104 in 2009 Week 45: Assassination Bureau and A Story of Floating Weeds

Back to the old speed, two movies per week.

The Assassination Bureau
Basil Dearden, 1969

An up-and-coming reporter (Diana Rigg) convinces Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed), the chairman of the Assassination Bureau, to accept a contract on himself. Little does she know that the man bankrolling her contract (Telly Savalas) is also part of the Bureau, and has a scheme of his own.

Boy, and it started off so well. After an amusingly slapstick montage of assassinations over the decades, The Assassination Bureau kicks things off with several clever, smartly written introductory sequences. There’s a little twinkle in the eye of every actor, the witty rejoinders just roll off of their tongues, and everything seems like it’s going to be great. In short order, the apparent structure of the movie becomes apparent: Dragomiloff will travel to various European cities and outwit the Bureau member in each location that is trying to assassinate him. Simple, but fun, and well-suited to Reed’s smug charm.

If only it had stayed as simple. Instead, the whole movie begins to deflate rather dramatically, as a plot to start World War I takes over the plotline and things just get too big and ponderous. We eventually wind up with a swordfight on a zeppelin. It’s really one of the worse flameouts I’ve seen – even the Reed/Rigg chemistry seemed to diminish as it went on. This could have been a modest but wonderful comedy/thriller, and for a brief moment it was – but it all just slipped away, right on screen. Such a shame.

4/10

A Story of Floating Weeds
Yasujiro Ozu, 1934

A traveling actor (Takeshi Sakamoto) brings his troupe to the city where his beloved nephew (Koji Mitsui) lives – but the nephew is actually his son, whom he abandoned out of shame over his profession. The actor’s current mistress (Reiko Yagumo) becomes jealous and plots to tear the family apart.

This is kind of an interesting production, a silent film made several years after they’d fallen out of style. It seems there may not have ever been a score attached to it, because the DVD offers a modern composition only as a secondary option. I can’t imagine watching it without music.

Overall, the story is extremely melodramatic and even starts to border on the silly at times. Fortunately, every time it threatens to fall apart, Ozu manages to pull things back together with a wonderful bit of low-key humanity, like the father and son fishing, the child actor protectively stuffing his porcelain kitty bank into his shirt like a kangaroo pouch, or the two people (names withheld for spoiler purposes) eating together on the train at the end. Touches like these, not to mention most of the cinematography, are beautiful enough that it’s easy to overlook the excesses of the plot.

6.5/10

Progress: 117 (Par +27)