“Here, let me give you one of my cards. If you should ever want to call me, call me at this number, don’t call me at that one. That’s the old one. If you happen to lose the card, don’t worry, I have plenty more.”

If you have ever met Elwood P. Dowd, then he’s already told you this. He offers everyone he meets his card and invites them to dinner with him and his friend, Harvey. Doctors, ex-cons, gatekeepers, he doesn’t mind anyone’s company. You will never find a more congenital, gracious person. His sister and niece, however, are intent on having him institutionalized.

You see, Elwood’s friend is a six-foot three (and a half) tall white rabbit. Veta and Myrtle only want Elwood to get better and stop going on about Harvey as if he exists. There’s only one problem: Harvey does exist.

In the audio forward recorded before his death, Jimmy Stewart states that Harvey had always been one of his favorite films. That may seem odd at first, given his extensive career; but there’s an indubitable charm about the film. He goes on to say that the nature of the subject matter required two things to work: good writing, and better acting.

Harvey first ran as a play in the United States. Both Stewart and Hull acted their respective parts for the run. This aided in their timing and deliveries when the play was later adapted to film. Although many characters are affected by Harvey, the film relies on Stewart and Hull’s performances as its center of gravity. Hull for her hilarious, somewhat absent-minded reactions (a la Arsenic and Old Lace), and Stewart for his Zen-like tranquility no matter what the circumstances are.

The circumstances are fairly straightforward: in trying to have Elwood placed in an asylum, Veta is mistaken as the “insane” one. Mayhem ensues as doctors, judges, and family members try to get Elwood in his supposed rightful place. All of this, of course, isn’t a coincidence. Harvey has been hard at work. After all, he’s a pooka:

poo·ka [poo-kuh] -noun (in Celtic mythology) a fairy spirit in animal form, always very large. The pooka appears here and there, now and then, to this one and that one; a benign but mischievous creature; very fond of rumpots, crackpots…

The character of Harvey epitomizes the deceptiveness of the film itself. At first glance, it has all the trappings of a light screwball comedy. Yet there’s always that faint vein of sadness lying just below the surface. While being questioned by a psychiatrist, Elwood says: “Well, I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.” The film never goes into what his life was like before he met Harvey. Did he feel a need to escape something or someone of his past? Elwood never says. By all outward appearances, he has simply withdrawn from the world around him into one within him. Whatever he has found in this seclusion has turned him wiser.

The source of his sadness? Perhaps it’s Veta and Myrtle. Their desire to “help” Elwood is less altruistic than they would admit to others: so long as Elwood is known as a crackpot in their social circles, Myrtle will be shunned by any available men. As it turns out, Harvey solves this problem by setting her up with a handler named Wilson from the psychiatric ward–the very one that had seized her mother and threw her in the hydraulic tank. This roundabout way of settings wrongs to right seems to follow Elwood and Harvey wherever they go:

Harvey and I sit in the bars… have a drink or two… play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they’re saying, “We don’t know your name, mister, but you’re a very nice fella.” Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We’ve entered as strangers – soon we have friends. And they come over… and they sit with us… and they drink with us… and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they’ve done and the big wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey… and he’s bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that’s envy, my dear. There’s a little bit of envy in the best of us.

It’s this acceptance of something bigger than him that has removed Elwood from the vicious circle that keeps us preoccupied with nothing at all until our time here is up.

Veta and Myrtle finally get what they want. Elwood graciously returns to the asylum to take a serum that will make him normal, better. The taxi driver that has driven the family there parts with a telling anecdote on the pitfalls of medicated normalcy:

I’ve been driving this route for 15 years. I’ve brought ‘em out here to get that stuff, and I’ve drove ‘em home after they had it. It changes them… On the way out here, they sit back and enjoy the ride. They talk to me; sometimes we stop and watch the sunsets, and look at the birds flyin’. Sometimes we stop and watch the birds when there ain’t no birds. And look at the sunsets when its raining. We have a swell time. And I always get a big tip. But afterwards, oh oh… They crab, crab, crab. They yell at me. Watch the lights. Watch the brakes, Watch the intersections. They scream at me to hurry. They got no faith in me, or my buggy. Yet, it’s the same cab, the same driver. and we’re going back over the very same road. It’s no fun. And no tips… After this he’ll be a perfectly normal human being. And you know what stinkers they are!

In the end, the two women must decide whether they want Elwood or their idea of who Elwood should be. Truthfully, it’s a decision we all have to make at some point.

They were known as “God’s mistakes.” They were an embarrassment to their families and hidden away. The only job they could have is one where people could gawk and laugh at them. They were “Freaks.”

It’s rare to find a movie that becomes more offensive and controversial over the years. Tod Browning’s Freaks shocked audiences across the globe in its honest depiction of the deformed. The United Kingdom even went so far as to ban the film for thirty years.

The ongoing question seventy years later is whether Freaks intended to exploit circus performers or enlighten viewers of their humanity. Regardless, it’s an experiment in filmmaking that no production company would touch with a ten foot pole today.

The film opens with a barker drawing a crowd towards a pen to see the monstrosity that is Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova). The contents of the pen are hidden from the camera. But she wasn’t always this way, the barker continues. Cleo was once one of the most beautiful women in the business. She was known as the peacock of the air.

A woman screams. The film fades to the past where Cleo is seen swinging through the air on her trapeze.

A dwarf named Hans (Harry Earles) stares at her through an opening in the curtain. He’s about three feet tall and has child-like features. Hans’s fiancé, Frieda (Daisy Earles, Harry’s sister), catches him peeping at Cleo and accuses him of wanting Cleo more than her. He denies it, but as we soon see, Frieda is a perceptive woman.

Cleo, knowing full well that Hans is infatuated with her, plays him like a violin. She has Hans buy her expensive fineries from Berlin while she sleeps with the carnival’s strongman, Hercules (Henry Victor). When Cleo and Hercules find out that Hans can afford all these gifts because he has inherited a large sum of money, Cleo plots to marry the dwarf and poison him.

Frieda pleads with Hans to break off his new engagement not out of jealousy, but knowing fully well that Cleo is simply using him. Hans brushes her off and goes through with the wedding. In a famous scene, Cleo and Hans sit at the head of a large table surrounded by the sideshow performers: “pinheads,” the man without legs, the “living torso,” and others. Cleo forces more and more alcohol on Hans. When he isn’t looking, she slips poison into a wine bottle. In the final ceremony, the performers pass around a giant goblet, each one drinking from it and chanting “We accept her – one of us – gooble, gobble – we accept her – one of us…”

Cleo, drunk and disgusted that the performers would call her, one of the most beautiful women in the circus, one of their own, berates them and calls them “dirty, slimy freaks” and chases them out.

When Hans’s friends find out that Cleo and Hercules are poisoning him, it is the final straw for them. As the barker in the beginning said: “Their code is a law unto themselves. Offend one, and you offend them all.”

The scenes that follow are still unsettling to this day. In lost footage, we find out that Hercules performs in a new circus, now only able to sing soprano after the loss of some essential equipment. As for Cleo, well…

Freaks is perhaps one of the earliest films to cast deformed, non-actors in lead rolls. On one hand, the quality of the dialog clearly suffered; but there was no way these individuals could be mimicked. The physical handicaps that they lived through ended up also making them irreplaceable to MGM.

Also, being pre-Code, the film made little effort to be subtle. In one scene, Cleo invites Hercules into her wagon and offers to cook him some eggs. She turns around and asks him, “How do you like them?” while jutting her breasts out. “Not bad,” Hercules responds.

The moral of the story is fairly blunt: the “freaks” showed humanity and kindness while the beautiful, “normal” performers were rotten to the core. There was a balance with the characters of Venus (Leila Hyams) and Phroso (Wallace Ford), two decent folk looking for love. Ford and Hyams, both attractive and talented actors, were no doubt included to draw average moviegoers in with familiar faces.

There were quite a few subplots involving performers other than Hans and Frieda. Most of them were included for their shock or humor value. There is the living torso (Prince Randian): a man without arms or legs that could move on his by sliding on his belly. In the movie, he makes a remarkable performance of rolling his own cigarette, striking a match, and lighting it with only his mouth. There are the Siamese Twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton): one was married to a stuttering man who can’t stand his sister-in-law. In a surprising scene, we see him kissing his wife only for us to see her sister receiving sexual gratification from it. A half-woman/half-man (Josephine Joseph) walks past a pair of men. The male half glares at one of the men. After a few steps, the female half turns around seductively and gives him a come-hither look. The other performer looks at his coworker and comments, “I think she likes you, but he don’t.”

Despite being the film’s main draw, the circus performers were certainly not treated fairly. Many of the other actors in the studio were uncomfortable with eating with the them, so the head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, removed the performers to another part of the studio to eat. Perhaps to make a point, one of the scriptwriters under MGM, a little-known writer by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald, opted to dine with the deformed rather than Hollywood’s elite.

A good deal of the controversy surrounding Freaks lies in how it was treated after it was withdrawn from theaters due to protests. Hoping to recoup production costs, MGM sold redistribution rights to Dwain Esper, an “entrepreneur” that specialized in exploitation shows. He renamed the film with suggestive titles such as Forbidden Love and Nature’s Mistakes. He added nudist camp footage after the film to increase viewership. Olga Roderick, the bearded lady, later publicly denounced the film and her involvement of it due to this.

A somewhat ironic state of affairs: when being distributed, a number of states banned the film. To this day, no one has bothered to repeal the law. It is still technically illegal to view Freaks in some American states.

Hopefully, that doesn’t stop anyone.

The Hollywood Production Code was once the bane of American filmmakers. Aside from the immediate annoyance of censoring controversial scenes, the Code also had the long-term effect of stifling new trends in film. Most think that the code only dealt with nudity or cursing. Its reach was much more invasive than that. Criminals could never get away with a heist, religion was never criticized, childbirth could not be depicted, and any reference to intimacy were cut out. For almost forty years, no one could even hope to adapt a classic play such Oedipus Rex in Hollywood.

How, then, did Stanley Kubrick ever manage to make a film about a middle-aged professor who only marries a woman in order to seduce her fourteen year old daughter?

Although the American release of Blowup is often seen as the final nail in the coffin of the Code, there is a respectable line of films that helped with the mortuary process: Hitchcock’s Psycho, Nichol’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and most certainly, Kubrick’s Lolita.

The novel Lolita, written by Russian emigrant Vladimir Nabokov, is often cited as one of the finest literary works of the twentieth century–despite its subject matter. This aside is important. As the American public grumbled about its immoral pretext, the novel still sold 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication.

It was this amalgamation of disgust and fascination that gave Kubrick hope that a film adaptation could succeed in America. In retrospect, Kubrick stated that if he know how much grief the Production Code would cause him, he would have given up.

The film opens as an elegantly-dressed man arrives at a mansion and sneaks in through an unlocked front door. The interior is the aftermath of a Bacchanal party. Expensive statues are draped with bawdy items. Endless bottles and crystal glasses litter the floor, clattering as the man accidentally trips over them. He calls for Clare Quilty. Someone plays a harpsichord upstairs. The man hurries upstairs and finds the disheveled master of the house.

The intruder is named Humbert. He has come to kill Quilty. Much to Humbert’s surprise, Quilty doesn’t take him seriously in the least.

He watches in astonishment as Quilty stumbles about, acting like an idiot. Humbert hands his victim his death sentence, which Quilty reads out loud in a mock western drawl. According to Humbert, Quilty is being put to death for defiling and corrupting an innocent.

Tiring of the games, Humbert shoots Quilty, who runs up the stairs and cowers behind a Gainsborough painting. Humbert unloads the pistol; bullets pierce through the painting. Quilty screams.

The narration flashes back four years and opens as Humbert Humbert arrives at a typical suburban New England home. He is seeking boarding and is, at first, unimpressed by the faux sophistication that the middle-class hostess, Charlotte Haze, tries to peddle. Her offer includes a congenital atmosphere, a garden, and her home-baked cherry pies. He’s about about to dismiss Haze when she insists that he at least sees her “flower garden.” Humbert walks out on the patio only to see Charlotte’s daughter, Lolita, sunbathing on the lawn.

He’s sold.

“What was the decisive factor?” Charlotte asks Humbert. “My garden?” Humbert pauses for a moment and replies, “I think it was your cherry pies.”

The censors weren’t known for their perceptiveness.

Humbert and Charlotte wed and it seems to be a happy marriage, provided you are as blind as Mrs. Haze. There is a good deal of humor in the exchanges between the debonair European and an aging American woman more concerned for her own romance than her daughter. There is a telling scene when Humbert, Charlotte, and Lolita are at a drive-in movie and a scary scene is playing. Both Lolita and Charlotte grab Humbert’s hands. Humbert pulls his hand away from Charlotte and places it on Lolita’s.

Circumstances eventually allow for Humbert and Lolita to take a road trip. Pressures from both within and without begin to threaten the delicate illusion that the European has built for himself. One constant, albeit unknown, threat to Humbert is the distinguished Clare Quinty–a writer “friend” of Charlotte and, perhaps, Lolita. He hounds the couple over the miles, appearing in different disguises and landing sly verbal jabs at Humbert. One night, Lolita disappears after being hospitalized with the flu. We know the culprit, but Humbert is left in the dark until two years later, when a typewritten note arrives from Lolita.

When he finds what happens, Humbert becomes intent on killing Quilty.

Much like Nabokov, Kubrick faced the difficult challenge of getting people to see past a morally impious plot and to realize a story that is both tragic and comedic in its overall effect. The characters of Humbert and Lolita are played more innocently and manipulatively than one would think. The moral line becomes more of a haze.

Is Lolita smut? No. Is it a morality tale? In a manner of speaking, yes. It doesn’t attempt to stand aside and ignorantly preach. Its morality is in forcing the viewer to identify with an individual one would dismiss out of hand as a monster, only to then lead both the character and the reader by hand to an unavoidable truth. Who took this girl’s innocence? Humbert would like to think it was Quilty. However, with the conclusion of the story, we now know what the look was in Humbert’s eyes when he stared at an incoherent, sniveling Quilty: recognition.

In 1999, The Blair Witch Project became one of the most successful independent films ever made. A major factor in its success was how its directors blurred the line between dramatization and documentary, leaving many moviegoers unsure whether or not it was real. What’s even less known is that this concept was done nearly 80 years prior with the Swedish film Häxan.

Imagine it’s 1922 in a packed theater, when the flickering projector illuminates the screen. The audience then witnesses two hours of footage that includes Satanic rituals, nudity, fellatio, implied masturbation, desecration of religious icons, violence against the dead and unborn, and human torture.

Suddenly The Blair Witch Project seems a bit tame in comparison.

Of course, the similarity between the two films isn’t coincidence. The creators of The Blair Witch Project even named their production company Häxan Films. They’re simply the latest in a long line of filmmakers that director Benjamin Christensen has influenced. Although it certainly had its controversial parts (not surprisingly, it was either banned or heavily edited even in Europe), Christensen didn’t aim to be sensationalistic. In fact, Häxan is a fairly honest, serious examination of the social and religious attitudes towards perceived witchcraft through history. His thesis was one that wasn’t widely considered until the latter half of the century: that many of the victims of the European witch hunts were individuals suffering from psychological disorders or were simply in poor social standing. Witch hunts were the religious manifestation of what we would now call eugenics.

The film’s content is divided into three categories: dramatization of the Middle Ages, stills from the Malleus Maleficarum, and moving models. The Malleus Maleficarum, perhaps one of the most accurate documents on the mechanics of witch trials, provided the material that formed the dramatization filmed by Christensen. In those sections, different scenarios were presented in which an individual would be accused of witchcraft and inevitably be put to death.

Near the beginning of the film, two doctors standing over a corpse that they were about to perform an autopsy on pray for forgiveness on the basis that they only want to discover the causes of diseases. They are found out by a young woman and we see her running through the village alerting others of the black magic being performed. Their fates are not difficult to predict.

In a longer sequence that spans most of the movie, an old, decrepit woman named Maria (Maren Pederson) goes door to door and begs for food. In what proves to be poor timing, she comes upon the wife of a man who had just died. The wife (Karen Winther) suspects that the swiftness of his death was due to witchcraft. They bring in a diviner who blesses a hot cast of molten lead over the husband’s corpse and then pours the lead into a bucket of water. He takes out the contorted lump and “reads” that the husband was, indeed, killed by witchcraft. The wife immediately suspects Maria and takes her case to the local monastery where the monks seize the old lady and proceed to torture her.

There is also an aside concerning witch-mania within the ranks of the clergy. Christensen points out that even monks and nuns were susceptible to hysteria. One monk is praying over the Bible when the Devil pops up and flicks his tongue menacingly at the man. Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne have clearly met their match. In another, a young nun is clubbed by the Devil and then proceeds to induce the entire nunnery into a bout of dancing hysteria that resembles a Satanic Sister Act.

Those looking for influences of Häxan in 20th century films needn’t look far. The opening scene has men bringing in bundles of sticks with various body parts hidden in them for potions. This wold be another nod from the Blair Witch. There is a scene in Häxan where the witches make their famous flight on broomsticks through the night air to join the Sabbat. Those familiar with Disney’s Fantasia may recognize the similarities of this with the Night on Bald Mountain sequence. Shaffer’s The Wicker Man follows Häxan in spirit by remaining faithful to the culturally-distinct rituals and traditions that frequently fell under the accusation of witchcraft. The ending credits also thank Lord Summerisle for the use of his isle as a means to once again blur that line.

Another source of influence is the cinematography by Johan Ankerstjerne. Desiring to create the perfect atmosphere for the live sequences, Häxan was filmed almost entirely at night–a task that was unheard of in its time due to the insensitivity to light with early silver nitrate stock. Häxan also displays some of the earliest uses of stop-animation and reverse-filming. In one scene, Maria wakes up in a castle completely covered in gold coins. She collects as many as she can, only to watch them slip out of her fingers, slide across the floor, and exit out the door. Then, a gremlin breaks through the door and steps through, much to her horror. Fans of Jan Svankmajer and Jean Cocteau will find this film a worthwhile study.

Towards the end, the film veers back into seriousness when Christensen makes a parallel between the treatment of so-called witches and the psychologically disturbed of his day. Remember, this was the era of mental asylums complete with water hoses, ice-pick lobotomies, and other barbarisms. Mental instability, much like witchcraft, was seen as being due to moral weakness. Hospitals were often no different than prisons. In pointing out the fine line between religious fervor and lunacy, Christensen wanted to inform a public of its past crimes in hopes of stopping present ones.

For many years, Häxan was only available in limited release or heavily edited for content. One American cut titled Witchcraft Through the Ages was fairly popular for its jazz ensemble and beat-artist William S. Burroughs as the narrator. Criterion eventually answered quite a few dreams by getting the original cut, restoring the print, adding the intended tinting, recording a new orchestral score based upon the original, including the Burroughs cut, and inserting the final intertitles written by Christensen. As is frequently the case, Criterion goes above and beyond other companies to do great classics the justice that they deserve. For those that want to see the film that influenced countless filmmakers across multiple genres for nearly a century, Häxan is worth every penny.

The Brewster sisters (Josephine Hull, Jean Adair) are the sweetest, kindest, most generous women you would ever meet. They put together toy drives for orphaned children, take care of a mentally handicapped relative, and offer a homemade dinner and elderberry wine to any aging gentleman who happens to pass by.

Unfortunately, they lace the wine with poison and have a mental handicap bury the bodies in the basement. But it’s not what you think, not really.

Arsenic and Old Lace is perhaps the single best example of dark comedy to ever be put to celluloid. It manages that delicate balance between morbidity and hilarity without effort. Its madcap pace gets faster and faster without ever stopping to take a breath. By the end, you can’t help but be caught in the whirlwind of absurdity, rooting for characters you never thought you could.

Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) is the oddball member of his family in that he’s normal–mostly. He’s a dramatic critic who also holds the public persona of being against marriage. Thus, his elopement to Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane) needs to be kept hush-hush for the time being. Elaine is a minister’s daughter who happens to live next door to Mortimer’s two doting aunts. While dropping Elaine off to get ready for their honeymoon, Mortimer stops by his aunts’ home only to find that he’s not the only unexpected visitor: there’s a corpse underneath a window seat. The dialog that follows is priceless:

Mortimer: There’s a body in the window seat.
Aunt Abby: Yes, dear, we know.
Mortimer: You know?
Aunt Abby: Of course! We never dreamed you’d peek.
…
Mortimer: Men don’t just get into window seats and die!
Aunt Abby: Of course not, dear. He died first.
Mortimer: But how?
Aunt Abby: The gentleman died because he drank some wine with poison in it. Now, I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal over this Mortimer. Don’t you worry about a thing!

You see, Abby and Martha like to believe they’re helping the gentlemen that they kill. They lead such lonely lives without family and all that a nice meal and conversation followed by a quiet passing is surely the best way to die. Afterwards, they convince Mortimer’s brother, Teddy (John Alexander), to dig a grave in the basement by telling him that the grave is, in fact, the Panama Canal. Teddy, you see, believes that he’s President Roosevelt.

As Mortimer tells Elaine, insanity doesn’t just run in his family, it gallops.

Mortimer, thinking quickly, believes that the best person to pin the blame on would be the family member that runs up the staircase screaming “Charge!” as if it’s San Juan Hill and blows the bugle at all hours of the night. So Teddy it is. Fair enough.

But when Mortimer’s other brother, Jonathan (Raymond Massey), arrives unexpectedly, his plans are up in the air. Jonathan has the distinction of being the only person to match body counts with his aunts: twelve dead, although he insists it’s thirteen. Jonathan, however, is a little less kind about his killing. In fact, he has a body in his car when he arrives. The unfortunate victim made the mistake of informing Jonathan that he resembles Boris Karloff (an inside joke, as Karloff was playing Jonathan’s part on Broadway as the film was being made). He just had to go.

It only gets crazier from here on out.

There are certain comedies that simply can’t age. When released, Arsenic and Old Lace pushed the boundaries of the censors. Even to this day it has a way of raising eyebrows with its premise. It lead the way for other films to laugh at the dead, from Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry to Kotcheff’s Weekend at Bernie’s. Without a doubt, Arsenic and Old Lace has long earned a place in anyone’s collection of classics.

What’s it like when you’re about to die?

“Well, it’s like pulling away from the maze. While you’re in the maze you go through willy-nilly, turning where you think you have to turn, banging into dead ends, one thing after another. But get some distance on it, and all those twists and turns, why, they’re the shape of your life. It’s hard to explain, but seeing it whole gives you some peace.”

These are the words of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thorton), a man who isn’t really a barber. He’s been sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t really commit. How he got there isn’t really straightforward. Only one thing is certain: this could only be a Coen Brothers production.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a modern film in black and white, falling somewhere in between the works of Raymond Chandler and Albert Camus. It has all the trappings of noir: a deadpan, sardonic protagonist, a heavily shadowed atmosphere, and a crime of both money and passion. But its idea, the question it poses over and over, is undeniably modern. “What kind of man are you?” Ed is asked, repeatedly. But being just another gear in the machinery of society, it’s a question he’s hard-pressed to find an answer to.

Many moviegoers would ask why anyone would willingly film a movie in black and white. It’s often been seen as the restriction of an era and medium. After all, as history has shown us, if directors could film in color, they did. Well, not quite.

The advent of color film as we know it is popularly associated with Technicolor in the 1940s and 50s. In reality, the first movie with color was made in 1895, soon after Thomas Edison had a working prototype of the Kinetoscope viewer. It was titled Anabelle Butterfly Dance (Youtube Link) and each frame was hand-painted. Annabelle Whitford was a vaudeville dancer, specializing in racy, exotic routines. This movie was soon banned after being publically shown. Soon after, A Trip to the Moon (1902), known as the first science fiction film, also utilized color in order to enhance its visual effects. There were other methods besides hand-painting, such as tinting the film a solid color or using toning to color dark parts of the film. These effects were typically used to invoke an atmosphere: blue tinting was often symbolic of a night scene whereas magenta tinting could be used for the warm hearth of a home. The first full-color talking movie was titled On With the Snow (1929).

So why did it take over sixty years to catch on? The profit of such films never outweighed the cost: moviegoers simply didn’t care that much more for color over black and white. Without the demand, color films remained a novelty until they were cheap enough to make for the masses.

In fact, The Man Who Wasn’t There is a working experiment that shows black and white cinematography can often be essential to the story itself. With their obsessive attention to detail, the Coens didn’t just set out to create a homage to the noir genre, they created a film that from all appearances could have existed nearly sixty years ago. Much of the movie is made with black and white in mind. The drabness of Ed’s life is well-suited to the medium. The interplay of light and shadow create contrasts between characters and settings. Seeing Ed walk with half of his face obscured is a telling indication of his nature. Cigarette smoke becomes an integral prop–Ed chain smokes through nearly every scene in the movie. The curling wisps of smoke in the light create a surrealism to an otherwise hard reality. With slight adjustments to the lighting and exposure, the cinematographer, Roger Deakins, effortlessly creates scenes of banality, mystery, and drama.

The film, however, does more than showcase style. The story of Ed Crane’s fall is carefully balanced between personalities and the circumstances driving them. There are many characters woven into the plot, some of them more important than others. Yet all of them have distinct traits and mannerisms that make them stand out on their own. Ed is perhaps the most paradoxical of them all.

He could be called an “everyman,” except that there’s not an ounce of variety in him. There’s little that he reacts to. His low, dispassionate voice rarely betrays any emotion. All in all, he makes a brick wall look lively. So what’s his appeal?

Something is writhing underneath the surface of Ed. His expression lies somewhere in between discontent and disgust. He finds out that his wife is sleeping with her boss, Big Dave Brewster. Does he care? It’s hard to tell where he stands with it all.

Then one day at the barber shop, a sleazy entrepreneur is looking for venture capital for a business he wants to start. It’s the future of the service industry. It’s called dry-cleaning. At first Ed barely pays him any mind, but the thought of becoming something more than a barber at his brother-in-law’s shop begins to eat at him. He decides to put up the $10,000 capital. How is he getting the money? He’s going to blackmail Big Dave, threatening to expose his affair with Mrs. Crane. Maybe he doesn’t care all that much.

The plot spirals out from there with key characters dying and people you wouldn’t expect to be accused of the crimes ending up in jail. Along the way, there are some illuminating performances by Frances McDormand, Tony Shalhoub, and Scarlett Johansson.

Does Ed ever find out what kind of man he is? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps what he finds out in the end is that the search for our identity in this brave new world becomes our identity. And by the time that search comes to its inevitable end, we’ve stop caring about what we were looking for in the first place.

It’s said that you don’t understand war until you see the eyes of the children whose lives have been ruined by it. Director René Clément takes this further by creating a film from the perspective of two such children during the Nazi assault of Paris in 1940.

Paulette is fleeing Paris with her parents when a dive bomber attacks their refugee line. In the havoc, Paulette’s puppy escapes from her arms. Paulette runs after it while her parents scream and chase her. They manage to push Paulette to the ground just before a plane flies low and riddles their bodies with bullets. The girl looks up and stares into the twisted, pained face of her dead mother. The puppy convulses in her arms, having been crushed in the commotion. After a few moments, it’s dead too.

She’s alone, now.

Paulette wanders off the line of Parisians with her puppy in her arms and eventually comes to a farmstead where she meets a slightly older boy named Michel. He’s fascinated by this immaculately dressed child from the city and brings her home to his family. Even though they struggle to feed themselves, they eventually relent and take on another addition to the family.

A sibling bond develops between Paulette and Michel. He becomes her protector and, in a way, her enabler. Paulette finally decides to bury her puppy in a mill next to a stream. Michel helps her. After creating a makeshift cross and praying for the animal, they take their leave. But Paulette is afraid that her dog will be lonely without friends. So the two children begin to find dead animals to add to their hidden cemetery. When there aren’t any, they kill some.

In order to improve their burial ground, Michel and Paulette begin stealing crosses from the cemetery behind the local church. After all, they’re much nicer crosses than what they had been making. Soon the cemetery is lavishly decorated with trinkets adorning the graves and improvised names scibbled on pieces of paper tacked to the crosses.

During one scene, Paulette looks up to Michel and happily tells him that they’ll continue adding members: a cat, cow, horse, tiger, and eventually, even people.

What was at first a childrens’ game begins to show its disturbing extent.

Social workers are often amazed at just how much horror children can seemingly adapt to. Forbidden Games asks the question: “What exactly do they adapt into?” Paulette loses her parents and dog; Michel loses his brother. Neither fully understands his or her loss. They can only try to put those losses into a context that they’re familiar with. The end result is a game that mimics the adult rituals that must seem so odd to them.

This game also serves to insulate both children from the reality of war. Paulette will never see her home or parents again. Michel has a brother that is dying a slow death in his bed. Yet so long as they can collect the dead for their own secret cemetery, the kids have a purpose and a distraction.

Although morbid, the story also finds its humor in mirroring the actions of the children and adults. Michel and Paulette’s game of creating more dead to bury is no less ridiculous than the war itself. If the cemetery seems gaudy and trite, what does that make of a religion whose words can only ring hollow in the face of so much senseless, wanton death?

Ultimately, the test of a truly great film is whether or not it can end on a note that is honest to its message rather than to the box office. French authorities eventually discover that Paulette is an orphan and she is handed over to be shipped away with other children. Michel rages against his parents to no avail. The little sister he had found was taken away from him. He runs back to the mill by the stream and begins destroying the cemetery. The game can no longer comfort.

Paulette sits in a train station, wide eyed and terrified, as a nun places a name card around her neck. It’s at this moment that she realizes everything that she has lost. She looks frantically into the shuffling crowd and picks out a woman who vaguely resembles her mother. The final scene is the little girl weaving through the throngs of people, screaming for her mom.

There is no happy, Hollywood ending. How can there be with war?

While often familiar with the Disney animation, few viewers are aware of Beauty and the Beast’s film influence. The actual folktale that we are familiar with as children and adults was first recorded by Madame Villeneuve in France in the mid-18^th century. Its modern incarnation was written and directed by the French artist, Jean Cocteau. It remains to this day one of the definitive film renditions of the story.

La Belle et la Bête was produced when France was still reeling from the world war. According to Cocteau, the only thing harder to come by than undamaged film was clean, unpatched bedsheets. “Shoe-string” didn’t even begin to describe the budget. It’s therefore surprising that despite these limitations, the film still holds up over sixty years later. Much of this can be attributed to the surrealist techniques of Cocteau, who pushed the medium to its limits.

The story remains relatively faithful to Villeneuve’s version: a merchant (Marcel André) hard on his luck goes to town in high hopes of profit from his ships only to leave empty-handed. On his return home, he gets caught up in a storm and ends up on the doorstep of a wealthy estate owner. Although the owner is no where to be found, the merchant finds a table prepared for him with food and wine. Eventually, the long day and food gets the better of him and he drifts to sleep.

After waking up the next morning, the merchant prepares to leave only to remember that he promised his daughters gifts. Unwilling to take any valuables from the mansion, the merchant decides to pluck a rose for his youngest: Belle (Josette Day). This act incites the rage of the owner of the estate: the Beast (Jean Marais). In exchange for his life, the merchant offers one of his daughters to the Beast. Only one daughter is willing to go: Belle.

Initially repulsed by the Beast, Belle slowly comes to accept and care about him. She begs him to let her see her father once more. The Beast relents, although he warns her that if she doesn’t return, he will die. Upon her return, one of Belle’s former suitors, Avenant (Jean Marais, again) decides to hunt the Beast down to “save” her from it. The two characters being played by the same actor is no coincidence.

When Disney made the animated film, he neutered a number of key elements in the original story in favor a traditional morality and romance tale. Cocteau, however, retains some of the more uncomfortable facets of what proves to be less of a children’s bedtime story than a psychological parable about sex relations.

Historically kept in the dark about sex, women often had a difficult time coming to terms with the demands of a wedding night. Many, understandably, saw male behavior as bestial. In saying, “Love can make a man into a beast and a beast into a man,” Cocteau notes that Avenant’s desire for Belle brings the monster out of him while the Beast’s love for her softens his heart. It’s perhaps a commentary on the dual nature of men when Jean Marais’ characters transform into each other in the end.

The is another element in La Belle et la Bête that is distinctly Cocteau: the temple to Diana on the Beast’s estate. At first it seems odd that he would include Roman mythology into a French fairytale. Yet those that remember the myth of Diana will recall that she was the goddess of beasts and the hunt, shunning all male contact. One day when a Prince named Actaeon spied on Diana bathing, she turned him into a stag and set his own dogs upon him. Suddenly the shots of mauled deer and the countless dog statues in the film make more sense. Cocteau accurately observed that the elements of the Beauty and Beast tale date back much further than we usually think.

The reason why the film still resonates to this day is partly due to the director’s experimental techniques. Cocteau was fascinated by time and the effects that film had on it. There are a number of home videos made by Cocteau that experiment with filming people performing an action backwards and then playing the film itself backwards to make them appear to accomplish impossible tasks in forward-motion. The scene with the candelabras held by disembodied arms lighting one by one as Belle’s father walks along the hallway was done by reversing the candlebras being blown out one-by-one as Marcel André walked backwards.

The Criterion edition of the film has been digitally restored and has alternative audio tracks that include an opera written by Phillip Glass that is timed to the original movie. The quality of the music updates Cocteau’s film a great deal. La Belle et la Bête is essential viewing to anyone who thought the Disney film was great as a kid.

There’s a hint of spring in the air. This is the observation of a grizzled worker in a pub as he watches a young couple meet and agree upon a date. The weather outside is typical of Stockholm during this time of year: cold and overcast. But that eternal cycle of seasons is following its course and it begins with Harry (Lars Ekborg) and Monika (Harriet Andersson).

The two teenagers come from poor, working class families. Monika has a large family with annoying younger siblings. Harry has a father who is rarely seen. Both share a hatred for their jobs.

When Monika suggests that they run off to travel, Harry laughs it off — initially. But as the monotony and distaste for their lives begin to worsen, the idea becomes tempting enough that the two lovers decide to make a run for it on Harry’s boat. They pass through the bleak waterways of the city and escape to the islands of the Stockholm archipelago.

Life is idyllic. Rolling clouds pass over a seemingly endless sea of shimmering water. They pass the time living simply and enjoying the freedom from their former constraints. Their love affair is as innocent as the life they escaped to.

The summer soon comes to an end. As the skies become slate grey and the sea swells and hurls against the beach, Monika discovers that she’s pregnant. Food becomes scarce. They finally decide that it’s time to return and start a life for the child.

In the scene after Monika is nearly caught stealing food from a local family, Harry holds her and tells her that they have been dreaming themselves. The question in both of their eyes is whether their bond can survive the reality that they have to wake up to.

With a harsh winter approaching, the couple must come to terms with a world that they, much like the parents that they left, cannot control. In the end, only one of them is willing to.

Summer with Monika is one of Ingmar Bergman’s earlier films. It’s a stark, contemporary portrayal of idealistic love and the challenges it faces when the pressures of life are too great for the illusion to be kept up. There are few cases of “happily ever after” in life and Bergman’s films often reflect this. The fleeting moments of bliss in a hard, demanding existence can only be sustained in memory. In one of the most powerful fade-ins in film history, Harry stares into the window of a shop with his child in his arms and for a moment relives the summer. As the memory concludes, he watches the ever-shrinking silhouette of their boat cross the sea back to Stockholm and fade into the pupil of his eye.

Bergman’s film predated the French New Wave movement and the era of free love in America by almost a decade. Its honest love scenes between two teenagers was quickly condemned by conservative moralists. In a telling example of the emotional maturity of American studios in the 1950s, Summer with Monika was licensed, cut down to a half-hour, and retitled to Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl to make it more palatable to the American public. Whatever realism and ethics the film had was removed in order to change it into an exploitive B-movie with a title that fit the ignorance of the times.

There was no judgment behind Bergman’s lens. The story illustrates the flaws and mistakes of a couple too young to know the demands of love–a theme that is as old as humanity itself, reflected in the seasons that we are born into and inevitably die from.

Bill likes to follow people. It isn’t a sexual thing or anything like that; he just picks someone at random and begins to follow him or her. He wants to see where they go, what they do, and who they talk to. He wants to be able to pick a face out of a crowd and come to know who that person really is.

It’s an exercise in character development. Bill wants to be a writer.

Then Bill (Jeremy Theobald) makes the mistake of following the same person twice: a clean cut, good-looking man in his twenties that is always carrying a bag. He follows the mark into a cafe, at which point the tables are turned on him: the mark gets up, sits down at Bill’s table, and looks him straight in the eye.

This is how Bill and Cobb (Alex Haw) meet. Perhaps there is something in Cobb’s mannerisms that triggers a sense of familiarity with Bill. It ends up that they aren’t all that different. Cobb also likes to get to know people. He breaks into apartments and homes not only to fence valuables, but to violate sentimental keepsakes.

You see, according to Cobb, everyone has a box. Sometimes it’s a fancy deal, most times it’s just a cardboard shoe box. But it always holds little, seemingly unrelated, odds and ends that delve deeply into who a person is. Photographs, sea horses, stones, strands of hair…

Cobb always makes sure that they know he’s been through all of these things. He says that people want these things to be found. It’s an exhibitionism that’s ingrained into all of us. Cobb just helps make it happen.

Seeing yet another opportunity to study “character,” Bill decides to tag along with Cobb in order to write a story about him. Of course, it never occurs to Bill that Cobb also has something in mind for him.

Following is the first in a series of modern black and white films that will be reviewed. Often people only associate older films with the medium. But there’s a whole sub-genre of films that have all the sensibilities of the latest thrillers. Sometimes it’s a matter of budget, and other times for aesthetics. Following falls somewhere in between the two. Directed by Christopher Nolan on a budget of $6,000, the film has all the narrative elements that fans would later recognize in Memento; the most notable being the lack of chronology.

If shown from start to finish, Following really couldn’t pass as a mystery. Nolan, however, infuses the motivations and outcomes of the characters with mystery by playing different story arcs out of order, all the while still maintaining a coherent narrative. Not easy, not by a long shot. It takes meticulous outlining and a very clear mind for what needs to be filmed ahead of time. The black and white stock creates an air of noir, providing the Following with a sophistication that would otherwise be lost with color film, given the equipment that he had to work with.

The fact that Following can hang with Memento and Insomnia is not only a testament to Nolan’s writing and directing, but also his aesthetic sense.