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Bigger Than Life Trailer (1956) – The Criterion Collection

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Bigger Than Life is an American DeLuxe Color CinemaScope film made in 1956 directed by Nicholas Ray and starring James Mason, who also co-wrote and produced the film, about a school teacher and family man whose life spins out of control upon becoming addicted to cortisone.

The film co-stars Barbara Rush as his wife and Walter Matthau as his closest friend, a fellow teacher. Though it was a box-office flop upon its initial release,[2] many modern critics hail it as a masterpiece and brilliant indictment of contemporary attitudes towards mental illness and addiction.[3]

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In 1963, Jean-Luc Godard named it one of the ten best American sound films ever made.[4]

Bigger Than Life was based on a 1955 article by medical writer Berton Roueché in The New Yorker, titled “Ten Feet Tall”.[5]

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Plot summary

Schoolteacher and family man Ed Avery (James Mason), who has been suffering bouts of severe pain and even blackouts, is hospitalized with what is diagnosed as polyarteritis nodosa, a rare inflammation of the arteries. Told by doctors that he probably has only months to live, Ed agrees to an experimental treatment: doses of the hormone cortisone.

Ed makes a remarkable recovery. He returns home to his wife, Lou (Barbara Rush), and their son, Richie (Christopher Olsen). He must keep taking cortisone tablets regularly to prevent a recurrence of his illness. But the “miracle” cure turns into a nightmare when Ed begins to misuse the tablets, causing him to experience wild mood swings and, ultimately, a psychotic episode which threatens the safety of his family.

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Cast

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Reception

Bigger Than Life was extremely controversial upon its release,[citation needed] and it was not a financial success. Mason, who produced the film as well as starring in it, blamed its failure on its use of the then-novel widescreen CinemaScope format.[2]

American critics panned the film, considering it melodramatic and heavyhanded.[6] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it tedious, “dismal”, and “more pitiful than terrifying to watch”.[7]

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However, the film was popular with critics at the influential magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Jean-Luc Godard called it one of the ten best American sound films.[4] Likewise, François Truffaut praised the film, noting the “intelligent, subtle” script, the “extraordinary precision” of Mason’s performance, and the beauty of the film’s CinemaScope photography.[8]

Modern critics have pointed out Ray’s use of widescreen cinematography to depict the interior spaces of a family drama, rather than the open vistas typically associated with the format, as well as his use of extreme close-ups in portraying the main character’s psychosis and megalomania.[9]

The film is also recognized for its multi-layered examination of the American nuclear family in the Eisenhower era. While the film can be read as a straightforward exposé on medical malpractice and the overuse of prescription drugs in modern American society,[10] it has also been seen as a critique of consumerism, the male-dominated traditional family structure, and the claustrophobic conformism of suburban life.[3][11][12]

Truffaut saw Ed’s drug-influenced speech to the parents of the parent-teacher association as having fascist overtones.[13] The film has also been interpreted as an examination of masculinity and a leftist critique of the low salaries of public school teachers in the United States.[14]

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Notes

  1. Jump up^ Solomon 1989, p. 250.
  2. ^ Jump up to:a b Cossar 2011, p. 273.
  3. ^ Jump up to:a b Halliwell 2013, pp. 159-162.
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b Marshall, Colin (December 2, 2013). “A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best American Films Ever Made (1963)”. Open Culture.
  5. Jump up^ Roueché, Berton (September 10, 1955). “Ten Feet Tall”. The New Yorker: 47–77.
  6. Jump up^ Schiebel 2014, p. 183.
  7. Jump up^ Crowther, Bosley (August 3, 1956). “Screen: Tax of Tedium; ‘Bigger Than Life’ Has Debut at Victoria”. The New York Times.
  8. Jump up^ Truffaut 2009, pp. 143-147.
  9. Jump up^ Cossar 2011, pp. 120-123.
  10. Jump up^ Truffaut 2009, pp. 145–146. Truffaut noted Nicholas Ray’s low opinion of the medical profession, and of so-called “miracle drugs”. His discussion of Bigger Than Life points out the visual similarity between the doctors in the film and “gangsters in crime films”.
  11. Jump up^ Basinger 2013, pp. 231-234.
  12. Jump up^ Rosenbaum 1997, pp. 131-133.
  13. Jump up^ Truffaut & pp-145-146.
  14. Jump up^ Schiebel 2014, p. 182.

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See also

References

  • Solomon, Aubrey (1989). Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History. Scarecrow Press.

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Vivre Sa Vie Trailer (1962) – The Criterion Collection

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My Life to Live (French: Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux; To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes) is a 1962 French drama film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It was released as My Life to Live in North America and as It’s My Life in United Kingdom. The DVD releases use the original French title.

Plot

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Nana (Anna Karina), a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties, leaves her husband and infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitute.

Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and Nana is killed in a gun battle. Nana’s short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written intertitle.

Cast

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Production

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The film was shot over the course of four weeks for $40,000.[1][2]

Style

In Vivre sa vie, Godard borrowed the aesthetics of the cinéma vérité approach to documentary film-making that was then becoming fashionable.

However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films.[citation needed] The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.

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Influences

One of the film’s original sources is a study of contemporary prostitution, Où en est la prostitution by Marcel Sacotte, an examining magistrate.

Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma (the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht and his theory of ‘epic theatre‘.

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Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitles appear before the film’s ‘chapters’ explaining what will happen next; jump cuts disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over; and so on.

The film also draws from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola and Edgar Allan Poe, to the cinema of Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir and Carl Dreyer.[citation needed] And Jean Douchet, the French critic, has written that Godard’s film “would have been impossible without Street of Shame, Kenji Mizoguchi‘s last and most sublime film.”[3]

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Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard’s former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard’s personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.[citation needed]

The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard’s Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana.

It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat, who is performing his own hit tune “Ma Môme” on the track that he has just selected.

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Nana’s bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks in the 1928 film Pandora’s Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.

The film was remade as She Lives Her Life in 2014 by director Mark Thimijan.

Reception

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The film was the fourth most popular movie at the French box office in its year of release.[1]

Critical response

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Vivre sa Vie enjoys an extremely positive critical reputation. Author and cultural critic Susan Sontag described it as “a perfect film” and “one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of.”[4] According to critic Roger Ebert in his essay on the film in the book The Great Movies, “The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt.”[5]

References

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b c Archer, Eugene (27 Sep 1964). “France’s Far Out Filmmaker”. New York Times. p. X11.
  2. Jump up^ Sterritt, David (1999). The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 1 March 2017.
  3. Jump up^ Jean Douchet “French New Wave” ISBN 1-56466-057-5
  4. Jump up^ Susan Sontag, On Godard’s Vivre sa vie, Moviegoer, no. 2, Summer/Autumn 1964, p. 9.
  5. Jump up^ “Roger Ebert, “Great Movies” – Vivre sa Vie/My Life to Live”. Rogerebert.suntimes.com. 2001-04-01. Retrieved 2012-02-06.

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Further reading

  • Colin MacCabe (2004) Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-16378-2.

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Lola Montes Trailer (1955) – The Criterion Collection

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Lola Montès (1955) is an epic historical romance film and the last completed film of German-born director Max Ophüls. It is based on the life of the celebrated Irish dancer and courtesan Lola Montez (1821–1861), portrayed by Martine Carol, and tells the story of the most famous of her many notorious affairs, those with Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria.

A French production, the dialogue is mostly in French and German, with a few English language sequences. The most expensive European film produced up to its time, Lola Montès flopped at the box office.

It had an important artistic influence, however, on the French New Wave cinema movement and continues to have many distinguished critical admirers. Heavily re-edited (multiple times) and shortened after its initial release for commercial reasons, it has been twice restored (1968, 2008). It was released on DVD and Blu-ray in North America by The Criterion Collection in February 2010.

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Plot summary

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In the mid-19th-century, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) is a famous, past-her-prime dancer and courtesan who has led an eventful and highly scandalous life. (She supposedly holds a world record for number of lovers.)

She is now reduced to performing in a New Orleans circus, where an impresario/ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) has both befriended and exploited her by making her the central attraction. In the course of a single circus performance — which dramatically reenacts Lola’s life and career — flashbacks reveal, first, her affair with composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg); second, her unhappy youth and marriage to her own mother’s boyfriend, Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny); and then her scandalous public breakup with conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau).

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Along the way, her career as a dancer and “actress” has its ups and downs and she initially rejects the career advances of a younger version of Ustinov’s impresario. In a longer flashback, constituting most of the second half of the film, her career as courtesan reaches a peak: her affair with the Bavarian King Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook), which incenses his subjects and leads to his eventual downfall in the March Revolution of 1848. In a final circus sequence, Lola — a “fallen woman” — ascends to the apex of the big top tent for a symbolic, death-defying plunge. She is last seen allowing herself to be touched, or kissed, by a very long queue of male, fee-paying circus patrons.

Cast

Martine Carol in Max Ophüls' LOLA MONTÈS (1955). Credit: Rialto Pictures. Playing 10/10-10/30

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Production

Lola Montès was filmed in Paris, Nice, and Munich.

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Release

This would be the last film directed by Ophüls before his death of a heart attack in March 1957. As originally shown in France in 1955, the audience sees the events of Lola Montès’ life through the use of flashbacks. Use of the technique was criticized upon its release and the movie did poorly at the box office. In response, the producers re-cut the film and shortened it in favor of a more chronological storyline, against the director’s wishes.

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According to Roger Ebert, a “savagely butchered version was in circulation for a few years” following Ophuls’ death.[1] The film critic Andrew Sarris and others eventually showed improved versions, progressively closer to the original, at the New York Film Festival in 1963 and 1968.

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Restoration

Certain elements remained missing and believed lost, but the recent discovery and restoration efforts by Technicolor artists of the lost footage allowed a new version to be edited according to Ophul’s original intentions. The color version of the film with missing footage was digitally restored by a small team of restoration artists including John Healy at Technicolor under the direction of Tom Burton.

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The black and white version of the film was repaired by Martina Müller and Werner Dütsch.[2] The color version including lost footage was shown at the New York Film Festival according to the director’s edit version on Sept. 26 – Oct. 12, 2008.[3]

Lola Montès was re-released by Rialto Pictures in November 2008 with the full Cinemascope aspect ratio restored and with five minutes of additional footage never before shown in any U.S. release.

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Lola Montès was released on DVD and Blu-ray in North America by The Criterion Collection in February 2010.[4]

Legacy

Roger Ebert lauded the film’s camerawork and set design, but felt that Carol’s “wooden [and] shallow” performance as the titular character prevented the film from achieving greatness.[1] Nonetheless, it is today among Ophüls’ revered works.[5] Dave Kehr called it a masterpiece, and wrote that “certainly this story of a courtesan’s life is among the most emotionally plangent, visually ravishing works the cinema has to offer.”[6]

The film also received five votes in the British Film Institute‘s 2012 Sight & Sound critics’ poll.[7] Lola Montès is acclaimed in Danny Peary‘s 1981 book, Cult Movies as one of the 100 most representative examples of the cult film phenomenon.

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References

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b Ebert, Roger (November 5, 2008). “Lola Montes movie review”. Chicago Sun-Times.
  2. Jump up^ Martina Müller, Werner Dütsch: Lola Montez – Eine Filmgeschichte
  3. Jump up^ “New York Film Festival review of the restored version”. Film Society of Lincoln Center. Retrieved 10 July 2009.
  4. Jump up^ http://www.criterion.com/films/938
  5. Jump up^ “Max Ophüls’s Acclaimed Films”. February 7, 2016. Retrieved July 24, 2016.
  6. Jump up^ Kehr, Dave. “Lola Montes”. Chicago Reader. Retrieved July 24, 2016.
  7. Jump up^ “Votes for LOLA MONTÈS (1955)”. British Film Institute. Retrieved July 24, 2016.

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