104 in 2009 Week 29: The General and Chinese Roulette

Just two this week, but I also got the chance to rewatch Alphaville, which I saw a few years ago (March 19, 2006). As I mentioned in my review of A Woman is a Woman, I hated it at the time - but after enjoying Woman and Pierrot Le Fou immensely, I started to wonder if I had misjudged it. I'm pleased to say that this is the case - while it's not nearly the equal of the other two, it's a solid, interesting film in its own right. I've re-rated it from a 2 to a 7, which is very nearly the largest jump any movie has made on my scale. It is beaton only by The Limey, which, over the course of several viewings, moved its way up from a 4.5 to a 10. But enough about that, on to this week's movies. . .

The General
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1927

A southern train engineer (Keaton) is unable to enlist in the Confederate Army because his job is too important. The love of his life, Annabelle (Marion Mack), rejects him for cowardice because he doesn’t enlist – but he gets the chance to prove his bravery when Union soldiers steal his train and kidnap Annabelle.

Wow. When you come across something like this, it’s always kind of exciting. I’d always written Buster Keaton off because of my general dislike for the extreme mugging that seems to be an inherent part of the comedy of the era – but it turns out that what he does is something else altogether. This is a comedy that is played almost completely straight, with big budget action sequences and a story that could work just as well without the jokes. I have to give a certain degree of credit to the new 2003 score by the Alloy Orchestra – while it sounds a tad modern and synth-ey, it accompanies the action very well and almost never lets on that this is a comedy, which makes it all the funnier. I can’t imagine how painful this could be if there were a cartoony score full of whistles and cymbal hits. Of course, somewhere out there that painful score may well exist – silent movies rarely had specific scores, so for the most part, the local theater played whatever they thought was appropriate. Is it appropriate to take the score into account when considering the effect of a silent movie? Perhaps not, but at the same time, music has such a tremendous impact that it’s nearly impossible not to.

The really amazing thing, though, are the ridiculously difficult and dangerous stunts and gags that Keaton pulls off, without the use of a double and usually on a fast-moving train. We’re all used to extreme computer-generated stunts now, and they’re pulled off very smoothly, so it almost doesn’t register just how absurd the things he does are – like sitting on the front of a moving train and throwing a large chunk of lumber at another chunk in order to bounce it away before the train hits. Hell, they even blew up a bridge with a locomotive driving across it. Not a model bridge, mind you, a real bridge. With a real train. And the whole time, Keaton keeps his wonderful deadpan expression. Fantastic.

9/10

Chinesiches Roulette (Chinese Roulette)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1977

A married couple (Margit Carstensen and Alexander Allerson), their respective lovers (Anna Karina and Ulli Lommel), and the hired help (Brigitte Mira, Volker Spengler, and Macha Meril) all converge on a mansion at the behest of the angry, polio-stricken daughter (Andrea Schober), who intends to manipulate them all into honest expressions of hatred and cruelty.
The word dysfunctional is often used to describe relationships, especially in fiction. Here, I think it applies to the individuals as well – the people in this movie don’t seem like they should be able to function on their own, much less in relation to one another. Basically, Chinese Roulette is an exercise in getting these people together and be horribly, horribly cruel to one another. At this, it succeeds spectacularly – and I'm not damning with faint praise, it actually is fascinating to watch the dynamics between the characters, with all of their sublimated rage. The Chinese Roulette game itself, which takes up almost the entire last half hour of the movie, serves to provide structure and impetus to the cruelty: The players divide into two teams. One team picks a member of the other team, and then the second team asks a series of questions (for instance, “what would be an appropriate death for this person?”) to try and figure out which of them was selected. Without a superhumanly friendly crowd, it would take a sick, sick bastard to want to play this game. As you can guess, it was the highlight of the movie.

The problem is, as much as I enjoyed wallowing in anger and misery, the plot is too thin for the already short running time, and it never really amounts to anything. The very end is a total cheat as well, a way to artificially create a mystery that doesn’t really add any meaning to anything else that happened. Also, despite receiving top billing (most likely, a good chunk of the funding came from her name), Anna Karina was criminally underused. There’s definitely plenty of good in this movie, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the problems.

4.5/10

Progress: 66 (Par + 8)