Forbidden Games

1952 Academy Award winner, Best Foreign Film.  Synopsis: young orphan Paulette and farm boy Michel deal with the actualities of death during World War II.

This is a difficult movie to describe.  At times harrowing, hysterical, and yet tragic.  In order to give a review of my thoughts, some plot points may be deemed by some as spoilers.  You have been warned!

This movie opens up with one of the most harrowing and realistic views of WW2.  Paulette, her parents, and her dog are evacuating Paris and crossing into the countryside when an airstrike occurs.  Her parents are killed, but Paulette has no understanding of what has happened.  She picks up her dog and gets a ride with an elderly farm couple.  The woman realizes the dog is also dead and throws him off the bridge.  Paulette chases after the dog and winds up on the bank, where she is found by Michel, who has been chasing a renegade cow from his family's farm.  He decides to take Paulette home to see if his family will let him keep her.

At the farm, Michel's older brother has been gravely injured in a cart accident and while the family tends to him, they continue a feud with their neighbors.  They claim the neighbor's son is a deserter from the army, but unbeknownst to them he is wooing their daughter.

Paulette notices a graveyard with crosses and asks Michel to explain why people are buried there.  After Michel explains to her his minimal grasp of religious ceremonies, she decides to bury her dog in the Mill house.  However, she is afraid he will be lonely, so she decides to bury other animals there, while Michel begins to steal crosses to creat a perfect burial ground.

So, there's the spoilers, as they may be.  Back to the review:  This movie is one of the most evocative views of tragedy seen through a child's eyes.  Despite the horror that Paulette has seen, she finds peace and satisfaction at the "forbidden games" that she and Michel have created.  After all, she is only duplicating what she sees the adults doing with their dead.

But don't think this is a total downer of a film.  The feud between the farm neighbors adds some unexpected, and almost slapstick comedy to the preceedings.  At one point the rivalry escalates into an hysterical fight in the graveyard between the patriachs, compounded by the fact that no one is quite sure who has been stealing the crosses from the graves.

However, reality does eventually set in, and the ending is heartbreaking, to say the least.

Thanks to TCM I finally got to see this film, and I was overwhelmed!  The main key to the movie is Paulette, and this six year old gives the most unaffected, natural, non-artifice performance I've seen since "The Fall" (see my earlier blog.)  Your heart really goes out to her throughout the movie.

It is also beautifully filmed in black and white, with a score that doesn't overtake the film, but subtly enhances it. 

In a word...a Masterpiece.

Ace in the Hole

Charlie Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a disgraced New York journalist who winds up at an Albuquerque, New Mexico newspaper.  He is determined to catch his big break but is stuck covering local feature stories.  He gets assigned to a local rattlesnake hunt, but when he and the young photographer stop at an Indian Curio shop, he discovers that the owner is trapped in a mine while searching for Indian artifacts.  The owner's wife (Jan Sterling) decides it's a good time to pack her bags and leave, but Charlie thinks this story will be his big break.

He convinces the wife to stay, since he feels once the story breaks the shop will be innundated with tourists.  He also connives the corrupt sheriff into not allowing any other press into the location.  Once the tourists do show up, the scene turns into a literal media circus.  Intent to get the best story possible, Charlie even convinces the local contractor to not go through the entrance and shore up the rock (which would get the victim out in a few hours) but to drill through the top of the mountain, thereby extending the rescue by several days.

This is a forgotten masterpiece by Billy Wilder that has been thankfully restored by the Criterion collection.  And what a masterpiece it is!  Filmed in 1951, it is an eerily prescient view of the power of media.  "Media Circus" is what the rescue literally becomes...the free admission to the mine becomes a 25 cent admission, and then, once the amusement trucks bring in circus tents and a ferris wheel (!) it is raised to a dollar admission.  And to think this was filmed over 50 years before CNN!

The acting is superb.  Kirk Douglas delivers one of his most infamous roles.  His Tatum is the most amoral, manipulative character in film, and Jan Sterling equals him in her greed and indifference to the husband she wants to leave in the cave.

Although many scenes are filmed in the bright New Mexico sun, this is definitely a film noir: there are few characters of redeeming value, and the scenes in the mine are dark and claustrophobic.  And the ending is as bleak as can be.

Thanks to our friends Ron and Sandy and their son Corey for loaning this to us.  I had never heard of this one before (the movie was originally a flop at the box office,) but was curious after I read that Criterion was re-releasing it.  And what a release it is!  The film is beautifully restored, and the packaging is outstanding (the inside liner notes are in the form of the Albuquerque newspaper, complete with ads for the Curio shop and the re-election of the sheriff!)   

A long lost classic.  This is one of the most important American films ever made.