Discovering 'Miss Julie'

Until a short time ago, my familiarity with the 1951 Swedish film Miss Julie—much acclaimed in its day and a top prizewinner at the Cannes Film Festival—was largely limited to the knowledge that Alfred Hitchcock, after seeing it, signed up its star, Anita Björk, for the female lead in I Confess (1953). American Puritanism scotched those plans, however. When Ms. Björk arrived in the United States with her lover and out-of-wedlock child, Hitchcock was forced by the powers-that-be at Warner Bros. to go looking elsewhere. Anne Baxter played the role instead.

Given that Miss Julie and Ms. Björk made such a strong impression on my main man Hitch, I'm frankly surprised at myself for not seeking it out earlier. I'm glad I finally did. (A friend's enthusiastic recommendation was the nudge I needed.) I found the movie so remarkable, in fact, that it inspired me to write an essay about one of its several memorable flashback sequences. Click here if you're interested in reading it. 

'Ordet' and Me

With some trepidation, I decided recently to compose what turned out to be a fairly lengthy essay about the 1956 movie Ordet by Carl Theodor Dreyer. The films of the "Great Dane" have been known to confound even the most sophisticated of critics—hence the trepidation. My humble effort is mainly an attempt to sort out some thoughts I had on spirituality and religion that were sparked both by the film and by a Facebook discussion in which I participated. To read my musings, click here.

An Action Scene Revisited

An ongoing conversation with a friend about the subtle but considerable merits of Hollywood master Howard Hawks (1896–1977) led me to revisit a paper I wrote for Professor Stefan Sharff's "Analysis of Film Language" course at Columbia way back in the '70s. Professor Sharff required us to take a single scene from a movie we had viewed in class and break it down shot by shot. I chose Scene 3 from Hawks's great epic Western Red River (1948). Analyzing it according to Professor Sharff's instructions gave me an enormous appreciation for the intelligence of Hawks's technique. It's an action scene which, in its visual coherence and expressiveness, puts to shame the chaotic slam-bang effects of today's action movies, in particular those tiresome, CGI-heavy megaproductions that clutter the multiplexes every summer (and, increasingly, throughout the year).

My friend was curious about what I had written, but I had long since lost the paper. My memory of it was still pretty sharp, however, so after rewatching the scene in question on DVD, I produced a new version (in greatly condensed form, of course).

Red River tells the story of a monumental cattle drive during the early days of Texas ranching. Its first few scenes take place years before the main action, showing how the future cattle baron Thomas Dunson establishes his empire and how he comes to mentor a younger man, Matthew Garth. In Scene 3, Dunson and his sidekick, Nadine Groot, having departed from a California-bound wagon train to start their own herd in Texas, engage with a band of Comanche warriors. Click here for what I wrote about it.