30 x 30/Opinion

From Fritz Lang to Mindy Kaling via Little Hours

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford star in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), in which a straight-arrow police detective goes rogue to take on the mob that’s running his city.
Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford star in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), in which a straight-arrow police detective goes rogue to take on the mob that’s running his city.

30x30: Coronavirus Week 11

Shut in as we are for the foreseeable future, there will likely never be a better time to hit some of the outstanding streaming possibilities at our fingertips, and fortunately enough, there has never been more available from which to choose.

1 The Big Heat (1953): Fritz Lang's indelible crime thriller makes no bones about where it's going, beginning with the opening shot of .38 lying on a desk. Working as a sort of Death Wish prototype, the film explores the fury of retribution when a Detective, Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), loses his wife (Jocelyn Brando) in an act of gangland violence intended for him. Turning in his badge to the corrupt police commissioner (Howard Wendell) who sanctions the brutality of gang boss Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) for rich payoffs, Bannion goes on a crazed mission to avenge his wife and take down the syndicate, including sadistic henchman Vince Stone (an inspired Lee Marvin, not yet gray), in the process.

Lang's noir-esque film isn't steeped in shadow on the screen, but it very much portrays a man whose soul has turned to darkness, at least for a spell and within limits. As brooding as it may be, the film goes out of its way for its hero to remain on the right side of the line -- conveniently, Bannion is spared having to do the actual killing by a moll (Gloria Grahame) who takes a shine to him -- rather than cross it.

In this way, Bannion is perhaps an interesting contrast between Hollywood's post-war mandate, and the '70s era of bleakness all around: Charles Bronson's vigilante crosses the line almost gleefully and never looks back. Watch how the masterful Lang carefully sets up the emotional journey of Bannion early on, by shooting the scenes of him gratefully coming home to his family almost like a different film altogether, with Ford breaking his sardonic mein with his young daughter (telling her a story about the "kittens who lost their mittens"), and being tender with his wife, as if it were some kind of family comedy -- only to use those softhearted scenes as a way of getting a better angle to shove the emotional knife in your back when things go horribly wrong. Shot in greytone black and white by Charles Lang (no relation), the atmosphere is thick with the smoke of a thousand cigarettes, and the powerful stink of dirty cops on the take.

Genre: Crime Thriller

Score: 7.4

Streaming Source: Criterion Channel

Streaming Worthiness: 8

2 The Little Hours (2017): If you've had the chance to watch Horse Girl (and if you haven't, get on it!), you've seen a bit of what the combination of writer/director Jeff Baena and star Allison Brie can pull off. This film, the second of their three collaborations, is ostensibly set during the 14th cntury at a convent in Italy, but by both language, attitude, and position, might as well be set in a Chi Omega house during Rush Week.

Starring Brie, as Sister Alessandra, one of the unhappy nuns under the meandering tutelage of Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly), a well-meaning sort, but lax on the house rules. This enables fellow nuns Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza), and Ginevra (Kate Micucci), to gossip and scold one another at will. When Tommasso brings back a straggling young man, Massetto (Dave Franco), after meeting him in the woods -- on the lamb from his previous master, Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman), with whose wife he was routinely sleeping with -- he concocts a scheme whereby the boy has to pretend to be deaf and mute, so as not to give anything away.

This works right up until the nuns take their own, separate interest in him, conniving to steal him away for themselves for slightly different reasons. The comedic conceit of the film -- that everyone is just as bored, profane, and diffident ("Eating blood?" questions a visiting Bishop -- played with perfect incredulity by Fred Armisen -- "Do you think I've ever written down 'eating blood' before? Where am I?") -- consistently generates giggles, and the cast, who apparently improvised a good deal of their dialogue, are spot on. More a kind of Medieval sex farce than serious religious allegory, it's loosely based on one of the stories from The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio's bawdy 14th-century framestory collection, and you get the sense the witty author would approve.

Genre: Medieval Comedy/Convent/Sex Farce

Score: 7.1

Streaming Source: Netflix

Streaming Worthiness: 7.5

3 Pickpocket (1959): Robert Bresson builds a sympathetic case for Michel (Martin LaSalle) from the first moment we see him: Outside a race track in Paris, disheveled and furtive, wearing an ill-fitting suit coat that's much too big on him. As he tells us via the journal he keeps of his crimes, this is the beginning of his acting out his criminal impulses, as a novice, however, he quickly gets detained by the police.

Released, he continues to learn and ply his trade via a pair of other, more seasoned thieves, who helpfully teach him the deft techniques that avoid such obvious detection. Furthering his case, Michel lives in what his friend Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) accurately describes as a "hovel," a tiny, grimy flat with a door so worn and battered, it doesn't even have a knob anymore.

After Michel's elderly mother dies, still believing her son to be virtuous, he gets more audacious in his thievery, despite the worry of his friend, and the radiant Jeanne (Marika Green), a young woman who helped care for his mother. Michel is a classic sort of philosophical nihilist ("I believed in God -- for three minutes," he mutters after his mother's funeral), who claims bitterly to care about nothing and no one, but his darting eyes, always searching for something -- be it a fine watch, an accessible billfold, or something, we suspect, of a higher nature -- give him away.

Through Bresson's lens, we, too, share Michel's unwavering gaze at these objects, the camera zeroing in on them, following their every movement, and presenting their desirability (the director also includes close-up shots of the thieves' impressive slights of hand, enabling them to steal as an almost balletic team of timing and precision). We are to understand the money and baubles mean nothing to him materially (even as he gets successful, he doesn't leave his horrible flat), but as expressions of something he can't quite make his way to see. That is, until the very end, when our anti-hero finally discovers a sense of what it is was he was after.

Genre: Crime Drama/Philosophical Treatise/Love Story

Score: 7.9

Streaming Source: Criterion Channel

Streaming Worthiness: 9.5

4 American Factory (2019): A film purportedly about cultural differences when Fuyao, a large Chinese automotive glass corporation, invests a bundle of money in opening a shuttered former GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, actually offers a more striking difference than just the depiction of two countries attempting to work together. In the minds of the Chinese workers who have been brought to the U.S. for a two-year stint to help establish the working culture, Americans are "lazy" and "not dedicated" enough to their work to be truly productive. Desperate for the work, in an area long depressed since the GM plant closed, the Americans suffer what they consider substandard working conditions (and lower pay) just to be able to keep the work they do have.

It is when a team of Americans travel to China, however, that we begin to learn what is considered the Chinese ways of production: Workers have one or two days off a month, and many of them only see their families a handful of times a year. What has been accepted practice in China, something the Chinese workers actually take pride in, is anathema to Americans, especially ones who had the opportunity to work through a union.

Naturally, when talk of unionizing comes to the plant, the Chinese are virulently opposed to it, and fight back every way they can think of -- up to and including a constant stream of anti-union propaganda, and, naturally, firing those employees most enthusiastic about the prospect. Steven Bognar and Julie Reichert claim that their film doesn't paint a clear villain, and while that's true, in terms of the two countries, the clear oppressor here is management, whose corporate ethos mandates that an employee's entire life be sacrificed for the good of the company's bottom line. The fact that the corporate culture has brainwashed its workers successfully in one country to think that anything less than total sacrifice is sheer laziness, should not translate here.

Genre: Documentary/Business/Cultural Divide

Score: 8.0

Streaming Source: Netflix

Streaming Worthiness: 8

5 Late Night (2019): Mindy Kaling seems to have two primary impulses with much of her material: On the one hand, a push toward refreshingly honest and comedic conversations about race, gender, and class; on the other, a love of standard pop-cultural conceits that competes with these previous convictions. It's a very delicate balance, and when she pulls it off, it can have the simultaneous effect of making a political point while also being entertainingly light on its feet; when it fails, however, it quickly becomes grating.

This film she wrote and stars in, features a nearly washed-up late night talk show host, Katherine Newbury (played brilliantly by Emma Thompson), in desperate need of new ideas and fresh material, who hires the completely unqualified Molly (Kaling) to add diversity to her writers' room. There's some good character work here between Molly and Katherine, and more than a handful of solid gags, but there are also an equal number of vaguely grating bits with Molly interacting with the male staff (she dates one who turns out to be a cad; while the one that hated her the most ... you get the idea) and a propensity to use a sort of emotional deus ex machina to have her characters get their way. Lessons are learned, hugs are employed, and everyone ends up better for the experience. It's still eminently watchable for those good bits, but it feels more of a lost opportunity than anything else.

Genre: Comedy/Female Empowerment/Buddy Movie

Score: 5.9

Streaming Source: Amazon Prime

Streaming Worthiness: 6

MovieStyle on 06/05/2020

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