DVD Chronicle by Jefferson Hunter (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: DVD Chronicle by Jefferson Hunter Jefferson Hunter (bio) One Wonderful Sunday, directed by Akira Kurosawa, in Postwar Kurosawa (Eclipse Series from the Criterion Collection, 2008) The Woman on the Beach, directed by Jean Renoir (Warner Archive, 2011) Quai des orfèvres, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot (Criterion Collection, 2003) Lady in the Lake, directed by Robert Montgomery (Warner Home Video, 2006) Dark Passage, directed by Delmer Daves (Warner Home Video, 2006, and Amazon Instant Video) The Unsuspected, directed by Michael Curtiz (Warner Brothers, 2009) It Always Rains on Sunday, directed by Robert Hamer (out of print, but available on the used DVD market) Brighton Rock, directed by John Boulting (Lionsgate, 2012 and Amazon Instant Video) Black Narcissus, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Criterion Collection, 2010) Down to Earth, directed by Alexander Hall (Sony Pictures, 2004). In this Chronicle I’ll be discussing films released in a single year, 1947. Obviously, this will not present motion-picture history in anything like long shot, showing trends over time, but rather in close-up, showing one short span’s cinematic interests. Why 1947? For one thing, it saw significant events in America—Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in baseball, the Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier in aviation, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, hearing testimony on alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood and creating the first black list, broke into new territory of scurrilous politics. The year also witnessed a symbolic transition of film figures. Ernst Lubitsch died in 1947, closing an era of Hollywood elegance which aspired to and sometimes attained European sophistication; Steven Spielberg was born in 1947, a figure destined to preside over a new era, populist rather than elegant, fantastic and imaginative and mega-budgeted, dominated by special effects. I’ll concede that for a few cinema luminaries 1947 was forgettable. As a gypsy vagabond in the World War II melodrama Golden Earrings, Marlene Dietrich gave arguably the worst, certainly the most unbelievable, performance of her career. Hitchcock was off form with The Paradine Case, Chaplin unsuccessful (at least in my view) with Monsieur Verdoux. Abandoning Paramount, where he had produced his great comedies, Preston Sturges brought out The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, which has a promising story idea—Harold Lloyd’s character from the silent comedy The Freshman, shown in later life—but a disappointing execution, a lapse into that strenuous whimsicality which was Sturges’s besetting fault. Besides these [End Page 104] misfires, 1947 saw such outright schlock as Mother Wore Tights, Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, Queen of the Amazons, Tarzan and the Huntress, and Copacabana (Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda, the cigar and the fruited chapeau, together on a nightclub stage!), all films it would be enjoyable to mock, but I will limit myself here to works with some claim to still being watchable nearly seven decades after 1947. Luckily, there are a number of them. Two young people, engaged but far too poor to marry, wander about Tokyo on a winter Sunday, trying to amuse themselves on the 35 yen in their pockets. This is the essence of Akira Kurosawa’s One Wonderful Sunday, portraying a 1947 Japan trying without much success to pick itself up from wartime defeat. Trash litters the streets; men go by wearing forage caps left over from their army service; the black market thrives; next to a bomb crater in the street, kids play a scrappy game of basebaru. The country is not just battered and psychologically damaged but culturally confused, with misspelled signs in English all over the place, presumably for the benefit of American Occupation troops. Kurosawa makes his own odd obeisance to the West by putting tunes like “My Blue Heaven” or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on the soundtrack. In general, he economizes, shooting on location with non-actors or on cheap studio sets with crudely painted backgrounds; he’s nearly as strapped as his pair of lovers, yet accomplishes some remarkable things. In this he’s very like De Sica and other Italian neo-realist directors (whose work Kurosawa greatly admired), using limited postwar budgets to strip filmmaking down to the austere, truth-telling essentials. For a while you...