Marco Ferreri's anti-imperialist comedy Touche Pas a la Femme Blanche (Don't Touch the White Woman) (1974) reconfigures the Battle of Little Bighorn to the modern-day streets of Paris, pitting Marcello Mastroianni's George Armstrong Custer against Alain Cuny's Sitting Bull. The climactic scene, featuring Custer's ill-conceived plan of attack, takes place not in the Black Hills of South Dakota but rather in a gigantic pit of a construction site that was formerly the famed Les Halles marketplace of working-class Paris, which was undergoing a sort of "urban renewal" at the time. The film also stars Michel Piccoli as Custer's deranged nemesis 
Buffalo Bill Cody and Catherine Deneuve as Marie-Helene de Boismonfrais, the primly Victorian "white angel of the white man" who beds Custer in a fit of untrammeled passion (under the watchful gaze of President Richard Nixon, whose photograph sits on Custer's writing desk). War with the Indians has been coordinated by various railroad executives--neocons in period costume--who have enticed the government with stock options, contracted the military for their own means, and pull the strings of the media. Aware of previous "mistakes" by the architects of Vietnam and the Algerian War, as well as the "lessons" of Watergate, they have hired Custer out of retirement knowing that the public will be drawn to the war by either total victory or total defeat. Little Big Horn, of course, like the 
Alamo, was a crushing defeat turned into national cause as fallen imperialist heroes such as Custer and Davy Crockett were made into martyrs. It was exactly the kind of rallying point that the atrocities of modern war cannot foster. Lurking in the background with the railroad executives is an undercover C.I.A. agent, posing as an anthropology professor, who carries postmortem snapshots of Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Surrealism at its finest, representing both the struggle of the subconscious and that of the common man under totalitarian regimes and/or modern capitalism, Ferreri's film is notable for predating Robert Altman's underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) which featured a toupee-wearing Paul Newman as the charlatan Buffalo Bill and Geraldine Chaplin as Little Miss Sure Shot (Annie Oakley). Altman's seething, but accurate, satire of Cody's Wild West show also featured Harvey Keitel, Kevin McCarthy, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, and a fantastic gag on President Grover Cleveland and his child bride Frances Folsom Cleveland.
Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (2008), which opened in New York at the IFC Center last summer, starred Asia Argento and Fu'ad Ait Aattou as ill-fated lovers in a brilliantly filmed version of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's 1851 novel Une Vieille Maitresse (aka An Old Mistress). D'Aurevilly was a minor French writer and newspaper critic whose career spanned the Second Republic and Second Empire of Napoleon III. 
Like many of his other works, Une Vieille Maitress presents characters in a vice-like grip of passion who are drawn to excess, criminality, and self destruction with an almost-supernatural obsession. For Breillat (Fat Girl, Romance, Anatomy of Hell), the period-costumes and mannerisms of d'Aurevilly's novel seemed more liberating than restrictive, and The Last Mistress was her most balanced and human work. Likewise, playing the outcast Spanish mistress Vellini opened new possibilities for Argento, whose carnality--while central to her on and off-screen image--is usually handled awkwardly by lesser directors (including her father). 
In surrendering herself to Breillat, however, Argento displayed the emotional depths of her talents as an actor and took the film to heights it would not have reached without her. Co-starring with Argento and the fey Ait Aattou was Roxane Mesquida as the demure bride Hermangarde and Yolande Moreau as La comtesse d’Artelles, the spiritual matriarch of the film. Shot by Greek cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis (Romance, Anatomy of Hell) and edited by Pascale Chavance (Fat Girl, Sex is Comedy), The Last Mistress was ultimately about the complex banality of doomed love-triangles (in any era) and will stand as one of the most complete films of the decade. Old lovers, literally, will haunt your dreams after watching this film.
Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961), like the geography and characters it portrays, has had a long and obscure history, paved over, discarded, presumably lost forever. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and distributed by Milestone, it was screened at IFC Center and BAM last summer. The film revolves around six or seven American Indians living in Bunker Hill, the benighted backwater of 
Los Angeles where wooden Victorian mansions, long since turned into hotels and cheap apartments, were carved out of the steep hillsides of downtown L.A. Once an exclusive and wealthy neighborhood, Bunker Hill was abandoned by local businesses in favor of the newly-constructed department stores (with off-street parking lots) on Wilshire Blvd. The former mansions were left to decay and, though filled with working-class Mexican Americans and South American immigrants working in the garment industry, the area was rezoned as an "urban renewal" project of the 1980s, financed largely by Japanese investment. Bunker Hill is today's financial district of Los Angeles, and the "center" of high culture with museums, opera houses, and concert halls. 
But the Bunker Hill presented by Mackensie's tragic and beautiful film is fraught with the romance of night, the uncertainty of youth, and the difficulties of assimilation for the American Indians of the film. It is the Bunker Hill of John Fante's Ask the Dust (1939) and Dreams From Bunker Hill (1982), filled with the same mystery, sadness, and humor. Few today know that in the late-1950s a young generation of American Indians left their Southwest Reservations for the "freedoms" of urban America. The Exiles has been called a documentary, which is about half-true. The film was a collective effort made while Mackensie (1930-1980) was studying at USC, filmed on leftover scraps of film stock, and its stars play honest versions of themselves and their lives. Of special note is the dance scene at the end of the film atop a desolate hill adjacent downtown. American neo-realism at its finest, it remains one of the greatest independent movies ever made.
Throughout his long career (almost 30 years) Jim Jarmusch has continually reasserted himself as this country's finest filmmaker. Each of his films have been a regeneration of his idiosyncratic and obsessive vision, and no one has painted a portrait of urban and national geography quite like Jarmusch. Like most great American art, this vision has been in the form of a quest. From James Fenimore Cooper's captivity narratives to John Ford's Western films, American art has traced the lines of the quest and hunt in both physical and moral terms. Occasionally, this quest has been subverted to show the hollowness and madness of America's violent obsessions. Herman Melville's Moby Dick is, of course, the great standard of subversion. Released in 1851, amidst violent territorial expansion and a headlong course to Civil War, its message was largely ignored before resonating with European intellectuals in the 1930s, as fascism descended upon Spain and Germany. 
Jarmusch's work is as relevant to his own time as Melville's was to his; amidst the Reagan Revolution and revival of the Wall Street ethos, Jarmusch released Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down By Law (1986). Amidst the culture wars, he offered the poetic Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog (1999).The Limits of Control (2009), which opened at the Angelica last spring, starred Isaach De Bankole, Paz de la Huerta, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Youki Kudoh, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Bill Murray. De Bankole is excellent as the mysterious and meticulous Lone Man in Spain who is met by a various ensemble of mysterious international characters who each greet him with the same line “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” De la Huerta, as the Nude girl, delivered one of the most subtle performances in the film; though everyone is an enigma, her character exudes more emotion than anyone else and yet keeps the most hidden as well (quite remarkable given her bared state throughout the film). The comparisons to Jean-Pierre Melville and John Boorman are obvious, but the film is far more than an existential homage to Le Samouri or Ponit Blank: Jarmusch has again reinvented himself by flooding the screen in Sevillian color and light and a seemingly disjointed soundtrack by Japanese noise band Boris. But this reinvention also represents a return to the same obsessive quest that has marked all of his movies; The Limits of Control, strangely, is most similar to Jarmusch's student film Permanent Vacation (1980), also about a mysterious loner who encounters mysterious characters as he wanders around burnt-out New York City. Though filmed with different budgets, each utilized brilliant location shooting to etch a portrait of time and place and memory through the eyes of a wandering stranger.
Though far from perfect, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen (2008) deserved much better than the moralistic and pejorative reviews that awaited its premiere at the Quad Cinema last winter. Written and directed by Vadim Glowna, who also starred as Edmond, the film featured Angela Winkler as the Madame and Maximilian Schell as Edmond's friend Kogi. 
Glowna, best known for Desperado City (1981) and Nothing Left to Lose (1983), adapted the script from a 1961 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). Yasunari's real-life suicide figures into the tale of unmitigated grief and the inescapability of dreams, for, haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter who have died in a crash fifteen years earlier, Edmond is a lonely man in modern day Berlin with nothing left to live for. Nothing, that is, until his friend Kogi tells him of a secret brothel where elderly men can stay all night with heavily-sedated girls who will not awake no matter what you do to them (the clients are presumed impotent by the Madame). Vadim Rizov, writing for the 
Village Voice on November 11, 2008, called the film "laughably somber" and "one of the year's worst releases." Jeanette Catsoulis of the New York Times, taking the morality up a notch, wrote on November 14, 2008 that an "odor of fusty smut" clings to this "clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence," and that its "whisper of necrophilia is impossible to ignore." And Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on January 9, 2009, complained "it's discouraging to see a movie where the women sleep through everything. They don't even have the courtesy to wake up and claim to have a headache." He continued, condescendingly suggesting that House of the Sleeping Beauties "offends not only civilized members of both sexes, 
but even dirty old men, dramatizing as it does their dirtiness and oldness." He then states that "obvious questions arise" in the film, such as how does the Madame "find the women? Who are they? Why do they seem to sleep peacefully instead of as if they are drugged? How do they keep their hair and makeup impeccable?" Some points raised by these reviews (and others) were well taken, and Edmond's soliloquies are pretentious and poorly written and the film is filled, in unexpected places, with bizarre religious imagery. But as for the film's implied necrophilia, its unsettled nature, its mysteries, its shortcomings, its matter of fact attitude toward the death machine of the sex trade (for which both prostitute and john are disposable), and its utter disregard for modern middle-class morality--they make it all the more worth watching. The underlying message of the reviews last winter seems to be that there is nothing erotic or nice or proper about severely-drugged girls or creepy men who pay top dollar to fondle them in their sleep. What is the world coming to?
Alfred Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937) starred Derrick De Marney and Nova Pilbeam in the classic man-on-the-run formula that Hitchcock had perfected two years earlier with The 39 Steps. Thanks in part to a surprise ending featuring a jazz band in blackface, 
Young and Innocent deserves re-evaluation as one of his more significant prewar films. De Marney plays Robert Tisdale, an innocent man turned preordained suspect who, after his mistress is found strangled on the beach, must chase the real killer while he himself is chased by the police. Nova Pilbeam stars as Erica Burgoyne, the young and adventurous daughter of the lead police detective and romantic interest of the fugitive Tisdale. For Pilbeam, who was just 18 at the time, this was her first adult role; as a 15 year-old she had played the daughter in The 
Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
with Peter Lorre. Based on a Josephine Tey mystery, Young and Innocent was written by Charles Bennett who had scripted several of Hitchcock's U.K. films: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage (1936), and The Secret Agent (1936). Tisdale's freedom (to pursue the detective's daughter, no less) rests on finding a missing raincoat and the man with the twitching eyes. Along the way are a multitude of hats, phones, cars, a chase through an old mill, and a strange birthday party. As Paul Duncan has written, the climactic crane shot in a London hotel was one of Hitchcock's most difficult, panning from 145 feet high down into a 4 inch close-up. The opening scene of this film--a strangled woman washed upon the shore--later reappeared at the beginning of Frenzy (1972).
Marco Ferreri's anti-imperialist comedy Touche Pas a la Femme Blanche (Don't Touch the White Woman) (1974) reconfigures the Battle of Little Bighorn to the modern-day streets of Paris, pitting Marcello Mastroianni's George Armstrong Custer against Alain Cuny's Sitting Bull. The climactic scene, featuring Custer's ill-conceived plan of attack, takes place not in the Black Hills of South Dakota but rather in a gigantic pit of a construction site that was formerly the famed Les Halles marketplace of working-class Paris, which was undergoing a sort of "urban renewal" at the time. The film also stars Michel Piccoli as Custer's deranged nemesis 
Buffalo Bill Cody and Catherine Deneuve as Marie-Helene de Boismonfrais, the primly Victorian "white angel of the white man" who beds Custer in a fit of untrammeled passion (under the watchful gaze of President Richard Nixon, whose photograph sits on Custer's writing desk). War with the Indians has been coordinated by various railroad executives--neocons in period costume--who have enticed the government with stock options, contracted the military for their own means, and pull the strings of the media. Aware of previous "mistakes" by the architects of Vietnam and the Algerian War, as well as the "lessons" of Watergate, they have hired Custer out of retirement knowing that the public will be drawn to the war by either total victory or total defeat. Little Big Horn, of course, like the 
Alamo, was a crushing defeat turned into national cause as fallen imperialist heroes such as Custer and Davy Crockett were made into martyrs. It was exactly the kind of rallying point that the atrocities of modern war cannot foster. Lurking in the background with the railroad executives is an undercover C.I.A. agent, posing as an anthropology professor, who carries postmortem snapshots of Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Surrealism at its finest, representing both the struggle of the subconscious and that of the common man under totalitarian regimes and/or modern capitalism, Ferreri's film is notable for predating Robert Altman's underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) which featured a toupee-wearing Paul Newman as the charlatan Buffalo Bill and Geraldine Chaplin as Little Miss Sure Shot (Annie Oakley). Altman's seething, but accurate, satire of Cody's Wild West show also featured Harvey Keitel, Kevin McCarthy, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, and a fantastic gag on President Grover Cleveland and his child bride Frances Folsom Cleveland.
