Manny Farber On The Leopard Man

"The Leopard Man", a reissued "B" (1942) showing with the rickety "King Kong", is a nerve-twitching whodunit giving the creepy impression that human beings and "things" are interchangeable and almost synonymous and that both are pawns of a bizarre and terrible destiny. A lot of surrealists like Cocteau have tried for the same supernatural effects, but while their scenes still seem like portraits in motion, Val Lewton's film shows a way to tell a story about people, that isn't dominated by the activity, weight, size, and pace of the human figure. In one segment of the film a small frightened senorita walks beyond the edge of the border town and then back again, while her feelings and imagination keep shifting with the camera into the sagebrush, the darkness of an arroyo, crackling pebbles underfoot, and so on until you see her thick dark blood oozing under the front door of her house. All the psychological effects -- fear and so on –were transferred to within the non-human components of the picture as the girl waited for some non-corporeal manifestation of nature, culture, or history to gobble her up. But more important in terms of movie invention, Lewton's use of multiple focus (characters are dropped or picked up as if by chance, while the movie goes off on odd tracks trying to locate a sound or suspicion) and his lighter-than-air sense of pace created a terrifically plastic camera style. It put the camera eye on a curiously delicate wave length that responds to scenery as quickly as the mind, and gets inside of people instead of reacting only to surface qualities. This film still seems to be one of Hollywood's original gems -- nothing impure in terms of cinema, nothing imitative about its style, and little that misses fire through a lack of craft.

--Manny Farber (September 27, 1952, The Nation)

Manny Farber on Ugly Melodramas

Hollywood has spawned, since 1946, a series of ugly melodramas featuring a cruel aesthetic, desperate craftsmanship, and a pessimistic outlook. These films ("The Set-Up", "Act of Violence", "Asphalt Jungle", and “No Way Out") are revolutionary attempts at turning life inside out to find the specks of horrible oddity that make puzzling, faintly marred kaleidoscopes of a street, face, or gesture. Whatever the cause of these depressing films -- the television menace, the loss of twenty-four million customers since the mid-forties -- it has produced striking changes in film technique. Writers overpack dialogue with hackneyed bitterness, actors perfect a quietly neurotic style, while directors -- by flattening the screen, discarding framed and centered action, and looming the importance of actors -- have made the movie come out and hit the audience with an almost personal savagery. The few recent films unmarked by the new technique ("Born to be Bad") seem naive and obsolete.

The new scripts are tortured by the "big" statement. "All About Eve" (story of the bright lights, dim wits, and dark schemes of Broadway) hardly gets inside theater because the movie is coming out of somebody's mouth. The actors are burdened with impossible dialogue abounding in clichés: ''Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience -- there's theater"; timely words: ''We are the original displaced personalities"; and forced cleverness that turns each stock character into the echo of an eclectic writer. The new trick is to build character and plot with loaded dialogue, using hep talk that has discolored cheap fiction for years. In "The Breaking Point" the environment is a "jungle", the hero a morose skipper ''with only guts to peddle" who decides after a near-fatal gun battle that ; "a man alone hasn't got a chance". His spouse comes, through with "You’re more ma n than anyone I ever knew".

Stories, parading success-seekers through a jackpot of frustration, are unique in that they pick on outcasts with relentless cruelty that decimates the actor as much as the character. As a colored interne moves through the "No Way Out" blizzard of anti-Negro curses, everything about him is aggressively spiked so that a malignant force seems to be hacking at him. When the cruel aestheticians really click on these sadistic epics, foreboding death lurks over every scene. Cameramen dismember the human body, accenting oddities like Darnell's toothpick legs, or Pat Neal's sprawling mouth to make them inanimate; faces are made up to suggest death masks, expanded to an unearthly size, spotlighted in dark, unknown vacuums; metaphorical direction twists a chimp's burial ("Sunset Boulevard") into an uncanny experience by finding a resemblance between monkey and owner. Under the guise of sympathy these brutally efficient artists are sneaky torturers of the defeated or deranged character.


Directors like Wilder and Mankiewicz mechanically recreate the unharnessed energy and surprise of great Silent films with an elegantly controlled use of the inexplicable. In the jitterbugging scene of "Asphalt Jungle" Huston delicately undresses the minds of four characters and gauchely creates a sensuous, writhing screen, though his notion of jive is so odiously surrealistic it recalls Russian propaganda against the United States. The first glimpse of the faded star in "Sunset", using Bonnard's suede touch on Charles Addams's portraiture (a witch surveying her real estate through shutters and dark spectacles) is lightning characterization with a poetic tang. Brando, in "The Men", commands a G.I. troop into battle like a slow, doped traffic coping cars through an intersection, but his affected pantomime electrifies the screen with the hallucinatory terror of an early painting by De Chirico. Movies have seldom if ever been as subtle as these scenes, or as depressing in the use of outrageous element to expedite ambiguous craftsmanship. To understand the motives behind the highly charged, dissonant acting employed today, one has to go back to the time wasting, passive performance of an early "talkie".

No matter how ingenious the actor -- Harlow, Garbo, Lee Tracy – effectiveness and depth were dissipated by the uninterrupted perusal of a character geared to a definite "type" and acted with mannerisms that were always so rhythmically and harmoniously related that the effect was of watching a highly attenuated ballet. Directors today have docked the old notion of unremittingly consistent, river-like performances, and present what amounts to a confusion of "bits", the actor seen only intermittently in garish touches that are highly charged with meaning and character, but not actually melted into one clear recognizable person. Darnell's honestly ugly characterization of a depressed slattern is fed piecemeal into ''No Way Out", which moves her toward and away from malevolence, confuses her "color", and even confounds her body. Her job -- like the recent ones of Nancy Olson, John McIntyre, Hayden -- shouldn't be called a “performance” because it is more like a collage of personality, which varies drastically in every way to create the greatest explosion and "illumination" in each moment.

-- Manny Farber

My Favorite Films of the 1930s

A Spanish magazine “Miradas de Cine” has conducted a poll and asked Spanish and a few abroad critics to select their 15 favorite films from the glorious 1930s and also to pick five that supposed to be overrated films. I have nothing to do with the latter part because I don’t believe if overrating of the classic films, when the creatures of them are all gone, will do any harm to us. As long as overrating is concerned, the predictable record breaker of the poll in Gone with the wind. But in my view, if we are really looking for overblown titles we must take a look around ourselves and revise some internationally accepted names and films in contemporary cinema.

Selecting top films of the 1930s is an irresistible poll to participate in. For me, one of the most essential periods in history of motion pictures is thirties and those early efforts to make something decent and artistic out of the new technical inventions like sound and later, color, while economical depression and fascism were the most serious issues of the time and maybe the whole century.

My real mentor in thirties cinema of the United States is Mr. Andrew Sarris. Writings of this wise man have been my companion in the worst and hardest days of my life and I owe him much for unveiling so many names of that era to me. So I’m going to pick my top 15 films of decade (sticking to the rules of Miradas de Cine!), but meanwhile I’m going to add another 50 titles to my selection! I must admit that my knowledge of 1930s cinema in Spanish language countries, far eastern cinema and also Italy is very limited.

You can see the complete lists in “Miradas de Cine” site, but if you are only looking for critics who are well-known outside Spain, these are the names and their picks:

Nicole Brenez (Paris) - À Propos de Nice (Vigo) • Lot in Sodom (Watson & Webber) • Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiss-Grau (Moholy-Nagy) • L’âge d’or (Buñuel) • Le fleuve Sumida (Amaya) • Limite (Peixoto) • Taris ou la natation (Vigo) • Les Berceaux (Kirsanoff) • Que viva Mexico (Eisenstein) • L’Or des mers (Epstein) • Vampyr - Der Traum des Allan Grey (Dreyer) • Le Bonheur (Medvedkine) • Rapt (Kirsanoff) • Rainbow Dance (Lye) • Early Abstractions (Smith)

Sergi Fabregat - City Lights (Chaplin) • L’Atalante (Vigo) • Vampyr - Der Traum des Allan Grey (Dreyer) • Modern Times (Chaplin) • M (Lang) • The Roaring Twenties (Walsh) • Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (Lang) • Aleksandr Nevskiy (Eisenstein) • A Night at the Opera (Wood) • La grande illusion (Renoir) • Bride of Frankenstein (Whale) • Freaks (Browning) • Duck Soup (McCarey) • Otona no miru ehon – Umarete wa mita keredo (Ozu) • White Zombie (Halperin)

Floreal Peleato (Paris) - Zemlya (Dovzhenko) • Ze soboty na nedeli (Machatý) • Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (Murnau) • City Lights (Chaplin) • La chienne (Renoir) • Liebelei (Ophüls) • Das testament des Dr. Mabuse (Lang) • Only Yesterday (Stahl) • L’Atalante (Vigo) • U samogo sinyego morya (Barnet) • Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey) • La grande illusion (Renoir) • Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks) • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra) • Remorques (Grémillon) • Zangiku monogatari (Mizoguchi)

Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago) - Laughter (d’Arrast) • City Lights (Chaplin) • M (Lang) • La nuit du carrefour (Renoir) • Ivan (Dovzhenko) • Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo (Ozu) • Love Me Tonight (Mamoulian) • Scarface (Hawks) • Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch) • Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (Milestone) • L’Atalante (Vigo) • Judge Priest (Ford) • King Kong (Cooper & Schoedsack) • Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey) • Zangiku monogatari (Mizoguchi)

Chris Fujiwara (United States) - La règle du jeu (Renoir) • Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford) • Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks) • Zemlya (Dovzhenko) • L’Atalante (Vigo) • You Only Live Once (Lang) • Naniwa erejî (Mizoguchi) • Stage Door (La Cava) • Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (Murnau) • Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Naruse) • City Lights (Chaplin) • Les perles de la couronne (Guitry) • Otona no miru ehon – Umarete wa mita keredo (Ozu) • Me and My Gal (Walsh) • Design for Living (Lubitsch)

And here is my list of 15 (+50) films of the 1930s, dedicated to Andrew Sarris:

City Lights	1931	Charlie Chaplin
L'Atalante	1934	Jean Vigo
M	1931	Fritz Lang
Le Règle du jeu	1939	Jean Renoir
Only Angels have wings	1939	Howard Hawks
My Man Godfrey	1936	Gregory La Cava
Stagecoach	1939	John Ford
Roaring Twenties	1939	Raoul Walsh
Steamboat Round The Bend	1935	John Ford
Partie de campagne	1936	Jean Renoir
Scarface	1932	Howard Hawks
Crime de Monsiuer Lange	1936	Jean Renoir
Dawn Patrol	1938	Edmund Goulding
Destry rides again	1939	George Marshal
Pépé le Moko	1937	Julien Duvivier

And the next 50, without any specific order:

À nous la liberté	1931	Rene Clair
Bete humaine,La	1938	Jean Renoir
Grand Illusion	1937	Jean Renoir
Boudu Saved from Drowning	1932	Jean Renoir
Dead End	1937	William Wyler
Holiday	1938	George Cukor
Informer	1935	John Ford
Propose de Nice, A	1930	Jean Vigo
Le quai des brumes	1938	Marcel Carne
Young Mr.Lincoln	1939	John Ford
Zéro de conduite	1933	Jean Vigo
Alice Adams	1935	George Stevens
All quiet on the western front	1930	Lewis Milestone
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang	1932	Mervyn LeRoy
Judge Priest	1934	John Ford
Little Caesar	1930	Mervyn LeRoy
Night At The Opera, A	1935	Sam Wood
Road to Glory	1936	Howard Hawks
Scarlet Empress	1934	Joseph Von Sternberg
Vampyr	1932	Carl Th. Dreyer
Whole Towns Talking	1935	John Ford
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse	1933	Fritz Lang
39 Steps	1935	Alfred Hitchcock
42nd Street	1933	Lloyd Bacon
Blonde Venus	1932	Josef Von Sternberg
Blood of a Poet	1930	Jean Cocteau
Bringing up baby	1938	Howard Hawks
Day At The Races,A	1937	Sam Wood
Dinner At Eight	1933	George Cukor
Dishonored	1931	Josef von Sternberg
Gay Divorcee	1934	Mark Sandrich
Invisible Man,The	1933	James Whale
King Kong	1933	Ernest B.Schoedsack & M.Cooper
L'Age D'or	1930	Luis Bunuel
Modern Times	1936	Charlie Chaplin
Mr. Deeds goes to town	1936	Frank Capra
Mr. Smith goes to Washington	1939	Frank Capra
Ninotchka	1939	Ernst Lubitsch
Top Hat	1935	Mark Sandrich
Twentieth century	1934	Howard Hawks
Under the roofs of Paris	1930	Rene Clair
Alexander Nevsky	1938	Sergei Eisenstein
Black Cat	1934	Edgar G. Ulmer
Frankenstein	1931	James Whale
Design for living	1933	Ernst Lubitsch
Devil Is a Woman	1935	Josef Von Sternberg
Duck Soup	1933	Leo McCarey
Fury	1936	Fritz Lang
It happened one night	1934	Frank Capra
Lady Vanishes	1938	Alfred Hitchcock
Peter Ibbetson	1935	Henry Hathaway
Petrified Forest, The	1936	Archie Mayo
Public Enemy	1931	William Wellman
Ruggles of Red Gap	1935	Leo McCarey
Plainsman	1936	Cecil B.DeMille
Tabu	1931	F.W.Murnau
Triumph Of The Will	1935	Leni Riefentahl
Women	1939	George Cukor
You can't take it with you	1938	Frank Capra
You Only Live Once	1937	Fritz Lang

Thanks to Jonathan Rosenbaum for notifying me about the event.

My Favorite Films of the 1930s (in Farsi)

مجلۀ اسپانيايي Miradas de Cine از منتقدان اسپانيايي زبان و چند منتقد مشهور در اروپا و آمريكا خواسته تا 15 فيلم مورد علاقه شان از دهۀ 1930 را انتخاب كنند و در انتها نام پنج فيلم را بياورند كه به نظرشان دربارۀ اهميت و بزرگي اين فيلم ها بيش از حد اغراق شده باشد. در بخش دوم (كه چندان مورد علاقۀ من نيست) منتقدان اندكي شركت كرده اند، شايد آن ها هم فكر مي كرده اند به هر حال حتي زياد نوشتن و گفتن دربارۀ فيلم هاي قديمي خيرش بيشتر از ضررش است. هر چه باشد سازندگان اين فيلم ها از دنيا رفته اند و مانند آدم هاي بيراهي چون كوئنتين تارانتينو براي اعتبارهاي من درآوردي دندان تيز نكرده اند. در اين قسمت – يعني بزرگ شده هاي بيش از حد – بربادرفته در صدر نشسته است.

اين رأي گيري مرا ترغيب كرد تا من هم فيلم هاي برگزيده ام از دهۀ 1930 را انتخاب كنم، با اين تفاوت كه علاوه بر 15 فيلم برگزيده، از 50 فيلم ديگر هم نام ببرم كه هيچ فهرستي بي آنها كامل نيست. 15 تاي اول را با عنوان هاي رايج فارسي در اين جا مي آورم، براي پنجاه تاي بعد به فهرست انگليسي در بالا رجوع كنيد.

فيلم هاي برگزيدۀ من از دهۀ 1930

روشنايي هاي شهر (چارلز چاپلين،1931)

آتالانت (ژان ويگو، 1934)

ام (فريتس لانگ، 1931)

قاعدۀ بازي (ژان رنوار، 1939)

فقط فرشته ها بال دارند (هوارد هاكس، 1939)

پيشخدمت من گادفري (گرگوري لاكاوا، 1936)

دليجان (جان فورد، 1939)

سال هاي خروشان 1920 (رائول والش، 1939)

كشتي بخار در خم رودخانه (جان فورد، 1935)

گردشي در ييلاق (ژان رنوار، 1936)

صورت زخمي (هوارد هاكس، 1932)

جنايت آقاي لانژ (ژان رنوار، 1936)

گشت سپيده دم (ادموند گولدينگ، 1938)

دستري دوباره مي تازد (جورج مارشال، 1939)

پپه لوموكو (ژولين دوويويه، 1937)