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Why run a risk like that?
Right. That all-night international heist marathon I mentioned. Normally I try to make my notes on marathon movies before I sleep, in case I forget them, but last night was a medical exception. I woke up at two in the afternoon today.
(We took the harborwalk to the Charlestown Navy Yard in the evening and saw the USS Constitution in drydock, which I had not realized meant the granite-blocked Dry Dock 1, built in 1833. The site has undergone renovations since then, of course, but I love that nineteenth-century shipbuilding and repair technology is still in use, keel blocks and caissons and all. I took a blurry phone photo I'll try to remember to post tomorrow. We picked up gelato on the way back through the North End. Back to the movies.)
The original Italian title of Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) is I soliti ignoti, "the usual unknowns." It is both a scene-setting piece of slang and an apt description of the main characters, a quintet of petty criminals hopelessly and touchingly out of their depth trying to pull off a pawn shop heist. Sweet-faced, leather-jacketed Renato Salvatori shoplifts baby carriages instead of cars because for cars you need to be able to drive. Bantamweight Sicilian Tiberio Murgia is obsessed with keeping his sister pure for her marriage (she is played by a very young Claudia Cardinale and is having none of it) and cameraless photographer Marcello Mastroianni is run off his feet taking care of the baby with his wife in jail for black-marketeering. Carlo Pisacane might have been a good man for the job thirty years ago, but now he's a dotty, birdlike kleptomaniac with the absent-minded appetite of a comic parasite. Vittorio Gassman's boastful young boxer gets KO'd within seconds of stepping into the ring. They have what looks like a fail-safe plan, inherited from a marginally bigger-time crook now serving eighteen months for bungled car theft; they have a dubious godfather in the form of Totò, the local safecracker currently under such police surveillance that he has to impart his lessons of crime from the roof of his apartment building, among blowing sheets of laundry; they haven't a chance. If they lived in a neorealist universe, their story would be tragic. Everyone really is broke, hustling, distracted and displaced; the black-and-white location shooting shows us an unglamorous Rome of concrete high-rises and train tracks. Criminals are introduced not by their talents, but by their predicaments. Even the wet-lit night streets in the opening scene do not signal the stone cold cynicism of film noir, but a kind of resigned shrug as a car thief fails to get the vehicle in gear or even shut off the alarm before the cops show up. But fortunately that means that they live in the closely adjacent, dell'arte-descended genre of commedia all'italiana, and so it's hilarious, with much of the comedy and the pathos generated by the thin line between the two. I'm reluctant to label the film a spoof, even knowing it's taking off on Jules Dassin's groundbreaking Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes, 1955) and its immediate successors: nothing in it is unbelievable, just inept, inopportune, and snafu. No one is pushed into caricature to reach a joke. The setbacks suffered by the protagonists are all individually realistic; it's the relentless accumulation that adds up to classic farce. The ending is refreshingly sweeter than I thought our hopeful no-hopers were headed for. I should warn people nonetheless that it is a bad film to watch if you get hungry in the middle of the night.
As with its predecessor Le samouraï (1967), I am finding Jean-Pierre Melville's Le cercle rouge (1970) difficult to describe without giving the impression of another kind of movie altogether. It is a heist film, but it runs a full hour before anything in the oblique, contemplative, richly suggestive plot makes this fact concrete. It opens by tracking two characters so apparently unrelated, I had to study the weather, the season, and the times of day in order to feel certain that their scenes were taking place simultaneously rather than heralding a nonlinear plot. Having taken a five-year fall for a mob boss, Corey (Alain Delon) is released from prison on the same morning that Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) makes a daring escape from police custody aboard a moving train; while Corey visits his erstwhile employer, a pool hall, and a used car dealership, Vogel is stumbling through winter fields, wading a river in his briefs to throw off the dogs baying behind him. Their paths converge in the parking lot of a roadside café with such perfect timing that the audience may be forgiven for assuming that one is the other's accomplice, but it's pure chance—or the inevitable, impersonal fate evoked by Melville in the epigraph: Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: "When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle."1 Slowly the film's circle widens to include the cat-loving inspector whose job is on the line for letting Vogel escape (André Bourvil), the nightclub owner to whom all the underworld comes sooner or later (François Périer), and ex-police marksman Jansen (Yves Montand), future key to the successful heist of Mauboussin's and current hallucinating drunk. The heist itself is performed in silence, a piece of perfect choreography that no one has explained in advance except for the camera, identifying the critical detail for audience members who have learned to think like Melville's minimalist protagonists. In retrospect I felt I should have seen the ending coming, but in my defense it's not like the film had in any way observed the rules of its genre until then. It's not a fast-paced movie at 140 minutes, but it never feels slow; it's visually cool, but not emotionally cold; Paris is both a beautiful nighttime backdrop and a real city full of people who behave with predictable geometry and appalling curveball impulsivity. I've seen three movies now by Melville and liked all three of them very much. One of them didn't even star Alain Delon.
Oh, Topkapi (1964). Go read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel's post if you want a real description of the experience. I am mostly here to reaffirm my enduring love for Jules Dassin, from The Canterville Ghost (1944) and A Letter for Evie (1946) through The Naked City (1948) and Rififi, which I don't appear to have written about yet. If you accept, however, that the latter film is both parent and original of the heist genre and that it is an incredible, gritty, fatalistic downer, then you may understand why it is hilarious that Topkapi is a Technicolor comedy. Which it is, from its psychedelic carnival prologue to the introduction of Peter Ustinov as designated "schmo" Arthur Simpson, who's failing as even a small-time hustler when we meet him on the docks of Piraeus. One minute he's agreeing to drive a car across the border to Istanbul and the next thing he knows he's answering to the Turkish police and shortly after that he's been recruited into a scheme to steal an emerald-encrusted dagger from the Topkapı Palace for Melina Mercouri's lynx-eyed adventurer, a master thief who likes beautiful jewels and beautiful men in that order—it's all above Arthur's pay grade, but he follows along gamely and the audience enjoys the ride. There's a strategist, a toymaker, an acrobat, a strongman; a soused cook who believes he's working for a household of Russian spies. Mercouri has chemistry with everything, including inanimate objects and a stadium full of half-naked wrestlers. Maximilian Schell has nothing to do with Nazi Germany.2 I cannot understand why Robert Morley never played the Penguin. The heist takes a half-hour at least and works like something out of Cirque du Soleil. Ustinov throughout is a hapless, sympathetic lens on this glamorous caper, the sort of steadfast loser who can answer an encouraging "You're not going to lose your nerve now?" with the rueful and entirely honest "It's not a question of losing my nerve—I never had none." He doesn't lose his hold on the rope, though. The whole gallimaufry is loosely adapted from Eric Ambler's novel The Light of Day (1962) and it's a lot of fun. All I'd remembered from childhood was a key image of the heist, which I should not spoil.
Man, everything I write now wants to be a 2000-word essay. This needs work. Next year I'll stay all night at the HFA and then I can justify the wordcount. This triptych brought to you by my excellent backers at Patreon.
1. The other thing Le cercle rouge may be is a love story. I found it very difficult not to read Corey and Vogel as romantically linked, at least in potential: Vogel stowing away in the trunk of Corey's Plymouth Fury is a criminal meet-cute if ever I've seen one, and the exchange which seals their mutual trust puts real emotional significance into a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. Relocated to Paris, the two of them stay in Corey's apartment, where Vogel can be seen in a borrowed pair of pajamas. They make a classic visual pair, Delon's slenderly built, meticulous self-containment—his extraordinary beauty both anonymized and made somehow more formal by a dark mustache—against Volonté's tousle-haired saturnine volatility. (Paginghandful_ofdust, basically.) Just at the point where I started to wonder if I was atypically slash-goggling them, a woman in Santi's bar gave Corey a rose: the next time we see it, he's given it to Vogel. I stopped worrying.
2. We had last seen him in Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron (1977), which made me wonder if I'd ever seen him in a role unconnected to World War II—the only movies that were coming to mind were Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), The Odessa File (1974), and A Bridge Too Far (1977), which didn't help. I felt better once I remembered about The Brothers Bloom (2008); Diamond Dog was Schell's last role. For some reason I'd mentally substituted Tom Waits.
(We took the harborwalk to the Charlestown Navy Yard in the evening and saw the USS Constitution in drydock, which I had not realized meant the granite-blocked Dry Dock 1, built in 1833. The site has undergone renovations since then, of course, but I love that nineteenth-century shipbuilding and repair technology is still in use, keel blocks and caissons and all. I took a blurry phone photo I'll try to remember to post tomorrow. We picked up gelato on the way back through the North End. Back to the movies.)
The original Italian title of Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) is I soliti ignoti, "the usual unknowns." It is both a scene-setting piece of slang and an apt description of the main characters, a quintet of petty criminals hopelessly and touchingly out of their depth trying to pull off a pawn shop heist. Sweet-faced, leather-jacketed Renato Salvatori shoplifts baby carriages instead of cars because for cars you need to be able to drive. Bantamweight Sicilian Tiberio Murgia is obsessed with keeping his sister pure for her marriage (she is played by a very young Claudia Cardinale and is having none of it) and cameraless photographer Marcello Mastroianni is run off his feet taking care of the baby with his wife in jail for black-marketeering. Carlo Pisacane might have been a good man for the job thirty years ago, but now he's a dotty, birdlike kleptomaniac with the absent-minded appetite of a comic parasite. Vittorio Gassman's boastful young boxer gets KO'd within seconds of stepping into the ring. They have what looks like a fail-safe plan, inherited from a marginally bigger-time crook now serving eighteen months for bungled car theft; they have a dubious godfather in the form of Totò, the local safecracker currently under such police surveillance that he has to impart his lessons of crime from the roof of his apartment building, among blowing sheets of laundry; they haven't a chance. If they lived in a neorealist universe, their story would be tragic. Everyone really is broke, hustling, distracted and displaced; the black-and-white location shooting shows us an unglamorous Rome of concrete high-rises and train tracks. Criminals are introduced not by their talents, but by their predicaments. Even the wet-lit night streets in the opening scene do not signal the stone cold cynicism of film noir, but a kind of resigned shrug as a car thief fails to get the vehicle in gear or even shut off the alarm before the cops show up. But fortunately that means that they live in the closely adjacent, dell'arte-descended genre of commedia all'italiana, and so it's hilarious, with much of the comedy and the pathos generated by the thin line between the two. I'm reluctant to label the film a spoof, even knowing it's taking off on Jules Dassin's groundbreaking Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes, 1955) and its immediate successors: nothing in it is unbelievable, just inept, inopportune, and snafu. No one is pushed into caricature to reach a joke. The setbacks suffered by the protagonists are all individually realistic; it's the relentless accumulation that adds up to classic farce. The ending is refreshingly sweeter than I thought our hopeful no-hopers were headed for. I should warn people nonetheless that it is a bad film to watch if you get hungry in the middle of the night.
As with its predecessor Le samouraï (1967), I am finding Jean-Pierre Melville's Le cercle rouge (1970) difficult to describe without giving the impression of another kind of movie altogether. It is a heist film, but it runs a full hour before anything in the oblique, contemplative, richly suggestive plot makes this fact concrete. It opens by tracking two characters so apparently unrelated, I had to study the weather, the season, and the times of day in order to feel certain that their scenes were taking place simultaneously rather than heralding a nonlinear plot. Having taken a five-year fall for a mob boss, Corey (Alain Delon) is released from prison on the same morning that Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) makes a daring escape from police custody aboard a moving train; while Corey visits his erstwhile employer, a pool hall, and a used car dealership, Vogel is stumbling through winter fields, wading a river in his briefs to throw off the dogs baying behind him. Their paths converge in the parking lot of a roadside café with such perfect timing that the audience may be forgiven for assuming that one is the other's accomplice, but it's pure chance—or the inevitable, impersonal fate evoked by Melville in the epigraph: Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: "When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle."1 Slowly the film's circle widens to include the cat-loving inspector whose job is on the line for letting Vogel escape (André Bourvil), the nightclub owner to whom all the underworld comes sooner or later (François Périer), and ex-police marksman Jansen (Yves Montand), future key to the successful heist of Mauboussin's and current hallucinating drunk. The heist itself is performed in silence, a piece of perfect choreography that no one has explained in advance except for the camera, identifying the critical detail for audience members who have learned to think like Melville's minimalist protagonists. In retrospect I felt I should have seen the ending coming, but in my defense it's not like the film had in any way observed the rules of its genre until then. It's not a fast-paced movie at 140 minutes, but it never feels slow; it's visually cool, but not emotionally cold; Paris is both a beautiful nighttime backdrop and a real city full of people who behave with predictable geometry and appalling curveball impulsivity. I've seen three movies now by Melville and liked all three of them very much. One of them didn't even star Alain Delon.
Oh, Topkapi (1964). Go read
derspatchel's post if you want a real description of the experience. I am mostly here to reaffirm my enduring love for Jules Dassin, from The Canterville Ghost (1944) and A Letter for Evie (1946) through The Naked City (1948) and Rififi, which I don't appear to have written about yet. If you accept, however, that the latter film is both parent and original of the heist genre and that it is an incredible, gritty, fatalistic downer, then you may understand why it is hilarious that Topkapi is a Technicolor comedy. Which it is, from its psychedelic carnival prologue to the introduction of Peter Ustinov as designated "schmo" Arthur Simpson, who's failing as even a small-time hustler when we meet him on the docks of Piraeus. One minute he's agreeing to drive a car across the border to Istanbul and the next thing he knows he's answering to the Turkish police and shortly after that he's been recruited into a scheme to steal an emerald-encrusted dagger from the Topkapı Palace for Melina Mercouri's lynx-eyed adventurer, a master thief who likes beautiful jewels and beautiful men in that order—it's all above Arthur's pay grade, but he follows along gamely and the audience enjoys the ride. There's a strategist, a toymaker, an acrobat, a strongman; a soused cook who believes he's working for a household of Russian spies. Mercouri has chemistry with everything, including inanimate objects and a stadium full of half-naked wrestlers. Maximilian Schell has nothing to do with Nazi Germany.2 I cannot understand why Robert Morley never played the Penguin. The heist takes a half-hour at least and works like something out of Cirque du Soleil. Ustinov throughout is a hapless, sympathetic lens on this glamorous caper, the sort of steadfast loser who can answer an encouraging "You're not going to lose your nerve now?" with the rueful and entirely honest "It's not a question of losing my nerve—I never had none." He doesn't lose his hold on the rope, though. The whole gallimaufry is loosely adapted from Eric Ambler's novel The Light of Day (1962) and it's a lot of fun. All I'd remembered from childhood was a key image of the heist, which I should not spoil.Man, everything I write now wants to be a 2000-word essay. This needs work. Next year I'll stay all night at the HFA and then I can justify the wordcount. This triptych brought to you by my excellent backers at Patreon.
1. The other thing Le cercle rouge may be is a love story. I found it very difficult not to read Corey and Vogel as romantically linked, at least in potential: Vogel stowing away in the trunk of Corey's Plymouth Fury is a criminal meet-cute if ever I've seen one, and the exchange which seals their mutual trust puts real emotional significance into a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. Relocated to Paris, the two of them stay in Corey's apartment, where Vogel can be seen in a borrowed pair of pajamas. They make a classic visual pair, Delon's slenderly built, meticulous self-containment—his extraordinary beauty both anonymized and made somehow more formal by a dark mustache—against Volonté's tousle-haired saturnine volatility. (Paging
handful_ofdust, basically.) Just at the point where I started to wonder if I was atypically slash-goggling them, a woman in Santi's bar gave Corey a rose: the next time we see it, he's given it to Vogel. I stopped worrying.2. We had last seen him in Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron (1977), which made me wonder if I'd ever seen him in a role unconnected to World War II—the only movies that were coming to mind were Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), The Odessa File (1974), and A Bridge Too Far (1977), which didn't help. I felt better once I remembered about The Brothers Bloom (2008); Diamond Dog was Schell's last role. For some reason I'd mentally substituted Tom Waits.
no subject
I love seeing old things that still work, and that work so well there is no need to "better" them. I'm a sucker for stuff like the terrifying wooden escalators. Roman roads.
The Monicelli follows The Killing by two years (in release dates, anyway). I wonder what the proportion of competent/successful to incompetent/unsuccessful heist movies is. (Obviously there's one of those box grids to cover all the permutations.)
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Agreed.
The Monicelli follows The Killing by two years (in release dates, anyway).
That was one of the immediate successors I was thinking about—Melville's Bob le flambeur was the other.
I wonder what the proportion of competent/successful to incompetent/unsuccessful heist movies is.
Big Deal on Madonna Street is the earliest I've seen in which the heist itself, rather than the aftermath, is a failure. Even The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) follows the latter, more common pattern, where the crime works perfectly, but everything else unravels—Ocean's 11 (1960) and The Italian Job (1969) are the same way. The heist in Madonna Street fails amazingly.
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Maybe this is intertwined with fear of ethnic gangs?
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It's a major point in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Rififi (1955) as well.
Maybe this is intertwined with fear of ethnic gangs?
If it only becomes prominent in the '50's, I'm more inclined to credit it as a kind of civilian transfer of wartime experience. I'm thinking of The Great Escape (1963), with the characters introduced by their various black-market occupations: the scrounger, the forger, the manufacturer, etc. They'd have similar roles if they had been formally selected for an intelligence operation.
(If the trope predates the war, I'll re-think this argument. But I'm not sure it's based on ethnicity even so.)
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You're welcome! Pedantic, ignore if I'm misinterpreting: Le cercle rouge is the heist film with Delon and Volonté, Le samouraï is the strange minimalist noir with Delon alone. But you should see both of them if you haven't already; they're beautiful films. The other Melville I've seen is Army of Shadows (L'armée des ombres, 1969): it's a story of the Resistance and it is bleak.
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I am so tired right now, I worry very much about misreading people. Thanks for clarifying as well.
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I am chagrined I missed Big Deal on Madonna Street if only because you made it sound like an Italian Damon Runyon story (Marcello Minds the Baby!) with a bit of the Jeunet/Caro avalanche of real world complications. Absolutely fascinating.
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You're right that getting trapped for hours on the roof of a greenhouse while the couple inside loudly hash out their relationship issues is totally something that would happen to the protagonists of Micmacs (2009). I wonder if the Runyon connection could have been intentional. He was adapted for film prolifically in the U.S., and as a comparison it sounds absolutely right to me, but I don't know what his international popularity was like. Anyway, we should be able to get hold of a copy: anticipating my needs as usual, Criterion has put the film out on DVD and I will gladly watch it with you again, assuming they haven't screwed up the subtitles à la The Seventh Seal. I really just loved everything about it.
(I have incredibly ambivalent feelings about the fact that it was apparently remade in 2002 as the American Welcome to Collinwood. On the one hand, completely unnecessary. On the other, starring Michael Jeter? Damn.)
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ETA: It turns out to be on Netflix after all! Yay! It says "long wait" though, but that probably just means they only have a few copies. So good: I can watch it and then if I think my dad would like it, I can get it for him.
*satisfied* All three are now in my Netflix queue, along with Le Samourai, because I'm demonstrating herd instinct, I guess, and
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Excellent! I gather it sounds like a movie your father would enjoy?
All three are now in my Netflix queue, along with Le Samourai, because I'm demonstrating herd instinct, I guess, and handful_ofdust just added it.
It is really, really good. I'm not sure it's my favorite Melville, but only because Le cercle rouge surprised me.
Which reminds me, did she tell you about Ikea Heights? It's a soap opera, told in five-minute installments, filmed surreptitiously in an Ikea store. It's pretty hilarious
No! That sounds amazing. What?
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I think Big Deal on Madonna Street would stand up to rewatch: I want to see it again, so I can show
The other two sound good too--I tell you, if it weren't for you, my Netflix list would look very sad.
I am glad to be of assistance.