Spine 709: Red River

In Jacques Demy's third film he more fully embraces his love of American musicals and takes it even further, with every line of the film being talk-sung. A beautifully vibrant film, that transitions into a beautifully desaturated film, Umbrellas is a melancholy delight.

Jacques Demy's second feature continues a trend of female characters who are more interesting than anything we've seen from the other male French New Wave directors. Jeannse Moreau stars as a woman throwing off the shackles of patriarchy by becoming addicted to roulette, becoming gambling buddies with Claude Mann as a young man throwing off the shackles of his incredibly forgiving father to feed his own growing obsession.

This week we have our first film from Agnes Varda's husband Jacques Demy and our second film called Lola. Kicking off The Essential Jacques Demy boxset we have his feature length debut Lola (1961) a "musical without the music" except for one very musical number written by Varda. This week the Collection also gives us 4 short films and while we are immediately in love with the work of Demy, at least one of the shorts puts that love to the test. Fortunately, for every profile of a modern saint there's also one about a rural shoemaker.

Sometimes years of doing the podcast align in fun ways and we get to talk about David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981) in October without moving anything around. Scanners is a smorgasbord of body horror effects that starts with a bang and keeps going. But it's also a Parallax View-esque political thriller with murderous psychics. That is to say, it's great.

Pat is a huge fan of the Beatles, which he inherits from his dad, and which he this week fails to pass on to his own children. Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964) is a movie those kids should like; it's fun and funny, it's The Beatles just on the cusp of being THE BEATLES. Popular as anything already, but not quite bigger than Jesus yet. The film is an interesting look at how that popularity is a prison for four guys in their early 20s.

Georges Franju's homage to/remake of Louis Feuillade's 1916 serial, Judex (1963) is a dreamy tale of revenge full of contrivance and illogic and every single frame is a masterpiece. Encountering films like this is biggest reward of doing the podcast.

Howard Hawks directs this grand western in which Montgomery Cliff maybe introduces Hollywood to The Method and John Wayne learns to act. It's a story about greed and America but it's not an open critique because it would be bad if we said America is bad. If nothing else John Wayne would quit the production.

Since first watching Taste of Cherry way back at Spine 45, we have looked forward to each Abbas Kiarostami the Criterion Collection has shown us. Color us intrigued when we found out that Like Someone In Love (2012) was made in Japan. Unfortunately, Pat maybe gets a little hung up on the fact that much of what the characters in this movie do don't really make sense within Japanese culture. Aside from that, it's a fantastic film.

With Il sorpasso (1962), Criterion once again shows us a single movie from a director we've never heard of and they will never mention again. As per usual, this is a great movie. An road trip through the effects of consumerism across class lines in post-war Italy, the film is a pretty clear inspiration for Easy Rider, and maybe after contextualizing Easy Rider as an American Il sorpasso we could like that movie more, too bad we'll never watch it again.

We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Master of the House (1925) is the earliest Carl Th. Dreyer we've seen and the last the Criterion has to offer us. When we watched our last Dreyer film, this one wasn't even in the Collection yet. Unfortunately, there's a reason this is the only film from Dreyer's pre-Joan of Arc period. While the seeds of what we love about Dreyer are there, this light domestic dramedy doesn't hit nearly as nicely as any of his later work that we've seen. But hey, it's still Dreyer.