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Movies I love ( The Rare Book Edition)

Sometime back awhile ago, I made a list of really, really bad movies and I promised an eventual list of really good movies that I liked.

So here we are.

This is not a list of “greatest movies ever”, this is only a list of really great films that I have seen, but I find that almost no one else I know has ever seen or even heard of these films, hence the 'rare book' concept. These are real gems, movies that are interesting, well crafted and will stay with you long after the DVD is back into its Netflix envelope.

Ikiru

An Akira Kurosawa film, need I say more? He could make a movie called “Small Engine Repair” and I would watch it. This movie is the story of a city bureaucrat who discovers that he has only a few months to live because he dying of stomach cancer. In the process of coming to terms with his pending death, he goes on a spree in the city and meets a girl. The girl helps reveal to the man a possible route to his own salvation. After his death, his co-workers gather in a sort of wake ceremony and begin to discuss the behavior of their friend and co-worker, who in the months prior to his death began acting very odd. One by one, each of them relates stories that reveal the nature of the man and how he learned to deal with the end of his life. All I can tell about the impact of this film is this; I dare you to not cry.

I dont mean to say that the movie is all weepy, its not like that at all. Its a very emotional movie, both up and down, which is an entirely different thing. There are scenes in this movie that are so moving and touching and inspiring that it’s hard to find the words for its true greatness. Why this film is overlooked, I have no idea. I would put this movie into any list of '10 greatest films of all time'.

Ice cold in Alex

'Ice cold in Alex' is the story of a WWII British medical team in the North African Desert. The crew of this ambulance is cut off and finds themselves behind enemy lines, but the real enemy in this film isn’t just the Germans, its the desert itself. The Doctor of the Ambulance repeatedly uses the inspiration of getting through their troubles and having a “Cold drink in Alexandria” as a motivator to keep the crew going as they do everything they can to stay alive in the hellish world of the North African desert in during wartime.

This is a quiet English movie where there is barely any mood music and most of the key scenes have no spoken dialog. It’s a movie about desperate people, but the most moving scenes are performed in absolute silence. There are two scenes that come to mind. The first the ambulance has to be winched out of the bottom of a gulley up the side of a cliff, which requires an act of superhuman effort to accomplish and you wonder how they can accomplish this task with the decidedly non-mechanically minded folks that are assigned to the ambulance. You are taken step by step through the process of moving a large truck up shifting sands and it’s a very, very tense scene.

The second scene is at the end of the film where you are finally allowed to see the actual “Cold drink in Alex”, and its absolutely breathtaking when it finally appears on the bar, a cold pint of beer, glistening with condensation on the outside of the glass. You react to it the same way as that the characters in the movie. It’s a great scene that you wont soon forget.

The Big Lift

It’s rare to find a film that even mentions the Berlin Airlift, but this film is actually about the airlift itself. Filmed just after the Berlin Airlift, This movie shows post war Berlin, Germany and the German people themselves as they once were not so very long ago. This is a film about a country shattered by the effects of war. This film is not made up of movie sets and special effects; this is the real thing. It’s a movie and a story about the men who flew in the miracle of the Berlin Airlift and the people they were helping to survive, people who just a few years earlier were our enemy.

Sure, it’s a movie, but to me it’s almost like a time travel experience to a period of history that is slipping away from our collective memory. The film is shot at a time when the Cold War was just getting started and it was all far from known how things would eventually turn out. It’s hard to get Americans to understand that there was once a devastating war in Europe that killed millions of people. Today if you say “Europe” people hear “Vacation”. But not all that long ago, “Europe” meant deprivation and destruction. This film shows that in deep detail.

Watch the credits and you will see that many of the characters in the movie are actual veterans of the Berlin Airlift.

A Matter of Life and Death (or ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in the US)

This film is really hard to find, but if you can find it, watch it and you won’t be sorry. Its pure fantasy, but it’s a real blast. David Niven plays a British bomber pilot named Peter who is flying a mission where he and his crew are shot up pretty bad. As her prepares to leave the aircraft, he informs the ATC operator that he has no parachute and will surely die, that his crew are all dead and the aircraft is on fire. The ATC operator is an American woman who is played by Kim Hunter **. They talk for a moment and David Niven jumps out of the plane into the fog to his ultimate demise.

And here’s where it starts to gets weird. After he jumps from the aircraft into the fog, he then appears on a English beach, standing in his flight gear and apparently none the worse for wear. It seems that as he jumped from his burning aircraft, his “conductor” to heaven missed him in the fog, so he has been returned to earth by error. As he walks along the beach a bit stunned to find that he’s still alive, June, the ATC operator he was talking to before he jumped finds Peter walking on the beach and of course, they both fall instantly and madly in love. (ah, Hollywood...)

Ah, but here’s the problem, Peter died. He’s not supposed to be walking the earth, he supposed to go to his great reward. His "conductor" whom only Peter can see, keeps trying to get Peter to go on with his mission; not in a 'menacing ghost' kind of way as you might expect; because as the “heavenly conductor” is actually a foppish French aristocrat who was killed during the French Revolution. Its hard to menance anyone dressed like that, with that kind of accent. However, being dead isn’t Peters only problem. Since his accidental return he’s fallen in love with a woman and that just gums up the works for Peter and the poor “Heavenly conductor”.

As a result, Peter must undergo a trial for his life in Heaven to determine whether he is to live or die.

Its funny, it’s touching, it’s instructive and in a way it’s timely as one of the key plot points in the film is the nature of US and British National relationships. Peter, a British pilot, June an American WAC and the Judge in the trial for Peters life is a Parson killed in the American Revolutionary War, so he’s got a bit of a bias against the English. The Jury is made up of the dead of the allies of World War II and his Attorney makes a special sacrifice to argue for Peters case.

The Red Tent

This is a Russian-Italian movie about the ill-fated expedition by Italian Admiral Nobile to fly an airship over the North Pole. Peter Finch plays Nobile, who every night conjures up the ghosts of men and women who were part of the disaster on the ice and they in essence put him on trial for his errors. Some absolve, some accuse and some forgive, but history has the final verdict to the life of a man, who once was great, but is now mostly forgotten.

It’s an interesting movie, but I loved the movies approach to a man putting himself on trial by summoning the ghosts of his past. I’ve replayed the closing scenes of the movie in my mind several times as it serves as a warning to those of us who take things in their work as being far more important than they really are. Sometimes, things are just beyond your control and no matter how you plan or how good you are, things can and will go terribly wrong.

Sean Connery is in the film, playing arctic explorer Roald Amundsen. Amundsen was not a big fan of Nobile, but Amundsen disappeared on a rescue mission to find him which makes you think about the role of a man in the process of fufilling his duty and how that sometimes works with fate and destiny. They have a most interesting dialogue at the end of the film.

The Hill

It’s Connery again, only this time its in the Libyan Desert and not the Arctic. The Hill is set in a British Military Discipline Camp in Libya the 1950’s. The Hill refers to a form of punishment for the likes of men like Connery, who have ran afoul of the rules of military discipline. The movie has almost nothing to do with the military but it does have a lot to do with the nature of oppression and the abuse of authority to further the careers of weak men.

“We're all doing time. Even the screws.” is the key line of the movie, and it’s uttered by Connerys character. In his characters view, all men are the same, but to the authority figures who run it, that’s exactly the kind of thinking that needs to be beaten out of him and the rest of the prison population to bring them back into line. Ossie Davis plays a prisoner who shows us all how to stand up against the ‘little men’ of the world.

The Best of Times

I grew up in the Central Valley of California. No one sitting in the snows of the northeast says to themselves ‘Gosh, when I get out of high school, I’m moving to Sacramento, because people out there are so damn cool”. People think of California as palm trees, movie stars, and beaches, but that’s only about 5% of the State. Most of us live in the other 95%, the part that they don’t make movies about. This movie is about the other 95% of the State thats been my home for most of my life.

'The Best of Times' is about a couple of aging high school football stars in the part of California that no one knows much about, down in the southern end of the valley, in Taft and Bakersfield. Yes, these are real places. You might have heard of Bakersfield, but you probably never heard of Taft. These are two towns in the Oil fields. (California has oil? Oh, say it isn’t so!) These are rough working class towns with no particular Hollywood style values at all. I’ve been down there many times and I love it. Taft that is, Bakersfield?, BAH!

Robin Williams plays a ‘butter fingered’ end receiver who drops the one pass that might have allowed his team in Taft to beat the perennial winner in the comparative rich town of Bakersfield, which Taft has only come close to winning on that one game in all the years they have played against each other. Kurt Russell plays his best friend who is also the Quarterback who threw the pass that was dropped by poor Robin. Years later, Robin is a manager of a Bank owned by the Bakersfield “big daddy” and high school football sponsor. “Big Daddy“ is also Robins' Father-in-Law, who never fails to remind Robin of the big flop in his football career and the end of the one shot of potential glory for Taft High School. Robin lives obsessed with “what might have been” and is always replaying the fateful day, only to find that in the end, he’s the guy that dropped the ball, as everyone in his life constantly reminds him.

Kurt Russell, who was arguably the best quarterback that Taft ever had, has fallen into hard times, working at a small auto-repair and Van painting business, his dreams of football stardom ended due to an injury after the famous “dropped pass”.

Robin eventually gets into a bet with his overbearing Bakersfield father in law. The bet being that the old Taft team could actually beat the old Bakersfield team. Robin and Kurt then begin work to gather the now middle-aged men of the Taft team into one more try to beat the now hated Bakersfield.

This is a sentimental favorite for me. I love the scenes of backwater California and redemption of a middle aged man through the game of football with his friends.Oh, and Holly Palance drives me wild.

Watch and Enjoy.

** - Yes, It’s Zira from ‘Planet of the Apes’ you nerds…

Posted @ December 13, 2006 06:03 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: Dennis at December 14, 2006 09:01 AM

Posted by: Jim Piper at January 8, 2007 09:17 PM

Posted by: frank martin at January 8, 2007 09:46 PM