Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas get involved in a battle of wits and ideologies in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic romantic comedy NINOTCHKA
NINOTCHKA (Ernst Lubitsch, 2012)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through January 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
Greta Garbo laughs — and says she doesn’t want to be alone — in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic pre-Cold War comedy Ninotchka, currently showing in a new 35mm print at Film Forum through January 3. 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 nearly three-quarters of a century ever since.
Multigenre master Quentin Tarantino, who as writer-director has taken on the gangster film (Reservoir Dogs), pulp movies (Pulp Fiction), Blaxploitation (Jackie Brown), the martial arts (Kill Bill, Vols. I & II), grindhouse (Death Proof), and WWII (Inglourious Basterds) with nearly universally acclaimed results, has now turned his attention to the spaghetti Western, resulting in yet another awesome achievement. A Southern Western that in many ways is the black version of Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is set immediately before the Civil War, as bounty hunter and former dentist King Schultz (Oscar winner Christoph Waltz) obtains a slave named Django (Oscar and Grammy winner Jamie Foxx) in order to track down the wanted Brittle brothers (Cooper Huckabee, Doc Duhame, and M. C. Gainey) and collect a substantial reward. Schultz has promised Django his freedom and some cash in return for his assistance, but the two stick together as they go off in search of Django’s wife, Broomhilda Von Shaft (Kerry Washington), who was brutally taken away from him and now works on the Candyland plantation owned by the slick, smooth Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and run by an Uncle Tom slave known as Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). As with most Tarantino films, things get a little violent by the end, an operatic barrage of blood and guts that would make Sam Peckinpah proud. Tarantino, who appeared in Takashi Miike’s 2007 Sukiyaki Western Django and plays a small part here as well, continues his reign as the King of the Revenge Film with Django Unchained, another movie that is, at its heart, another celebration of movies themselves. Tarantino masterfully toys with cinematic conventions, tongue often firmly in cheek, evoking a stream of Western classics, including The Wild Bunch, The Searchers, Blazing Saddles, and, of course, Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Django — he even gives a small part to Franco Nero, who played the title role in the Corbucci flick. Tarantino also adds beautifully absurd humor, primarily in the form of a riotous scene with masked marauders, a perhaps overly liberal use of the N-word, a vast array of familiar faces rounding out the cast (Don Johnson, Dennis Christopher, Bruce Dern, Tom Wopat, James Russo, Jonah Hill, Robert Carradine, and James Remar inexplicably in two roles), and, as usual, a killer soundtrack, ranging from new music by Ennio Morricone, John Legend, and Anthony Hamilton to a spectacularly out-of-place song by the late Jim Croce. He even references German literature in the form of the famous myth of Siegfried and Brunhilde. Yes, the film is too long, too violent, and too filled with stereotypes, and the story comes together a little too easily, but heck, it’s still about as much fun as you’re gonna have at the movies this year.
In 1963, producer Gastone Ferranti asked Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini to make a leftist political documentary about the postwar situation utilizing the producer’s large collection of Mondo Libero newsreel footage, answering the question “Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war?” Not thrilled with the result, he chopped Pasolini’s film in half and hired right-wing demagogue Giovanni Guareschi to create a conservative documentary providing an opposing viewpoint. La rabbia, or The Anger, opened in theaters in Italy and was quickly pulled from release, essentially disappearing until 2005, when a complete color negative was discovered and the two parts were restored and brought back together in a deluxe DVD package. La rabbia di Pasolini (The Anger of Pasolini), which is screening with the amazing La ricotta on December 26 at 4:30 as part of MoMA’s Pasolini career retrospective, is a curious examination of the state of the world. “My idea was to offer a Marxist denunciation of the society and events of the time,” Pasolini explained. Over the course of fifty-four minutes, he and editor Nino Baragli (with Giuseppe Bertolucci handling the recent reconstruction) create a cinematic collage of religion, communism, fascism, socialism, poverty, hunger, colonialism, race, and war through footage of the Hungary revolts of 1956, protests in Rome and Madrid, the war in Algeria, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the rise of Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo, and clips of such other international figures as Lenin, Stalin, Pope John XXIII, Sukarno, Nasser, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Yuri Gagarin, and even Marilyn Monroe as he poetically laments about life in the twentieth century. “People of color, it is in hope that man has no color,” one of his narrators says in the film. (The text is recited by actor Giorgio Bassani and painter Renato Guttuso; works by the latter are included in the documentary, along with pieces by Ben Shahn, Jean Fautrier, and George Grosz.) “Long live freedom,” the film repeats, but there’s not much promise for the future.
