Every month, A Place for Film brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited.
Jesse Pasternack, contributor | Touch of Evil (1958) – with the sound off
In a recent appearance on the BBC 4 show Life Cinematic, acclaimed British writer/director Edgar Wright advised aspiring directors to “watch [their] favorite films with the sound off. You’ll be amazed at how much you can gather.” Eager to follow his advice, I watched Orson Welles’s 1958 classic Touch of Evil with the sound off. What I found was that so much of what makes it iconic — from its set pieces to its performances — is almost entirely accessible through the film’s use of visual storytelling.
Touch of Evil follows Mexican drug official Miguel “Mike” Vargas as he tries to figure out who killed an American named Rudy Linnekar by planting a bomb in his car. Since the car exploded on the American side of a town on the Mexico-America border named Los Robles, Vargas is forced to team up with the aging American lawman Hank Quinlan to solve the case. Vargas becomes convinced that Quinlan is corrupt. Meanwhile, drug lord Joe Grandi targets Vargas’s new American wife Susan as a way to get revenge on him.
This movie famously starts with a three-and-a-half minute tracking shot that follows Linnekar driving in his car after the bomb has been placed in it. Almost every important piece of information that this shot conveys — that there is a bomb in the car, the environment of Los Robles, as well as Vargas and Susan’s status as the male and female lead — is established visually and can be understood without the music or dialogue. This famous shot is as good at setting up that Touch of Evil is going to be a visual experience as it is in regards to its earlier accomplishments.
The performances in this movie are surprisingly effective without dialogue. The straightforwardness and righteousness that Heston brings to his performance as Vargas are as apparent in his facial expressions and gestures as they are in his dialogue. Welles plays Quinlan, and his portrayal of his character’s complex essence is conveyable without the sound of his haggard voice. One of the film’s most touching scenes — in which Quinlan tries to charm an old flame played by Marlene Dietrich — is understandable without a single sound.
There are things that you miss if you watch Touch of Evil with the sound off. Welles’s screenplay has a lot of excellent dialogue, and Henry Mancini composed an excellent score (particularly “Tanya’s Theme,” first heard on a player piano). But it is a testament to Welles’s immense skill as a filmmaker that he can make the audience understand the story and characters almost entirely through the language of visual storytelling. The entire experience of watching Touch of Evil this way proved that Wright was right: seeing movies you admire with the sound off is a great way to learn how they work, especially if, like me, you aspire to make films yourself.
Michaela Owens, Editor | Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
Although I have a weird relationship with the James Bond franchise (I explained it very briefly here), I’ve become super intrigued by the upcoming release of No Time to Die and, since its story is clearly connected to the events of the last entry, I thought I better give Spectre a watch. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I was that taken with the film, and for that I partly blame the Mission: Impossible films, a series I love dearly. Throughout Spectre, I couldn’t help comparing the action and the characters to the electrifying exploits of Tom Cruise and Co., which is why I put on Mission: Impossible – Fallout as soon as I was done with Spectre.
For me, director/writer Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise have crafted some of the best, most thrilling action films recently made, as exemplified by the last three M:I films. Despite seeing Fallout twice before, including once on the big screen, my latest viewing was still a stomach-dropping, heart-stopping experience. The M:I series always elicits such a visceral reaction from me. The action scenes have clarity, a dash of humor, and plenty of high stakes, while the characters are richly drawn and exciting to watch. I’m still bitter that we haven’t gotten the sequel to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that we all deserve, so it’s a special thrill to see Henry Cavill as a spy again. And can we talk about what a fantastic addition Rebecca Ferguson has been? Her quietly fierce Ilsa Faust had my heart the second she walked onto the screen in Rogue Nation, making her return here more than welcome.
Near the end of Fallout, a character growls to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, “Why won’t you just die?” I can only hope that we don’t have to entertain such a thought for a long, long time to come.
Jack Miller, contributor | Lonesome (1928)
The most exciting discovery of the month for me was finally catching up with an undersung classic from the last days of silent cinema: Pál Fejős’ exquisite, romantic “city symphony” of 1928, Lonesome. Fejős remains an interesting figure in film history: born in Hungary, he began his professional life as a doctor of medicine, and then made about a dozen narrative features in Hungary, Hollywood, France and Denmark before embarking on an anthropological career, during which time he made a number of ethnographic documentaries. Lonesome displays its director’s international background by synthesizing a number of techniques from the silent era with dazzling coherence: the film combines the shadowy Germanic expressionism of Murnau and Lang, the stirring Soviet montage of Eisenstein and Vertov, and the ghostly superimposed images of French Impressionism with glorious virtuosity.
This late masterpiece is also a highly poetic reflection of life in the big city, telling an almost fable-like tale of a man and a woman who meet and fall in love during an afternoon off of work at Coney Island, only to lose each other amongst the crowds during a storm. Fejős makes use of hand-stenciled color during the Coney Island sequences, reviving an archaic technique used by pioneers like Georges Méliès at the dawn of cinema. The film is a strange hybrid known as a “part-talkie,” meaning that it’s mostly silent with intertitles, but contains three scenes in which dialogue is heard, as well as a dense synchronized musical soundtrack. I had the good fortune of seeing the immaculate print of this film that the George Eastman House restored, and which Criterion brought out in 2012 on one of their most impressive home video releases to date.