The Hip Opinion

I am inspired by the success of The Artist to write about an even better silent film–1927′s It.

The title refers not to a sci-fi creature but to that dazzling human quality which entices members of the opposite sex, and herein Clara Bow enacts (outstandingly) a comely character with It.  She’s a frisky salesgirl who falls for her handsome boss, and vice versa.  Because of a misunderstanding, the boss thinks the salesgirl has been non-virginal enough to have given birth to a child and so he spurns her.  The Bow character is taken aback by the boss’s failure to give her the benefit of the doubt . . .

Directed by Clarence Badger and an uncredited Josef von Sternberg (why did it need two directors?), it’s a well-made, charming, amusing rom-com and a perfect vehicle for Bow with her wholesome face and killer eyes.  It’s very much a girl-in-love role.

Available on DVD.

Clara Bow (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

The plot of Alias Betty (2001) is a bit too good for most screenwriters to have concocted, but not too good for the novelist Ruth Rendell, on whose novel–The Tree of Hands–it is based.  A French film by Claude Miller, it concerns a mentally unbalanced woman who kidnaps a little boy in order to make a gift of him to her grieving, now childless grown daughter.  What we have here is a person whose suffering drives her to become comfortable with an immoral situation.   Several story strands are juggled perfectly; the novel is adroitly adapted.  Nothing wrong with the acting either.

Cover of Alias Betty

A mostly silent film made in black and white, The Artist (2011) is a novelty piece which ought to have had a better plot.  Its value lies in its details and its cast (Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are as self-assured and winning as it is possible to be).  There is another asset too:  The Artist is moving.

No, I don’t believe it’s a masterpiece, but I’m glad I saw it.

Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius.

Carlos (Manny Perez) is an aspiring comic-book artist living among many Latinos and some whites in New York City, a locus of crime whereby Carlos is made to face much responsibility.  That is to say, his father Eddie (Tomas Milian) gets shot and paralyzed by a robber and Carlos must care for him (temporarily) and run Eddie’s old bodega.  Exasperation besets the young Dominican as he dwells with a man–Eddie–who fails to support Carlos’s cartoonist ambitions and was often unfaithful to the dead wife he now says he loved.  What’s more, Carlos is having problems with his girlfriend and scarcely treats her properly.  Disorder grows; folly never stops.

Washington Heights (2003), by Alfredo de Villa, is small but potent.  And humane.  Villa’s Washington Heights, a section of Manhattan, is not hellish, just rough and disheartening.  Even so, the film demonstrates a failure of nerve by crafting certain troubling realities and then scurrying away from them before the credits roll.  Why, after all, does Carlos’s best friend, the white fellow played by Danny Hoch, become a thief and what happens to the guy who perpetrates violence against him?  Villa gives the whole thing short shrift.  This is very much a young man’s movie–young man-made, I mean.  There is little intellectual and artistic maturity behind it.

But it is worthy.  Perez is passable, Milian a little more than that.  I wonder about Milian’s nuances but not his passion.  Hoch is entirely true and Bobby Cannavale is forceful, even unforgettable, as a half-likable punk with money.  The DV visuals are fine, and so are Villa’s scenes of bodega business and of tension between Carlos and Maggie the Girlfriend, etc.  He’s a talented fimmaker, familiar territory in WH notwithstanding.

Washington Heights (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

Since I am displeased with the review I wrote for the 2008 French film, The Class (or Entre les Murs), I wish to supplant it with the following:

During the Aughts, Laurence Cantet adapted a French novel titled Entre les Murs for the screen.  Called in the United States The Class, it’s a gem of a picture, set in a Paris inner-city school, which has no faith whatsoever in multiculturalism and very little in urban public education.  The novel was written by the schoolteacher, Francois Begaudeau, who plays the lead role–that of schoolteacher Francois Marin–in this film.  Though dedicated, Marin is not nearly as effectual as a pedagogue should be:  the school is a multiracial semi-horror.  There is constant disrespect and constant egalitarian sensibility.  Absurdity involving meetings and student representatives paves the way for Marin’s losing his temper and telling two misbehaving girls, the student reps, that they behave like “skanks.” He never apologizes.

The movie invites us to wonder just what kind of country France will be in the future.  The liberalism underlying multiculturalism seems unsustainable.  Yes, you can get a student expelled from Marin’s school, but can you get a satisfactory education re-admitted?

Cover of The Class (Entre Les Murs)