John Grant

It happens every year.  The studios wait until the end to release the best movies.  I find no exception this year, although Terrance Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” released in May, could qualify as the best movie of the year.  I also liked “The Artist” and “The Descendants.”  But as the clock winds down on 2011, I pick Martin Scorcese’s “Hugo” as the most enjoyable and interesting movie of the year.

Hugo in 3D

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Hugo takes place in Paris in the 1920’s, and it includes scenes with lots of gears, steam trains, and a prominent automaton who holds the secret to the whole story.  But it stays sweet and refined and never seems gothic or creepy.  Hugo, an orphan, inhabits a world where the slightest misstep could get him caught and sent to an orphanage, so he moves around on the outskirts of society, holed up in clock towers while feeding himself on stolen croisants.  It’s a Dickensian story with masterful stage sets and wonderful 3D, and it moves at a vibrant pace.

“The Old Dark House,” a 1932 film directed by James Whale, tells a story about a couple who must take refuge in a spooky mansion in the Welsh countryside.  A fierce rainstorm washes out the road, leaving them no choice but to knock on the gothic mansion’s large wooden door.  The door opens and the sinister face of Boris Karloff, the mad butler, fills the screen.

Boris Karloff and Gloria Stuart

This spooky movie stars Karloff, Melvin Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey and Lillian Bond.  The Butler’s family turns out to be the angry and suspicious Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore), her fearful brother Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger), and the family patriarch Sir Roderick Femm (Elspeth Dudgeon).  They harbor a secret about a mad and murderous sibling living in the attic.  Of course, in all gothic concoctions, someone or something sinister always lurks in the attic.
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Stuart, who later played Old Rose in “Titanic” from 1997, plays the menaced lady as she’s pursued in her white evening gown by the fiendish Karloff.  Massey, who plays Philip Waverton, becomes determined to unmask the secret in the attic, which brings tragic consequences and ends up wrecking a sizable portion of the mansion.

The film plays out as a drawing room comedy with magnificent visual touches by Whale, including a closeup of the rain falling off the hat of Melvyn Douglas, and the collapse of the road leading to the mansion.  But the film really gets a jolt of electricity when Laughton arrives, who plays Sir William Porterhouse with full British bluster.  The wisecracking Douglas, with pipe in hand, comes across as a poor man’s William Powell, and we also get a wonderful performance from Thesiger, who plays the proper, respectable but very fearful Horace.  This is one of Universal’s horror gems, even if it is the least well known.

Before Jacques Tati became Monsieur Hulot, he played a bicycle-riding postman in “Jour de Fete.”  The film, originally filmed in color, came out in black and white in 1949 with hand-tinted color scenes.  Certain scenes present individual objects in color, such as flags, balloons, bunting and wooden horses in a merry-go-round.  The story focusses on a one-day travelling carnival that comes to a small French village.  The fair features the usual games and sideshows, including a tent showing a short film about the American postal service.

Francois sees a postal film.

Director Tati, who plays a French postman named Francois, bungles through the village on his daily postal run.  He stops to help set up the carnival flagpole (with its hand-tinted French flag), stops for a “tipple” or two of wine, and fails to deliver all the mail in his leather pouch.  At one point, owing to his ineptitude, Francois manages to feed an important telegram to a goat.  But when the postman sees a film at the carnival about the efficiency of the US Post Office, its spurs him to action.

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I love it when directors emphasize the visual spectacle over the dialogue.  Tati turns up the sound on the bike’s horn, buzzing insects, cow moos, and various crashes and pratfalls, but turns down the sound on the film’s dialogue.  This technique puts the viewer into the slow and traditional pace of life.  Tati also puts lets a hunched-over old lady give us a tour of the village, so we know how the townsfolk look forward to their carnival day.  Oddly enough, the inhabitant who rises the earliest every day is an artist, who sets up his easel near the town center.  It’s as though Tati is making a comment about the artistic nature of village life, with its daily rituals and special characters putting themselves into the frame.

The film about the American postal service shows postmen delivering mail by helicopter, motorcycles and biplanes.  Francois tries to upgrade his efficiency too, but discovers that the French way works fine too.  Like the yearly carnival, Francois’ speedy day of mail delivery becomes a one-day experiment.  In this case, the traditional pace of life beats technological progress.

Terrance Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” from 1978, came to the big screen in 70 mm, but unfortunately I did not see it that way.  I enjoyed it very much on my TV screen, taking in the wheat fields on the Texas Panhandle (although it was actually filmed in Canada) through my ancient Magnavox color television set.  I love Malick’s emphasis on the visual because it gives the eerie effect of projected memory.  Dialogue-based movies seem to drag and stifle my curiosity about exploring the scene.  In Malick’s movies, I explore the geometry of the frame.

In Days of Heaven, Malick shows a burning wheat field and a plague of locusts descending on a wheat crop.  These events happen well into the story.  By then, the audience is comfortable with the story-telling style.  At the beginning of the film, however, Malick layers scenes of Richard Gere starting a fight in a Chicago steel factory with a teenage girl’s (Linda Manz) narration of the events that led her, Gere and Brooke Adams (as Gere’s girlfriend) to hop a train for the wheat fields of the Texas panhandle.  At a Texas wheat farm owned by Sam Shepard, the family settles into the daily routine of harvest and planting chores.  Shepard falls in love with Adams, and with Gere’s approval, she marries the rich but dying man.
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Since the film sets up Gere as a violent and impetuous man, I expected a confrontation between Shepard and Gere and perhaps a tragedy.  However, the tragedy lies not so much in Shepard’s fate but in Gere’s destiny.  He experiences heaven on the wheat farm and Manz’ narration says so.  But after an earlier exit from the farm, Gere returns with a pink motorcycle to find Adams resigned and happy about her marriage to Shepard.  In this heaven, Gere plays Lucifer, suffering from the sin of pride.  Shepard finally figures it out.  When Gere leaves the farm for good, he returns to the violent and uncertain world.  Outside of heaven, there are no guarantees.