104 in 2009: Week 25: Night and Fog and Knives of the Avenger

Two very different movies, two very similar ratings. Huh. The first one is kind of a cheat - it's shorter than I tend to accept. It's a highly acclaimed movie that frequently appears on best-of lists, though, so I'm going to count it (as I did with Un Chien Andalou, for another example).

Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog)
Alain Resnais, 1955

A documentary about the Holocaust. Basically.

The first half or so of this documentary was a disappointment, given the acclaim that it typically receives. It was made up of a mixture of documentary footage of the concentration camps and newer footage shot at the same locations, now abandoned and overgrown. It’s an interesting conceit, but the focus was on the documentary footage which, combined with the matter-of-fact voiceover, gave it the tone of the sort of thing you’d seen in a middle school classroom.

But then they started showing the bodies. Mutilated, starved, bulldozed, burned . . . simulated death in movies never looks like this. The point of the flat narration suddenly became apparent, as anything else would trivialize the images, rather than showcase their full nauseating potency. I was impressed.

And yet. . . it almost seems like cheating, in a way. The imagery was horrifying, sure. It had a strong, dramatic impact – but only because of the subject matter. I don’t know that this movie presented the pre-existing footage in a way that made it any more effective than it would have been in some other (relatively neutral) context. The movie works, yes, but the reason why it works (given that the other interesting aspect, the comparison with the abandoned sites, never fully developed) is kind of disassociated from the production.

6/10

I Coltelli del Vendicatore (Knives of the Avenger)
Mario Bava, 1966

Helmut (Cameron Mitchell), a warrior with a dark past, falls in with a peasant woman (Elissa Pichelli) and her son. He soon finds himself the only thing standing between them and all manner of violent semi-political intrigue.

Knives of the Avenger is far from Mario Bava’s best effort. It was a cheap and rushed production, and this is evident in pretty much every frame. Still, Bava does what he can to make it look good, and even succeeds at times. The fight in the tavern and the climactic battle in the cave/grotto are shot with wonderfully moody lighting that would better fit a gothic horror movie, and it does a lot to help those sequences pop. Of course, that’s the sort of thing Bava could do in his sleep.

Storywise, this is basically a western made out of Vikings, which particularly owes a debt to Shane, what with the troubled drifter falling in with a poor family, becoming a father figure to the son, falling in love with the mom, and protecting them from the bad guys. The plot is actually reasonably compelling, with plenty of twists and turns - it just isn’t put forward with much enthusiasm. It’s definitely worth a look, but if you just want to see Bava’s style applied to a swords-and-sandals film, you’d do a lot better with Hercules in the Haunted World.

6/10

Progress: 53 (Par +3, and we're over the halfway point)