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Scanlines
JULY 28, 1997:
("Scanlines" wishes to thank Encore Movies & Music, I ™
Video, and Vulcan Video for their help in providing videos and laser discs.)
The Bicycle Thief
D: Vittoria De Sica (1947, subtitled)
With L'Amberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lionella Carell.
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No witty cutline repartee this week. This frame from The Bicycle Thief beautifully
illustrates its moving cinematography.
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Antonio Ricci is a man who needs a bicycle to keep a job and a job to keep his dignity,
and struggles on the edge of losing all three. From this simple tale arises a film
of complex beauty, a film that is both a searing portrait of post-war Rome and a
finely realized meditation on family, fate, and circumstance. It is both expansive
and intimate, wide in scope and yet crushingly human. L'Amberto Maggiorani's portrayal
of the besieged Antonio is a wonder, packed with a rich and bitter emotion that stays
with you long after the movie ends. (My girlfriend says that a lot of heartache could
have been avoided if 1940s Rome only had a Yellow Bike program, but that's another
story.) Film scholars will tell you that The Bicycle Thief is a masterpiece
of Italian neo-realism, a deceptively simple film that challenged prevailing ideas
about plot, mood, and dramatic structure. I will tell you it's a damn good story
and we'll both be right. The video format may not do justice to the stifling crowd
scenes, and the subtitles are a bit sparse, but no matter: The Bicycle Thief
says much of what it says without words, plays well on any screen, and is rightfully
a classic. -- Jay Hardwig
The Sadist
D: James Landis (1963)
with Arch Hall Jr., Helen Hovey, Richard Alden, Marilyn Manning, Don Russell.
Okay, maybe you've seen Arch Hall, Jr. coast breezily through movies like Eegah!
or Wild Guitar utterly unfettered by talent, but that won't prepare you
for this. Three teachers (two male, one female and sexy) in an Impala have car trouble
and stop in a garage/junkyard where they are accosted by leering, giggling thug Arch
Hall, Jr. and his Appalachian-trash girlfriend. Soon, he pistol-whips the middle-aged
teacher, then gives him the time it takes to chugalug a grape Nehi to whimper, grovel,
and beg for his life before blasting him with a .45. He then makes things miserable
for the other two while the guy grapples with the fuel pump on the Chevy, and smokes
two motorcycle cops who stumble onto the place. Hall (in construction boots, high-water
Levi's and denim jacket) is half-creepy, half-simpleton as the killer on the run;
along with his girlfriend, they conjure up homicidal hick geek losers Charlie Starkweather
and Caryl Fugate. The Sadist is frustrating, though, for all the times when
the teacher could have jumped Hall but didn't because he was too much of a yellabelly.
Finally he calls up enough cojones to give Hall a faceful of gasoline from
a gas pump, but instead of doing something decisive like paste him with the pump
nozzle or slam the damn car hood on his head, he just runs off like a fourth grader!
And he looks like he should be able to mop up the floor with Hall! A genuinely tense,
nerve-racking trash thriller (with great camera work by Vilmos -- billed as "William"
-- Zsigmond), heightened by Arch's moronic sneer and the unbelievable structure of
his blond pompadour. -- Jerry Renshaw
Classical Hollywood cin- ema granted its viewers resolute plotlines which rarely
told the whole story. That, of course, created the charm many contemporary audiences
and critics bemoan the absence of as they wistfully ponder a Now, Voyager or
a Swing Time. But what about darker, more politically oriented classical Hollywood
movies that passed themselves off as melodramas, or noirs, or Westerns --anything
but what their displaced subject matter subtly articulated? Case in point is 1952's
Western Rancho Notorious (D: Fritz Lang; with Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy,
Mel Ferrer), which for a first-time, contemporary viewer should do far more than
raise eyebrows. Here's a flick about a mysterious ranch hideout known only to those
few in the know as Chuck-a-luck, in which Marlene Dietrich plays Altar Keane, a former
good-time girl of the Wild West who runs a ring of bandits given sanctuary at the
ranch as long as they give Dietrich the obligatory 10 percent cut. Kennedy plays
an innocent but hell-bent-on-revenge protagonist whose fiancée is brutally murdered
by two of the bandits. Kennedy finds his way to Chuck-a-luck, but only by his own
wile -- the principal deterrent to his arriving there being the fact that no one
will provide him the needed information about how to get there, and those who do
seem to know about Chuck-a-luck's location turn a very blind eye to its denizens'
murderous tendencies. Sound anything like political events in WWII Germany? After
all, Rancho is made by a refugee of the Holocaust, and stars Germany's best-known
cinematic cultural export. But to watch it as just another Western really does no
harm; the producers intended it as a Western, by god, and it sure as hell is one,
even if you don't look for the telltale signs that much more is going on here than
Hollywood's ticket-takers would like for you to know. But for perhaps an even more
deeply allegorical Lang film, check out The Big Heat (1953; with Glenn Ford,
Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Lee Marvin, Carolyn Jones) which, at least on the
surface, is about city detective Tom Banyon's attempt to end the corrupting control
of a mafia-like "syndicate" which has its hands in every corner of city
government. But when Banyon's wife is killed by accident -- the car bomb intended
for Banyon instead strikes his wife -- The Big Heat really becomes an account
of what happens to Banyon in his pursuit of vengeance. The attack on Banyon's wife,
in which the bomb explosion is visualized with a white flash similar to the kind
created for Fifties cautionary Cold War documentaries about atomic explosions, is
only the beginning of the film's several atomic references, the most affecting of
which are the facial scars left on a gangster and his moll (Grahame) after this film's
particular atomic liquid, coffee, is poured on both their faces, each by the other,
no less! The scars mimic radiation burns left on Hiroshima victims in WWII bombing.
But once again, this film can be watched without knowledge of the atomic allegory
that sneaks throughout the film -- it's just a far more fascinating experience watching
these films on more than one level, as the widened scopes they were intended to be.
-- Claiborne K.H.Smith
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