Billion Dollar Brain (1967) – Ken Russell

“In England, Colonel, the historic mission of the proletariat consists almost entirely of momentary interest.”

Michael Caine reprises his role as Len Deighton’s more dour than dapper spy Harry Palmer with mixed results. The venture is largely kept afloat by Russell’s stylistic direction, which succeeds in lending the first act a darkly unnerving tinge. Unfortunately, as the plot unravels so does this and everything quickly devolves into over-the-top quasi-self-parody, especially thanks to Ed Begley’s laughably one-dimensional bad guy. Caine is his characteristically dry and snarky self, but it doesn’t help when the only characters he has to interact with are walking, talking cliches (mysterious foreign femme: check, goofily endearing Soviet colonel: check, bombastic, expository villain: checkity, check check.) A modern-day recreation of the iconic icefield battle from Alexander Nevsky, with Prokofiev’s theme cleverly incorporated into the score, counts as one of the film’s few highlights.

La Belle Noiseuse (1991) – Jacques Rivette

“We want the truth in painting. It’s cruel.”

Freely adapted from the same Balzac short story that, according to art world apocrypha, inspired Picasso to paint his masterpiece Guernica, La Belle Noiseuse is a deliberate examination of the artist and his process.

Young artist Nicolas (David Bursztein) visits the villa of aging master Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) and unilaterally offers the aid of his partner Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) as a model for the reclusive painter’s unfinished masterwork. Marianne, dismayed that this offer was made without her consent, rightly divines that the best way of getting back at her lover is by determinedly going through with the deal. Nicolas soon regrets his decision but finds himself with no recourse.

The couple’s personal travails are not the focus of this film, though, and once Marianne enters the old man’s atelier, it is the creation of the eponymous portrait that takes center stage. Rivette dedicates a substantial portion of the four-hour running time to exhibiting the artistic act; Frenhofer produces sketches and ink drawings from conception to completion before our very eyes, via the hand and sensibilities of real-life French figurist Bernard Dufour. Surprisingly, these sequences are less tedious than absorbing, Dufour’s real-time creation breathing energy into the proceedings and obscuring the line between narrative cinema and documented event, drawing to mind a similar conflation of media in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s more experimental Le Mystère Picasso.

The rapport between Marianne and Frenhofer evolves from coldly distant to playful and back again as Rivette explores the symbiosis between artist and model. Frenhofer insists that the mental and physical pain imposed on Marianne during their sessions is also visited upon him, although whether or not he is telling the truth is uncertain. He also defends her suffering, maintaining that she must be destroyed before he can hope to truly capture her, but this too is questionable.

In fact, much of Frenhofer’s dialogue is so wrapped up in the “artist’s mystique” that it is difficult to accept his explanations as anything but purposefully elliptical B.S. This wouldn’t really be a problem except that one gets the feeling that he is meant to be a surrogate for Rivette, spouting out cryptic truths about the artistic process that the director expects us to swallow unquestioningly. The original Balzac story hints that the Frenhofer character may, in fact, be mad and calls into question his pontifications, a dimension that seems to have been unfortunately stripped away in this adaptation.

At the end of the film, Rivette wisely decides to withhold a glimpse of the completed masterpiece from the audience, showing us only the principal characters reacting to it. This is a shrewd move on his part because, as Marianne tells Frenhofer, the answer is always less interesting than the riddle.

Piccoli gives a strong performance here and the supporting players acquit themselves well, although they seem to spend the majority of their screen time eating modest Provençal breakfasts and navigating stretches of Gallo-Roman architecture. Jane Birkin manages to stand out as Frenhofer’s long-suffering wife and former model, although I was a bit distracted by the fact that she looks so eerily like her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Not really her fault, though, so I forgive her.

Stage Fright (1950) – Alfred Hitchcock

“After all, there must be a lot that doesn’t appear on the surface. I mean, like wheels within wheels.”

While not nearly at his best, Hitchcock still manages to craft an interesting, if not particularly suspenseful, exploration of artifice and deception. Jane Wyman is charming as an actress-turned-gumshoe looking to prove her former love’s innocence in a murder case, employing her thespian skills to gather evidence against the suspected killer, a celebrated stage figure played deliciously by Marlene Dietrich.

The material is all there, and the actors all turn in top-notch performances—particularly Alastair Sim as Wyman’s playful codger of a father and Dietrich, who manages to inject some humanity into her cold-as-ice prima donna—but unfortunately it never completely clicks. The film is lighthearted to a fault, and there are moments when it feels more akin to a Nancy Drew mystery than to a genuine thriller. While the direction is expectedly fine, there are surprisingly few of the creative flourishes and exciting set-pieces for which Hitchcock is known.

The film goes a long way to redeem itself in the final reel by delivering a plot twist that shocks on multiple levels. CAUTION: SPOILAGE FROM HERE ON OUT: Narratively speaking, the revelation of Jonathan Cooper, Wyman’s supposedly innocent former love, as the actual killer is surprising but not unbelievable, particularly because Richard Todd smartly plays Cooper with an undercurrent of menace throughout the preceding scenes. It completes the arc of his character within the audience’s perception from possible protagonist, to possible love-interest, to burdensome sod and finally to psychotic murderer, as well as playing deftly with one of Hitchcock’s favorite themes by presenting a case in which the wrong man turns out to be the right man after all.

The twist also serves a second, and much more revolutionary, function within the film by entirely subverting its opening scenes. The audience assumes Cooper’s innocence along with Wyman’s protagonist because Hitchcock shows us his side of the story acted out in flashback, a convention typically accepted as a narrative truth and necessity. By undermining such a convention, Hitchcock introduces the unreliable narrator into cinema and forces us to question the camera’s omniscience. Audiences back in 1950 were understandably not-so-pleased with having the rug pulled out from under them like that, and were furious at such “manipulative” tactics. Even Hitchcock himself later called the false flashback one of his biggest regrets.

I hate to say he’s wrong, but the move is a masterstroke in an otherwise rather unremarkable suspense-mystery, fitting in perfectly with the story’s themes of performance and staged deception. The film even opens with a Renoir-esque curtain rise that leads directly into the flashback, warning us overtly not to believe what we are seeing and exposing cinema as just another type of artifice. The Usual Suspects later took this device to its logical extreme, although one could argue that such an extension was irrelevant. Hitch already did it forty-five years prior, and he didn’t even think it was that good.

One, Two, Three (1961) – Billy Wilder

“Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad.”

Molto furioso, indeed. Billy Wilder delves back into the waters of pure farce, this time against the backdrop of a pre-Wall Berlin. James Cagney sheds his gangster persona, although not entirely, to play C.R. MacNamara, a corporate officer in the Coca-Cola army who quickly finds himself embroiled in the holy trinity of comedy: marriage, slapstick and the boss’s daughter.

The movie has more than enough laughs, with every cast member doling out one-liners like they were afraid the scene would end before they’d get a chance to. When there are misses—and there are misses—the film has already cycled through three more jokes before you get a chance to complain; the sheer volume of humor is staggering, and surprisingly effective. The dialogue takes on an almost musical rhythm of back-and-forth, punctuated by the clacking heels of the formerly-SS office assistant Schlemmer and Cagney’s repeated calls of “Sitzen Machen!”

Wilder’s screenplay tries to be an equal-opportunity offender, with Russians, Americans, Berliners, Capitalists and Communists each getting their turn with a zinger or twelve, but it’s always clear which side of the Iron Curtain its loyalties lie. Despite a few jabs at Coke and the cultural imperialism it represents, it is evident that by 1961 Wilder, regardless of his Teutonic origins, was as American as apple strudel.

Otto, an angry young Mensch and faithful Party member played by Horst Buchholz, is the film’s only significant weak point, the broadest of caricatures in a sea of broad caricatures. Like a Marxist Pygmalion, he must be transformed from a proletarian revolutionary into a “respectable” über-bourgeois in order to gain the approval of his prospective father-in-law, the CEO of Coca-Cola. Unfortunately, Otto’s over-the-top Commie schtick becomes grating very quickly, and it doesn’t help that Buchholz plays the character for maximum volume and obnoxiousness, but thankfully it’s one of the few sour notes to be found.

The film plays like a Marx Bros. flick on fast-forward, and Groucho’s name even shows up as one of an unrelenting barrage of pop and political references, in-jokes and callbacks. Red Buttons appears briefly to do an impression of Cagney, and a few scenes later Cagney does an impression of Cagney, armed with an iconic grapefruit. While you’re still smiling at this, the film just barrels onward. It is both riotous and exhausting, and quite possibly the only film whose frenetic pace justifies the use of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.”