"Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

Used book in good condition, due to its age it could contain normal signs of use

Chinatown (1974)

Tell me the story again, please.

Very well, there was this detective in Los Angeles, Jake Gittes, as honest as he could be after years with the LAPD. But he had had trouble in Chinatown and so retired into independent operation. Then he was set up, and you have to realize that he was sought out in just the way that Scottie was in Vertigo. Someone picked him to receive the story that Hollis Mulwray was having an affair. Trace it back and you'll see it was all a cruel design. Jake Gittes did his best, but he was as much damage as he was good, because he fell in love on the job with a woman who was such trouble it smelled like gangrene. And so, finally, the bad man, Noah Cross, was left in charge, and they led Jake away to some hiding hole and they whispered in his ear that it was all “Chinatown.” I really don't see why you love the story so much.

It was a story that Robert Towne, an Angeleno, dreamed up for his pal Jack Nicholson to play. And another friend, Robert Evans, would produce it at Paramount. But Evans thought that Roman Polanski should direct, and Polanski battled with Towne over the script-it had to be clearer and tougher. Towne had had a gentler ending, with less death. But Polanski knew it was a story that had to end terribly-so no one forgot. The director won, and the picture worked with its very bleak ending.

What's more, the picture worked in every way you could think of. Faye Dunaway was the woman, and she was lovely but flawed and incapable of being trusted. John Huston was Noah Cross, and the more you see the film, the better you know that that casting is crucial, because Cross is so attractive, so winning, so loathsome. And the rest of the cast was a treat: Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, Roy Jenson, Burt Young, Belinda Palmer, and the others. John Alonso shot it. Richard Sylbert was the production designer. Sam O'Steen edited the film. Jerry Goldsmith delivered a great score. The craft work, the details, are things to dream on. We are in 1937. And don't forget Polanski's own little bit of being himself.

So it's a perfect thriller, and a beautiful film noir in color. Moreover, if you care to look into how William Mulholland once brought the water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles, it is a piece of local history. But with this extra aspect-that accommodation of the history of southern California itself, and the fable of how sometimes power and corruption make life and the future possible- you also get another reflection on filmmaking in that world: It is that you can do very good work, work so full of affection and detail and invention that you can live with it over the years, but in the end the system will fuck you over and someone will whisper in your ear that you are not to mind, because “It's Chinatown.”

And that's how it worked out. There had been a trilogy in the reasonably honest mind of Robert Towne. They let him make the first part near enough to his own dream so that he would always know it could have been. And then they crushed him on the second (The Two Jakes)-blew it straight to hell-so no one had the heart ever to ask about the third.

Duck Soup (1933)

Duck Soup is all credentials: Leo McCarey directed; Herman J. Mankiewicz produced it; Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote it; Ansel Adams photographed it, mostly at magic hour; it was Marcel Proust's favorite Marx Brothers film; the Duke of Windsor watched it constantly in his years of exile. Are you believing this? Where does that get you? It was the poorest performer of all their Paramount films-there was a time when the University of Chicago economics department was stocked with people who'd done their Ph.D. on “Duck Soup and the Collapsing Cash Nexus” and similar titles. In other words, how could you expect a dazed, defeated, demoralized, and de-walleted population to go to see a film that mocked government when the folks were waiting for a New Deal?

In case you can't place the film, this is the one where Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) will give the nation of Freedonia $20 million if Rufus T. Firefly is appointed its leader (and if she gets the fire in the fly). Aha, you may say, such cynicism and manipulation the affairs of modest third-world nations was far more likely the cause of public despair. Enter Trentino (played by that very respectable actor Louis Calhern), the ambassador from Sylvania (before it was in the TV business), and soon we are on the brink of world war. But why remind the public of that?

Like many Marx Brothers films, Duck Soup has the suspicious air of a few set pieces strung together with Christmas lights and Hollywood was learning with talk and plots and so forth that the manufacture of whole films (as opposed to scene anthologies) was a dirty job, even if you were being paid for it. There has never been a better answer to the question of what holds this film together than glue. The essential ethos of the Marx Brothers (this is Irving Thalberg talking as he prepared to ship them off to Culver City) is to make their fragmentation seem natural. So Thalberg foresaw Marxian nights with a film program continually interrupted by little scenes from Marxist groups. This was a principle applied fully on the BBC years later with the arrival of Monty Python. The show might be over, but still somehow the other programs-the news, Gardeners' Question Time, England v. Pakistan-could not but take on a Pythonesque flourish. This could have revolutionized TV, but the Python boys (who had been to university) asked for ghostly residuals.

Anyway, Duck Soup has the extended routine where Chico (as Chicolini) and Harpo (as Pinky) harrass Edgar Kennedy. And it also has Groucho and the mirror, which is enough to persuade you all to get every bit of polished glass out of the house.

If you find you like this sort of thing, you'll be glad to know that The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers once existed. There was a moment-we call it sound-when the Marx Brothers made the trip from vaudeville to Hollywood, and it's like Neil Armstrong stepping down onto the moon and landing on a banana peel.

Seven Samurai (1954)

In sixteenth-century Japan, an idyllic village, in a valley below steep mountains, discovers that bandits will attack as soon as the barley crop is ripe. They have suffered before-should they yield again, or fight back? A small committee is appointed to find samurai who will defend the village. This is a long film, drawn out by a master of suspense and control (over 200 minutes in its full version). We meet the seven samurai. We see them living in the village, doing their best to train the farmers and work out a strategy. And then there is battle, begun in sunlight and ending in pouring rain. Why seven?

The film is over fifty years old now, and it is impossible for anyone to see it today without thinking of the traditions it inspired: not just The Magnificent Seven and the Sergio Leone pictures; not just the immense field of martial-arts films based on the Western fascination with samurai armor and Japanese discipline; not just Melville's Le Samourai, or Frankenheimer's Ronin, but the laser-beam sword battles of the Star Wars series. (George Lucas was a huge admirer of Akira Kurosawa-and the eventual coproducer on Kagemusha.)

Yet I urge you to do your best to regard this film with the eyes of 1954, and to see the astonishing vigor from Kurosawa that goes into every frame and meeting. I suspect that by the time he made Seven Samurai, he was well aware of and much in love with tropes from the American Western. But then consider the things that are uniquely his: the restless camera movements, the urge like that of a mettlesome horse, to be galloping and moving; the intense, burning close-ups and the way in which the cadet samurai can look at the weary master and say, “You are simply great!,” and we feel the justice of it, but understand the sad smile on the master's face. There are the lovers on the forest floor, spread-eagled and surrounded by wildflowers. There is the terrible look on the face of the kidnapped wife as she realizes her husband is about to rescue her. There is the sudden use of slow motion (so that you wonder if you really saw it). And the sounds of running water, of bird cries, of the wind and of Toshiro Mifune's snorts of derision for everyone- himself included. These images and sounds are like moments in Shakespeare.

You can say that the film was a canny attempt to win Western audiences-and it undoubtedly achieved that. But over fifty years later, you can marvel at the rich black-and- white, the natural sounds, the drumbeats, the hooves on the ground and the music. It is a landmark in action films, but in its treatment of heroism, too. These samurai work and some of them die, for mere food. You wonder if they may seize the village, or be turned on by the villagers, for there is not too much trust between those parties. But the integrity of the contract prevails. There has always been a vein of cinema in which people do the right thing. And Seven Samurai comes as that notion was being treated with cynicism. But there is no denying or forgetting the faces of these men. They are the seven samurai, and they have found themselves. They do not need to say so, because we understand it.

The Sign of the Cross (1932)

“Bib-lit” is mercifully light on the ground these days, but in a world afflicted by bank closures and food lines, thoughts of sin and the sinning class could be stirred. No one had more history in this than Cecil B. DeMille, and as it turned out The Sign of the Cross is one of the more intriguing social commentaries of 1932, even if one is not quite sure whether it is a Marx Brothers film or not. No, it can't be-it moves too slowly.

There was a play, by Wilson Barrett, which seems to owe a few centavos t...