“EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK”

By Raymond Benson

In the late 1950s, a film movement emerged in Britain known as “Free Cinema.” Some of the U.K.’s most celebrated filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s were among its practitioners—Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Lorenza Mazzetti, and Tony Richardson. The directors made low budget, short documentaries about the working class with an almost deliberate “non commercial” sensibility. It was radical and exciting, and it was a precursor to the British New Wave that dovetailed with the French New Wave that was so influential on filmmakers everywhere.

Many of the pictures of the British New Wave, released between 1959 and 1964, focused on characters described as “angry young men,” and the films themselves were referred to by critics and theorists as “kitchen sink dramas.” This was because the movies were presented in a harsh, realistic fashion and were indeed about the gritty, working class lives of “ordinary” (but actually, extraordinary) people. Some of the titles you’ll recognize—Look Back in Anger, Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, This Sporting Life, and others.

A Taste of Honey, released in 1961 and directed by Tony Richardson, was a product of the early Free Cinema Movement and the British New Wave. Based on a controversial but highly successful stage play by first-time dramatist (at age 19) Shelagh Delaney, Taste is remarkable for several reasons. For one, it is about an “angry young woman.” It is also shockingly frank for its time. The British Board of Censors approved the picture only for persons over the age of 16, for it deals with these then taboo subjects—female promiscuity, alcoholism, interracial sex, pregnancy out of wedlock, and homosexuality. There’s even a bit of nudity. (As a “kitchen sink drama,” it indeed has everything but!)

The story focuses on Jo (expertly played by newcomer Rita Tushingham), who lives with her tramp of a mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), in a Manchester ne’er-do-well working class environment. Helen seems to flit from man to man and doesn’t care all that much for her daughter, now 16. Jo, frustrated and dissatisfied with the status quo, has a relationship with a black sailor (Paul Danquah) who’s in town for a few days. Helen runs off with a new beau, Peter (Robert Stephens), and gets married, leaving Jo alone and pregnant. Jo then finds solace by befriending a gay man, Geoffrey (courageously portrayed by Murray Melvin), who moves in with her until Helen decides to leave her husband and return.

This was bold stuff in 1961. In fact, it was still against the law in England to be homosexual at the time. It is to Delaney’s credit to bring the Geoff character to life on the stage without saying he’s gay, but letting the audience know without a doubt that he is. The film version accomplishes the same thing (Melvin is the only cast member who was also in the original stage production), handling the subject matter with honesty, grace, and empathy.

Filmed entirely on location, the picture captures the grime and hardships of these people but also manages to be brilliantly entertaining. The acting is top-notch, and Richardson’s direction is flawless. The camerawork by Walter Lassally, often hand-held, provides a documentary feel to the proceedings that expound on the earlier stylistic traits of the Free Cinema Movement.

The Criterion Collection Blu-ray release features a new, restored 4K digital transfer with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, and it looks marvelous. Supplements include: new interviews with Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin (the latter’s is especially enlightening); an audio interview with Tony Richardson from 1962, accompanied by stills and clips; an excerpt from a 1960 television interview with Shelagh Delaney; a 1998 interview with DP Walter Lassally; a new piece with film scholar Kate Dorney about the film’s origins and the stage production’s director, Joan Littlewood; and Momma Don’t Allow, a 1956 Free Cinema documentary short co-directed by Richardson and Karel Reisz and shot by Lassally. The booklet contains an essay by film scholar Colin MacCabe.

While the storyline and subject matter might sound drab and dire, A Taste of Honey does have an under-flavor of sweetness that makes viewing the film a truly rewarding experience. Recommended.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

BY RAYMOND BENSON

“SAND IN YOUR...”

By Raymond Benson

One of the hallmarks of 1960s art house cinema was Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Japanese author/playwright Kōbō Abe from his own 1962 novel. The picture won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1964 and was nominated that same year for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. The following year, Teshigahara was nominated for Best Director (but lost to Robert Wise for The Sound of Music).

This is avant-garde cinema at its finest—or perhaps its most tedious, depending on your taste.

The story is straight-forward. Niki (played by Eiji Okada, the male lead from Hiroshima mon amour), a schoolteacher and amateur entomologist (he studies bugs), has ventured to a desert-like area of Japan (does one exist?) near the sea to find specific species of insects. He is stranded and needs a place to stay overnight. The “villagers” (we never see a village) point to a dilapidated shack at the bottom of a deep sand pit where a young woman lives. They throw a rope ladder over the side of the pit so that he can meet the woman (Kyōko Kishida). She seems nice and welcoming enough, and she’s attractive, too. The next morning, the rope ladder is gone. Niki is stuck in the sand pit with the nameless woman, despite several attempts to leave.

It is the woman’s “job” to shovel sand from the pit, which is raised by the villagers to be used in concrete for sale. It also prevents the shack from sinking into the sand and being forever buried. Niki is forced to be her helper, whether he likes it or not. Weeks and months go by—eventually he becomes the woman’s lover. Even when Niki does manage to escape, he is caught and brought back to the pit. The sand becomes his lot in life (pun intended).

All this takes place over 2-1/2 hours. Is it entertaining? Yes and no.

The symbolism and metaphors may have been revelatory in 1964, and I always tell my film history students  to judge a film within the context of when it was released, not by whether it “holds up” today. In that perspective, Woman in the Dunes is fascinating. It’s obviously meant to be a modern-day take on the myth of Sisyphus, a Greek king who was punished by the gods to continually roll a heavy stone up a hill, only to have it roll down again. Niki and the woman toil with the sand, day after day, and yet there’s always more sand. The couple represent, of course, man and woman, the pit represents life, and the villagers are the “taskmasters” or perhaps the gods. It’s not a spoiler to say that Niki, in the end, accepts his fate.

As to whether or not a young audience today will find much to like about the picture is a matter of aesthetics. The film is beautifully shot in glorious black and white (but in the old Academy ratio, i.e. not widescreen, unusual for 1964) by Hiroshi Segawa. The shots of sand, in particular, are striking—sand slipping, sand falling, sand on skin, microscopic sand, sand everywhere. The arty love scenes (there is some nudity, but this was Japan, not America, in 1964) are notable because the sand coats the sweaty bodies, causing one to wonder where all that sand is going. Ouch.

The Criterion Collection released the film a few years ago on DVD as part of a set of Teshigahara’s pictures. Now comes a stand-alone Blu-ray edition with a new high-definition digital restoration, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The images are suitably grainy (sorry, couldn’t resist). Supplements are ported over from the earlier release: a 2007 video essay on the film by film scholar James Quandt; four short films by the director—Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako (1965); Teshigahara and Abe, a 2007 documentary about the collaboration between the director and writer; and the trailer. The booklet contains an essay by film scholar Audie Bock and a 1978 interview with Teshigahara.

Woman in the Dunes is an important work of international cinema from the 60s and will be appreciated by serious art house cinephiles; the rest of the audience might feel like taking a shower after a viewing.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

“BEAUTY, LOVE, MOTHER... AND AMERICA”

By Raymond Benson

Filmmaker Terrence Malick has perhaps out-mystique’d the great Stanley Kubrick in terms of his public perception. Famously reclusive, Malick never allows photographs of himself to be used, and he never appears in “making of” documentaries about his films. A Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard graduate, he is obviously a brilliant man. Once he got into the film business, he worked as a script doctor until he made his first feature, Badlands (1973). It was critically acclaimed and established Malick as a hot addition to the “New Hollywood” movement. Next came Days of Heaven in 1978, also critically lauded.

And then... he disappeared. For twenty years.

In 1998, he appeared on the scene again, and Hollywood was more than ready to open checkbooks and fund his third feature film, The Thin Red Line.

It takes a lot of mystique for that scenario to happen.

Malick’s fourth picture, The New World, continued the director’s journey in exploring what has become signature stylistic and thematic traits—to make movies in which the plot is secondary to image, sound, music, and emotion. Malick is more interested in inventing a different kind of cinema—one that is certainly not mainstream. Terrence Malick uses film to create visual and sonic poetry, expound philosophy and existentialism, and touch upon a very basic and primal chord in his audience. He wants us to feel as well as think, and to fill us with awe and wonder. But make no mistake—in a Malick film, the story is not essential to the journey.

The director’s work of late is even more elliptical, impressionistic, and free form. Beginning with The Tree of Life, the Oscar-nominated treatise on the creation of the world and how that spark is inside each and every human being, Malick threw down the gauntlet to audiences, asking, “Are you with me or not?” The believers will follow him wherever he goes. Most everyone else will scratch their heads and... walk out of the theater (which happened a lot when I first saw The Tree of Life!) For the record, I’m a follower.

The New World has more in common with The Thin Red Line than Malick’s more recent works. There is a story in The New World, it’s just told very unconventionally, the same way he freely adapted The Thin Red Line into a lyrical piece about war and nature. The New World is also about nature, and in fact, “Mother” is probably the central character.

The year is 1607, and English adventurers have just landed in Virginia. Among them is Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell). The “Naturals,” as Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) calls the Native Americans, at first cautiously welcomes them. Smith meets the free-spirited Pocahontas (astonishingly well-portrayed by 14-year-old Q’orianka Kilcher) and they fall in love. Then things go sour between the two peoples. A little later, another Englander, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), enters Pocahontas’ life, and she accompanies him back to meet the King and Queen of the United Kingdom. That’s the story in a nutshell.

What Malick does with this is extraordinary. With the aid of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (the first of a collaboration that would continue for the remainder of Malick’s work), the director presents a collage of spectacularly beautiful images that emphasizes how fresh and virginal the land of this “new world” is. In addition, the depiction of the Powhatan people is arguably the most realistic and accurate portrayal of Native Americans in a Hollywood film, compounding the notion that they knew how to live with nature, whereas the newcomers fight “Mother” the entire way. The film is a meditation, like most of Malick’s work, on man’s relationship with the earth.

The Criterion Collection has pulled out all the stops with this new, lavish box set of three disks containing three different cuts of the film. The main attraction is a new 4K digital restoration of the “extended cut” (172 minutes), supervised by Lubezki and Malick. Also included are high-definition transfers of the original “first cut” (150 minutes, released for the first time on home video), which was the version that premiered in L.A. and New York in December 2005 and ran for a week in order to be considered for Academy Awards, and the “theatrical cut” (135 minutes), which was the version most audiences saw during the film’s wide release in early 2006.

Which version is better? Difficult to say. The extended cut is probably Malick’s preferred assembly, and if you’re a fan of the director’s work, then this is definitely the one to watch. The theatrical cut is much leaner, thereby making the storyline stronger. But the first cut, while only fifteen minutes longer than the theatrical one, fills out the gaps of the shorter version quite well with Malick’s elegiac, stylistic choices—it’s a nice compromise between the extended and theatrical editions.

A 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack accompanies all three cuts, and you can hear every cricket and bird chirp as if they’re in your living room.

Supplements include new interviews with Farrell and Kilcher, producer Sarah Green, production designer Jack Fisk, and costume designer Jacqueline West. There’s an informative piece on the differences between the three versions as told by co-editor Mark Yoshikawa, as well as new interviews with editors Yoshikawa, Hank Corwin, and Saar Klein. Making “The New World” is an approximately 90-minute documentary directed and edited by Austin Jack Lynch (David’s son), detailing the production in Virginia and England. The theatrical and teaser trailers are also included. The thick booklet contains an essay by film scholar Tom Gunning, a 2006 interview with Lubezki from American Cinematographer, and a selection of research materials that inspired the production.

The Criterion Collection always produces quality material—their release of The New World stands as one of the company’s most impressive packages.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON