Last In, First Out / L'ordre et la sécurité du monde (1978)

Last In, First Out / L'ordre et la sécurité du monde (1978)   

Claude d'Anna is an obscure (pardon my French;) arthouse French director. I have not seen any film of his until this one. I guess this is also a curio in his filmography, it is obvious this is not a thriller / genre director at work here. 

Youtube just put this film in front of me (scroll down), with a cover still of Dennis Hopper. So, obviously I took a look...it's dubbed in French. Some small passages though, his real voice can be heard...(he does not talk much ;)

A very ecclectic cast: Marie-France Bonin (as Laure Dechansel, also co-writer, her real job) , she is the lead and the weakest element of the ensemble, Bruno Cremer (picked probably after Friedkin's Sorcerer). Gabriele Ferzetti, Dennis Hopper, Donald Pleasence (his part is barely a cameo), Joseph Cotten (petty cool as the big boss), Michel Bouquet (mosltyl on the phone), Pierre Santini and Vernon Dobtcheff as the Receptionist ! The names of the characters are cool too, Richter, Herzog, Rothko, Medford, Lehman, Muller, Kauffer and Foster Johnson (Cotten), serious names if you ask me, but you don't ;) 

Cool pre-credits intro, also interesting title sequence, after which you would expect more to come, but... 

A time capsule, some of it very tiring, heavy verbally plotted- An African nation, American companies, banking, capitalism, industrial espionage, colonialism, natural resources, . Mostly talking heads, people on telephones, train trips, based on a premise of mistaken identity -pasports swap- and a McGuffin of a secret dossier. 

The train goes Zurich -Belfort-Paris. There's a chase between Cremer and Hopper, pretty well done. That's about all the action you get. And a downbeat ending, very much a la maison in the French, Italian films of that time. 

Most interesting of course today to see for Hopper, who is at his most menacing as Medford, the mercenary in pursuit of the dossier. He sits many scenes on the train, in the back, a silhouette, chain-smoking.

He looks like a psycho, black leather jacket, cool haircut, and nasal spray. He's a like a younger version of Frank Booth. Hopper did some European fares at the time (The American Friend), then he went to do Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. 

#Music by Claude Nougaro and Maurice Vander, with a cool (but sad) song on the end credits (Nous n'avons pas de passeport).

                                                           All the film here !

3 out of 5 / 6 out of 10 !

What a Way to Go! (1964)

 What A Cast!... What A Past!... What A Show!...

Plot: A widow (Shirley MacLaine) discusses her past four marriages with her shrink. All of her four husbands got incredibly rich and died abruptly because of their money driven goals. 

 What a Way to Go! is a zanny 1964 comedy, ahead of its time. A combo of genres, parodies, witty script and great cast, plus Edith Head's costumes and gowns. Glorious CinemaScope (2.35.1), a very expensive film at the time.

You can say it was a leftie film, the idea of money can't bring you happiness, really , right? ;).

Screenwriters: Legendary Broadway duo Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The director is Brit J. Lee Thompson, that is mostly known for thrillers (the original Cape Fear), war movies (The Guns of Navarone), Planet of the Apes sequels (he was supposed to direct the original), westerns (Mackenna's Gold), a weird reincarnation film (The Reincarnation of Peter Proud) and many Charles Bronson vehicles. But in the 60's Thompson did a couple of off-beat comedies, next on John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! written by William Peter Blatty, also with Shirley MacLaine. 

Coincidentally I finished the new Cape Fear series, after much wanting to see again the original, on J. Lee Thompson's birthday, August 1st (he was born in 1914!). 

Shirley MacLaine was hot after Billy Wilder's Irma la Douce (1963) but this was originally Marilyn Monroe's film. After Monroe died Elisabeth Taylor was supposed to be in th lead. That's why you have all kind of Cleopatra puns. 

Oscar nominations for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (color) and Best costume design. 

Gene Kelly won an award in Locarno !

Seconds: Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin, Gene Kelly, and Dick Van Dyke.

psychiatrist: Robert Cummings. 

Best bit imo: the Lush Budgett film parody. In 1966 an LA band took the name of Lush Budgett !

Oh, I forgot, you can see the film on youtube here. It's a very good copy. By Lush Budgett.;)

4 out of 5 ! 8 out of 10 !!!

RIP Vincent Pastore

Pussy is no more...Vincent Pastore played most famously Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero on the HBO drama series The Sopranos, for which he got a Screen Actors Guild Award. 

He was also in Scorsese's Goodfellas and the HBO film Gotti. He was 80...

In Bruges (2008)

 Romanian version here. I was aked to to piece for the TIFF 25 retrospective in AperiTIFF and here it is. 

"They're Filming Midgets..."

Heaven, hell or purgatory? It's Bruges!

An extraordinary debut by Irish filmmaker Martin McDonagh (Seven Psychopats, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri), In Bruges is one of the very best films of 2008—and much more than that. A cult film par excellence, it becomes more valuable every time I revisit it. I am still astonished that, after premiering at Sundance, it failed to win any major awards there. It did go on to win Colin Farrell a Golden Globe and earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, a category it won at the BAFTAs.

I like to think, however, that it did for tourism in Bruges what Roman Holiday did for Rome!

I, for one, spent a day there in 2014, and my impressions matched Ray's point of view exactly, as opposed to Ken's.

The Colin Farrell/Ray – Brendan Gleeson/Ken pairing is fabulous, and McDonagh reunited them fourteen years later in another extraordinary film, The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).

And Ralph Fiennes as Harry is impeccable, ferocious—an irresistible character.

You can tell that McDonagh is also a playwright, and that his literary influences stem from the Theatre of the Absurd, yet the film remains intensely cinematic.

First and foremost, it owes a great deal to Harold Pinter's 1959 play The Dumb Waiter. In turn, Pinter's play was inspired by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). Add a touch of British gangster cinema—Irish, in this case—a hint of Bruegel landscapes in Bruges, nihilism, a fatal trauma, an improbable love story, and black, absurd humour turned up to eleven.

Other clues: Touch of Evil, Don't Look Now, Carlito's Way, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Carter Burwell's score most likely came into McDonagh's world via the Coen Brothers (see Fargo in the same TIFF retrospective of black comedies), with whom McDonagh began a wonderful collaboration that continued throughout all of his subsequent films.

Like Fargo, In Bruges was never released theatrically in Romania at the time.

Alin Ludu Dumbravă