something interior decorator living in Paris in 1961. For the past five years she’s been in a relationship with Roger Demarest (Yves Montand), a farm tractor importer / exporter. Paula knows Roger is an inveterate womanizer who cheats on her with an endless line of vapid, young women, all of whom he calls Maisie. However, because of her low self-esteem, insecurity or the naïve belief that she can change Roger, Paula clings to him and refuses to end the relationship. Roger claims he loves Paula, but he’s too self-centered and egotistical to give up his freedom as a womanizer. If Paula was honest with herself, she’d recognize that Roger was never going to change and their relationship was going nowhere.

One day Roger gives Paula the name of a wealthy American divorcee, Teresa Van der Besh (Jessie Royce Landis), who needs a decorator for her Paris apartment. Mrs. Van der Besh has a 25-year-old son Philip (Anthony Perkins), an attorney who is studying international law with a Paris law firm. Philip is immature, melancholy, directionless, spoiled, and has a penchant for play-acting at being physically injured or deformed. When he meets Paula, he becomes hopelessly infatuated with the attractive, cosmopolitan middle-aged woman, and insists that their fifteen-year age difference is no barrier to a romance.

Flattered by the novelty of having a young admirer, and plagued by Roger's serial infidelities, Paula does little to discourage Philip's persistent advances. He drives her around town in his little Triumph TR3 sports car, revealing his romantic philosophy in the process. They lunch in an outdoor restaurant and attend a Brahms concert.

When Roger goes on an extended international business trip, Paula allows herself to begin an affair with Philip, convinced she can change him like she changes the décor of an apartment, even though she’s tried, without success, to change Roger. At this point, although she may not realize it, Paula is involved with two men who act like irresponsible little boys and refuse to grow up

[Twenty years later, in 1983, psychologist Dan Kiley would define this as the Peter Pan Syndrome. He would also use the term Wendy Syndrome to describe women who act like mothers to their Peter Pan partners. So both Roger and Philip are Peter Pan, and Paula is Wendy.]

Eventually, Paula can no longer deny the reality that Philip is irresponsible, childish, indecisive, indolent, slovenly and unable to develop a passion for his work. All of this, plus her self-conscious guilt over having such a young lover, ultimately forces her to end their brief affair.

Litvak uses the recurrent theme of circles to convey the sense that the lives of these three people are going nowhere. There are scenes in which Philip drives aimlessly around the traffic circles of Paris in order to pass the time, and after Paula breaks up with Philip, she watches him as he descends a long, spiral staircase. Brahms' Symphony No. 3, whose melody has a cyclical theme, is used throughout the film, including a haunting blues version sung to Philip by a night club singer (Diahann Carroll), which reflects the hopelessness of Philip’s love for Paula, and of Paula’s love for Roger.

Bergman, Montand and Perkins are all excellent in their roles, and Perkins, especially, shows exceptional depth as the lost and vulnerable Philip. Paula is tolerant, forgiving and continually disappointed, Roger is self-indulgent and egotistical, and Philip is directionless and hopeless. Sadly, there is nothing positive or uplifting about this romantic drama, just the reality that these three people have learned nothing and will continue to enact the same patterns over and over.

Labels: drama, Ingrid Bergman, Paris, romance, Sixties

Internet Movie Database 7.0/10 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=NA, viewers=76)