Allen Baron, 1961
You (Allen Baron) get hired to kill a low-level mob boss and spend a few days around Christmas time tailing him in preparation. Will you be able to go through with it? Will your high school girlfriend deter you? Do you etc? You! You! You! You!The most interesting thing about Blast of Silence is the narration, which is delivered in 2nd-person form (“you walk into a bar, you wonder if someone is following you,” etc). This is quite arresting, since you almost never hear that sort of thing in a movie. It also gives the proceedings a fabulous sense of immediacy right off the bat. Unfortunately, it also makes Baron's Frankie Bono feel like a bit of a cipher, despite the fact that you are given a whole mess of information about him – the narration makes him seem like a stand-in for – well, you. The audience. I guess that makes it pretty clear why this type of narration is so rarely used, but as an experiment, it’s fairly interesting.
Otherwise, the plot is pretty standard, but the performances are strong, particularly (Larry Tucker), who has a shockingly naturalistic air about him. The best scenes belong to him.
7/10
Wild Strawberries
Ingmar Bergman, 1957
Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom), an elderly doctor, travels with his daughter in law (Ingrid Thulin) to receive an honorary degree. Along the way, through flashbacks and hallucinations, he confronts the choices he's made in his life and the effect they've had on the people he loves.Dr. Borg is the nexus around which everything in this movie orbits. He’s in nearly every scene, and the few that take place without him are his flashbacks/imagination, so he’s still present in an authorial capacity. It takes a particular sort of presence to support a movie in that way, but Bergman found himself just such a presence in Victor Sjostrom. He’s so good, in fact, that it renders the ever-present narration entirely superfluous.
Bergman has always had a way with creeping, surreal dread (see Persona or Hour of the Wolf), and he indulges that side of himself here with a terrifically disquieting dream sequence that opens the picture and a less terrifying (but perhaps more upsetting) dream at the midpoint, both of which set the stage and create the context for the events that follow.
Honestly, there’s not much I could complain about, other than the unnecessary narration, and a lot that I could praise. Nonetheless, I wasn’t really moved emotionally to the degree that I think I should have been. Maybe the point was a little too simple and was hit too many times, or maybe it’s something in me. Maybe it’ll look a little different in 40-50 years.
7.5/10
Progress: 73 (Par +9)
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