Category: Screengrabs

After writing about the Tour de France, blackcap bush in my backyard, and 2024 Paris Olympics in my first three July Drink & a Movie posts, I had two obvious places to look for inspiration for my last one. Rather than choose between the birthday celebrations of the two countries members of our household have citizenship in, though, I decided to leverage my penultimate “bonus” post (my goal is 54 in four years, so just one per month won’t quite cut it) to do both. It’s arriving a bit later than intended, but my follow-up to my Canada Day commemoration featuring Crimes of the Future therefore highlights what I think surely must be the greatest “3rd of July” film ever made, Lonesome. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD copy:

As a film in the public domain, you can also easily find it streaming for free on platforms like Tubi. The beverage I’m pairing with it is the Sherry Tale Ending that Toronto-based bartender Colie Ehrenworth created for the fourth Canadian season of the Speed Rack bartending competition, which is included in the book A Quick Drink by its founders Lynnette Marrero and Ivy Mix. Here’s how to make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Reposado tequila (Espolòn)
3/4 oz. Amontillado sherry (Lustau)
1/2 oz. Lillet Blanc
1/4 oz. Maple-sugar syrup
3 dashes Angostura bitters

Make the maple-sugar syrup by combining equal parts by volume of maple syrup, turbinado sugar, and water in a small saucepan and stir over low heat until the sugar has fully dissolved. Remove from heat and cool completely. To make the cocktail, stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Normally I try to avoid repeating base spirits in consecutive months, but that actually doesn’t seem so inappropriate in an extra post arriving hot on the heels of its predecessor–think of it as a sort of “two for one” deal! I like the Canada connection for the same reason, which: Ehrenworth advises using maple syrup from Ontario and that definitely is the way to go, especially if like us you’re lucky enough to have family who make their own and are willing to share. This drink was specifically engineered to be a lower ABV nightcap by combining elements of the Adonis, a sherry-based classic cocktail, and a 50/50 Manhattan and yet another affinity between this month’s concoction and its predecessor is that the tequila is once again a supporting player. The dominant flavors here are instead dried fruit notes from the amontillado on the sip which gracefully give way to the candied citrus from the Lillet on the swallow. So it’s a sweet drink, yes, but an agave and dark molasses finish prevents it from ever coming across as cloying, making the Sherry Tale Ending a light but satisfyingly complex way to finish your night.

At just 69 minutes, Lonesome would also be a great way to unwind after an evening out. The plot is simple: lonely hearts Jim (Glenn Tryon) and Mary (Barbara Kent) arrive home to their respective empty apartments after a half-day at work feeling listless:

Suddenly, each hears this bandwagon as it passes by on the street below:

Lured by its siren song, both decide to head to Coney Island beach. Jim spies her on the bus ride there fending off a would-be Romeo with the implicit threat of brooch pin violence

Impressed, he pursues her through the crowd upon arrival:

Undeterred by either a young hooligan who trips him:

Or her apparent disinterest in watching him perform feats of strength:

And with a bit of extra prompting from an auspicious fortune that reads “you’re about to meet your heart’s desire”:

He finally succeeds in catching her eye in a very nice rack-focus shot:

And before long they’re talking to each other on the beach:

Literally: while its first 29 minutes are silent (although they do feature a sophisticated sound mix timed to the action), Lonesome contains three dialogue sequences which most critics revile, but that Aaron Cutler argued in a blog post for Moving Image Source “add to the rest of the film largely because they are inconsistent with it.” Referring also to the final one, he continues:

For the first time in their lives onscreen, Jim and Mary speak, and they do it because of each other. When Jim promises Mary that “We’ll never be lonesome anymore,” he says it in his own voice, out loud; when he later argues with a judge and police, he does so with the voice that Mary helped him find. Even after the lovers fall back into silence, we retain the sounds of their voices in our heads, distinguishing them as individuals.

To Cutler the “brightly smeared” colors that suddenly make an appearance in the film’s 37th minute perform a similar function.

“Within a long-shot world,” he says, “Jim and Mary see each other in medium and close-up; within a black-and-white, silent world, they can see and hear each other in color and in sound.” Anyway, Jim and Mary have lots of fun together on the boardwalk after the sun goes down:

And he wins her a doll:

But the party ends during a ride on the dual-track Jackrabbit Racer roller coaster when a wheel on Mary’s car catches fire:

She faints:

And when Jim tries to come to her aid, he is arrested by a bizarrely aggressive cop, leading to the scene described by Cutler above in which his obvious passion earns him a reprieve:

Alas, he and Mary are unable to locate each other again in the throng:

A squall suddenly blows up while they’re searching and, not having exchanged contact information, they return home despondent and alone. But wait! Jim puts on a record of the song he and Mary danced to earlier; in the next shot, she hears it coming through the walls and pounds on them, yelling for her neighbor to turn it off:

Jim recognizes Mary’s voice and rushes down the hall:

They’ve been living next to each other all along! As they embrace, the lovers contemplate Mary’s doll, which as Glenn Erickson noted in a Blu-ray review has had “its face half washed away in ‘tears'” by the storm, thus becoming a “physical ‘locator'” for the heartbreak they have just triumphed over:

The end. Lonesome is brilliantly, restless inventive from start to finish and probably contains twice its running time’s worth of visual information if you count the many superimpositions, such as the clock face which accompanies shots of Jim and Mary at work and portraits of the people she is connecting to one another in her job as a switchboard operator:

As Richard Koszarski observes in his excellent DVD commentary track, even director Pál Fejös’s most ostentatious images are far more innovative than they appear:

When a shot of Mary at work seems to elbow a shot of Jim right out of the frame, we are seeing this new optical printing technology at work. The effect is not, as some historians have said, a panning shot in which the camera moves to the left or right, but a much more complicated technical exercise introduced to Hollywood only a few months before Fejös shot this film in which the optical printer and a new Kodak duplicating film stock could allow filmmakers the sort of flexibility in shaping the image that prefigures the development of digital cinema decades later.

Meanwhile, for the ostensibly more straightforward scenes that begin the film, cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton “developed a small mobile camera system that allowed him to follow the actors very closely as they moved within the cramped confines of their cold water flats”:

Fejös and company also make great use of a technique which was falling out of style with the advent of sound in the applied color sequences, which as Joshua Yumibe explains in his chapter for the book Color and the Moving Image were “proving difficult to apply in ways that did not interfere with soundtracks on prints.” Universal nonetheless approved their use here both to facilitate marketing the film in the company’s publicity journal Universal Weekly as “the first talking picture with color sequences” and because they “greatly enhance an already beautiful story.” Specifically, per Yumibe, color formally reinforces the narrative ambivalence he (riffing on Siegfried Kracauer) reads into Lonesome‘s insistence on tearing Jim and Mary apart before it allows them to be together by using “the same hues that previously colored their romance” for the flames that result in their separation.

A sequence in which Jim and Mary search for a lost ring on the beach serves a similar function. Sure, they are ultimately successful:

But what were the chances? As Jonathan Rosenbaum said about my February, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection The Young Girls of Rochefort, despite the fact that all eventually ends well, “the missed connections preceding this resolution are relentless, and one may still wind up with a feeling of hopeless despair despite the overdetermined happy ending.” No wonder, then, that he numbers both that film and Lonesome among his hundred favorite films!

One of the best things about Koszarski’s commentary are when he points out places where, with his assistance, things obviously seem to be missing like a “gag title” to explain Jim’s exchange with the man who serves him coffee and doughnuts on his way to work:

Flaws like this are on of the reasons that David Cairns, another champion of Lonesome‘s dialogue scenes, provides for calling it “a magnificent one-off” in a 2016 blog post: “I wish the part-soundie era had lasted another five years. When the two leads abruptly start speaking to each other in live sound on the beach at Coney Island, the jarring transition from one medium to another is beautiful. You can’t get that in a perfect film, only in a makeshift masterpiece like this one, a superproduction assembled on shifting sands.” Talking about this moment:

He concludes by saying, “When the film reaches its tearful conclusion, sudden nitrate decomposition afflicts the footage, with PERFECT artistic timing — it drives home the fragility of what we’ve been watching.” It may be a bit of a stretch, but this strikes me as a possible callback to the delicate balance of the Sherry Tale Ending and even the holiday that occasioned this post. It’s great that the United States has made it to 249, but if we’re not careful it won’t still be around next year to mark its Semiquincentennial, let alone make it all the way to the year 2074.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

Happy Canada Day! This month’s post honors that country’s first citizen of cinema, David Cronenberg, and its de facto national cocktail, the Caesar. To begin with the former, here’s a picture of my Neon DVD copy of Crimes of the Future, one of *my* best movies of the 21st century so far:

It’s also currently available on Hulu with a subscription and via a number of other platforms for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Everyone in my household except me is a Canadian citizen and we spend a lot of time north of the border, so Caesars are a staple of our holiday and other gatherings. I knew that I eventually wanted to write about a drink from the excellent book Caesar Country: Cocktails, Clams & Canada by Aaron Harowitz & Zack Silverman, which was published the same year this series began, and when I settled on Crimes of the Future as the movie I’d be pairing it with the choice became obvious. Here’s how to make our very slightly modified version of their ingenious Waltermelon:

1 1/2 ozs. Reposado tequila (Espolòn)
2 ozs. Watermelon juice
2 ozs. Caesar mix
1/4 oz. Simple syrup
1/4 oz. Lemon juice

Make the Caesar mix by roasting 4 1/2 lbs. halved Roma tomatoes cut-side down on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a Silpat mat with a seeded, stemmed, and halved jalapeño chili (skin-side up) and four whole cloves of garlic with their skins left on about 30 minutes until nicely browned. Let cool completely, then remove the skins from the garlic, add everything to a blender with two tablespoons fresh oregano (or two teaspoons dried), and blend until smooth. Add one cup of water, 1/2 cup clam juice, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/4 cup simple syrup, and two teaspoons sea salt and blend again to homogenize. Add 1/4 teaspoon cayenne powder, 1/4 teaspoon celery seed, 1/4 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon onion powder, and 1/4 teaspoon paprika and quickly blend again. Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer and cheesecloth (you’ll need to squeeze, which can be messy if you’re not careful) and adjust the consistency with additional water as needed and/or seasoning with more salt. To make the cocktail, stir all of the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled Collins or highball glass rimmed with kosher salt. Serve on the rocks garnished with cubes of feta cheese and watermelon on a skewer.

This beverage is certain to surprise and delight Caesar fans for sure, but even more so anyone who only knows its cousin the Bloody Mary. Thanks to the addition of watermelon juice, which per Harowitz & Silverman was inspired by an observation by chef José Andrés that “tomatoes with watermelon is a simple, refreshing, and perfectly balanced combination,” it’s sweeter and much lighter in body than the brunch staple you’re familiar with, which I personally find unpleasantly sludgy. Watermelon is also probably the flavor that will dominate your initial impression, but only because it’s unexpected: starting with the second sip, it feels like the world’s most natural companion to the umami-rich Caesar base. Finally, there’s a nice bit of heat on the finish, which is also where you finally pick up agave notes from the tequila and the oregano (one of the ingredients in the original Caesar created by Calgary bartender Walter Chell, as the book notes) we added as a second connection to Greece, where Crimes of the Future was shot. The first is of course the cubed feta garnish, which reminds me a bit of these trapezoidal purple “candy bars”:

They aren’t actually candy, hence the scare quotes: this is, rather, what you eat after you get the elective surgery that leaves these scars:

And replaces your digestive system with one capable of converting reprocessed industrial waste into energy. But we’re getting just a bit ahead of ourselves. Following the opening credits sequence that inspired this month’s drink photo:

Crimes of the Future begins with a shot of a structure that looks simultaneously futuristic and decrepit viewed from the shoreline of a rocky beach:

The camera pulls back to reveal a boy (Sotiris Siozos) sitting next to a rusty can and digging in the water with a spoon:

Then circles around to the right before tracking in, almost as if were studying him. A woman’s voice says “Brecken” and he looks up:

Cut to a long shot of the speaker, his mother Djuna (Lihi Kornowski): “I don’t want you eating anything you find in there, you understand me? I don’t care what it is.”

Cut back to Brecken, who rises, then back to a medium shot of Djuna as she mutters “I don’t care what it is” to herself a second time, her voice quavering.

It’s an odd exchange and on a first viewing the logical assumption is that she’s concerned about him consuming marine animals or fish, possibly because the water is polluted? But the real cause of her duress is revealed about 30 seconds later when Brecken finishes brushing his teeth and begins to munch on a plastic wastebasket as Djuna looks on:

What happens next is even more shocking. As Brecken sleeps, Djuna smothers him with a pillow:

She confesses her crime over the phone in the scene that follows, and although her words are unrepentant (“yes, yes, I mean the Brecken thing”), there are tears in her eyes when she hangs up:

The person at the other end of the line is an associate of Djuna’s ex-husband Lang (Scott Speedman), who is understandably also reduced to sobs when he shows up to claim his son’s body:

And with one murder in the books, we’re off. The next shot introduces us to Crimes of the Future‘s protagonists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). She awakens him from a restless night in his LifeFormWare OrchidBed with good news: there’s a new hormone in his body!

You see, he suffers from a condition called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome whereby his body produces new organs, which Caprice tattoos while they’re still in his body:

Then removes in front of a live audience using another LifeFormWare product, the Sark autopsy module, which has made them stars of the performance art world:

There’s no need for anesthesia or sterilization because human beings have ceased to feel pain except in their sleep and infections have disappeared for reasons unknown. People now get their thrills from a new fad called “desktop surgery,” which basically consists of cutting into each other:

And the entire situation is making the government nervous. As the two bureaucrats who staff the National Organ Registry it establishes in response explain, “human evolution is the concern. That it’s going wrong. That it’s . . . uncontrolled, it’s . . . insurrectional.”

Violet Lucca reads Crimes as being deeply autobiographical in her monograph on Cronenberg, but immediately goes on to note that there’s far more going on here than just taking stock and settling scores:

Saul is Cronenberg himself, performance art is cinema, “body art” is “body horror” (the questionable subgenre Cronenberg supposedly invented), the National Organ Registry stands in for TIFF and Telefilm Canada, and Timlin (Kristen Stewart) and Wippet (Don McKellar), the jittery geeks who work at the NOR, are a heady mix of film fans and people who work in film (critics, archivists, programmers, publicists, or whatever). However, the way in which these parallels are drawn–and Saul’s succinctly croaked objections to the various interpretations of his work, the state of performance art, and to the state of the world–are commentaries that are just as applicable to our reality as they are in the film’s. The government’s endeavors to control both art and body are meant to protect those who are already powerful, going so far as to deny nature and very clear biological warnings.

What takes the movie to the next level and makes it what Neil Bahadur calls on Letterboxd “one of the most visionary works of science fiction in the history of cinema” is how this is accomplished: “it deemphasizes technology for exploring changes in human habit, psychology, and physiology.” Deemphasizes is exactly the word–there’s plenty of tech in the movie, but like LifeFormWare’s Breakfaster Chair it’s shown to be unable to keep pace with the body’s endeavors to heal itself.

Enter Lang, who is not only Brecken’s father, but also the leader of the “plastic-eaters” mentioned above. He cannot explain how their body modifications came to manifest naturally in a new generation beyond referring to the boy as their “miracle child,” but approaches Saul and Caprice with the idea of performing a public autopsy on his son’s body “to show the world that the future of humanity existed and was good–was at peace and harmony with the techno world that we’ve created.”

Saul accepts under orders from his handler in the government’s New Vice Unit, which unbeknownst even to Caprice he works for as an undercover agent, ostensibly to earn Lang’s trust so that he can infiltrate his group, but really because they’ve already gotten to Brecken’s body:

Meanwhile, LifeFormWare is making plans of its own to ensure the continued viability of its products:

Crimes of the Future is also quite erotic, to the point where the album Pinkerton by Weezer could almost function as an alternative soundtrack to it, especially the tracks “Tired of Sex,” which matches well with this awkward encounter between Saul and Timlin:

“The Good Life,” which might as well be all about him, and “Butterfly,” our new accompaniment to the end titles that follow this brilliant final image:

Speaking of which, many critics identify it as a reference to my February, 2023 Drink & a Movie selection The Passion of Joan of Arc, but it also marks the conclusion of a motif that started with the 14th and 15th screengrabs in this post by putting a new twist on it. Djuna and Lang both weep for things lost, in her case the familiar world she knew in her youth, and in his the unexpected delay of long-anticipated future he thought had already arrived. Saul’s tear, on the other hand, is like Joan’s a sign of acceptance. Caprice gives him a bite of Lang’s “modern food”:

The Breakfaster Chair stops moving:

And to paraphrase a different set of alternative rockers active in the 90s, it’s the end of the world as we know it–but he feels fine. To Bahadur, “Cronenberg’s deep fear here – as it should be to all of us – is of reactionaryism: that those who are deemed different are then deemed subhuman, if not human at all. The title is in reference to this alone: is difference or the new the crime of the future? Is it already the crime of the now?” Noel Vera similarly suggests in a blog post about Crimes that by the end for Saul “the coming apocalypse isn’t so much a calamity as a fascinating new condition to explore and exploit, even embrace.” He also observes in passing that his name might be a reference to Alfred Bester’s classic sci fi novel The Demolished Man, something that occurred to me as well, specifically this nonsense rhyme that Ben Reich learns to prevent his thoughts from being read in a future where telepathy is common:

 Eight, sir; seven, sir;
 Six, sir; five, sir;
 Four, sir; three, sir;
 Two, sir; one!
 Tenser, said the Tensor.
 Tenser, said the Tensor.
 Tension, apprehension,
 And dissension have begun.

What’s interesting is the way that story ends. It revolves around Reich’s attempts to commit the perfect crime and escape his world’s worst punishment, something with the threatening name of “Demolition.” But it’s not what we think it is, as we finally discover in the final pages:

Reich squalled and twitched.

“How’s the treatment coming?”

“Wonderful. He’s got the stamina to take anything. We’re stepping him up. Ought to be ready for rebirth in a year.”

“I’m waiting for it. We need men like Reich. It would have been a shame to lose him.”

“Lose him? How’s that possible? You think a little fall like that could–“

“No, I mean something else. Three or four hundred years ago, cops used to catch people like Reich just to kill them. Capital punishment, they called it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Scout’s honor.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. If a man’s got the talent and guts to buck society, he’s obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you’ve got left are the sheep.”

“I don’t know. Maybe in those days they wanted sheep.”

Harowitz & Silverman argue that a big part of what makes the Caesar a great drink is that it’s infinitely customizable: they define it as “a cocktail (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) made with a base of vegetable juice and an element of the sea.” It thus can be adapted to almost any dietary preference or restriction, so mix yourself up a Watermelon like we recommend or try something different: whether you do or don’t drink, are an omnivore or vegetarian, or even (judging from Crimes‘ first line) eat plastic, Caesar Country is your roadmap to a satisfying Canada Day concoction.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

You’d never know it from this monthly series, but My Loving Wife and I aren’t drinking as much as we used to, and the most common way I discover new cocktails these days is by trying to find novel uses for old bottles which have been languishing in our liquor cabinet and refrigerator for far too long. And so it was that I found myself mixing up The Navigator which Frederic Yarm featured on his blog in 2018 earlier this year with some of the madeira I purchase each December to make bigos, a nod to both my upbringing in Pennsylvania Dutch country where we eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s day for good luck and the two years of Polish I took in college. When it proved to be a perfect platform for not just that spirit, but two other household favorites, Bacardí Reserva Ocho and Rothman & Winter’s Orchard Apricot Liqueur, I immediately decided to feature it in one of my last remaining Drink & a Movie posts. Here’s how to make it:

1 oz. Bacardí Reserva Ocho
1 oz. Rainwater Madeira (Leacock’s)
3/4 oz. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Simple syrup
1/4 oz. Apricot liqueur (Rothman & Winter)

Combine all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an edible orchid and a lemon twist.

Punch provided a great overview of rainwater Madeira in 2017 for their “Bringing It Back Bar” series. Once considered the most prestigious style in the category in United States, it emerged from Prohibition with a debased reputation but has recently found favor with bartenders who find it “attractive not only for its relatively low price point, but for its subtlety.” It functions in The Navigator the same way as it does in the recipes linked to in that article–as a medium-dry counterpoint to the apricot liqueur and rum, resulting in an easy-drinking concoction which is sweet, but subtle instead of cloying. That’s actually not a terrible way to describe the movie I’m pairing it with, The Strange Case of Angelica, which like Madeira and The Navigator’s presumptive namesake Prince Henry hails from Portugal. Here’s a picture of my Cinema Guild DVD copy:

It’s also available for rental or purchase on Apple TV+, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Director Manoel de Oliveira was 101 years old and had 30 features under his belt when The Strange Case of Angelica debuted at Cannes in 2010, and it has a stately mien and pacing befitting such a remarkable resume. The film begins with an epigraph by Antero de Quental: “yonder, lily of celestial valleys, your end shall be their beginning, our loves ne’er more to perish.” This is followed by two languorous minutes of titles accompanied by Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires performing the third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in Bi Minor which unspool over a nighttime cityscape of Régua from a vantage point across the Douro River:

The action begins with a 3:30 single take street scene also shot with a stationary camera and featuring a “strongly diagonal” (per James Quandt on the DVD commentary track) composition that will accrete significance as the movie progresses. A man inquires as to the whereabouts of the photographer who lives above the shop is car has stopped in front of:

And is told that he’s out of town, but a passerby helpfully offers directions to the home of a young “Sephardi emigrant” he knows who “takes photos all over the place.” This turns out to be Isaac (Oliveira’s grandson Ricardo Trêpa), who we meet bent over a malfunctioning wireless in what J. Hoberman identifies as a reference to Jean Cocteau’s Orphée in an essay collected in his book Film After Film:

Unable to make the “static-garbled radio transmissions” any clearer, Isaac shoves the device forward in frustration, knocking a pile of books onto the floor. When one volume falls open to this page:

He picks it up and begins to read. “Dance! O stars, that in constant dizzying heights you follow unchanging. Exalt, and escape for an instant the path that you are chained to.” Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door.

“It’s the angel!” Isaac exclaims and returns to the book. “Time, stand still, and you, former beings, who roam fantastical, celestial ways. Angels, open the gates of heaven, for in my night is day, and in me is God.” As he finishes the passage, there’s another knock, now accompanied by a voice calling his name. Shaken at last from his reverie, Isaac puts the book down and answers the door to find that it’s his landlady Madam Justina (Adelaide Teixeira), who Quandt describes as “like a kind of one-woman Greek chorus,” bearing a message that he has been summoned by a “very important lady” to take pictures of her daughter.

Upon arrival Isaac is greeted outside at the foot of a staircase by a nun (Sara Carinhas) who turns out to be the sister of the woman he is there to photograph (Pilar López de Ayala) and her maid (Isabel Ruth).

They inform him that his subject Angelica has just passed and that his commission is to create “one last souvenir, even if it is very sad” at the behest of her mother. Isaac asks for a stronger bulb for the room’s only light, which Hajnal Király characterizes as “a historical memento of the Oliveira family, owners, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of a factory manufacturing electric devices” in her book The Cinema of Manoel De Oliveira:

Then sets to work in a photo shoot depicted through a combination of long shots of Isaac:

And point-of-view shots complete with frame lines showing us exactly what he’s looking at as he focuses his camera:

He moves in for a close-up:

When suddenly Angelica appears to open her eyes and smile at him:

He is obviously shocked:

But upon realizing that no one else has noticed anything strange hastily finishes up and departs. The next day as he’s developing the pictures he took, an image of Angelica again comes to life, causing him to once more jump back in surprise:

Moments later he spies some laborers tilling the soil in a vineyard across the river:

And resolves the photograph them, much to the chagrin of Madam Justina, who laments the fact that “hardly anyone works like that these days”:

As Quandt notes, “Oliveira’s materialist appreciation of sound is wonderfully apparent” in the sequence that follows, which features more slanted lines:

And a charming call-and-response working song about a shabby suit of clothes. It ends with Isaac appearing to hear bells calling mourners to Angelica’s funeral, for he next appears in the church where one of the friends gathered around her coffin comments that “she looks like an angel from heaven”:

Which inspires him to recite the snippet of poetry he read earlier. That night in a scene which begins with what we soon realize is a shot of his reflection in a mirror, Isaac wakes up and walks over the photos hanging on a line in front of his balcony:

As he stands there an apparition materializes behind him:

He passes through the doorway and becomes translucent himself. The two of them embrace and rise into the sky:

Leading forthwith to my favorite image from this movie, the epically goofy grin plastered on Isaac’s face as he floats supine through the air:

Which he wears right up until the moment when a strikingly topographical overhead shot of the Douro abruptly gives way to one of him in freefall:

He awakens the next morning with a start and lights a cigarette:

“That strange reality . . . perhaps it was just a hallucination? But it was just as real as this. Could I have been to that place of absolute love I’ve heard about?” Then: “I must be out of my mind.” The second half of the film chronicles his self-deportation from the land of the living, which Daniel Kasman read as reminiscent of the director of my September, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection History is Made at Night in a dispatch filed from Cannes 2010: “as in Borzage, escape from the world’s ails to the bliss of an otherworldly love is at once the most cowardly and most heroic of actions.” As part of The Strange Case of Angelica‘s very first wave of viewers, Kasman understandably focuses specifically on the titular character’s role in precipitating Isaac’s withdrawal from his fellow lodgers:

Growing frustration when Angelica remains tantalizingly out of reach even in his dreams::

And increasingly public erratic behavior:

But as Rita Benis notes in a paper collected in the book Fearful Symmetries called “The Abysses of Passion in Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica,” the film’s fantastical elements like Isaac’s visions of Angelica are strongly linked to its realist sequences like his efforts to document the “old-fashioned” ways of the vineyard workers visible from his apartment and “their contrast is what generates the real fear implicit in the film,” such as in “the distressing sequence where he desperately follows a tractor working the rocky soil, taking furious snapshots to the fading traces of an ancient world (the connection between man and earth)”:

These shots are, of course, immediately followed by one of him thrashing around in his bed, haunted by the sounds of hoes striking the earth over and over again, and they finally unlock the secret to all those diagonals: each of Isaac’s impossible loves are a step on what is ultimately one long stairway to heaven.

J. Hoberman closes his essay on The Strange Case of Angelica with a quote:

The last living filmmaker born during the age of the nickelodeon, Oliveira told an interviewer that cinema today is “the same as it was for Lumiére, for Méliès and Max Linder. There you have realism, the fantastic, and the comic. There’s nothing more to add to that, absolutely nothing.” The great beauty of this love song to the medium is that Oliveira’s eschewal remains absolute. It’s a strange case–pictures move and time stands still.

The other night at dinner we went around the table at the request of my children and all said what we’d eat if we had to subsist on just one food for the rest of our lives. Neither Oliveira’s film nor The Navigator may be the most daringly innovative creation featured in this series, but they both contain everything I’m looking for in a drink and a movie respectively, and while it would be suboptimal (to say the least) to be confined to such a limited diet, I can think of far worse answers to the cinema and cocktail versions of my kids’ question!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

I knew right from the start that this series would eventually feature the Cinema Highball, an ingenious rum and Coke variation created by Don Lee and included in The PDT Cocktail Book, but what to pair it with? A name like that suggests primacy of place–should I save it for the final entry and write about it alongside my favorite movie, I wondered? But then I’d have to pick a single favorite, and as the days went by my options narrowed. The Flowers of St. Francis and Early Summer came off the board within six months of this project beginning and The Passion of Joan of Arc and Pyaasa followed in its second year of existence. Meanwhile, another question was beginning to vex me: which of the 100+ films directed by Jean-Luc Godard was I going to tackle? The solution to both my problems arrived simultaneously last May when I realized I wouldn’t finish my post about Stalker before the first of the month, eliminating a possible hook: what better way to commemorate May Day 2025 than with a post celebrating “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”?

The source of these title cards is, of course, Masculine Feminine. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD copy:

You can also stream it on the Criterion Channel and Max with subscriptions or via Prime Video for a rental fee, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

The drink, which lends itself beautifully to batching and bottling (Lee sold them out of a vending machine at his Greenwich Village bar Existing Conditions), requires advance preparation, but is otherwise dead simple. Here’s how you make it:

4 1/2 ozs. Coca-Cola Classic
2 ozs. Popcorn-infused Flor de Caña Silver Dry Rum

Infuse the rum by combining one ounce of freshly popped corn per 750 milliliters of rum in a nonreactive container and let sit at room temperature for one hour. Strain to remove the solids, then add one ounce of clarified butter per 750 milliliters of rum, cover, and let sit for 24 hours at room temperature. Freeze the liquid for four additional hours to solidify the butter, then fine-strain and bottle. To make the cocktail, combine both ingredients in a chilled cocktail glass filled with ice cubes.

The impression of taking a big swig of soda while your mouth is still full of movie theater popcorn is so pronounced that you may instinctively start trying to pick kernels out of your teeth! If you can’t get Flor de Caña, another smooth silver rum like Planteray 3 Stars would work just fine here as well. Finally, while I suppose you *could* use something other than Mexican Coke made with real cane sugar in this drink, I don’t know why you would.

Masculine Feminine‘s Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is actually a highball drinker himself, although he prefers Vittel (a brand of mineral water) and cassis.

He is shown here with Madeleine (Chantal Goya), whose character’s name also comes from Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Paul’s Mistress,” and her roommate Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert). This is one of two by the author that inspired the movie; as Richard Brody notes in his book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, the other manifests most directly in the form of the erotic Swedish film (which many people also interpret as a parody of The Silence) these characters go to see with their friend Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport).

Despite apparently missing this connection completely, Roger Ebert surfaces another even more interesting one in his review of the 2005 American rerelease:

The movie was inspired by two short stories by Guy de Maupassant. I have just read one of them, “The Signal,” which is about a married woman who observes a prostitute attracting men with the most subtle of signs. The woman is fascinated, practices in the mirror, discovers she is better than the prostitute at attracting men, and then finds one at her door and doesn’t know what to do about him. If you search for this story in “Masculine-Feminine,” you will not find it, despite some talk of prostitution. Then you realize that the signal has been changed but the device is still there: Leaud’s character went to the movies, saw [Jean-Paul] Belmondo attracting women, and is trying to master the same art. Like the heroine of de Maupassant’s story, he seems caught off-guard when he makes a catch.

He is referring to a cigarette flip trick Paul attempts numerous times through the film (I stopped counting after five) but isn’t ever quite able to execute, making him look silly instead of cool:

“Paul’s Mistress” also shines light on how to interpret our hero’s failure to survive the film, which in her insightful contemporaneous review Pauline Kael describes as “like a form of syntax marking the end of the movie.” Or, as Godard himself says in an interview with Gene Youngblood collected in David Sterritt’s book Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, “even though my adaptation is very different, the de Maupassant story ended with Paul’s death. But I think death is a very good answer in that kind of movie. There is no meaning in it.”

Quotations from other works abound as well, most conspicuously in the form of three members of the original French cast of Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman (Chantal Darget, Med Hondo, and Benjamin Jules-Rosette) performing dialogue from it in character, which introduces a racial component to film’s sociological analysis of male-female relationships:

And perhaps most famously in Paul’s monologue about his generation’s relationship to the movies, which per Brody is clipped “nearly verbatim from Georges Perec’s novel Les Choses,” with Godard’s main contribution being the specific reference to American cinema:

We went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we’d feel a thrill. But Madeleine and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy. Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t that total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live.

Scenes like these, each of which would require a blog post entirely its own to fully unpack, represent Masculine Feminine at its most intricate, as does the 39 second-long sequence Richard Roud analyzes in his monograph about Godard which flips back and forth between day and night five times in a way that “more or less” parallels what we hear on the soundtrack. The first shot accompanies a voiceover by Paul in which he says, “lonely and dreadful is the night after which the day doesn’t come”:

The second, third, and fourth go along with voiceovers by Catherine and Paul’s friend Robert Packard (Michel Debord) saying, “American scientists succeeded in transmitting ideas from one brain to another, by injection” and “man’s conscience doesn’t determine his existence–his social being determines his conscience” respectively:

And finally the fourth, fifth, and sixth are paired with voiceovers by Elizabeth and Madeleine saying “we can suppose that, 20 years from now, every citizen will wear a small electrical device that can arouse the body to pleasure and sexual satisfaction” and “give us a TV set and a car, but deliver us from liberty” in turn:

Roud postulates that “one could make out a case that Godard has treated this sequence dramatically.” According to the theoretical argument he outlines, “darkness corresponds to Paul’s loneliness, to Robert’s pessimistic view of life and to Madeleine’s plea for a television-set,” while “daytime would correspond to Catherine’s rosy optimism about what science will be able to do and to Elizabeth’s Utopian future in which sexual problems will be solved by a gadget.” He believes that such ideas are “meant to be only lightly suggested,” though, and to him the real interest of this sequence is that it “shows Godard reaching towards that almost total escape from the shot as filmed” that he will achieve later in his career” and “brings out even more strongly than before that dialectical tension between reality and abstraction which forms the basis of all Godard’s later films.”

Did you get all that? I certainly didn’t my first (or second) time around, and I still don’t agree with every part of it, but the genius of Masculine Feminine is that it’s apparent that *something* is going on, which keeps you coming back to take a closer look. The fact that this is invariably rewarding is what I think Dave Kehr is talking about when he calls Godard “very strict in his sloppiness” in his capsule review for the Chicago Reader. The movie also offers many more straightforward pleasures, including an extremely animated Paul telling a Robert a story in a laundromat sequence punctuated by a panoply of jump cuts:

A hilariously cheeky depiction of him “putting himself in someone else’s shoes” by copying the actions of man who asking for directions to the local stadium:

Paul telling the story of how his father “discovered” why the earth revolves around the sun, an experience I myself had in a third-grade science class when I figured out where rainbows come from seconds before the teacher explained it to me and my fellow students:

And Chantal Goya’s songs, which are crucially far more interesting than any statement Paul or Robert ever makes on screen.

Penelope Gilliatt called Masculine Feminine “the picture that best captures what it was like to be an undergraduate in the sixties” in an article for The New Yorker, but moments like these are remarkable because they also feel timeless to one like me who went to college in the early 2000s. As do, sadly, the random acts of political and tabloid violence that Gilliatt speaks of next: “five deaths recorded; total apathy expressed by the characters.” Only two are depicted, a woman shooting her husband outside a café:

And a man (Yves Afonso) who appears to be about to mug Paul before he suddenly turns his knife on himself:

Non-diegetic gunshots also appear throughout on the soundtrack, though, which Adrian Martin describes in his essay for the Criterion Collection as “harsh aural interruptions, firing at unpredictable points” that represent “the violence of everyday modern urban life” in concentrated form. Can you blame Paul if he’s so inured to it that he’s more worried about the draft coming in through an open door than the murder taking place outside of it, or about his matches than the man about to immolate himself with them in protest of the Vietnam War? Maybe so, but my point is that while Godard, who styled Masculine Feminine a “concerto on youth” in an interview with Pierre Daix collected in the Grove Press film book about it, may not approve of his protagonists playing at pop stardom and philosophy while the word burns, he (to paraphrase another great work of music) obviously understands that they didn’t start the fire.

One of the movie’s most talked-about shots is Paul’s single take interview with “Miss 19” (Elsa Leroy), which lasts nearly seven minutes and is introduced by a title card which reads “dialogue with a consumer product.”

His questions are seemingly designed to reveal her ignorance about current events, but as Stephanie Zacharek observes in her 2005 review, “the scene is fascinating because although on the surface it seems Godard is asking us to join in ridiculing this girl, in the end it’s Paul’s vulnerability and naiveté that are exposed.” He is also every bit as concerned with his image as Madeleine is, it’s just that where she’s specifically focused on hair and makeup:

He’s attuned to the power of mise-en-scène in all its dimensions (remember that cigarette prop?) and nearly scraps a marriage proposal entirely when he can’t make the location he has scouted work:

It really is too bad that Masculine Feminine‘s boys map so clearly and simplistically to Godard’s notion of the “children of Marx” and its girls to the progeny of Coca-Cola, but it strikes me as a major stretch to say that the former come away looking better than the latter, especially when, as Ed Gonzalez points out in his Slant Magazine review, the ladies get the final word: “the last shot of the film acts as a female-empowering solution to Godard’s philosophical algorithm of the sexual politic. FIN.”

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

I didn’t conceive of it as such, but my “Drink & a Movie” series is a fair approximation of my personal cinema and cocktail canons because (predictably, in retrospect) I have mostly chosen to write about my “go-to” directors and ingredients and scenes and techniques, the ones I’ve spent the most time thinking about and which have therefore played the biggest roles in shaping my point of view as a cinephile and drinker. My tastes are constantly evolving, though, and to conclude my three-post-long celebration of crème de cacao I’ve selected two new discoveries from the past few years.

Shortly after I watched Black Sheep for the first time, I talked about it first in an “Ithaca Film Journal” home video recommendation as “total catnip for me,” then again a few months later in my “Top Ten Movies of 2023” post as “the most fun I had with a movie all year.” Here’s a picture of my bare-bones 20th Century Fox “Cinema Archives” DVD copy:

Unfortunately, although I originally saw this film on the Criterion Channel as part of a collection called “Directed by Allan Dwan,” it doesn’t appear to be streaming anywhere right now.

One of the things I found so delightful about Black Sheep are the old-school drinks heroine Claire Trevor’s Janette Foster orders: she asks for, in sequence, crème de menthe, a crème de menthe frappé, and Dubonnet. I wanted to offer a more complex alternative to Janette’s usuals like I did with the sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist ordered by Andie MacDowell’s Rita Hanson in my Drink & a Movie entry for Groundhog Day, and I quickly settled on the Chapuline, a delightful variation on the grasshopper created by Toby Maloney of Chicago’s The Violet Hour. He specifically calls for green crème de menthe, but does so while making a joke related to presentation: “the white pales in comparison.” I’ve never been able to find the bottle by Marie Brizard he recommends and every verdant variety that *is* available in Ithaca tastes unbearably artificial in comparison to Tempus Fugit Glaciale, so that’s what we went with. In addition to tasting much better, I submit that it also looks just fine in this yellow glass we picked out to serve it in. Here’s how we make it:

1 oz. Crème de cacao (Tempus Fugit)
1 oz. Crème de menthe (Tempus Fugit)
3/4 oz. Pisco (Macchu Pisco)
1 oz. Heavy cream

Shake all ingredients vigorously with ice and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a spanked (to release its aromas) fresh mint leaf.

As he notes in The Bartender’s Manifesto, Maloney’s goal was “to prove that [he] could take a gauche drink and make it at least interesting, at best delicious.” Mission accomplished! The first thing you notice is its beautifully silky texture. The flavor that pops is peppermint immediately followed by chocolate–the effect would be almost exactly like eating a York Peppermint Pattie except that there’s also a burn which resolves into grape on the finish, as if the drink was morphing from a grasshopper to a stinger, the other classic cocktail most commonly associated with crème de menthe. You wouldn’t get this with a barrel-aged spirit like cognac, obviously, so the choice of pisco is quite brilliant!

Maloney’s recipe includes instructions to shake “like it owes you money,” which is actually a pretty excellent segue into discussion of Black Sheep since income, like the film’s camera movements, represents both freedom and confinement for its protagonist John Francis Dugan (Edmund Lowe) and the other characters. As Frederic Lombardi writes in his book Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, “the opening shots of the film give a full sense of the great breadth of the ship Olympus but as the story unfolds, there are increasing attempts to restrict the space in which Dugan can move, so that he must literally know his place.” To start at the beginning, an introductory montage provides a tour of the ship’s first-class spaces:

Before the gliding camera comes to rest on this sign:

And then goes tumbling down the stairs:

Moving at a much faster pace than it did earlier, cinematographer Arthur Miller’s camera now repeats its double-exposure trick to show us we’ve been taken down a notch to second class:

Before it finally stops on a sign and cuts to Dugan playing solitaire:

In just the first of many examples of what Fernando F. Croce calls Black Sheep‘s “limpid storytelling,” our logical assumption that he must be one of the sharps that the people on board the Olympus are cautioned to be wary of is confirmed by the two shots which follow him looking up from his game at his fellow denizens of the second-class smoking room.

First a woman indignantly responds to her companion’s suggestion that they play bridge for a tenth of a cent per point by saying, “I should say not! I lost 55 cents at a twentieth last night. I’ll play for a fortieth or nothing.”

Then one man responds to another’s suggestion that they play checkers by saying, “I don’t mind if you don’t play for money.”

Dugan shakes his head and returns to his game, but is soon distracted by an offscreen clicking noise which a quick tracking shot soon reveals to be caused by Foster’s vain attempts light a cigarette:

And with that we’re off and running! Foster’s lighter doesn’t work because it isn’t supposed to: “that’s how I meet so many nice people,” she informs Dugan. It’s a toss-up for me whether the *very* best thing about Black Sheep is the dialogue by director Allan Dwan (who wrote the story that the movie is based on) and screenwriter Allen Rivkin or the chemistry between its stars, who David Cairns brilliantly describes as “so delightful together you long for a whole season of Thin Man type romps for them to connive through (as he says, “sometimes film history just misses a trick”) although these things are of course related. The snappy one-liners come fast and furious right from the start: when Foster asks if she can buy Dugan a drink, his reply is “I don’t know, can you?” A few beaters later she labels them “two good mixers with no ingredients.” Then a bit further on after the two sneak upstairs to “see how the rich people live,” Dugan condenses a whole lifetime of back story into just a handful of sentences. “There are two things that always floor me,” he tells Foster, “horses and dames. One keeps me broke, the other crazy, and you can’t depend on either of them.” When she quips, “don’t tell me a horse jilted you!” he replies in kind: “yes, and a girl kicked me.”

But then he adds: “that was twenty years ago. Forget it.” Speaking of coin flips, in addition to sharing a profession in common with the main character of last month’s Drink & a Movie selection Bob le Flambeur, Dugan similarly uses them as an external signifier of his deference to the Fates:

“Dugan and Foster stay in business,” he says after this one, referring to the partnership they have entered into to help a young man named Fred Curtis (Tom Brown) they observed getting fleeced in poker during their upper deck sojourn who also, as it happens, turns out to be Dugan’s son. This fact is revealed in a moment that Matt Strohl describes as “an emotional bolt of lightning in the middle of the film” which occurs after Dugan has helped Curtis win back some of the money he lost to Eugene Pallette’s and Jed Prouty’s buffoonish oil tycoons Colonel Upton Calhoun Belcher and Orville Schmelling by posing as his friend, but only at the expense of his own profits when he is forced to accept the checks Curtis wrote them as payment or risk giving up the ruse. He’s right in the middle of getting tough with Curtis (“I’ve got $1800 coming from you and I want it–in cash”) when suddenly he spots a set of framed photos:

“What’s the matter?” Curtis asks him after he notices the older man’s reaction:

“Oh, nothing, nothing–I probably had too much to drink or something,” Dugan stammers. He gives no further explanation, but immediately changes his tune regarding repayment. “Where’s that note for those rubber checks?” he asks, then looks on with what my daughter Lucy would call a “thin smile” while Curtis writes it:

As Strohl notes, although Dugan never reveals his discovery to Curtis even through the end of the film, “that one reaction scene reverberates and lends weight to everything that follows,” including what I think must be the romantic non-kiss in the history of cinema. It takes place about halfway through a 30-second-long shot that begins right after the coin flip depicted above when Dugan notices Foster’s hand on the lapel of his bathrobe:

They put their arms around each other and lean in, but suddenly he pulls back:

It’s just for a second and they lean in again, but the result is the same:

Foster is already smiling as he lets out a perplexed sigh and is laughing by the time he calls for the steward to “take this lady out of here”:

Destiny can bring lovers together but in my experience the key to a happy marriage is that you have to really like each other! Dugan is clearly wondering what the heck happened to him and there’s work still to be done, so the wedding bells will have to wait, but these two clearly have a future together and he’s earned it. And that brings us right back to where we started! The steward appears in this scene because Dugan is supposedly under lock and key, and as Lombardi notes “restriction of movement is a severe violation for a Dwan character and film,” but Dugan “uses his room arrest to serve his ends.” In other words, all those attempts to put Dugan in his place ultimately fail, which is another connection between him and Bob Montagné: they both remain true to themselves no matter how down and out they find themselves and are eventually rewarded. Which now makes three “exceptions to the rule” I wrote about in my February Drink & a Movie post about The Young Girls of Rochefort, suggesting that it’s time to update my notion that “the human experience of trying to become a better person” is a theme of this series. After all, resisting the temptation to change more than you need to can itself be a challenge. Which, come to think of it, is the secret to the Chapuline’s success, too, isn’t it? Toby Maloney elevated the grasshopper by tweaking its proportions just a bit and adding one single ingredient. Or, to reframe this in terms that Dugan and Bob (and Kenny Rogers) would appreciate, sometimes the highest form of wisdom is knowing how to quite when you’re ahead.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

From where I’m standing the net impact of expanded legalized sports betting has clearly been negative. Research shows that it results in increased levels of debt for individual consumers, athletes are subject to unconscionable levels of abuse because of it, and the constant barrage of ads and ridiculous celebrity parlays makes the experience of watching sports on TV less fun. For all of these reasons I’d probably support more regulation at this point despite my libertarian inclinations, but as long as it remains so easy to place a bet, I will selfishly continue to enjoy doing so during certain times of year. March is one of them because of the NCAA Tournament, so lately I’ve been thinking about my favorite titular (which disqualifies Howard Ratner) movie gambler, Bob Montagné (Roger Duchesne). Here’s a picture of my Kino Lorber DVD copy of the film he lent his name to, Bob le Flambeur:

It is also available for rental from a variety of other platforms, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

The drink I’m pairing it with was created by Natasha David as boozy version of her favorite thing to eat, “dark, bitter chocolate.” Here, per Imbibe, is how you make her All In (which for the uninitiated is a poker term which refers to the act of pushing all of one’s chips into the middle of the table) cocktail:

1 1/2 ozs. Rye (Pikesville)
3/4 oz. Campari
3/4 oz. Dry vermouth (Dolin)
1/4 oz. Crème de cacao (Tempus Fugit)

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Express a lemon twist over the top and discard.

This concoction’s nose is dominated by lemon from the twist, and my brain therefore immediately latched on to the citrus notes in the Campari and Dolin on the sip. There’s also a lot of burn from the rye, though, which combines to create an initial impression not unlike drinking grappa. The swallow and finish are all very dark (think 85+% cacao) chocolate. David specifies rye that is 100-proof or higher, making this a perfect place to showcase Pikesville, which clocks in at 110 and is totally my jam these days. She also described her goal being “to create a dry chocolate cocktail that wasn’t limited to a dessert drink—a cocktail that could be enjoyed any time of the day,” and in that regard the All In is a resounding success.

Bob would appreciate this beverage, as he is no stranger to imbibing during the daylight hours. Here, for instance, we see his best laid plans for breakfast being waylaid by a tempting bottle of wine:

His luxurious apartment, which has one of the best views in the history of cinema and a slot machine in the closet:

“Absolutely massive American car,” as Nick Pinkerton says in his DVD commentary track (where he also identifies it as a 1955 Plymouth Belvedere):

And the fact that he appears to have a standing invitation to join any high-stakes game in Paris all suggest that he must have been more disciplined in his youth, but he is become, in the words of his best friend Roger (André Garet), a “pitiful” compulsive gambler who squanders every big win by taking his profits elsewhere and promptly losing them.

Because he does so in style, though, and according to a moral code that includes generosity to those even less fortunate as one of its primary tenets, he nonetheless remains an idol to the young men in his circle like Paolo (Daniel Cauchy), whose late father knew Bob back in his gangster days:

A hero to young women like Isabelle Corey’s Anne, to whom he provides pocket money and a place to sleep with no expectation of repayment in any form:

And the object of fraternal or maternal affection from compatriots like Roger and Simone Paris’s Yvonne, who purchased her café with a loan from him:

As well as the recipient of professional courtesy from René Havard’s Inspector Morin of the police, whose life he once saved:

If you didn’t know this was a caper movie, you’d never guess it from the first 37 minutes, which function more as a sort of nature documentary showing Bob in his natural environment. As Glenn Erickson observes in his review of Kino Lorber’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray copy of the film which came out last year, the location shooting makes it “a literal time capsule of a long-gone Montmartre, a collection of nightclubs and bars where colorful, unsavory night crawlers plot their next moves.” It begins with a monologue that characterizes the Parisian neighborhood as “both heaven and . . . hell” with the image of a descending funicular and accompanying musical cue during the ellipse.

Anne is introduced as an illustration of how “people of different destinies” cross paths in the pre-dawn hours not by name, but as a girl “with nothing to do” who is “up very early . . . and far too young” who passes a cleaning lady hurrying to work on the street:

Finally, we meet Bob playing craps in an establishment featuring the first example of what J. Hoberman calls “the insistent checkerboard patterns that make the movie so emphatically black-and-white”:

They appear again on the walls of Roger’s office, where author of A History of the French New Wave Cinema Richard Neupert argues they function “to remind the viewer that Bob, with his flowing white hair, sees the world as one big board game”:

Per Neupert, Bob le Flambeur inspired the French New Wave with its “raw, low-budget style that mixes documentary style with almost parodic artifice.” My favorite examples of both tendencies can be found in the rehearsals which lead up to the attempted robbery that Bob begins to plan after he learns that the safe in the Deauville casino will have 800 million francs (which as near as I can work out is about $20 million USD today) at 5am the morning of the upcoming Grand Prix race. After he and Roger find someone (Howard Vernon as McKimmie, who insists on a 50% cut of the take) to finance their operation in the first of many scenes that the 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven directed by Steven Soderbergh pays homage to, the “recruitment waltz” begins:

With their team assembled, they set about casing the joint by circling it repeatedly in a car and sketching an outline in a minute-long scene that embodies the “documentary style” Neupert describes:

They also obtain blueprints and specs which they use to obtain a safe so that Roger can practice opening it:

And best of all draw chalk outlines of the casino on a grass field so that they get an accurate sense of the space:

We also see Bob’s vision of how the operation is supposed to in a casino of empty of anyone except him and his crew, a technique borrowed by my July, 2023 Drink & a Movie selection Inside Man among scores of other films:

We never see the actual heist, though, because although Bob arrives at the casino to scope things out at 1:30am as planned in a stylish low-light sequence:

Instead of making contact with Claude Cerval’s Jean, their guy on the inside, like he’s supposed to, he forgets his promise to himself and Roger not to gamble until it is over and places a bet:

He wins, so he places another, this time at odds of 38 to 1:

That hits, too:

And suddenly Bob is off on the heater of his life. The voiceover informs us although the roulette is over by 2:01, “the chemin de fer continues”:

He is successful there, and at 2:45 he enters a the high-rollers room:

It’s difficult to say for sure how much he wins there, but by 3:30 he has attracted a crowd of onlookers:

And not long after that, he’s tipping the croupier one million francs at a time:

Based on the stacks of chips in shots like this, it appears that Bob’s winnings total nearly as much as the 400 million francs he and his crew are expecting to make from robbing the casino. Suddenly he chances to look at his watch and sees that it’s 5am:

He shouts, “change all this, now!” and sprints to the entrance, but it’s too late: the police, tipped off by Jean and his wife (Colette Fleury) and an informant (Gérard Buhr) armed with details that Paolo carelessly let slip to Anne, are waiting for Bob’s crew when they arrive and Paolo dies in the shootout which ensues:

Bob arrives just in time to cradle his protege in his arms as his life expires:

As Inspector Morin places Bob and Roger in handcuffs, one of his officers removes a coin from Bob’s pocket that we saw him flipping earlier.

“I’ve known it was double-headed for ten years,” Roger tells him. “And I’ve known you knew for ten years,” Bob replies. “Paulo knew too,” he adds. Just then the somber mood is broken by a procession of bellhops bringing out Bob’s winnings:

“And don’t let any of it go missing!” Bob says as he is led into a squad car. “Criminal intent to commit . . . you’ll get five years,” Morin says as he offers Bob and Roger cigarettes.

“But with a good lawyer, you might get away with three years,” he continues. “With a very good lawyer, and no criminal intent, maybe an acquittal!” Roger adds. And finally Bob: “If I play my cards right, I might even be able to claim damages!” The movie ends with a amazing shot of his car sitting in front of the Deauville shore as the sun rises behind it:

Dave Kehr writes in an essay that appears in his book When Movies Mattered that “[director Jean-Pierre] Melville is often described as an existentialist, but to execute a scene like the finish of Bob le Flambeur, even in jest, you need to have some faith in the basic benevolence of the world–some faith in a higher, protective power, such as the ‘luck’ that Bob turns his back on and that then returns, in the end, to save and reward him after all.” I couldn’t agree more with the first part of this statement, but would quibble just a bit with the latter. Bob never *abandons* Lady Luck; rather, ever the gentleman, he tries to take a hint and move on when it seems like he has lost her favor, but when he realizes his error, he’s more than happy to come home. As the voiceover remarked earlier as the seconds ticked down to 5:00, “that’s Bob the gambler as his mother made him!” I noted last February in a post about The Young Girls of Rochefort that a friend has suggested that the theme of this series is “the human experience of trying to become a better person.” I suppose that must make Bob le Flambeur another exception to this rule.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.