Link Round-Up: Year End

Some final posts and catch up before 2014 takes over, which will have much more exciting information in the future...

Firstly: Above is a copy of my piece that appeared in the 50th issue of Little White Lies. Each writer was given a random year and chosen to write about one shot from that year. I went with the final shot of Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees. You can find LWL at some major bookstore retailers or subscribe to the magazine here. 

I also contributed to LWL's "Perfect Day 2013," in which I programmed a perfect day of film watching based on four 2013 films and one 2013 repertory release. Read that here.

For In Review Online, I wrote about Asghar Farhadi's new film, The Past, which is his quite striking and beautiful follow up to A Separation. I also burbled Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess for the site's Top 20 films of 2013.

Speaking of 2013 lists, my own will be part of an upcoming two part Cinephiliacs show with Keith Uhlich. If you cannot wait, you can see a preliminary list of some of my favorite films, performances, and undistributed films at Indiewire among other categories.

You can also pick up the latest episodes of The Cinephiliacs, which have included Imogen Sara Smith on In A Lonely Place, Nellie Killian on Five Year Diary, and Genevieve Yue on Cafe Lumiere. Lots of goodies in those discussions.

Upcoming on Masters of Cinema are booklets for William Wellman's Wings and Sidney Lumet's Serpico. You can currently pre-order both, but look for more information here on what goodies can be expected.

On Letterboxd: Lots of goodies (and a few baddies) have gotten words from me...

For 2013: American Hustle, Oldboy, Gravity, 12 Years a Slave, I Used to Be Darker, It's a Disaster, and Gold.

Howard Hawks: His Girl Friday, The Dawn Patrol, Air Force, and A Song Is Born.

Canonical Films: Providence, Manila in the Claw of Light, Arabian Nights, L'Intrus, News From Home.
 
And some esoterica: Smile, Freedom, Rapado, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

December Screening Log

Color coded via Dan Sallitt's method (Current or upcoming releases not included). Click on the titles to writing when applicable.

1.  The Chase (Penn, USA, 1966).
2.  The Women (Cukor, USA, 1939)
3.  Five Year Diary (Robertson, USA, 1982-1997)
4.  The Hanging Tree (Daves, USA, 1958)
5.  The Marrying Kind (Cukor, USA, 1959)

Also Notable (No order besides color categorization): Sparrow (To, Hong Kong, 2008), The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, USA, 1940), Cafe Lumiere (Hou, Taiwan/Japan, 2003), Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor, USA, 1935), Mauvias Sang (Carax, France, 1986), Lady of Burlesque (Wellman, USA, 1943), Born Yesterday (Cukor, USA, 1950), Running on Karma (To, Hong Kong, 2003), Spencer's Mountain (Daves, USA, 1963), Trances (Maanouni, Morocco, 1981), Youngblood Hawke (Daves, USA, 1964), Redes (Muriel/Zinnenmann, Mexico, 1936) 

Rewatches: Stalker (Tarkovsky, USSR, 1979), Touki Bouki (Mambety, Senegal, 1973)

Unique Film Writing in 2013

“95% of film writing is shit.” This is what a fellow critic reminded of me during one of my podcasts this year. The more I thought about it, I knew he was right.

But there was good film writing this year, if from a small selection of people. Most of what passes for serious film criticism is hardly serious, more than it seems what passes for good films. So this is a small selection of writing I liked this year. It’s not everything, but when I opened a Word document and remembered what pieces stayed in my mind for whatever reason, these were the ones that popped immediately into my head. There are a number of writers whom I adore not on the list simply because my mind is flawed, and there are some writers I thought of more than one piece, but I thought one should do—my friend Carson Lund has more. There is no order, but the first two are my favorites.

Kent Jones, "Intolerance," Film Comment, May 3, 2013. (Or: We cannot remain outside the sphere of our art)

It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America. It’s certainly preferable to right-wing orthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment. The New Left is now very old but its rhetoric lives on, many times removed from its original context, and that rhetoric seems to have found a welcome home in film criticism.

David Bordwell, "Mixing business with pleasure: Johnnie To’s DRUG WAR," Observations on Film Art, July 8, 2013 (Or: How a movie tells you everything you need to know)

The Milkyway writing team often treats story points in this peremptory way. If the Hollywood rule is “Tell the audience every major point three times,” To and Wai often assume that one mention is enough, and even that can come before we’re in a position to appreciate it.

Ozu

I wrote 3,300 words on Yasujiro Ozu and Tokyo Story's canonization. I would like you to read them. There is no dedication in the piece, but it would surely go to David Bordwell.

System Malfunction: Spike Jonze's Her

Many thanks to my friend and fellow cinephile-in-arms Carson Lund for helping me edit this piece.

Her is so obsessed with trying to tell a story about “how we live now” that any of its profound ideas seem quite self-evident. By playing the romance between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix, introverted to the point of limitation^[i]) and his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson^[ii]), as a serious relationship, Jonze certainly asks us to explore radical territory by thinking about our new(-ish) relationship to technology. However, it becomes quite apparent that despite this bold premise, it’s more of a sleek surface to create an allegory of loneliness. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a choice, except Jonze emphasizes his narrative through utter banality, a conventional romance about letting go of the past. Despite the uniqueness of the central relationship, Jonze is complacent in simply following through the various conventions of meet cute scenes, vulnerable people talking about their vulnerability, and various day trips that play to broad gestures of emotions. These sequences rely on montages that could come out of his 90s music videos—pleasantly shot in mutedly light colors for pleasant compositions, but rarely perceptive ones—pandering to a little more than a cinematic equivalent of BuzzFeed. It’s an emotional simulacrum without depth. 

November Screening Log

Color coded via Dan Sallitt's method (Current or upcoming releases not included). Click on the titles to writing when applicable.

1.  Chimes at Midnight (Welles, France/Spain, 1965).
2.  In the Mouth of Madness (Carpenter, USA, 1994)
3.  Red Line 7000 (Hawks, USA, 1965)
4.    Shanghai Express (Von Sternberg, USA, 1932)
5.   The Freshman (Newmeyer and Taylor, USA, 1925)

Also Notable (No order besides color categorization): Emperor of the North (Aldrich, USA, 1973), Dangerous Game (Ferrara, USA, 1993), The 'Burbs (Dante, USA, 1989), Nosferatu The Vampyre (Herzog, Germany, 1975), In Another Country (Hong, South Korea, 2012), The Big Sky (Hawks, USA, 1952), Batang West Side (Diaz, Philipines/USA, 2001)

Rewatches: Tokyo Story (Ozu, Japan, 1953), The Color Wheel (Perry, USA, 2011), Southland Tales (Kelly, USA, 2006), In a Lonely Place (Ray, USA, 1950)

Wanderers Before God: Alexander Sokurov's Faust

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Casper David Friedrich, Oil on Canvas, 1818

Somewhere between a Rabelaisian paean to Earthly pleasures, complete with the drunken waltz of the camera, and a serious investigation to the failure of human desire for knowledge, Alexander Sokurov’s Faust is quite unlike any other cinematic event I’ve encountered this year. The film’s loose adaptation of Goethe’s masterwork sees no difference between its highly aspirations and its low humor—an opening CGI shot that sets up an epic mythology ends with a blurry shot of a flaccid (and dead) penis of a cadaver being examined for the progress of human knowledge. That failure of knowledge is key for Herr Doktor, a man who has learned all he knows about the stars, only to be disappointed that he finds no pleasure in this life—that perhaps the science he defines his life brings him no pleasure (he has much to learn by the woman visiting his gynecologist father, her checkup an excuse for the orgasm the examination will produce). Even a monkey on a moon, a bizarre and lovely image, adds no interest to him. This man is destined to his meeting his Mephistopholies (Anton Adasinsky, the performance of the year), a drunken and ghastly creature who will take him through the maze of life’s lowly pleasures (a bath of virgins, a drunken pub, a mockery of a funeral), all in the hopes to make him reveal some desire worth trading his soul. Like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Faust meanders without implicit meaning or classical rhythms, forcing the viewer to accept his venture of the physical into something metaphysical, the camera spinning around like a waltz (two steps forward, one step back) in an attempt to make Faust find something within the moral schema he still submits to. Sokurov's demented view of humanity is so decidedly strange (the Devil is not just evil; he's also a bad speller) that it’s easy to dismiss his portrayal of this “important” work as the sign of a filmmaker who can’t tell good from bad, but even his obsession with bowel humor is sublimated into the great philosophical search, all implemented through the garish colors of Bruno Donbonnel's boldly inventive visual palette (at once seductive and repulsive). The film’s most beautiful moments—a golden vision of his beauty, and the two’s romantic drift into a river—are also the most tragic.

Gina Telaroli's Traveling Light

Like I noted with my piece on Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act, I consider Gina Telaroli enough of an acquaintance that I can’t completely write about her film without proper disclosure. Gina is one of NYC’s most dedicated repertory film viewers, so we do end up seeing a number of the same films and chatting before and after. The two of us are also contributing on a project to be announced at a later date.

Traveling Light deserves to be seen on the big screen, so if you are in New York, I highly recommend attending one of the three screenings at Anthology Film Archives this weekend (and pair it with one of the great train films Gina has programmed alongside). For those outside of New York, the film will stream on Lumiere for a month starting on November 15^th. It’s only an hour, and very much worth your time.

Gina Telaroli’s Traveling Light strikes me as a work essentially about loss, and one that operates unlike any other film set on a train—its visual language and rhythms are highly unique (certainly falling under the category of “experimental” but never didactically so).¹ The film is almost like a collection of postcards, filled with moments of reflection on not only how we view the world, but also how we view each other. It’s also a film that stirs emotions hard to explain. The fact that Telaroli’s initial plan for the film went haywire (described her in my interview with her) and the final work is still something of rapturous transfixion, should speak no doubt to the conviction she has when wielding cinema.

The Philosophy of Histoire(s) Du Cinema

About two hours into Histoire(s) Du Cinema, I finally had a small epiphany moment with Late Godard, a period that begins with this mammoth work and continues into what I’ve seen from the 90s and up to Socialisme. Late Godard isn’t popular with most folks who fondly remember his 60s films because he largely abandoned narrative. He’s not an avant-garde artist either, or at least in a way that where his work isn't a complete breakdown of form (See: Brakhage, Snow, Dorsky). Instead, it’s now clear to me that Godard is trying to write philosophy in the same way that Kant or Hegel or Hume write philosophy. But instead of the pen, his choice of means is cinema, where he can use the image and the juxtaposition of image to create his dialectics stronger than words could do—perhaps the closest thing to the hopes of an intellectual montage as theorized by Eisenstein. Some would call this thus an essay film—a term I must admit I still don’t have a strong hold on, so I will avoid it (Andrew Tracy provides some fantastic thoughts here on the essay film).

Thinking of Godard as philosophy gives us some easier access points into Late Godard and specifically Histoire(s) Du Cinema. Firstly, it makes me more forgiving in how inaccessible the film can sometimes be, whether by its references to events, films, and people we might not understand (Kant’s Third Critique makes numerous references to his contemporaries, and yet we can still understand his view of judgement without reading those works). Perhaps it also makes more palatable the fact that not everything—heck, at least a third of the film—remains untranslated from French. Plenty of philosophical texts I’ve read will quote Latin or Italian or what not and expect that the person reading such a work is familiar with these languages. Godard does that too—it’s frustrating to someone as naïve in other languages as me (I wrote down about 10 oft-repeated words from the film in my notebook to translate after), or that I have no idea who some of these people who appear in the frame with Godard are, but it has its justification.

The “Godard as philosophy” tenet also means reserving judgment of the work in ways that I think we might approach other cinema, whether narrative or avant-garde. During the beginning to part 4A, Godard goes on a long rant about the tyranny of governments, who justify murder but are no different than the anarchic man who murders. Godard has his reasons, as all political philosophers do, and I strongly disagree with his view of government. But I also feel the same way about reading some of the more tenuous views of Plato or Machiavelli. What I’m more interested in while watching Histoire(s) is that it’s central problem: did cinema ultimately fail the 20^th century? Did we fail to properly answer the question of “what is cinema”? Although for some reason many had told me this work essentially came down to that essential famous quote from Godard about the failure to record the images of the Holocaust, I think there’s much more going on here that cinema’s failure to record. 

Link Round-Up: The End is Nigh

Besides some writing on Letterboxd and maybe a blog post, expect this to be the last work you'll see from me until late December—my thesis is due December 12th, and my PhD applications before that, so I'll be working on those day and night until then. You'll still get podcasts (I think), or at least they are in the pipeline, but for now...

Three more episodes of The Cinephiliacs went up in October: you had the final NYFF report with Tony Dayoub talking about big hitters like 12 Years a Slave, Blue is the Warmest Color, Her, The Immigrant, and more. Then there's an episode with Craig Simpson from the Indiana University archives talking about Welles, Pauline Kael, and Paris, Texas. Finally, there's a roundtable episode of the show on the occasion of what would have been Andrew Sarris's 85th Birthday. The roundtable includes past guests like Dan Sallitt, David Schwartz, and Godfrey Cheshire. So head on over and take a listen.

In terms of written work, I took another dive at Blue is the Warmest Color and reviewed it for In Review Online, and then my contribution to scary movies was a piece for The Film Stage on the release of two new Criterions: Lewis Allen's The Uninvited and Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (the worst horror is marriage). 

On Letterboxd, my piece on The Counselor got some buzz, so much that Critcwire guru Sam Adams chose it along with a piece by Keith Uhlich on 12 Years a Slave to highlight. Thanks Sam! Otherwise: I also wrote about...A Girl In Every Port, The Big Sleep, Pulse, Club Sandwich, I No Longer Hear the Guitar, HaHaHa, The Chase, I Used to Be Darker, All is Lost, and La Chembre. 

October Screening Log

Color coded via Dan Sallitt's method (Current or upcoming releases not included). Click on the titles to writing when applicable.

1.    Only Yesterday (Stahl, USA, 1933)
2.    The Dawn Patrol (Hawks, USA, 1930)
3.    Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Altman, USA, 1982)
4.    Manila in the Claw of Light (Brocka, Philippines, 1975)
5.   L'Intrus (Denis, France, 2004)
6. Arabian Nights (Pasolini, Italy, 1974)
7. La Notte (Antonioni, Italy, 1961).
8.   La Chembre (Akerman, Belgium/USA, 1972)
9.    A Song Is Born (Hawks, USA, 1948)
10. Providence (Resnais, France, 1971) 

No Placement Because I Have No Idea What To Do With This Yet: Historie(s) Du Cinema (Godard, France, 1988-1998)

Also Notable (No order besides color categorization): Smile (Ritchie, USA, 1975), Air Force (Hawks, USA, 1948), La Libertad (Alonso, Argentina, 2001), The Chase (Ripley, USA, 1946), Hail Mary (Godard, France, 1985), The Book of Mary (Meiville, France, 1985), Rapado (Rejtman, Argentina, 1992), The Uninvited (Allen, USA, 1944), Hotel Monterey (Akerman, France, 1972), News from Home (Akerman, France, 1977)

Rewatches: His Girl Friday (Hawks, USA, 1946), Paris, Texas (Wenders, Germany/USA, 1984).

Kurosawa, Cinephilia, and Seven Samurai

Kurosawa is part of a contentious tradition now with Bergman and early Fellini in cinephilia for not making "open" movies. The main claim would be that their perfectly executed, pictorial frames do not allow for interpretation beyond what they present. These films do not require explanation in the way that their counterparts - Mizoguchi, Rosselini (only the latter works) and Antonioni respectively – make films that are only legible to those who have truly engaged with cinema. While I could point to Andrew Tracy’s piece in Cinema Scope at the time of the AK100 Criterion set (“prompts the question of why his presence among the most active and engaged sectors of present-day cinephilia feels so pallid,” a sentence that certainly doesn’t engage in any sort of exclusion process) or even David Bordwell’s defeatist attitude (“I still find most of his official classics overbearing, and the last films seem to me flabby exercises”), this would be falsely presumptuous to lay the blame on contemporary shoulders.

Instead, we can go all the way back to Cahiers Du Cinema to find the origins of such debate. Luc Moullet on Drunken Angel: “Its aesthetic pretensions…surpass in their grotesqueness anything even the European Cinema has produced,” and Ikiru: “As for the ending with the swing, confronted by such a piece of idiocy and affectation the audience is left speechless.” Jacques Rivette too, who notes “those ‘picturesqure qualities that made for the facile success of The Seven Samurai, of which we may now rightly ask whether it was especially aimed at the export market.” And Godard’s famous comment, “merely a more elegant Ralph Habib.”  Bazin was more cautious, noting his own (and I’d admit my own) preference for Mizoguchi, while writing “I wonder whether, instead of considering Kurrosawa’s cosmopolitanism as a commercial compromise, albeit of superior quality, we should not rather see it from now on as a dialectical progression pointing the way forward for the Japanese cinema.”*

Three Images for the Day (10/15/13)

Ordet (Dreyer, Denmark, 1955)

Only Yesterday (Stahl, USA, 1933)

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, Denmark, 1928)

Only Yesterday image courtesy Gina Telaroli.

NYFF Capsules

While I’ve been podcasting through much of NYFF, I did not have that much chance to talk about my two favorite works at the festival, and one of high merit. Capsules below:

Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, USA, 1933)

Few will be able to question a dogmatic stance that John Stahl’s Only Yesterday is a towering masterpiece of the classical melodrama given its rarity (not even on VHS!), but be assured such a work is deserving of the praise. As soon as the film’s seemingly trivial depiction of Black Tuesday (but delightfully so—suicide never seemed so funny) begins to feel staid, Stahl suddenly shifts toward innocent love, bitter disappointment, and ultimately the value of life an unappreciated life. John Boles moves through his wife’s fancy dinner party, unable to answer any questions about the crisis until he locks himself in his office. With the gun loaded, he notices a private letter for him, leading him down memory lane to a young woman named Mary Lane (Margaret Sullivan) he met during the war and then abandoned, while she became the woman who does not forget (for reasons both emotional and physical). Movement seems to be the game that Stahl plays. Either the camera moves, or the characters move, often in opposition, passing just for a second. The narrative involves passing movements as well, these rare chances when diagonals of life can finally cross, but only for a moment, and one that may lack recognition (Stahl’s was the first adaptation of Letters from an Unknown Woman, but where Ophuls highlights physical tragedy, Stahl turns toward the metaphysical). A meet cute ends first as a comedy, secondly as a tragedy, and thirdly as something beyond us entirely, a navigation of emotional territory rarely felt in the American (or any) cinema. When the two lovers finally collide first via a slow exchange of silent close-ups and then finally via words, each phrase out of Boles’s mouth is an emotional dagger, cutting right into Sullivan’s heart. But her continued gaze and affectation is the core of the film—she is willing to let this man reveal his own hollowness, and unwilling to believe their night was not destiny. Sullivan comes from a theatrical background, but her close-ups stand in stark relief, a blank face also a canvas of tears held back. While it’s wrong to create pointless value judgements, Stahl does silent, black and white close-ups in a way that rival any devastation created by Douglas Sirk, sometimes letting the gaze of Sullivan carry all the pain in a way much riskier than a gambit by Sirk’s spilling of emotions. His work is toward a quiet reverence that always respects its protagonist, and never once falters toward anything of pity. She is a triumph of human testament to live despite (a word beyond her vocabulary). The ending of Only Yesterday, both in terms of narrative and the carefully constructed mise-en-scene of the final bedroom, brings to mind Dreyer’s Ordet. There is no literal transcendence for this melodrama, but there is instead an emotional one.

Link Round-Up: NYFFing It Up

These people are having way more fun than most of my first dates do.

The New York Film Film Festival ends this weekend, but my coverage is only about halfway complete, starting with this piece (my first) for Reverse Shot on the latest Romanian comedy, Corneliu Porumboiu's When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism. It's a strange little work that tries to articulate a number of concerns related to art and theory, and I hope the piece (made palatable by Reverse Shot's tremendous editor, Michael Koresky) is worth your time, especially if you've seen it.

On podcast duties, there are two for you - first up, how about some experimental cinema? Views From the Avant-Garde featured over 200 films this year, and somehow fellow Columbia alum and now OSU PhD candidate James Hansen joined me to work through films by Luther Price, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jodie Mack, Stephanie Barber, and a few more. Back in something a little more mainstream (though not by much), Boston's darling Monica Castillo talks about the latest from the Coens, Tsai Ming-Liang, Phillipe Garrell, and Joanna Hogg from the festival.

To Be (Cont'd) continues this month with a discussion on Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt between Bill Ryan and Keith Uhlich. Ryan gets the ball rolling here.

On Letterboxd: Russian Ark, Il Grido, The Rapture, Written on the Wind, Trent's Last Case, and Paid To Love.

Masters of Cinema, Red River, and Me

Big News! I am pleased to announce that I'm joining the team at Masters of Cinema to be a occasional booklet editor. What is Masters of Cinema, you say? In short, they are the "Criterion Collection" of the United Kingdom, and have put out many of the same films with the highest quality transfers. They've also put out things you can't get in the United States, like Le Pont Du Nord, Van Gogh, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and then they've done releases for major works like Lang's M, Ozu's Floating Weeds, The Blue Angel, and next year Computer Chess! (you can see a full list here). More than that, each booklet is more than just an essay, but a collection of canonical articles, interviews, and rare photos to go with it. The upcoming Mizoguchi box set, for example, has a booklet that runs 344 pages!

My first big project, as it turned out, happened to be a favorite: Howard Hawks's Red River. It's an excellent transfer of this amazing film, and the booklet I edited includes essays by Andrew Sarris and Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, plus interviews with editor (and The Thing credited director) Christian Nyby and writer Borden Chase. The Blu-Ray also features a video conversation with two of my favorite cinephiles: Dan Sallitt and Jaime Christley. Finally, I have a small essay in the booklet as well, talking about the differences between the now canonical Book Version and the rarer, hard to find Voice Version. 

Anyways, major thanks to Craig Keller for bringing me on the team—it's a total honor to work with and investigate these fantastic films and bring them all to you. As a treat to get you all excited, one of the things I pulled during my archival research was The Chisholm Trail, the original short story by Borden Chase that ran in the Saturday Evening Post starting on December 7, 1946. We didn't have room for it in the book, and since it is now out of copyright, I am presenting the first part here for your reading enjoyment—the second chapter should be especially interesting for fans of the film, as it paints Joanne Dru's Tess in a very different light. Enjoy!

September Screening Log

Color coded via Dan Sallitt's method (Current or upcoming releases not included). Click on the titles to writing when applicable. (A smaller list that usual, mainly because New York Film Festival means I didn’t screen that many repertory titles as usual; and I’m a bit behind in writing about each as well for the same reason).

1.    The Rapture (Tolkin, USA, 1991)
2.    Hahaha (Hong, South Korea, 2010)
3.    Pulse (Kurosawa, Japan, 2001)
4.    I No Longer Hear the Guitar (Garrel, France, 1991)
5.    Written on the Wind (Sirk, USA, 1956)
6.    A Girl In Every Port (Hawks, USA, 1928)
7.    The River (Renoir, France/India, 1951)
8.    Twixt (Coppola, USA, 2011)
9.    Il Grido (Antonioni, Italy, 1957)
10. “The Chinese Fan” The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies (Edwin, USA, 1914)

Also Notable (No order besides color categorization): Russian Ark (Sukurov, Russia, 2002), Never Fear (Lupino, USA, 1949), The Cradle Snatchers (Hawks, USA, 1927), The Spoilers (Enright, USA, 1942), Upstream (Ford, USA, 1928), Trent’s Last Case (Hawks, USA, 1928), The White Shadow (Cutts, United Kingdom, 1924), Autumn Sonata (Bergman, Sweden, 1978), Fig Leaves (Hawks, USA, 1926), Paid To Love (Hawks, USA, 1927).

Rewatches: Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, Japan, 1954), M (Lang, Germany, 1931), The Big Sleep (Hawks, USA, 1946).