104 in 2009 Week 21: How to Steal a Million, The Magus, and Anna

Three movies this week, one of which maaaaaaybe shouldn't count for a couple of reasons, but I'm going to count it anyway, because it's good enough to deserve counting.

How to Steal a Million
William Wyler, 1966

Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of an art forger (Hugh Griffith). After her father unknowingly gives the Paris art museum permission to have a fake statue tested, Nicole must find a way to steal it back before the forgery is revealed. She turns to a handsome burglar (Peter O’Toole) for help, but he has an ulterior motive (here’s a hint: it involves kissing. A lot. A lot. Also, it involves a lot of kissing).

How to Steal a Million is a fluffy, pleasant comedy that pretty much coasts by on the charisma of its stars, but is definitely a minor entry in the filmographies of everyone involved. It’s fun enough to watch, but it never really comes to life, just moving everything forward in a perfunctory manner. I’m tempted to use the word lazy.

It’s also too long by a considerable amount – it’s over two hours, when it would probably feel better at 90 minutes. Fortunately, the best material comes late in the game, so by the time that you start to get bored or restless, everything finally starts to kick into gear so it winds up feeling less bloated than it is.

The actors pretty much do their thing in a basic fashion and move on, with the exception of Audrey Hepburn, who does her thing with spectacular gusto. People watch her movies so they can see her fall in love – and she does that here in spades. With her sudden glassy-eyed, dreamy, far-away look and near paralysis at key moments, I was starting to wonder if Peter O’Toole had smeared his lips with some kind of tranquilizer. I was kind of laughing at her, not with her – but hey, I was laughing, so they must have been doing something right.

6.5/10

The Magus
Guy Green, 1968

Nicholas Urfe (Michael Caine), fearful that the relationship with his girlfriend, Anne (Anna Karina), is becoming too serious, takes a job as a teacher on a small Greek island to escape. There he meets Maurice Conchis (Anthony Quinn), a supposedly dead Nazi collaborator, and the ghost of his lost love, Lily (Candice Bergen). Or maybe he meets Dr. Lambros (Anthony Quinn), and his schizophrenic patient, Julie (Candice Bergen). Then again, maybe he meets Maurice Conchis (Anthony Quinn), an avant-garde movie director, and his lead actress, Julie (Candice Bergen). Whoever they may be, they’ve been waiting for Nicholas’s arrival for a long time, so that he can play a key role in a bizarre game that he can never hope to understand.

The Magus is an infamously terrible movie, panned by critics at the time and panned by critics today. I rented it in the hope that, given the intriguing premise, strong cast, and ridiculous level of vitriol leveled at it, I might uncover some sort of misunderstood masterpiece. Sadly, this was not the case, although it’s far from the debacle that it is typically identified as. In fact, other than the insufferably smug ending, I quite liked it.

Part of the problem, critically speaking, is that it is based on a long (700+ pages), complex, and well-regarded book. A two hour movie really has no hope of satisfying fans of such a thing. The movie does feel a bit disjointed and even shallow at times, as if we’re skimming and skipping over something deeper – but from my perspective, not having read the book, that felt more enticing than frustrating. Still, that disjointedness does keep it from being as effective as it could be, and is the primary reason why something like the conceptually much simpler The Game, which shares much of the premise of this movie, has a much stronger emotional core.

Anthony Quinn is the driving force that holds this movie together, and he is front and center in the most effective segment, an extended flashback to the Nazi occupation. Michael Caine was perhaps not the best choice for his character, as he is far too cool and stoic to display the kind of psychological breakdown the role required. Anna Karina is perhaps miscast as well, seemingly far too vibrant and likeable for such a world-weary character. Still, her presence is always welcome. Candice Bergen is really just weird throughout the movie, but that actually works to its advantage. That’s a 50% success rate for the principal cast, with caveats on both sides – which well sums up the movie as a whole. Even when it’s a failure, though, it’s an interesting one, so I can’t really complain.

7/10

Anna
Pierre Koralnik, 1967

Anna (Anna Karina), an artist at an advertising agency, is accidentally photographed without her glasses in the background of a shoot. Serge (Jean-Claude Brialy), a photographer at the same agency, finds the picture and becomes obsessed with finding this woman, not realizing that she is the co-worker that he sees every day (because of the glasses, you see). Meanwhile, Anna daydreams a lot and sings about being lonely, I think. Then some weird stuff happens. . .

Before I get any farther, I need to point something out. Anna is not available in the English language. I got a copy that was most likely recorded off of French TV, although with a bit of digging, I understand that you can find it on youtube as well. Since I don’t speak French, I didn’t understand a word of it. That’s why I won’t be giving it a rating, and that’s why I’m kind of unclear on several plot points. Most of it was fairly easy to follow since, as you may have picked up from my plot summary, the basic story is pretty thin (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing). Somewhere around the ¾ mark, though, we start getting soldiers jumping on trampolines and Anna Karina in a spacesuit. With a cape.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing either; I just couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

By the way, did I mention this was a musical? It’s actually a rather strange example of the genre, about as far from the classical Gene Kelly type of production as you can get without switching to a whole other genre (not that that’s necessarily a . . . ah, who am I kidding. It’s a very good thing). Anna actually has a lot in common with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in that many of the songs aren’t really songs, per se, but just music. They lack the repetition and structure that one tends to expect from a song (There are a few exceptions, though, including the fantastically catchy Rollergirl - which you can hear in the trailer I linked to above). This is somewhat surprising given that the music was all written by Serge Gainsbourg (who also costars), a man with extensive experience writing songs. Whether you call it music, or songs, or something else, though, the soundtrack to this movie is terrific.

The visual style is also very interesting. Koralnik seems intent on keeping things as grounded as possible, tying his actors into the physical world around them. The stars are frequently photographed from angles that obscure them with foreground objects – cars, columns, other people. A lot of the camera work also seems to be hand-held, with a lot of close-ups and continually shifting framing. Oddly enough, this is more true of the musical numbers than the rest of the movie. At times, it almost starts to look like Battlestar Galactica.

All in all, I loved this movie. I love the look, I love the songs, I love the leads, I love the vibe. There’s a good feeling to it, which is particularly appropriate for watching it late at night, when you’re just a little too tired. I’d kill for some subtitles, although I do worry that the words might turn out to be a little too pedestrian, and some of the magic will be lost.

No rating/10

Progress: 46 (Par +4)