Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) lives a life filled with misery after misery in Mizoguchi melodrama
THE LIFE OF OHARU (SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, September 3, 4:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
We used to think that Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl was the saddest film ever made about a young woman who just can’t catch a break, as misery after misery keeps piling up on her ever-more-pathetic existence. But the Finnish black comedy has nothing on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu, a searing, brutal example of the Buddhist observation of impermanence and the role of women in Japanese society. The film, based on a seventeenth-century novel by Ihara Saikaku, is told in flashback, with Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) recounting what led her to become a fifty-year-old prostitute nobody wants. It all starts to go downhill after she falls in love with Katsunosuke (Toshirô Mifune), a lowly page beneath her family’s station. The affair brings shame to her mother (Tsukie Matsuura) and father (Ichiro Sugai), as well as exile. The family is redeemed when Oharu is chosen to be the concubine of Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe) in order to give birth to his heir, but Lady Matsudaira (Hisako Yamane) wants her gone once the baby is born, and so she is sent home again, without the money her father was sure would come to them. Over the next several years, Oharu becomes involved in a series of personal and financial relationships, each one beginning with at least some hope and promise for a better future but always ending in tragedy. Nevertheless, she keeps on going, despite setback after setback, bearing terrible burdens while never giving up. Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff, The 47 Ronin, Street of Shame) bathes much of the film in darkness and shadow, casting an eerie glow over the unrelentingly melodramatic narrative. Tanaka, who appeared in fifteen of Mizoguchi’s films and also became the second Japanese woman director (Love Letter, Love Under the Crucifix), gives a subtly compelling performance as Oharu, one of the most tragic figures in the history of cinema. Winner of the International Prize at the 1952 Venice International Film Festival, The Life of Oharu is screening September 3 at 4:30 as part of MoMA’s “An Auteurist History of Film Reprise,” which gives film enthusiasts a second chance to catch works that have previously been shown at MoMA at earlier hours in the day, when many people cannot see them.
The 1952 MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain is one of the all-time-great movies about movies, in this case focusing on the treacherous transition from silent films to talkies. It’s the mid-1920s, and the darlings of the silver screen are handsome Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and blonde bombshell Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen). They’re supposedly just as hot offscreen as on, as Don explains to radio gossip host Dora Bailey (Madge Blake, later best known as Aunt Harriet on the Batman TV series) at their latest Hollywood premiere, but in actuality the debonair Don can’t stand the none-too-bright yet still conniving Lina. After accidentally bumping into Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), an independent-thinking young woman who claims to not even like the movies, Don is soon trying to chase her down, determined to get to know her better. Meanwhile, studio head R. F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) decides he has to capitalize on the surprise success of the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, by turning the latest Lockwood-Lamont movie, The Dueling Cavalier, into a talkie, with initially disastrous results, threatening to bring everything and everyone crashing down.
Penny Lane’s debut documentary, the all-archival Our Nixon, offers a compelling new inside look at the Nixon White House. The classic cautionary tale about power, corruption, and paranoia, which ultimately brought down the thirty-seventh president of the United States, has been told many times before, on film (All the President’s Men, Oliver Stone’s Nixon), in books (Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon), onstage (Frost/Nixon, Checkers), and even as an opera (John Adams’s Nixon in China). When Nixon moved into the White House in January 1969, he brought along three key figures: Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, Chief Domestic Adviser John Erlichman, and Deputy Assistant Dwight Chapin. And those three men brought along Super 8 cameras, prepared to document not only their daily lives but also how they were going to change the nation. During its investigation of the Watergate scandal, the FBI confiscated more than five hundred reels of footage, totaling more than twenty-six hours, taken by Haldeman, Erlichman, and Chapin, and these home movies, which belong to the Nixon Library and have been digitized specifically for the film, form the basis of Our Nixon. Director-producer Lane combines this deeply personal footage — showing alternate views of the 1969 inauguration, a White House Easter egg hunt, the moon landing, Trisha Nixon’s wedding, Nixon’s trip to China, the Republican National Convention, and other, more mundane events — with carefully chosen audio excerpts from the White House tapes, creating a unique audiovisual experience.
The Bride of Frankenstein meets Scanners, Weird Science, and Re-Animator in Frank Henenlotter’s over-the-top horror comedy Frankenhooker. When Elizabeth Shelley (August 1986 Penthouse Pet Patty Mullen) is done in by a runaway lawn mower during a family gathering, her geeky engineer fiancé, Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz channeling 1980s star Andrew McCarthy, who is now one of the directors of the Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black), decides that he has to put her back together again. But since much of her body has been torn to shreds, Jeffrey has to go out looking for compatible parts — and just might find them at a prostitution party with some rather explosive crack on hand. As Jeffrey works tirelessly trying to rebuild and perfect his fiancée, Zorro the Pimp (Joseph Gonzalez) is hot on his trail, wanting to know what has become of his ladies of the evening. Shot in New York by native citizen Henenlotter (Basket Case, Brain Damage), Frankenhooker is silly fun, even when it gets overly ridiculous, as it regularly does. But those bodies blowing up are a hoot, and the film features some rather strange cameos, including Shirley Stoler (Seven Beauties, The Honeymoon Killers) as Spike the bartender, Louise Lasser as Jeffrey’s mother, and Zacherle as the creepy weatherman. Ted Hope, who went on to form the production company Good Machine with James Schamus, presenting films by Ang Lee, Todd Solondz, Nicole Holofcener, Hal Hartley, and others, served as first assistant director, while the script was cowritten with former Fangoria editor Robert Martin. One of those films you hate yourself for watching but you just can’t look away from, Frankenhooker is screening August 30 & 31 at 12:20 am as part of Nitehawk Cinema’s midnight series “I Heart New York Horror.” 
