Recommendations: Great Unknown Movies
Copyright 1987 by Steve Upstill
Speaking of unknown great movies, here is a short list of unknown/forgotten films that populate my all-time-favorite list.
Face in the Crowd (1957) -- The writer-director team of the earlier Marlon Brando classic "On The Waterfront" collaborated on this melodrama of a bum from the South who gets on the radio and becomes what is now known as a media celebrity in the early days of television. Andy Griffith, of all people, turns in one of the most galvanizing performances you'll ever see. Turn off the lights, watch it all at once and be stunned.
The Tenant (1976) -- Roman Polanski's existential horror film about a man with a shaky lease on his own soul. Polish immigrant in Paris (Polanski) takes the apartment of a woman who hasn't quite committed suicide. The clearest example I know of Polanski's greatness as a filmmaker, this film can be seen as three or four independent great films: as straightforward mystical horror; as creepy, blackest comedy; as a depiction of existential detachment along the lines of Polanski's earlier "Repulsion"; as a brutal examination of human vampirism. Again, you have to pay full attention to get the full impact, but under the right conditions this one will have you raving for days.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) -- Robert Altman's first film after the celebrity afforded him by M*A*S*H wasn't entirely ignored, but neither does it have nearly the regard it deserves. Possibly the first "revisionist Western," it's an exquisite mood piece exactly like a Leonard Cohen song -- and a number of those appear on the soundtrack. Warren Beatty plays a gunfighter attempting to retire to a dingy mining town running a whorehouse. Or rather, getting Julie Christie to run it for him. This is a classic for illustrating the magic of cinema, as all the scenes and small bits add up to a deeply moving, melancholy finale.
Breaker Morant (1981) -- again, hardly an unknown (it enjoyed a sweep of the Australian Academy Awards), this is a courtroom drama and a moral examination of stunning perfection. "Breaker" Morant is an Australian officer in the Boer wars in South Africa brought up on war-crimes charges by British officials in search of a scapegoat. It is first a riveting courtroom drama as the attorneys for Morant struggle to overcome the system. But it is also about moral ambiguity, personal responsibility and colonial exploitation (of the Australians as well as the South Africans by the British), recalling implicitly such historic tragedies as the Holocaust and the war in Vietnam. But the show's the thing -- it isn't every day that you have to tear your eyes away from a film and forcibly remind yourself that what you're seeing is really just a movie.
Sullivan's Travels (1943) Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1941) -- the seven or eight movies made by Preston Sturges between 1939 and 1944 (other highlights are "Hail the Conquering Hero," "Palm Beach Story," the original "Unfaithfully Yours" and "The Lady Eve") are as unrecognized a set of national movie treasures as I could name. No one before or since has combined snappy wordplay, low slapstick, loony characterizations, hurtling plots, arch social commentary (especially regarding the then-sacred small-town America) and sure-handed direction in such tight packages. "Miracle at Morgan's Creek" is both the wildest of his comedies and the most cutting -- the plot concerns a small-town girl who marries and gets pregnant by one of the five soldiers ("Oh I don't know -- it was something like...Ratskiwatsky") she goes out with one night before they ship out to Europe. "Sullivan's Travels" is Sturges' masterpiece, at once a self-defense for doing comedy in a grim world, a satire of socially-conscious filmmaking, and a moving picture of the suffering comedy relieves. If that sounds like an odd mix, then you get an idea of the miracle that Sturges pulls off here. The ease and sure-footedness with which he switches from broad comedy to tragedy, again and again, will make you gasp.
Steve Upstill
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