A problem talking about the films of Ernst Lubitsch is that it's very hard not to just start listing the good gags, and To Be or Not to Be (1942) is full of great gags. It's also full of suspense - a film that seamlessly balances noir-ish intrigue with farce. Fascism deserves to be mocked. Fascism is a performance, and can be undermined with performance. To wring our hands over jokes about Hitler, or any other fascist past or present, is to suggest fascist figures are somehow sacrosanct. They aren't. They never will be. Become the frog that plagues Pharaoh, make der Fuehrer into a clown, reject their authority and reject the fear they want to use against you. And where whatever mask you need to to do so.
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Spine 669: Charulata
Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) is a masterpiece. We haven't seen a film that so exquisitely captures longing since Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) 500 Spines ago. In ten more years I suspect I will still be thinking about the visuals of Charulata - the swing, the bedroom window, that final pair of freeze frames - as much as I still think about, say, the camera following the cigarette in In the Mood. Absolute perfection.
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Spine 668: The Big City
We absolutely fell in love with the films of Satyajit Ray when we first watched The Music Room a few years ago, and we are so happy that Criterion is finally showing us more of his work. The Big City (1963) is an Ozu-like take of the effect progress has on the "traditional" family, an ode to female emancipation, and a condemnation of social, racial, and gender-based discrimination in Ray's homeland. And it's also a gorgeous movie. Ray is a filmmaker who knows that film is its own language, a language of the eye, of light, of frame, and The Big City has some of the most beautiful scenes we've ever seen.
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Spine 667: Seconds
We get our first John Frankenheimer feature in the Collection with Seconds (1966), though we covered his version of Dr. Moreau on a Patreon episode recently and also he directed The Comedians teleplay in the Golden Age of Television boxset. In Seconds a late middle aged banker, bored with career and marriage is stalked and blackmailed into using a MLM service that promises a new life with the face of Rock Hudson. Turns out sometimes you can't just walk away from your past with no strings attached and become a new hot person.
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Spine 666: The Devil's Backbone
Sometimes the Criterion Collection goes and does a silly thing, like releasing Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone as Spine 666. How spooky! One of the great Mexican director's films about how fascism is bad for children - a lesson we as a society apparently do actually keep needing to learn - The Devil's Backbone sets a ghost story at an orphanage during the waning years of the Spanish Civil War, just before Franco cemented power. The release is also chock full of del Toro and his collaborators talking about the film, its politics, and its special effects.
The Adam Glass and John Patrick Owatari-Dorgan attempt the sisyphean task of watching every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection. Want to support us? We’ll love you for it: www.Patreon.com/LostInCriterion
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