Immortal Material
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What a delight it’s been to see so much celebration of the long and magnificent career of Angela Lansbury, who passed away on Tuesday. This coming Sunday, she would have turned ninety-seven. Most of the clips being passed around capture highlights from her performances in musicals by Jerry Herman, Stephen Sondheim, or Rodgers and Hammerstein. “Her theatrical gift was a mix of a farceur’s timing, immense warmth (which she could curdle on demand), and a willingness to go broad, tapping into old reservoirs of English music-hall brass,” writes Helen Shaw at Vulture.
Lansbury was seventeen when she was cast as a slyly flirtatious maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), and her on-screen debut scored her the first of three Oscar nominations. The second was for her turn as a tavern singer in Albert Lewin’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and the third for her portrayal of the sinister wife of a Joe McCarthy-like senator and the mother of a brainwashed war hero in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
“The prospect of being typecast by Hollywood as a maternal terror galvanized her to action,” writes Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. “As Lansbury explained when I interviewed her at her Brentwood home in 2014, ‘You can’t live down a part like that. I decided, “Forget it. I’m going to sing now. I’m going to make you happy by singing.”’” That she did by performing on Broadway and in Disney movies such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)—a favorite of the Atlantic’s David Sims—and Beauty and the Beast (1991). By that time, she was known to millions of television viewers around the world as Jessica Fletcher, the amateur sleuth who solved 264 cases over the course of twelve seasons of the surprise hit Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996).
While we await the results of the polls of critics and directors that Sight and Sound conducts just once every ten years so that we can gleefully argue all over again about which films are indeed the greatest of all time, Craig Keller has put together an intriguing collection of alternative ballots from an illustrious round of writers, editors, and filmmakers. Keller’s informal poll is one of several unrelated yet notable lists to have appeared in the past week.
Filmmaker has published its annual roundup of twenty-five new faces of independent film, and the Swedish magazine FLM has tallied ballots from seventy-two critics to come up with a list of the best Swedish films ever made—a list topped by Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921). For Newcity, filmmaker Jennifer Reeder (Knives and Skin) writes about her favorite genre films directed by women, and for IndieWire’s Seven Days of Scream Queens series, Alison Foreman has been drawing up one list after another.
A few quick festival updates before turning to this week’s highlights: The program for the Viennale’s sixtieth anniversary edition (October 20 through November 1) is set, and Sundance has announced that it will present new restorations of Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995) and Marc Levin’s SLAM (1998) in January. Highlights of this year’s Lumière Film Festival, opening tomorrow in Lyon and running through October 23, include retrospectives dedicated to Louis Malle, Sidney Lumet, Mai Zetterling, and André De Toth; conversations with Lee Chang-dong, James Gray, and Jerzy Skolimowski; and a hundredth anniversary screening of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu with live accompaniment from the Opera Orchestra of Lyon.
- Martin Scorsese’s brief remarks in defense of the art of cinema in a market-obsessed climate have gone viral, and Deadline hears that he’s set to executive produce a series that would draw from Herbert Asbury's 1927 book The Gangs of New York—and that he will direct the first two episodes. We’ll see. Now Cahiers du cinéma has published Scorsese’s tribute to the late Jean-Luc Godard, who “redefined cinema, not to mention the terms of his very own film, the one that you were watching, on a minute-by-minute basis.” Scorsese finds that in “film after film, Godard kept pushing further, dealing with not just film grammar but the physical facts of cinema . . . His choices were meant to appear spontaneous and random, but they always grew out of the spirit of the material.”
- While Scorsese focuses on early works such as Vivre sa vie (1962) and Contempt (1963), Nathan Lee, writing for Literary Hub, tackles the “mediatic form Godard invented and refined starting in the late ’80s,” most famously with Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998). Godard’s final feature, The Image Book (2018), is “seductive and confounding, concise and inscrutable, a surge of audio-visual materials that feels like nothing so much as the externalization of Godard’s consciousness,” writes Lee. “To embrace the interplay of formal mastery in The Image Book with its semi-legible tumult of ideas is to revel in a cinematic experience whose primary effect is to make you think about how you’re thinking, to force reflection on the ways you process sounds and images.”
- “For nearly a century,” writes Samanth Subramanian in the New Yorker, Bollywood has “worn the warm, self-satisfied gloss of being a passion that unifies a country of divisions.” But since Narendra Modi became prime minister of India in 2014, he and his Bharatiya Janata Party have been pressuring studios and streamers to get with its Hindu nationalist program. Some have responded by putting “audacious film and TV projects into cold storage,” writes Subramanian. “Other filmmakers embrace genres that match the BJP’s tastes: dubious historical epics that glorify bygone Hindu kings; action films about the Indian Army; political dramas and bio-pics, dutifully skewed . . . Through Bollywood, India tells itself stories about itself. Many of those stories are now starkly different, in lockstep with the right wing’s bigotry.”
- Writing for the New York Review of Books, Francine Prose notes that This Is Not a Film (2011), the first feature Jafar Panahi made after he was placed under house arrest, is also the first “in which he appears as a main character, or in any case as his persona: genial, kindly, easily amused, remarkably easygoing—an unlikely candidate for an enemy of the state.” Prose finds Taxi (2015) to be “the funniest, warmest, and most slyly devastating of Panahi’s films,” and while his latest, No Bears, is “sadder and tougher,” it’s also “more ambitious, daring, and formally inventive.” The opening scenes “make it clear that Panahi’s real-life experience has left its mark. He’s still bemused, determined, mostly cheerful, and calm, but the stresses and anxieties of having worked for so long in defiance of intense harassment and restrictions are visible on his face, in his mood, and in the ominous tone of the film.”
- Guy Maddin tells Ethan Vestby at the Film Stage that when he made his first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), “I just felt like I was good friends with Luis Buñuel just because I watched his movies so often—especially L’âge d’or—that I felt I knew him . . . I was a little bit crazy and a little bit delusional and overconfident that I could make this thing. And it pretty much turned out the way I thought it would.” This “sixty-four-minute fever dream exudes a confidence and singularity of vision rarely seen in debuts,” writes Thomas M. Puhr in Film International. A new 4K restoration opens today at IFC Center in New York, and in London, Maddin’s immersive exhibition Haunted Hotel: A Melodrama in Augmented Reality is on view for free through October 30. He tells the BFI’s Samuel Wigley that restorations of Archangel (1990) and Careful (1992) are currently in the works as well.
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