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.
Be sure to join us for December’s round-up, which will be presented LIVE as a virtual event on December 14. Register now!
Laura Ivins, contributor | National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)
Christmas Vacation is endlessly quotable, and you’ll see its lines embroidered and screenprinted and painted on a variety of craft fair and Etsy items. However, what really elevates Christmas Vacation from funny holiday movie to timeless comedy classic is the physical comedy of Chevy Chase as Clark W. Griswold.
As Clark reacts to the escalating obstacles to his perfect family Christmas, a kaleidoscope of expressions flit across his face. Chevy Chase softens his eyes to project serenity when watching his family’s home movies; widens his eyes with eyebrows raised to show the surprised joy of the houselights finally coming on; and widens his eyes with eyebrows lowered when Clark’s mind cracks. Chase has an expression for every moment, just cartoonish enough to be funny without crossing the line into terribly cheesy.
Chase is also a master of pratfalls and bumbling gestures. One of my favorite moments is when Clark get stuck in the attic and tries to yell at his family leaving the driveway, and he fiddles with the gable vent to swing it open. The back and forth of not quite getting it right, the believable clumsiness, add an extra level of elegance to the comedy.
Christmas Vacation has a great script, a wonderfully talented cast, and perfectly executed staging. The comedic skill of Chevy Chase amplifies the other elements, making the film not just one of the best Christmas movies of all time, but one of the best comedies of all time.
Michaela Owens, Editor | Remains to Be Seen (1953)
For many years, Remains to Be Seen was a film I was dying to see. Van Johnson, June Allyson, and Angela Lansbury in a comedic murder mystery? Yes, please! Sadly, the movie’s title is more apt than I’d like it to be: it isn’t on DVD and hasn’t been shown on TCM in years, but I finally tracked it down (let’s just say it’s around the internet) and was downright delighted by what I saw.
This film definitely won’t be for everyone: the plot becomes convoluted; there are a few shots that feel nonsensical; Angela Lansbury is wasted; Louis Calhern’s character appears to be Van’s rival for June until he just disappears; and the mystery is easily the weakest aspect of the script. However, if you’re a fan of either June or Van, you have to see this movie. They are electric together, with June playing a sexy, hep kitten singer with fabulous clothes (when did MGM ever let her play sexy?) and Van as an apartment manager who aspires to be a drummer and falls head over heels for June as soon as he sees her.
There are so many moments between them that made me grin like an idiot… Van serenading her with “Too Marvelous for Words,” which she later croons in his ear. Their brief, exuberant dance to “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” His sweet proposal. The smitten way he looks at her from the beginning of the film to the very end. For this fangirl, it is just complete bliss.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a trailer, but I found one clip!
Jesse Pasternack, contributor | DekaDonen 10: Dekalog: Ten (1988) / Charade (1963)
(Once a month, Jesse will watch a double feature he calls the DekaDonen, which consists of an episode of Krzystztof Kieslowski’s miniseries Dekalog and a film by Stanley Donen. Ten episodes and ten films. This is the last one.)
Dekalog and the ten films of Stanley Donen which I have selected contain commentary on many of the great themes. A small smattering of them include but are not limited to love, death, violence, and forgiveness. At their core, these works of art tackle a central human question: how should one act in the world? It’s fitting that the final installment of the DekaDonen — Dekalog: Ten and Charade — provides two different answers to this question. What is surprising, however, is how it does so in terms of the common element it shares: stamps.
Dekalog: Ten is about a pair of brothers, straightlaced family man Jerzy (Jerzy Stuhr) and exuberant punk rock singer Artur (Zbigniew Zamachowski). They reunite after their father dies and learn that he amassed a collection of stamps that is worth millions. But their quest to profit off of the collection, and prevent others from taking it, will lead the brothers down an unexpected path.
Kieslowski is justly acclaimed as a great filmmaker. But he doesn’t get enough credit for his understated talent for black comedy. He displayed his facility for that sub-genre in Dekalog: Three, with its After Hours-esque story of ex-lovers running around Warsaw on Christmas Eve, but he tops himself with this final episode. Kieslowski invests his story with increasingly absurd elements that include rival stamp collectors, a bat-like guard dog named Lokis, and even a kidney donation. But he also shines with smaller comedic moments, such as when Artur listens to punk rock on a Walkman at his estranged father’s funeral or when Jerzy’s wife refuses to rehash an old argument even though she’s still mad about it. Kieslowski makes great use of this black humor while dealing with some of his favorite themes, namely connection and deception. This episode even has several callbacks to earlier episodes of Dekalog because Artur and Jerzy’s father was a character in Dekalog: Eight, and the protagonist of Dekalog: Six makes a brief appearance in a post office near the end. It’s a potent mixture of humor and nostalgia which makes for an entertaining finale.
Charade, often acclaimed as “the best Hitchcock film which Hitchcock never made,” is about a young woman named Regina “Reggie” Lampert (Audrey Hepburn). She has decided to divorce her new husband after she returns from a vacation in Switzerland. Back in Paris, she learns that her husband is dead and stole some gold which he and his fellow OSS agents hid during World War II. She tries to find the gold — and later the very expensive stamps her husband used the gold to buy — with the help of the mysterious Peter Joshua (Cary Grant), which may not be his real name.
This film is one of the best Donen ever made. It contains a lot of what made him great as a director. He was highly skilled at working with actors, so the performances in Charade are excellent. In particular, Hepburn and Grant have the type of exceptional chemistry which makes you wish they’d made more films together. Donen had a wonderful eye for creating beautiful imagery, and he gets the best out of his beautiful Parisian locations with the help of cinematographer Charles Lang. Donen was excellent at creating joyful works of cinema (including Singin’ in the Rain) and this film is no exception, but he also makes the wise decision to give this film an air of violent menace which grounds the effervescent romance in a dangerous mystery. It’s a reminder of Donen’s versatility that he made this film as highly entertaining as it is emotionally complex.
When I first made this pairing, I thought it was one of the easiest I had made in programming the DekaDonen. I remembered that Dekalog: Ten and Charade were both about two people who are trying to profit off of expensive stamps, and I knew they both had specific tones which made them a lot of fun to watch. But when I rewatched this episode and that film, I discovered an even more striking similarity: they both have a similar plot point which Kieslowski and Donen treat in different ways, and in doing so, are reflective of how both men told stories.
In Dekalog: Ten, a stamp collector cons Jerzy’s young son out of four very rare and expensive stamps by getting him to trade them for more, albeit worthless, stamps. This is a minor cruelty in the murky moral universe of Dekalog, but it still stings, especially because it feels so realistic. That small scene is a reminder that, even in a relatively light episode of Dekalog, Kieslowski is willing to depict people acting solely to gratify their own desires.
Late in Charade, Lampert discovers that an older stamp collector has tricked her friend’s young son Jean-Louis (Thomas Chelimsky) into committing the same error as Jerzy’s son: trading a few expensive stamps in exchange for a larger number of inexpensive stamps (it’s worth mentioning that this is similar to an error which Ray Barone convinces his daughter Ally to commit on the “Hackidu” episode of Everybody Loves Raymond). But the elderly stamp collector in Charade is not a charlatan like his counterpart in Dekalog: Ten — he only tricked Jean-Louis as a way to hold onto the stamps until he could return them to a more careful owner, namely Lampert. When he hands them back to her, he wistfully remarks that “for a few minutes they were mine. That is enough.”
In this scene, Donen depicts a much more optimistic view of life than Kieslowski did in Dekalog: Ten. He argues that people are capable of helping each other at the expense of themselves because it is the right thing to do. You may think that it is not realistic that someone would give up such expensive stamps, but one of the glories of American cinema from the 20th century is that it created counter-worlds of kindness to which people can aspire. That brief scene in Charade is a reminder that showing the best of people was something that came as easily to Donen as swimming is to a fish.
It would be remiss if I didn’t mention, in this last installment of the DekaDonen, how Donen and Kieslowski ended Charade and Dekalog. I don’t want to spoil anything, but needless to say, Charade has the type of romantic and clever ending that was typical of so many of the classic Hollywood films from the 20th century. Dekalog: Ten ends on the type of note of connection between two people which Kieslowski loved, as the brothers laugh over a coincidence as one of Artur’s punk rock songs plays. Kryzstof Kieslowski and Stanley Donen were very talented in many different ways, but both of them certainly knew how to end a story.