Dial E for espionage

MLK and Inauguration weekend M4

Bonuses, bonuses! First, I got into Grand Central plenty early, and it was a sunny day in the 50s (a perfect day to spend inside in a dark room, I like to say), so I got to take a pleasant mile-and-a-half downtown stroll before settling into the program. The the cashier at Cinema Village charged my credit card only 6 bucks--senior price (yeah, OK, that's not an altogether good thing)--and by the time I noticed, it wasn't worth going back and insisting on paying more.

Later I saved even more money when I discovered that the two noirs from the years just before my birth were being treated as an old-fashioned double feature--one $12.50 admission for the pair! Finally, I unexpectedly made the 9:34 train (cutting it so close that I had no time to buy my usual cookie and soda before board, thus saving me another 5 bucks or so, against my will) and was thus snug in my bed before midnight.

Oh, and in addition to the nice bonuses, the movies were good too.

Fairhaven

CV

Yes, this is the sort of indy film that has bringing me here for a dozen years or so: quiet without being soporific, heartfelt without being goopy, human and engaging and sad and funny.

Three buddies from a nowhere town, Dave (Chris Messina), the lone escapee, returning for his father's funeral; Jon (Tom O'Brien), a writer chafing against his job on a fishing boat; and Sam (Rich Sommer), a real-estate agent with a daughter and an ex-wife--an ex-wife with whom, Jon is upended to learn, Dave had an affair years earlier when the couple was struggling.

So no: no new narrative trails blazed here. Doesn't matter; the well-worn trails are driven with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity.

Barbara

Ang

Geez, hadn't been to the Angelika in . . . well, let's just see . . . in almost 5 years, since seeing Paranoid Park there on Easter weekend 2008. And apart from showing me an excellent movie, they didn't do anything to make me want to come back soon: their computers were down, so no credit card purchases--OK, unavoidable perhaps, but what was not unavoidable was making us stand in a long line snaking down the Houston Street sidewalk in conditions that had become a little cooler and lots windier because only one cashier was working the two-window booth.

So why was I there? Because this seems a film that might slip through the New Haven cracks, and (duh) I didn't want to risk missing it. Good call, and I won't second-guess myself if it does come to town. It's East Germany in the '80s, and the title character (Nina Hoss) is a sullen doctor exiled to a provincial clinic for unspecified irregularities (though it later becomes clear to the audience that the authorities are right to suspect her devotion to the communist cause).

There she meets André (Ronald Zehrfeld), a colleague who confesses to her the transgression that got him there--to which her reaction is to ask, "Is that the story they told you to tell me?" André is simultaneously puppy-dog infatuated with a woman he sense will be even more beautiful if she ever smiles and determined to encourage her to trust, to become a willing part of the community and the medical team that he has come to love, notwithstanding the circumstances and forces that put him there.

This is a very good film that forfeits its chance to be a great one with a stage-managed conclusion straight out of Hollywood.

The Thief (1952)

FF

Allan Fields (Ray Milland) is America's dumbest nuclear physicist, insufficiently sharp to realize that you don't escape the FBI agent tailing you by climbing the stairs up from the 88th floor of the Empire State.

Fields has been sending secrets to the commies, though why is unclear: he obviously hates himself for doing it and would stop if he could, but he can't. It would be a gripping Cold War spy drama without the gimmick, but the gimmick raises it a couple of notches: it's silent. Well, sans dialogue. There's plenty of sound: traffic noise, jazz from the apartment of the sultry and seemingly randy neighbor (played by the aptly named Rita Gam), and--especially--the phone, ringing three times and stopping, the signal from his handler.

Why silence is brilliant is that it encapsulates the isolation of a man who has betrayed his country and his vocation, who has no friends or family in evidence, whose relationships even with colleagues is nodding at best--whose relationship even with his spy handlers is limited to delivery of instructions and Minox film cassettes en passant. In films that could not but be silent, there is plenty of language, whether on title cards or simply in pantomime. This film recognizes that it is language more than anything that links us, and the silence here is a vacuum of language, making the story far darker and more discomfiting than it could otherwise be.

Until a presumably Hays-mandated ending that in fact punishes Fields less than the outcome toward which we seemed to be heading, one tough-minded piece of noir.

Blast of Silence (1961)

FF

The first time I saw this I was so involved in what was old and what was new that I didn't notice how much Allen Baron's visual idiom here influenced Francis Ford Coppola and David Chase when they painted their gangster hits. Interesting that this too has a conclusion that the Hays Committee would have approved, the difference being that the conclusion here is the only one the story could reasonably have reached.

Trailers

• Molly's Theory of Relativity--Earning power & marital solidarity; could be a gem, could be blah.
• Starbuck--Looks like one of those farces that encourages us that the French can be just as stupid as us.
• A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III--Roman Coppola wrote and directs Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, and Bill Murray.
• No--Gael García Bernal is an ad man charged with bringing down Pinochet. Oh yes.
• Blancanieves--Director Pablo Berger has clearly studied Almodóvar and del Toro.
• Yossi--Sequel to Yossi and Jagger, which I wanted to like more than I actually did.