The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939) A Film by Kenji Mizoguchi

"On the back cover of their Blu-ray release of The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, the Criterion Collection heralds the 1939 Kenji Mizoguchi film as 'the first full realization of the hypnotic long takes and eloquent camera movements that would come to define the director's films'—a seductive claim, to be sure, but one with the potential to mislead. The Japanese filmmaker was experimenting with the cited aesthetic as early as 1935 with The Downfall of Osen, which withheld a close-up revelation of its titular protagonist until the tail end of a lugubrious flashback structure, while 1937's criminally underseen The Straits of Love and Hate, inspired by Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection, plays like a model for Hou Hsiao-hsien's work in its serene patience and pictorial distance. That's, of course, to account for only Mizoguchi's extant films; within the dozens undiscovered, it's reasonable to assume, given the stylistically bold temperament of something even as early as 1925's The Song of Home, that there's some sophisticated time-sculpting going on elsewhere."

Reviewed the new Criterion Blu-ray.

History is Made at Night (1937) A Film by Frank Borzage

Frank Borzage's History is Made at Night bounces around—no, jolts—between two diametrically opposed tonal/emotional realms treated to differing stylistic registers: first, the familiar Borzagean realm of love and bliss, and second, the world of obsession, wealth and power, here standing in for any number of frictional forces (others include war and poverty) propped up against love’s attainment throughout his body of work. In the former, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur, through the sheer indomitability of their enchantment with one another, seem to bend reality to meet their desires. They can singlehandedly reopen a restaurant after hours, cross a bustling New York City street without so much as flinching at the braking and honking automobiles, and survive a surefire shipwreck in the Antarctic. In this realm, Borzage indulges romantic orchestral music and sweeping tracking shots (one particularly virtuosic one glides with the newly love-drunk Boyer through the maze-like dining room of his restaurant and into the elaborate kitchen in the back). The lovers are often joined in frame here, the space they mutually occupy made whole.

In Borzage’s contrasting tonal register, the opposite is true. Scenes playing out in single rooms get chopped up into 5, 7, 10 angles, all isolating and/or organizing characters into stiff geometric patterns—a common one being a triangle that shows two suited men bearing down on a nervous Arthur. Borzage uses mirrors to further fragment space; there’s even a recurring motif of the heroine’s back to the camera, whereby we only glimpse her expression through a reflection. In the scenes with Boyer, hands are friendly anthropomorphized puppets, but here they become disembodied strangling instruments, with an unnerving Colin Clive reflexively finding his paws around his wife’s throat. And, throughout all this, there are no lilting strings to soften the mood, only a static room tone.

The function of the film’s increasingly ludicrous plot—which involves speedy transcontinental relocation, nightlife entrepreneurship, a murder case, and a long-distance cruise—is to have the fragmentary unease encroach upon the fairy-tale simplicity until the worlds collide, the point being to illustrate love’s ability to conquer even the most farfetched and wicked of impositions. It sounds like I’m describing any Borzage movie, and on the surface I am, but it’s the elegance with which the director stages this friction and eventual collision that makes History is Made at Night such a lucid and transformative expression of his unwavering worldview.

In what I’d hold to be the most ingenious display of Borzage’s subtlety in UCLA’s retrospective (of the films I witnessed, at least), the two realms that vie for supremacy within the film’s structure become translated as sound. The movie’s operatic final act finds Boyer and Arthur, unbeknownst to them in their attempt to escape, boarding an ocean liner actually owned by Clive, who has covertly ordered his captains to steer the ship through a treacherous pass—a suicide mission, essentially. This new route triggers a bellowing foghorn, which then becomes the rhythmic backdrop for the couple’s romantic evening in the cabin. When Boyer throws on a vinyl of classical music to class up his dinner date, the music doesn’t drown out the menacing moan; rather, the two accompaniments get overlaid awkwardly, the scene suddenly playing like an archetypal melodramatic vignette that’s being perversely tinkered with by some disapproving third party. It’s the perfect distillation of the film, enacted on the most of cunning of levels.

The Front Page (1931) A Film by Lewis Milestone

"Key to the 1930s newspaper comedy is the disjuncture between the hermetic bubble of the press room, where typists fire away at their machines and local stories get barked back and forth, and the vast, abstracted, presumably filthy world that lies outside it. The Front Page, the film that many credit as the subgenre's catalyst, puts this internal/external split front and center. Lewis Milestone's direction emphasizes the closed-off quarters of the Chicago news office to such a stifling degree that the camera almost never leaves. On the rare occasion that it does, a preponderance of frames within frames—shots through car windows, compositions that place concrete walls all around the subjects—underline the idea that the newspapermen who work in this 'round-the-clock industry can never really escape it. In a telling shot that gets repeated throughout, the team of fast-talking reporters reacts to something on the street below their elevated office and Milestone tracks from inside to outside, at which point the men are seen boxed in by the window frames." Full review of a new Kino Classics Blu-Ray of The Front Page available at Slant.

Walk Cheerfully, That Night's Wife, and Dragnet Girl (1930-33) Films by Yasujiro Ozu

"In 1930's That Night's Wife, Walk Cheerfully and 1933's Dragnet Girl, Hollywood genre films in general stick out like product placement, albeit with an appreciative rather than mercenary function. It's a significant running detail, as Ozu's filmmaking in these early capers is unmistakably, spiritually indebted to American genre cinema without necessarily incorporating any specific references. Beyond their pulpy plots, which all more or less take the form of crime-doesn't-pay parables, there are visual flourishes that Ozu would largely dispose of as his career progressed." Reviewed a new Criterion Eclipse package of three silent Ozu films for Slant Magazine.

An Evening With Vampyr (Dreyer/1932) and Steven Severin

From the vantage point of a semi-jaded soon-to-be graduate of film school, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr embodies a film-school surrealist's idea of plot: stick a character in a weird scenario, watch as things get progressively strange. But the basis of this (some might say Lynchian) approach is Vampyr, and it was a whole lot more powerful in 1932 with Dreyer's formal innovation than it is in 2012 with half-baked conception and quasi-ironic gimmickry. The film follows, circa intertitles, "young Allan Gray, who immersed himself in the study of evil worship and vampires" and "a dreamer for whom the line between the real and supernatural became blurred," as he enters a remote European village and checks in to a dark, dusty inn. From there, Allan gets involved in the macabre history of the inn, where ages of the undead still stalk the premises and all manners of paranormal happenings occur. The machinations of Vampyr's narrative would hardly meet a literal-minded screenwriter's approval – Allan's barely developed, the spatiotemporal logistics of the world are not accounted for, characters and subplots shapeshift – but Dreyer's real accomplishment here is imaginatively recreating Allan's feverish subjectivity at a time when few films attempted such levels of paranoia and disorientation.

Dreyer wastes no time establishing the off-kilter world, letting Allan be greeted immediately by bizarre occurrences. When approaching the inn, he sees a dark silhouette beside a lake bearing a scythe, but it's not quite a Death figure; it's something less overtly sinister and more down-to-earth, a man capable of enacting physical rather than abstract violence. On his first night, a crippled insomniac enters his bedroom, circling the space slowly before reaching him as if gathering up demonic forces. Leaning over, his eyes gleaming, he offers Allan a book on the vampiric history of the village and admits to his own need to be saved from the imprisoning loop of the undead. Not long after, Allan is scouring the book for secret information about the mysteries of the inn (information that Dreyer relays via shaky intertitles), and clues from the text start to materialize around him. As an audience surrogate, Allan manages to be both overeager and fundamentally detached, lending the film the feel of a waking nightmare in which nothing can be acted upon or stopped.

Vampyr is full of indelible images, and the visions accumulate at a relentless rate: a view of the shadow of a man digging a hole displayed in reverse so that it appears as if he is forcefully burying something; a wide shot of a surface of water where the reflection of a man walking by has no above-ground counterpart; a close-up of the recently bitten innkeeper's daughter turning her head slowly on axis with a chilling grin stuck to her face; an image of Allan's soul casually leaving his body; an aerial shot of his blank face as he's carried away in a coffin as well as the point-of-view shot of the sky, trees, and imposing inn from inside the coffin. Dreyer's standout images are surrounded by unsettling blankness, a peculiar emphasis on walls and doors that suggest claustrophobic dead ends. Indeed, the film's horizontality and flatness is a bold gesture in a genre in which vast, shadowy spaces are the common route for implying dread lurking where it's least expected. Vampyr, however, still summons the atmosphere of the best horror films, a visceral effect that has to do with the indistinguishability between the real and the unreal, facilitated by Dreyer's skill in filming both tangible horror and the horror of the unseen as if there's no difference.



Technically, Vampyr was Dreyer's first sound film despite its scant use of sync sound, but for all intents and purposes, it remains an expression of silent cinema. The first time I saw the film on DVD, it was accompanied by its original monaural score, a rickety orchestral haze by Wolfgang Zeller that sounds as gloriously degraded as the image, but seeing the film again in a theater setting, I was able to witness longtime Siouxsie and the Banshees' bassist and English musician Steven Severin's intense, cathartic live ambient score, perhaps even more fascinating than the original music for the way it digests the impact of Dreyer's film and intensifies its moods from a retrospective angle. Incorporating repeating motifs and movements that emphasize the cyclical nature of the vampire history in the village and Allan's sightings, Severin's music is awash in thick synth-pad drones, reverby chimes, electronic string sections, floor-shaking bass rumbles, and amorphous melodies. Certain movements suggest the dreamy romanticism of a Badalamenti/Lynch composition with its sappy tunefulness emptied out and rendered distant and ghostly (if that sounds like I'm describing what Badalamenti and Lynch are already doing on a standard piece, it goes to show how radically this score recedes into murkiness that it outdoes even their most unconventional scores).

If pressed to choose between the original and Severin's sound, I would probably opt for the latter. Coupled with this eerie, disheveled print from the 1930's, the modern ambient music offers a compelling clash of generations and approaches to the same sense of moody atmospherics. But even beyond that, Severin's music offers a more innate understanding of Dreyer's intention, a more complex and fulfilling synergy with the moods of the film, even outlining some of its tonal and thematic progressions through musical shifts that were not as obvious in the original score. Its throbbing drone sits confidently atop the action, giving shape and depth of feeling to Dreyer's more aimless interludes, and in the rare instance that Severin makes an attempt to sync loosely to what's onscreen, it's startlingly effective, as in a creepy shot when Dreyer's camera pans along a wall of shadows of dancing patrons and Severin conjures up a bygone jitterbug reminiscent of The Shining's music. I seriously hope this soundtrack iteration becomes more widely available at some point in the future, but if it never ventures beyond infrequent appearances in live settings, it's an experience not to be missed.

Babies Again: Romance Games in It Happened One Night (Capra/1934) and The Awful Truth (McCarey/1937)

“You know this is the first time in years I’ve ridden piggy back,” ponders Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) to Peter Warne (Clark Gable) in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night as the pair trudge down a country road in Connecticut, far from the laws of civilization and the men pursuing Ellie. Peter, a hard-nosed, recently unemployed journalist, disagrees: “This isn’t piggy back.” What occurs in this moment is one character’s uninhibited expression of joy followed by another’s refusal to look silly, and it’s a dynamic that is visible across many screwball comedies of the 30’s. Ellie’s joy is a simple emotion displayed without pretense, without any attempt to conform to public convention, and it is not until both characters adopt Ellie’s perspective – ultimately, a fresh, untainted perspective, like that of an infant – that they can fully connect. For the soon-to-be-lovers in It Happened One Night as well as Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, reverting to childish behavior is not a way of evading emotional truths as much as it is part of a process of revealing them.

In fact, acting childish is not only a method for following the heart; it’s what’s necessary for characters to emerge from their stuffy social environments with their authentic selves still intact. It Happened One Night and The Awful Truth, among many other similarities, begin in the upscale world of cocktail parties and businesslike marriages before moving inexorably to the untouched wilderness of Connecticut, a stand-in for nature and a tonic that awakens otherwise sublimated feelings of attraction and sexual desire. In order for that transition to occur, however, the central male/female duo must undergo a series of conflicts with each other and with their environment (not unlike the stresses endured by a traditional married couple) that will highlight the unbreakable bond between them. In these films, the characters cannot deal with these conflicts in level-headed, pragmatic ways – doing so would mean contradicting their spontaneous sexual impulses towards one another. Instead, they must approach them through other means: physical combat, role-playing, imaginary scenarios, and all other forms of games that allow them to get closer to each other and act upon the blossoming attachment between them.

Both films, at the beginning, find their central duos in denial of the connection between them, convinced for some superficial reason that they cannot get along. In It Happened One Night, Peter has stumbled upon Ellie in the midst of her escape from her father, who has settled upon the idea of Ellie marrying a rich man she has no feelings for. Peter, immediately feeling an attraction towards her and seeing the clumsiness of her ways (she is carelessly blowing her dwindling pocket change on immediate pleasures rather than doing the sensible thing and saving it for her unpredictable bus trip across country), takes it upon himself to accompany her on her escape, ready whenever to catch her when she’s about to fall. However, Peter disguises what amounts to clear attraction with the cold approach of a disciplinarian: that is, he is only helping her to save her from herself and not for any selfish reasons. Meanwhile, Ellie outspokenly rejects Peter’s assistance even as she relies upon it every step of the way. What exists for these characters is tension, a refusal to acknowledge the air of magnetism between them, and it cannot be alleviated until something loosens them up. Is there a better tool for such a thing than a game?



Unlike Peter and Ellie, Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) begin The Awful Truth as a married couple. They have the advantage of understanding each other. Or, at least they think they do. The truth (maybe the awful truth) is, if they were able to acknowledge how intimately they understand each other, the divorce they initiate at the beginning of the film and nearly consummate at the end of the film would never be a question. Thus, their situation is not entirely dissimilar to Peter and Ellie’s: they must move beyond the surface flaws of their relationship (in this case, they have trouble telling each other the truth about their respective vacations, and therefore both assume infidelity) to reach an acknowledgment of the fundamental qualities that connect them. Over the course of the film, both Lucy and Jerry develop potential partners – an old-fashioned Oklahoma oil magnate for Lucy and a materialistic sporting type for Jerry – before finding their prospect deliberately spoiled by the other person. In a way, the entire process of committing to and then rebuffing some secondary marriage is a game for Jerry and Lucy designed to illuminate the utter farce of either of them being with anyone else.

The turbulent path from detached, formal interactions to childish playfulness – a path reflected by the other progressions in the film such as from civilization to nature and from social order to disorder – is what must be traversed in these films in order for the central couples to eventually enjoy each other’s company. Peter and Ellie’s relationship shifts throughout It Happened One Night from the strict guidance reminiscent of a father-daughter relationship to a point of collaboration and equality. The first hint of this metamorphosis is a scene when they must disguise themselves as a married couple to fend off a search party who has arrived at their countryside motel room. Stunned by the sudden arrival of these men at their door, Peter must devise a strategy to drive them out of the room. He decides to pretend to be an anonymous husband in a petty argument with his anonymous wife, and the anger stemming from his argument is only expanded by the policemen’s interruption of their private space. With only slight hesitation, Ellie follows his lead, snapping back at Peter and then turning her head away in irritation while her “husband” convinces the search party that there is nothing special to see. Once they have achieved their goal of guilting the cops away, the two of them share a cathartic, hearty laughter. It is in such a moment that they mutually acknowledge, albeit non-verbally, the pleasure that can arise from this type of behavior, as well as what it can reveal about their compatible character traits.

There’s a similar moment in The Awful Truth that also tips the audience off to the intensity of understanding between its central couple, and it features Jerry and Lucy out on separate dates at a nightclub. Lucy is with her Oklahoma-born simpleton Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), and Jerry has decided to interrupt their dinner by introducing his boisterous quasi-date Dixie Belle Lee (Joyce Compton), who shortly thereafter takes center stage to perform a corny rendition of “My Dreams Are Gone With the Wind.” At every mention of the song’s title, Dixie’s dress is blown up by the fan beneath her feet, a lowbrow joke that nonetheless charms and titillates the club’s classy guests, but Lucy and Jerry share glances of discomfort and embarrassment with each other. Crystallizing the subtext, McCarey bunches them up together in the frame, leaving Dan on the far right, suggesting their unspoken bond through pictorial closeness. Even in this moment when Jerry is feigning interest in his date to disrupt Lucy’s experience and provoke jealousy (a somewhat convoluted game in itself), neither he nor Lucy can ignore that they’re in agreement.



After these initial indications of chemistry, Capra and McCarey begin to introduce additional layers of childish behavior into their narratives. Peter and Ellie steal cars, passing through the countryside shuffling through fake names and auditioning different goofy hitchhiking gestures. Jerry plays a man who’s lost interest in Lucy but still needs to complete unfinished business, and therefore the film finds him repeatedly barging into her space, often during time alone with Dan. Peter dons the persona of a professional criminal seeking $1,000,000 in ransom money in order to scare away a naïve bus passenger who tries to capitalize on the reward for finding Ellie. Lucy facilitates a scenario in which her dog Mr. Smith steals Jerry’s black top hat, causing a mix-up with the her male friend. Ellie worries about the prospect of sleeping in a straw pile in the forest and subsequently cowers in fear when she wakes up in the middle of the night and Peter is nowhere to be found. Jerry hides behind a door and tickles Lucy while she fends off Dan. In The Awful Truth’s most pivotal moment, Lucy intrudes on Jerry’s dinner party at the home of his fiancé Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont) and gets Jerry to coax her out of the house by acting as his nonexistent French sister and performing an even more tasteless version of “My Dreams Are Gone With the Wind.” The fun and games go on.

Because of this seemingly irrational behavior, these characters appear on the surface, especially to those around them, to be in broken, dysfunctional relationships. In It Happened One Night, Peter does not have the wealth or even the desire for wealth that characterizes the men in her family’s social circle. In The Awful Truth, the fact that Jerry and Lucy are on the verge of divorce only confirms the narrow-minded suspicions of those around them they must be unfit for living together. In these films, it’s very much Peter and Ellie/Jerry and Lucy against The World (It Happened One Night builds this idea into its very narrative by using two characters on the run from society), and the question of whether or not they will give in to the demands of conformity shapes the structure of the narratives, providing the overarching external conflict to match the internal conflict. There’s no better image of the ultimate victory over The World than that of Lucy – in a gesture of hilariously disingenuous “oopsiness” – lifting the emergency brake of Jerry’s car to let it roll over the edge of a cliff, prompting their mystical motorcycle ride to the outer reaches of society. From one perspective, it’s a horribly wasteful, immature move, but from another, it’s the most romantic thing possible.



But while both films set the stage for love, they also provide the roadblock. Both It Happened One Night and The Awful Truth use some form of physical division to suggest the emotional barriers erected by the two characters: in It Happened One Night, it’s the “Walls of Jericho,” a white sheet draped on a clothing line in between Peter and Ellie’s single beds, and in The Awful Truth, it’s a door that separates the two guest bedrooms at Ellie’s grandfather’s country home in Connecticut, where they spend the evening leading up to the official annulment of their marriage. These dividers must be torn down for love to bloom, and they finally are torn down at the conclusion of both films due to a blend of natural forces and personal will. That both films end promptly at the annihilation of these roadblocks underlines the symbolic significance of the plot development: everything that occurs throughout the films – the fighting, the playing, the aggressive jabber, and the traveling – leads inevitably towards this moment.

When the bed sheet tumbles to the floor and the wind blows the adjoining door open, it’s also clear that while these characters have made major leaps in their understandings of themselves and each other, they are also paradoxically at their most childish. Like babies, they are suddenly looking at the world with fresh eyes. Peter, in the end, chooses to collect $39.60 rather than the $10,000 reward offered for returning Ellie, suggesting a child innocently arguing for a quid-pro-quo approach, not an adult tainted by greed. Jerry elects not to criticize his sister’s ridiculous behavior in the presence of Barbara Vance’s family, but rather to laugh along with her. When Ellie’s father tells her before her impending wedding at the end of It Happened One Night, “I haven’t seen you cry since you were a baby,” it’s a culminating statement that speaks to the trajectories of both of these films: once at the infantile state, these characters are free to accept the truths of themselves and love each other.

Bringing Up Baby (1938) A Film by Howard Hawks

In Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks delights in introducing zany element after zany element, an accumulation of absurd details so overwhelming that it's a wonder he manages never to lose sight of the film's fundamental dramatic and thematic goals. A tame leopard, a pending $1 million museum donation, a missing Brontosaurus bone known as the intercostal clavicle (this being a screwball comedy, a term that receives its fair share of repetition), a yapping dog that likes burying things deep in the ground, a rural circus and the wild leopard it mistakenly lets loose, and plenty of other details compile around the central comic entanglement of David Huxley (Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn). David's a prudish, even-tempered paleontologist with an impending marriage to a professional assistant that's destined to develop into a passionless coexistence, as well as a four-year-in-the-making dinosaur sculpture waiting on one last elusive bone. Susan's a prickly, siren-voiced, and utterly selfish ditzy woman gone madly desperate for love. Hawks creates two people so totally opposite that the increasingly surreal series of events and parade of oddness they collaboratively produce feels like a natural extension of the void existing between them.

This void is at first deepened, then detailed, and finally eliminated through Hawks' construction, a series of combative circumstances and childish games ever escalating in absurdity and dramatic stakes. In the early stages of the plot, mistaken identity plays a pivotal role in the combat between Grant and Hepburn. David first runs into Susan on a golf course where a mix-up occurs regarding the question of who possesses a certain golf ball that has strayed from David's hole onto Susan's. David insists that it's his, that he took a faulty swing, while Susan is insistent upon continuing to play with it. Moments later, she tries to leave the parking lot in his car, clumsily bumping other vehicles as she leaves the parking space in front of David, who pleas in irritation. Susan is plucking the objects of David's lifestyle away from him right before his eyes. If the external markers that come to define these characters are this impermanent, this liable to shift at a moment's notice (indeed, later on the very names of these characters are hilariously called into question), then the identity that they embody must be too. Hawks is aware of the duplicity of identity, the fact that humans are mere vessels for a shifting variety of potential selves that are brought about through interaction with the public world.

Susan's theft of David's possessions is passed off as unintentional yet feels oddly calculated, as if the beginnings of a compulsive longing towards David that expresses itself as the film progresses through increasingly over-the-top acts of selfishness and dependence. As outlandish, manipulative, and seemingly mean-spirited as it gets, Susan's behavior is bent on a single goal: keeping David in her company. That need is acted upon throughout in the form of conflict, which Susan explicitly refers to as being the fundamental expression of human love (though she's accusing David of creating this conflict, it's clear that it represents her inner mantra of flirtation). In order to give David a reason to be by her side, she pretends over the phone to be getting attacked by her aunt's pet leopard (the titular "Baby," which she has just been asked to temporarily care for). From there, the film proceeds in similarly loony fashion, with Susan constantly creating circumstances of a problematic nature for David so that he will be forced to spend time with her; to name a few, she parks in an illegal space in his car, she steals the adjacent vehicle, she misplaces his clothing, and she lets her aunt's dog George get a hold of and subsequently bury the intercostal clavicle. It's an awfully selfish set of actions for a character to perform, and a strange movie ploy in general, but Hepburn brings a sense of overwhelming romantic desperation to the part that prevents Susan from becoming merely a sadistic bitch.



David's goal the whole time is to recover his bone and retrieve the $1 million he had coming to him for his museum, but every time his tasks seem on the cusp of being accomplished, Susan steps in and throws a wrench in the operation. It certainly doesn't help his case that Susan's Aunt Elizabeth (May Robson) happens to be the wealthy women behind the hefty donation, and her lawyer, Alexander Peabody (George Irving), is one of Susan's good friends. What this means for David is that he has to prove to these people that he is a worthy recipient of the money while being pushed to the brink of aggression by Susan. The role of chance, such a powerful factor in the sorting out of this situation, is materialized by the traveling circus that is passing through Aunt Elizabeth's rural Connecticut town. If Baby can be said to represent a surrogate child for David and Susan – who amount to a surrogate marriage over the course of the film – then the search for the misplaced Baby and subsequent failure to recognize the right animal when presented with a wild leopard released unintentionally from the circus illustrates just how profoundly unprepared either of them are for any kind of serious adult life. Likewise, the constant roles they are forced to play, the childish games they find themselves involved in, and the lies they tell in order to avoid confronting any sort of deeper truths about themselves or about their situation, suggest the impish, chaotic lifestyle both of them seem prone to – naturally so for Susan, and perhaps beneath the surface of David's pragmatic exterior.

This move from adult responsibilities to childish tactics is mirrored by other key structural progressions in Bringing Up Baby: the move from the suburban to the rural, from day to night, and from social order to disorder. Everything in the film follows in tandem: as more craziness is dumped into the plot, the day gets longer, and the characters progress further into the dark forest in search of their leopards (shall I say, their structure?). By the end of the night, nearly all of the characters have found themselves in jail cells, and though Hawks finds a hilarious narrative justification for it (they're all recoiling from the encroaching leopard), the metaphor is about as blatant as metaphors come: not only does Susan get herself in trouble with her bewildering behavior, she also manages to swallow up everyone around her in her mad pursuit of love, which runs counter to any of the conventional methods and laws of the public world. Indeed, the success of her pursuit (and of David's) is reliant upon her(/his) ability to break from the structure of her(/his) life.



After all the dizzying layers of symbolic game-playing, there comes a beautiful shot in the final scene of the film that that suddenly crystallizes what was perhaps only vaguely visible through the overlapping chatter of Hawks’ high-velocity filmmaking: Susan breaking through David’s dinosaur and David saving her by grabbing her hand, refusing to let her fall into the rubble, a perfect visualization of a relationship that is simultaneously parasitic/destructive and productive/vital. Susan’s been clinging to David throughout the film, destroying his comfy complacency, yet the aspects of her character that so sharply contrast his persona are also the forces that agitate his sense of self and usher him towards a (potentially) "better" happiness. The bricks and mortar of Grant’s previous regressive lifestyle – after all, he's an archaeologist for God's sake, digging up bones! – have been replaced by something new, a hesitant embrace of the chaos and spontaneity that Susan represents.

But this embrace is about something less specific and less trite than love. The conclusion of Bringing Up Baby has been lambasted for the abruptness of its seeming dramatic shift – that David suddenly admits to loving Susan. However, the word "love" emerges from David out of what appears to be practical impulse: a desire to influence Susan to either get off the precarious ladder or take his hand – ultimately, to resign to safety. Yet it is significant that this is one of the few scenes in the film where Hawks shows David actively looking out for Susan's best interest. He has come around to her in some way, but how? Is he acknowledging the strangely absorbing, major influence she's had on his life? Is he, to put it simply, greeting the fact of his vulnerability? To the same extent that Grant’s final, falling-out-of-the-mouth “I Love You” is less a true statement than a verbal placeholder for a major shift within himself, Bringing Up Baby traffics in all sorts of external presentation that it proves not to be fundamentally about. In Hawks' film, everything stands for something, a dynamic alternative to a man who has built his life around empty markers of contentment.

Age of Gold (L'âge d'or) A Film by Luis Buñuel (1930)

Age of Gold is an unparalleled early example of surrealist filmmaking, and indeed a landmark of cinema in general, in which Luis Buñuel cracked open his thematic toolbox in as over-the-top a manner as possible. An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou) - his previous collaboration with surrealist painter Salvador Dali - was technically his first film (albeit with a short running time at 16 minutes), but whereas that film favored the poetics of irrationality, Age of Gold follows a thin storyline and makes several anarchic statements that were wholly absent from the former. One can actually grasp at the several meanings apparent in any given image from the film and tie them together as one coherent, if broad, commentary, as was not the case in the general euphoria of Un Chien Andalou's images, which mainly arose out of Dali and Buñuel's dreams and contained only scant, inconsequential meanings. The film is essentially the first true Buñuel film, less a product of Dali's uncompromising imagination and more of Buñuel's own sensibility, indicated by Buñuel's declaration that Dali only imagined a very small portion of the scenes in Age of Gold.

The society that Buñuel is targeting with the film is metaphorically evoked in the opening scenes which demonstrate the lives of scorpions with an instructive voice-over. Scorpions are creatures that smugly refuse the company of others during solitude, devour creatures lower than them with nonchalance, and appear genuinely intimidating. High society in Buñuel's France does not stray far from these oppressive traits. The film's protagonist, a mustachioed man with a magnetic attraction towards the glistening daughter of a clergyman, is perpetually a victim of this society, caught first in a mud bath making love to her beside religious furor led by the Majorcans, a symbol of the dominating upper class (so dominating in fact that before this, a troupe of bandits fell defeated simply for deciding to approach and attack them). He also is dragged ruthlessly around urban France by two authorities, during which he imagines the woman's advertised fashion poses as desirous sexual behavior, until he finally slips free, booting a blind man in the chest while he's at it.

In doing so, Buñuel greets for the first time his distinguished theme of desire, although it is understandably portrayed most frankly here. Once the hero finds his way into the bourgeois gathering that makes up for nearly three quarters of the film, he at last meets back up with his lover only to find his erotic appetite not entirely satisfied; an obligation and the mounting pressure of the elite sitting nearby listening to a classical music performance force him to abandon his female (leaving her to her own devices sucking sensually on the toe of a garden statue) and explode in rage in an upper story room (firing inanimate objects out the window). The film concludes with perhaps its most controversial stretch: a demented staging of "120 Days of Sodom" which features a Christ-like figure surfacing from an orgy to the repetitive clamor of the drums of Calanda. Of course there are times when Buñuel's images simply emerge out of an interest in the absurd and shocking, for instance the appearance of a cow seated like a pet atop the object of desire's bed. Moreover, this gives the film its surrealist badge, and it works splendidly as a trip through the uninhibited subconscious. It's enough of an accomplishment that Buñuel had the audacity to kick down the door to what is socially, politically, and religiously acceptable and cause public outrage in response.