#221: La Passion De Joan de Arc (1928)
All Movie review:
One of the undisputed masterpieces of cinema, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc glows with the fervor of spiritual and aesthetic single-mindedness that is so intense it's almost blinding. With a script culled from the actual proceedings that led to Joan of Arc's burning at the stake, the movie seems an artifact from a lost time. Dreyer imagines the French saint's ordeal as an exalted passage to grace. Insisting that his actors not wear makeup, he captures images of indelible immediacy; Joan's sad, soulful eyes and the craggy faces of her leering inquisitors stay with you. The realism is as much emotional as it is physical. Recognizing that the truth of the story lay less in historical accuracy than in psychological nakedness, Dreyer paints an almost abstract march to martyrdom. The spare, blinding-white set seems stylized, as is Dreyer's high-pitched visual strategy, which relies heavily on close-ups. Frequently, you're left with little but a harsh cascade of them, with no wider shots to ground the action in a given space — the drama literally transpires across the human face. Holding it all together is Renée Falconetti, in one of the great performances in film history. Her mournful eyes wide with rapture, Falconetti seems under a spell, as is the viewer by her. The performance was too great, so intense that Falconetti never returned in front of the camera again. The movie and her performance have since inspired imitations, most notably in the work of Danish director Lars von Trier, whose melodramas of female suffering seem almost tawdry by comparison. As influential as it is singular, The Passion of Joan of Arc remains many decades later an overwhelming experience and an undiminished tour de force. —
Elbert Ventura
VS
#88: Duck Soup (1933)
All Movie review:
Along with A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup is often regarded as the definitive Marx Brothers movie, the picture in which every shot, every line, and every gag worked. Modern audiences are often surprised to learn that it was a notorious flop that killed the Brothers' contract at Paramount Pictures in the mid-1930s. Audiences harried by the Great Depression seemed unable to connect with the Marx Brothers in their Paramount movies, at least not in the way that Broadway theatergoers and Paramount executives who'd seen them in The Cocoanuts or Animal Crackers did. Part of the problem may have been their piercing topicality and ethnic humor, whether Groucho's Jewish conniver or Chico's fake Italian. And no movie was more piercing in its topicality in 1933 than Duck Soup, a satire of nationalism, diplomacy, and international intrigue that seemed all too real as Hitler's rise to power in Germany dominated world news. When the Marxes then moved to MGM, the company's chief of production, Irving Thalberg, convinced them to tone down their image and give themselves sympathetic personae, and audiences then devoured their work. But Duck Soup, a failure in its time, remains the brothers' definitive film in their classic original style. —
Bruce Eder