ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

Ikiru
Ugetsu Monogatari
Madame de...
Tokyo Story
La Strada

5 of my fave films

The Earrings of Madame de... has resided in my top ten for almost thirty years.

I've never watched Ikiru, maybe now is the time.

I have also seen Singin' in the Rain many times, but I'm always happy to watch it again. When I first saw it I got antsy and bored during the long dance sequence, but I've come to look forward to it. It used to feel out of sync conceptually with the movie, but it eventually clicked with me that it is a celebration of how far the medium had advanced and evolved in just a few decades of color and sound.

(plus also obviously it was a massive Gene Kelly flex at the height of his powers as a movie star and director, he could do what he wanted)

Don and Cosmo are one of the truly great gay couples of the Hollywood golden era

I've watched SITR many times at home and shown it in class, but the silent sequence still strikes me as long and boring.

just learned that the "famous zip girl of the screen" Zelda (very jazz age) was played by rita moreno. although her introduction scene gets stolen by a shouting extra.

https://www.tcm.com/video/1525509/singin-in-the-rain-1951-movie-clip-that-famous-zip-girl

also little thing i missed: she's clearly dating the old guy for his money, but the announcer says "zelda's had so much unhappiness, i hope this time it's really love"

I find gene Kelly very off-putting and have seen this way too many times

Watched this yesterday and as always it's a complete joy. Remember when I was a kid my dad saying Donald O'Connor was the best, and being more familiar with silent comedy now I feel like I can really appreciate this. The energy Gene Kelly puts into the Broadway Melody section is also kind of astounding though. As a depiction of the birth of sound film there's a load this gets wrong, but as it was still fairly recent memory I suppose they probably knew but didn't care. It's probably been said a thousand times before but having these in chronological order really underlines how much this most famous example of a big studio musical also marks the end of big studio musicals - those Busby Berkeley dance spectaculars were already history, and this was Kelly's last major hit. I guess this is also the start of Hollywood looking back with nostalgia at its golden age, which it has been doing intermittently ever since. The timescale is bizarre though, the equivalent today would be a film set in the year 2000.

I don't mind Kelly's constant mugging to the camera, but I can understand anyone who finds it off-putting. I'm afraid I find Jean Hagen may be the weak link personally - her comedy performance is of course wonderful, but I just don't buy her as a silent movie star, she doesn't have that theatricality to her face. Kelly isn't 100% convincing either, but he seems to at least be trying.

If you want to see a spot-on parody of the problems with early sound film I can heartily recommend this short from 1930

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH7XlG9j0xs

Kelly's mugging helps his character, an insecu.re mediocrity

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Ikiru_poster.jpg

Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa, 1952

Morbsies #230
Sight & Sound Critics #157
Sight & Sound Directors 72

I'm at a loss: the one Kurosawa masterpiece I can't like. I can watch any number of Ozu films from this period about aging/dying men, though.

Great film

I’m with Alfred aside from the “only Kurosawa I don’t like” part. It’s no secret he’s not at the top of my list of Japanese masters (tho I do quite like his later ones), and in IKIRU’s case I just don’t think I ever get on the same wavelength of its tone. I had higher hopes for this one going in though, so the falloff might have been partially expectation-based

He's still the top of mine so that evens it out!

Love Ikiru, it's all about that long final scene with the dudes at the funeral getting drunk and angry and wondering how to Fix Things.

Yup, it is an amazing thing when the funeral comes on.

Kurosawa is a curious one. I liked to loved pretty the three or four I've seen but I never went onto obsessively track the other half a dozen or so down.

Kurosawa has like 30 films still available. and of those i think only one is out of print and hard to find (The Idiot)

First saw Ikiru as part of a Sociology Of Death college class in the late 80s. Not my favorite Kurosawa, but easily one of my fave watching experiences.

Finished this yesterday, in agreement with most of the above in one way or another, it's kind of tonally all over the place until the last section at the wake, when it finally all clicks this this is less a film about death, and more a film about bureaucracy. Also enjoyed the brief scene in the night club earlier on, I have some Japanese jazz from the era and it's really like nothing else.
His son is a prick.

Holiday is now available in full on YouTube

So is Ugetsu Monogatari

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Ugetsu_monogatari_poster.jpg

Ugetsu Monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953

Morbsies #462
Sight & Sound Critics #90

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNPfl1dcTkI

Now that most of his great films have become available in the last 20 years, I have less time for Ugetsu, but it's a landmark of creepiness and erotic sorrow.

Not my favourite Mizoguchi but still devastating, timeless

Brilliant

The phrase I see a lot is “first among equals.” I submit that there should be a similar and near-equally laudable “second among equals,” which UGETSU probably is, alongside Mizoguchi’s late run

I don't want to do "better than" arguments, so I'll try very hard not to do that, but what a movie, what magic he crafted throughout his career but the 50s especially, fuiud

I've dug thru the source material cos it fascinates me and I'd confidently argue that - like Hitchcock for example - he made his sources his own and made them better. Ugetsu taps a bunch of veins at once, political personal, but the big point is it sticks with you, it transcends what it might be "about"

It's strange that the most memorable scene from this for me is where the "samurai" brags about his non-existent virtues to his young cronies. The ghost story stuff is a little vague by comparison, though it obviously made a big impression on Tarkovsky.

So this was wild. Don't think I've ever seen anything like it.

Watched with my wife who knows a decent amount about Japanese ghost culture, my idea was that the story followed a dreamlike narrative, but she pointed out that it was a standard, fairly simple morality play if you are familiar with Japanese ghost stories. It was the atmosphere, especially the sound, that made it work for me.

yeah, there are quite a few like it. i think i prefer Kuroneko. i need to rewatch Ghost of Yotsuya (it's on youtube). Kwaidan has similar bits too. Onibaba...

useful list here, including more modern j-horror
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnica240Wq4

the kiln aspect was interesting as well - there was a bbc4 japanese traditional arts programme on just before i saw Ugetsu for the first time and the same kilns are still in use (although not universally)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Madamedeposter.jpg

Madame de..., Max Ophuls, 1953
Morbsies #499
Sight & Sound Critics #90

Sometimes the greatest film ever made.

Another cracking film.

I love Earrings... because it's a film whose editing and camera movements convey a passage of time as subtle as any novel. When I read Balzac and Trollope, the marriage between Boyer and Darrieux is how I imagine the day-to-day functionalities of a patrician 19th century marriage. The beauty of Boyer's performance is how he's perfectly willing to go along with it but with the quiet half-grins that Ophuls catches it's clear he also loves Louise enough to have given a more erotic marriage a shot if she wasn't so bent on escaping within her confines. Few films convey how possessions delineate the confines of one's own entrapment.