Those Wonderful People Out There In The Dark

• 1900

  Last month, we waltzed through mid – 19th Century Italy. Today, we jump forward a half – century --- royalty continues its decline, the middle – class and powerful industrial leaders are ascendant in Europe. It’s a new century and the dawn of a new, perhaps golden era. But is it? Where still a force, European royalty is having its last hurrah in controlling lands far beyond their borders through vicious policies of imperialism. A minor Prince in Germany (who calls himself the German language derivation of Caesar) is going to overstep his bounds and plunge Europe and some of the rest of the world into a butcher’s shop of a conflict, known airily as WWI. As a result, the world further shunts royalty into the wastebin of history. But the desire for power, for rule over lands beyond your own borders? That remains. The eyes that lust after it, the hands that seek to grasp it, change from supposedly holy royal hands to an unholy alliance between politicians and industrial and financial might. And the world again sends its military off to slaughter one another. We saw the seeds of the downfall of royalty during the unification of Italy in Luchino Visconti’s film, The Leopard. This month, we follow two men from very different backgrounds who emerge from a unified Italy. They face the fallout of WWI and the rise of cooperation between autocracy and industrial might that forms fascism. Another decorated Italian director, Bernardo Bertolucci, mounted an ambitious film to follow their path and that of Italy as a five – hour epic, 1900. The film, which debuted in 1976, not only portrayed another turning point for Italy and the world but was a significant change for Bertolucci as he moved away from a scandalous and dark part of his career. But this is just a light story travelling over decades --- nothing to teach the US and the world in 2025…Website and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.comIG: @thosewonderfulpeopleTwitter: @FilmsInTheDark

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• The Leopard

  Visconti has been seen in this season as the director of the searing, accusatory film of the interdependence of the industrial class with the Nazis in Germany, The Damned. But where did this European industrial class arise, when Europe was still saddled with an immense set of royalty that began with kings and queens and spread its fingers into every aspect of the lives in their respective nations or nation-states until almost 1920? How was the transfer of power and wealth from the royals to a burgeoning middle- and then upper-class of technocrats, industrialists and traders brought about? How did this unweighting of the royals and shift in power to common but now wealthy families buckle civil society under the strain? In the 1963 film, The Leopard, Visconti examines the shift in the sand in the quiet, almost dispassionate gaze of a Sicilian nobleman, who sees his royal station being slowly eroded by the forces of politics, but also by the forces of economics, as wealth passes from hands supposedly blessed by a lineage from God into the more clever, adept hands of a new line. Website and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.comIG: @thosewonderfulpeopleTwitter: @FilmsInTheDark

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• The Great Silence

  As with Django, Corbucci wrote the film with his brother Bruno, as well as Vittoriano Petrilli and Mario Amendola. He’d been deeply influenced by the recent assassinations of Che Guevara, Cuban revolutionary who had tried to spark a Communist overthrow of Bolivia, and the US’ Malcolm X, a one-time Nation of Islam leader converted to the Muslim faith and killed at a speaking engagement. As the end of the 60s approached, Corbucci felt that the era of progressive political action was dwindling, to be overtaken by fierce reactionary elements. The earlier activism seemed to him to be hurled backward in progress and time. As Alex Cox noted about Corbucci’s thoughts, “You could only take on the powerful and the wicked for a short while, it seemed, before they crushed you.” Corbucci set the film’s action in 1899 Utah just prior to the Great Blizzard, the winter scenes reflecting his feelings of pessimism, depression, and disgust. Another influence --- famed Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni had secretly wished to play a role in a Spaghetti but felt his poor English would interfere --- he suggested to Corbucci to pen a film of a mute protagonist. Corbucci adapted the idea into the film sans Marcello --- it would become the second Mud and Blood work, 1968’s The Great Silence, a word play on the bleakness of the winter setting and the mute anti-hero. Website and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.comIG: @thosewonderfulpeopleTwitter: @FilmsInTheDark

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• Django

  There’s a small set of seasons that lurk after the best of winter, but before spring is in the air. You’re emerging from the wonders of a White Christmas (TM) --- those beautiful, light, star-filled dustings of a snowfall, so picturesque. Then slogging into the wet, deep, and ongoing snowfalls that you shovel every day. And then --- worse! --- the melting of that semi-season into the wet, drippy, soggy next phase --- the season of mud. Both the slogging snow and mud seasons are drags on the spirit for those who live through them --- they possess an endless feel of oppression. Contrast this with the blazing sun and hot desert environments of, well, Westerns. Even in the most desperate of Western films, the atmosphere is usually sunny, with vistas of mesas and rock formations as far as the eye can see. Think John Ford Westerns as a prime example. It’s as if the West is centered in Monument Valley, Arizona --- everything farther west is California, and everything eastward is St. Louis. And 98% of American Westerns follow suit…Website and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.comIG: @thosewonderfulpeopleTwitter: @FilmsInTheDark

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• Danger! --- Femmes Fatale

  Last season we walked through an admittedly unscientific list of the greatest character actors in recent memory --- all men and mostly known for roles as so-called bad men. But we made the promise to rebalance the favor in this season --- so here it is --- an honor roll that by definition only women fill; the femmes fatale. The direct translation is the fatal women, but above all, a female character played in predominately film noir. Part of the atmosphere, darkness, nihilism, and hopelessness of that genre is amplified by the woman who lead the protagonist (you really can’t call them heroes, the scenario being so nihilistic) by the nose, often unwittingly, into the situations that lead to their downfall. Using their beauty, their cunning, their duplicity to maneuver the gee we’re following into doing their bidding --- knocking off a bank to live large for a time, knocking off a husband who’s grown tiresome. And leaving the protagonist to face the music or holding the bag as she slips away. Thus, the understood translation of the femme fatale as a deadly or lethal woman. She crops up in most noirs, not with a voiceover as the protagonist is sometimes granted, but a part of all those noir flashbacks in which the gee traces what went wrong, and just as likely to be seen in a dark room with the shades casting shadows like prison bars across her lovely face --- portents of the future. She has a magnetic presence and deadly agency --- she walks out of the sunlight into a dark bar, or appears at a party on someone else’s arm, or walks down the stairs flashing a honey of an anklet. She hooks the gee with a glance, a look, or by sidling up to him to entice him to buy her a drink. It starts innocently, but then it goes wrong, so very wrong. Inevitably, her feelings for the guy are false, or dropped like a handkerchief, to allow her to drift again, with the money, with her freedom, off to entice and hypnotize another protagonist. As we had seven character actors last season, we have a Magnificent Seven of femmes fatale from the classic era of noir to savor, compare, and contrast. And we’ll delve into some of the sweep of their cinematic craft outside of the noir genre --- no one trick pony these ladies…Website and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.comIG: @thosewonderfulpeopleTwitter: @FilmsInTheDark

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