Every month, Establishing Shot 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 | All That Heaven Allows (1955)
All That Heaven Allows is my favorite Douglas Sirk movie. I have loved it ever since I saw it for the first time at IU Cinema for a class called Hollywood II. I also enjoy the other films he has directed which I have seen, especially his underrated film noir Lured (1947), which starred Lucille Ball as a chorus girl trying to catch a serial killer in foggy London. But a recent viewing of All That Heaven Allows at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles (on a beautiful 35mm print) reminded me of its glorious cinematography and brilliant performances, and confirmed that it will always have a prime place in Sirk’s filmography for me.
This movie is about Cary (Jane Wyman), an affluent widow who lives in New England. She falls passionately in love with Ron (Rock Hudson), a working-class tree surgeon who is younger than her. They begin a romantic relationship, but pressure from her snobbish friends and adult children threaten to tear them apart. Cary will ultimately have to decide what she really cares about: the life she has built, or the new one she can have with Ron.
All That Heaven Allows is visually splendid. Sirk and his cinematographer Russell Metty make great use of a varied color palette to beautifully depict various seasons. It’s both a great autumnal movie that’ll make you want to rake some leaves as well as a wonderful winter movie that’ll make you want to play in the snow. In addition, Sirk and Metty create a great motif of Cary reflected in windows to make her look trapped. That visual pattern finds its greatest expression in a shot of a television set that is one of the best of the 1950s.
The entire cast of this film is fantastic. Wyman gives an emotional and moving performance as Cary. Hudson is charismatic as Ron, and the way he shows his character’s increasing vulnerability is heartbreaking. The supporting cast is also solid, especially Jacqueline deWit as Cary’s gossipy “friend” Mona. I look forward to seeing more of the films that Sirk directed. But I have a feeling All That Heaven Allows will always be my favorite thing he did in cinema. Its stunning visuals and excellent acting definitely make me want to revisit it for a long time to come.
Chris Forrester, contributor | Oedipus Rex (1967)
My big achievement this month was finishing out Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (who I last wrote about here in 2022) feature filmography. The major blind spot there was his much-lauded masterpiece The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), but for me the finest of the bunch — and maybe even of his entire canon — was Oedipus Rex (1967), his time-jumping adaptation of the Greek tragedy by Sophocles. Pasolini called Oedipus Rex his most personal film, and it unfolds in three chapters (or maybe more accurately a prologue, main narrative, and epilogue) that each loosely correspond to a turn in the eponymous figure’s life. The first — set in 1920s Italy and chronicling the baby Oedipus’s abandonment by his father — and final — set in then-contemporary Italy and shot with fisheye lenses whose haloed, distorted focus visualizes a sense of alienation from the present — foreground the film’s deeply personal bent. Pasolini felt an immense disconnect with Italy’s cultural present and related to Oedipus’s tortured relationship with his father. His distaste for Italian culture was specific to its postwar economic period (known commonly as il boom) and the twin sicknesses of capitalism and Americanization it birthed (both justly skewered in his The Hawks and the Sparrows), which together left him longing for the Italy of his childhood. Thus the tragedies of this Oedipus Rex are temporal as much as narrative; when the baby Oedipus is abandoned by his soldier father into the past, he has had the world to which he belonged stolen from him, and when he returns to the present after learning of his misdeeds and blinding himself, his alienation is made absolute by the loss of both the life he had made his own and the Italy of his childhood.
And even if much of the film’s thematic heft comes from its recontextualizing of the central tragedy by Pasolini, the world he has conjured (fueled, in part, by his ongoing search for parts of the world untainted by modern capitalism) is a strange, hypnotic meshing of influences that proves a captivating, even pleasurable setting for the drama’s meat. Though the action is still transposed to ancient Greece, Pasolini’s Greece is filmed in Morocco and peopled by Italians and North Africans clad in straw hats and medieval knights’ armor. The effect is both visually enrapturing, but also in keeping with the sense of temporal displacement that stems from the film’s bookending chapters — a certain strangeness courses all the way through it. Of Pasolini’s 13 feature films, six were adaptations, and two of those were taken from myth. The other, Medea (1969), is a film of considerable beauty, equal to Oedipus Rex in its formal grace and willingness to forego dialogue for lengthy passages, but ever so slightly inferior in pure emotional power. Of all the wonderful things the filmmaker ever put to the screen, Oedipus Rex‘s closing passages just might be the finest.
Michaela Owens, Editor | The Thin Blue Line (1988)
“A softcore movie, Dr. Death, a chocolate milkshake, a nosey blonde, and The Carol Burnett Show. Solving this mystery is going to be murder.” That’s the poster tagline that finally persuaded me to watch Errol Morris’s groundbreaking documentary The Thin Blue Line, a film I’d always heard praised but never really sought out until I went on a long documentary kick this month. Using fantastically dramatic reenactments — which were rumored to be why the movie wasn’t nominated for an Oscar since they weren’t yet a popular feature of the documentary form — interviews that range from the infuriating to the comical, and a superb Philip Glass score, we’re presented with the story of Randall Adams, a man who was wrongly convicted of killing a police officer during a routine stop in 1970s Texas. Despite many of the clues pointing to David Harris, a then-16-year-old who committed multiple other crimes and randomly met Adams that same night, the law was quick to go after Adams, resulting in a riveting, frustrating, and decidedly cinematic illustration of how horrific the justice system can be and why films exposing this kind of corruption have only grown in importance since 1988.
If you want to do a fun little double feature, I also highly recommend following The Thin Blue Line with its Documentary Now! parody episode, “The Eye Doesn’t Lie.” Condensing Morris’s film into a tight 22 minutes, the episode is pitch-perfect in its visuals and really nails details like the police’s weirdly chummy relationship with Harris, his motivation for putting the blame on Adams, and the confusion over the perpetrator’s car make and model (which Documentary Now! embellishes with a NSFW vanity license plate that honestly made me laugh out loud). This brief video even points out some of the ways the show directly pays homage to its source material.
Note: for some reason, I couldn’t find a trailer for this film, but this fan-made one is pretty good.