Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas get involved in a battle of wits and ideologies in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic romantic comedy NINOTCHKA
WEEKEND CLASSICS: NINOTCHKA (Ernst Lubitsch, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
October 3-5, 11:00 am
Series continues through November 9
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
Greta Garbo laughs — and says she doesn’t want to be alone — in Ernst Lubitsch’s magnificent pre-Cold War comedy Ninotchka, which is being shown October 3-5 in a DCP projection as part of the IFC Center Weekend Classics series “1939 — Hollywood’s Golden Year.” In her next-to-last film, Garbo is sensational as Nina Ivanovna “Ninotchka” Yakushova, a Russian envoy sent to Paris to clean up a mess left by three comrade stooges, Iranov (Sig Ruman), Buljanov (Felix Bressart), and Kopalsky (Alexander Granach). The hapless trio from the Russian Trade Board had been sent to France to sell jewelry previously owned by the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire) and now in the possession of the government following the 1917 Russian Revolution. But the duchess’s lover, Count Léon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), gets wind of the plan and attempts to break up the deal while also introducing the three men to the many decadent pleasures of a free, capitalist society. Then in waltzes the stern, by-the-book Ninotchka, who wants to set the Russian men straight, as well as Léon. “As basic material, you may not be bad,” she tells him atop the Eiffel Tower, “but you are the unfortunate product of a doomed culture.” At first, Ninotchka speaks robotically, spouting the company line, but she loosens up considerably once Léon shows her what communism has been depriving her of, yet it’s difficult for her to turn her back on the cause, leading to numerous hysterical conversations — the razor-sharp script was written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Billy Wilder, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel — that serve as both a battle of the sexes and social commentary on the Russian and French ways of life. “I’ve heard of the arrogant male in capitalistic society. It is having a superior earning power that makes you that way,” Ninotchka tells Léon shortly after meeting him on a Paris street. “A Russian! I love Russians! Comrade, I’ve been fascinated by your Five-Year Plan for the last fifteen years,” Léon responds, to which Ninotchka tersely replies, “Your type will soon be extinct.” Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Original Story, and Best Screenplay, Ninotchka is one of the most delightful romantic comedies ever made, filled with little surprises every step of the way (including a serious cameo by Bela Lugosi), serving up a blueprint that has been followed by so many films for three-quarters of a century ever since. The IFC Center series celebrating Hollywood’s most spectacular year continues through November 9 with such other splendid fare as Wuthering Heights, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind.
Vanessa Lapa’s chilling feature documentary debut, The Decent One, reveals that there wasn’t a whole lot that was decent about Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief who was the architect of the Final Solution. In 2006, Lapa’s father purchased a collection of Himmler’s diaries, letters, documents, and photographs that had initially been discovered in his home by U.S. soldiers in May 1945. The treasure trove forms the narration for Lapa’s film, as actors read from many of the items in chronological order while home movies, still images, and rare archival footage of Himmler and the rise of the SS are shown onscreen. The film includes letters, postcards, and diaries from Himmler; his parents; his wife, Marga; his mistress, Hedwig Potthast; his beloved daughter, “Püppi”; his foster son, Gerhard von Ahé; and others, in which the Gestapo head discusses love and romance, racial purity, motherhood, duty and honor, order and obedience, the Jewish question, homosexuality, and subhumans, troubling views he developed from a young age. “People don’t like me,” he writes after not being accepted into a fraternal group at college. Looking for purpose in his life, he explains, “You start to think, if only there was a war again. If only I could put my life on the line. Fight! It would be a pleasure.” He was also fully aware of the brutality of the Nazi regime. “I can predict the horrors of the future,” he notes in 1927.
Josh and Benny Safdie’s Heaven Knows What is a harrowing tale about addiction and obsession, but it turns out that its back story is much more compelling than what shows up onscreen. Josh was researching a film about the Diamond District when he came upon Arielle Holmes, a nineteen-year-old temp assistant. He was determined to find out more about her and shortly discovered that she was a homeless junkie with a wild, unpredictable druggie boyfriend, Ilya. Josh and Benny, who had previous collaborated on such indie features as The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Daddy Longlegs and the documentary Lenny Cooke, commissioned Holmes to write her story, and she quickly delivered 150 pages that ultimately inspired the film, in which Holmes plays Harley, a young heroin addict living on the streets of New York City, spanging money (begging for spare change) for her next fix while in a combative relationship with Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). Harley has done something to alienate Ilya, and she says she will kill herself to prove her love and devotion. He tells her to go ahead and do it, so she slits one of her wrists and is rushed to the hospital. That sets the stage for the rest of the lurid and sordid narrative, as Haley bounces between the cruel Ilya and her drug dealer, the far more easygoing and mellow Mike (real-life street legend Buddy Duress in his acting debut); she is also followed around by Skully (rapper Necro), who wants to save her from herself but is clearly in no position to do so.
Director Abel Ferrara packs a whole lot into controversial Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last day on earth in the multinational coproduction Pasolini. Unfortunately, it all ends up a rather confusing jumble, with Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction) and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci (Gomorrah, Black Souls) squeezing too much into too little. Willem Dafoe stars as Pasolini on November 2, 1975, as the director is interviewed by a journalist, reads the newspaper on the couch, sits down at his typewriter to work on his novel Petrolio, edits what would be his final film (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), and goes cruising to pick up a young stud. Ferrara adds enactments of scenes from the never-realized Porno-Teo-Kolossal, with Pasolini’s real-life lover, Ninetto Davoli, playing the fictional character Epifanio. (Davoli was supposed to play the younger Nunzio in the hallucinatory tale, about a search for faith and the messiah. Davoli is played by Riccardo Scamarcio in Ferrara’s film.) Ferrara never really delves into the internal makeup of Pasolini (The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema), an openly gay outspoken social and political activist, poet, Marxist, Christian, and documentarian, instead using brief episodes that only touch the surface, as if Dafoe is playing a character based on Pasolini rather than the complex man who was indeed Pasolini. But Ferrara does get very specific about Pasolini’s mysterious, brutal death. Pasolini is screening October 2, 3, and 12 at the 52nd New York Film Festival.