104 in 2009 Week 28: Orpheus, The Firemen's Ball, The Quiet Earth, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, and The Man Who Never Was

A big five movies this week. Or, at least, four movies and a. . .thing.

Orphee (Orpheus)
Jean Cocteau, 1950

Orpheus (Jean Marais), a poet, becomes ensnared in a deadly love quadrangle (love square?) involving his wife, Euridyce (Marie Dea), the physical embodiment of death (Maria Casares), and death’s servant/chauffeur (Francoise Perier).

Orpheus is a wildly uneven movie, full of striking images (the bombed out buildings in the world of the dead) and clever conceits (the explanation for why mirrors serve as the gateway to the world of the dead) that coexist with effects that were crude even for the time (all of the reversed action) and bizarrely tone-deaf farce (Orpheus’s attempts not to look at his wife). The negatives have a way of canceling out the positives – because the effects are so crude, and the artifice so apparent, they fantastical elements never really reach the level of surrealism, instead seeming silly most of the time.

The terrible and intrusive narration doesn’t help matters, particularly with the oddly defensive and apologetic introduction that tells us the story of Orpheus is a legend and it doesn’t matter when it takes place. It’s really not a relevant point to make, though, because this movie has about as much to do with the myth of Orpheus as O Brother, Where Art Thou has to do with The Odyssey – that is to say, there are names in common, and plot points, but they’re all twisted around to the point of losing all of the original meaning. This isn’t inherently a problem, but Orpheus would probably stand better on its own, without the clumsy attempt to graft on that additional layer of meaning. In fact, despite the title, Orpheus himself is really a supporting character – the way the movie concludes makes it clear that it is Heurtebise (the chauffeur)’s story being told. This explains why I spent most of the running time wondering why Huertebise was so much more interesting and likable than the ostensible lead. I have to give Cocteau credit for that.

Overall, though, it was a pretty big disappointment.

4/10

Hori, ma Panenko (The Firemen’s Ball)
Milos Forman, 1968

The fire brigade in a small Czech town throws a ball to honor their former chairman, who just turned 86. Everything goes wrong, and they are powerless to stop it.

The Firemen’s Ball was a daring, subversive film in its day – to the point of being banned in its native country. The pathetic attempts of the firemen to exert control over the masses are an obvious metaphor for the oppressive government, and viewed in that light, this is a brutally satirical film. Unfortunately, time has not been kind, and what once seemed dangerous is now kind of quaint. Normally I wouldn’t hold that against a movie – but the problem is that The Firemen’s Ball doesn’t really offer much beyond its governmental critique. There are a few laughs, to be sure, but no distinctive characters to speak of and it drags, even though it runs less than 90 minutes.

3.5/10

The Quiet Earth
Geoff Murphy, 1985

A scientist (Bruno Lawrence) wakes one morning to discover that every other living being has mysteriously disappeared – and that it may be related to the project he was working on. As the guilt and isolation slowly drive him to the point of suicide, he begins to notice that he’s not alone. . .

This is not your typical sci-fi epic. It’s basically a three-character piece. There are other actors and characters around, but only as corpses. And for the first half of the movie, it’s a one-man show. Fortunately, Bruno Lawrence has the chops to pull it off. Conceptually, a lot of what we see during this segment is kind of standard end of the world fare, recalling (just off the top of my head) Day of the Triffids and Dawn of the Dead, among others – but it remains compelling and distinct due in large part to Lawrence’s performance. Murphy also manages to generate some fantastic images of an empty world, with the saxophone/rain shot as a standout.

Once the other characters begin to enter the story, it becomes considerably less interesting. It’s never bad, but there seems to be a distinct lack of inspiration at this point, with the two men and one woman falling into exactly the sort of conflicts you would expect them to. Fortunately, things swing back around in the last twenty minutes, as we delve into the dimensional shift (or whatever it was) that caused the disappearance in the first place. Things start to get kind of strange at this point, and it all leads to an ending that doesn’t entirely make sense, but makes just enough sense to be satisfying.

It’s a flawed film overall, but interestingly so, and I liked it a lot.

8/10

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
Steve Oedekirk, 2002

No.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA
HOOOOOOOOOOHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That was the sound that I didn’t make during this movie.

Yes, that is hyperbole. No, I don’t want to discuss it further.

1.5/10

The Man Who Never Was
Ronald Neame, 1956

The true story of a British plot to mislead Nazi intelligence by planting the dead body of a man who never really existed, carrying forged documents.

The Man Who Never Was is two movies in one. The first is essentially a procedural, detailing the development of the misinformation campaign and the struggle to avoid exposing the truth after the plan is enacted. It’s a terrific story, well told, and surprisingly suspenseful given the low-key nature of most of the events that take place. There’s a wonderful sequence in the middle of the film where the corpse is prepared for service in an underground morgue while an air raid (played out as sound only) takes place. If this is all there was to The Man Who Never Was, I would be very enthusiastic about it.

The problem is, there’s another movie interspersed into it – a terrible melodrama about a librarian who is in love with a doomed pilot. Gloria Grahame, who is usually very good, overplays the librarian role horrendously, and seems to have refused to wear makeup during the shoot (they could have lit the entire set with the shine from her face). She can’t be solely blamed, though, because the material is also extremely florid and overblown. Eventually she plays a key part in the procedural, but this whole plotline does far more damage than good. This, coupled with the over the top music (noticing a pattern here?) and the portentously intoned poetry that bookends the piece (how about now?) drag a movie that would otherwise be an 8 or an 8.5 quite a way down the scale.

6/10

Progress: 64 (Par +8)