Double Indemnity (1944)

Dir. Billy Wilder
Writ. Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler; based on James M. Cain's novel
w/ Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and Jean Heather

Trying to reconcile himself to the person he's closest to, insurance salesman Walter Neff surrendurs the truth of the events leading up to a fraudulent scam in which his lover's husband can produce a golden egg by dying accidentally on a train. The voice over narrative, ever reminiscent of the opening scene of Neff careening recklessly to get to the office, leads a suspensful and introspective domestic nightmare. As he's pulled ever deeper into Phyllis Dietrichson's machinations -- sympathizing with her dread of the abusive, alcoholic terror awaiting her at home -- he learns that all is not as it seems. Their lopsided love affair staggers between the twisted passion that arises at the prospect of ridding the world of one man and the thrill of plotting a scheme that would go all the way, no hiccups, straight down the line.

If ever a writing duo wove an unsung swan song, Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder did when they penned this lush but terse and often powerful landmark film. [1] Although owing a lot to earlier noir-like flourishes, Double Indemnity remains an enigmatic foreshadowing of the subsequent emergence of American crime novel fixation in Europe, and film historians usually diagnose this as the first complete noir expression. [2]

All the elements of classic filmmaking, though, combine to render an intriguing and unparalleled feature that bears, as part of the ironic legacy of its title, the dual blessing and curse of reflexive history. In response to its less than immaculate reception at the Academy, Wilder sank his disappointment into his follow-up, The Lost Weekend (1945), which snagged the same majors as rival Leo McCarey for Going My Way (1944). Wilder's competitive nature probably explains most of the seeming jest of experiencing a sense of personal failure for not having made it big at the Oscars, even in light of the fact that until the 1960s, the Academy Awards were considered by more than just the Hollywood sector of the industry to be the last word in quality. Taking in the film as a whole, however, leaves a question as to what kind of director couldn't simply take pride in his work, award winner or not.

For one thing, Fred MacMurray turns in a to-the-letter performance as the salesman taking the irresistable challenge of the ultimate sale, kindling his obsession with perfection. Barbara Stanwyck, burdened with the necessity of playing off not only her co-star but the voice over, radiates an alternating little girlishness and an older woman's aloof but accessible charm. The combination's heady and alluring and wouldn't be equaled again until Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967). But Edward G. Robinson's little man, Barton Keyes, brings a character to the screen so rich with nuance and mannerisms that his naturality as the anchor of this small insurance world oftentimes goes completely unnoticed. It's as if the sun may rise and set elsewhere, but in the black and white world of eternal noir night, the bottom line sets the bar.

To counteract that direction and to give the film a bit more breadth, perhaps, we're introduced to a fourth character, Lola, Phyllis's step-daughter. She brings back some of the daylight and a naive quality that leaves her fragile and confused, only the appropriate reaction to the world spinning out of control around her. Descriptions of sensory influences blend with Lola's simple presence in the film as a reminder of everything that the insurance business purports to protect but instead betrays.

It's so easy to be debauched by Phyllis and Walter's seductive relationship that it's even easier to forget their penchant for murder, thanks to the incredible work of cinematographer John Seitz and the chemistry between MacMurray and Stanwyck. Every gesture, every glance, charges the air around them with intrigue and excitement so compelling that even the smallest objects around them transform into conduits for those feelings. The stacks of canned goods on the grocer's rationed shelves become Aztec cities; the phone booth transcends its geography to suggest howling winds that must be hushed into reverence; and honeysuckle smells famously like murder.

The most awing and humbling act arrives when, having been caught up in the dirty business of covering up their crimes, Neff does his best to make things right. He may be a little late, but after all the madcap racing around, his effort speaks quietly of a man who recalls that life offers more than the option between the grind or a heist. Partly due to Lola but mainly because no man likes to be tricked by someone he cares about, the film's finale reverberates with the simple reminder of things that all of us need to be able to count on but can take for granted way too much. Even those not easily succumbing to the thoughtless whispers of a dark and dreary night in nowhere.

[1] Crime novelist Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) in addition to whipping up the dialogue with Wilder from Cain's novel, which was originally entitled Double Indemnity in Three of a Kind. If titles are any indication whatsoever of writing abilities, suffice to say it's a good bet that the film's substantially better.

[2] A year too late to make the grade, Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) struck a similar note as a classic that would be all but forgotten upon release, only to be dug up by film historians who, presumably, preferred the indie director to Wilder.

Yojimbo (1961)

Dir. Akira Kurosawa
Writ. Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
w/ Tohiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai

A samurai was many things in his lifetime: a protector of the realm, a defender of the ruling party, and the iconoclast to whom all other classes gave honor. In Yojimbo, he's also the scruffy wanderer who seeks to find a new place in which to sharpen his skills before they rust, and to do so with as much tact as possible. When Sanjuro walks into a town which has been taken over by a sake dealer named Seibei and a silk dealer named Ushi-Tora, he finds just such the whetting stone for his talents. The merchants, appraising the recent fall of Japan's last dynasty as a time for greed and corruption, have been busy raising their stations by collecting gamblers as cutthroat bodyguards and attacking the farmers who once supplied their trade. Although the samurai has been bereft of food and away from the ruling family he once protected with his life for an unsubstantiated amount of time, he takes his time, sizing up the atmosphere and events carefully. It is a new Japan. One of the merchants has kidnapped a local farmer's attractive wife to negotiate for his son; but, it is a time of social disorder and chaos. It is a time when some parents advise their son to kill to win the respect of men while yet others advise staying on the farm and reaping an honest day's work.

Eh, parental expectations can be heavy, you know?

Samurai as Loner: a Study in Contradiction

Humility comingles with self-sufficience in the lonely, wayward manifestation of Tohiro Mifune's chest-scratching, abrasive Sanjuro. His very name, pulled from the mulberry fields that are the conspicuous focus of his enigmatic stare, elicits a sense of dissipatory elusiveness that supercedes all of his actions. When he lets the stick fall where it will and follows, he acknowledges that his destiny lies outside of his hands. Like the restless, roving, and ultimately crumbling samurai class to which he belongs, though, this unforgettable visual component acts as deft commentary on the unforeseeable -- but just as precarious -- future of Japan.

Keiko I. McDonald's extensive look at the historically-based but aesthetically licensed milieu Kurosawa creates in Yojimbo explains the four-tiered class system as having the samurai at the top, followed by the farmer, with the artisan and the merchant comprising the bottom, respectively. [1] Having been abandoned by the Tokugawa Shogunate's corruption and collapse, the classes have been left in the rapacious lurch of the feudal system, Sanjuro included. "Kurosawa's camera, focusing on the protagonist's back for an unusually long time, evokes a sense of claustrophobia," writes McDonald. "At the same time the white family crest in the center of Sanjuro's black kimono becomes fixed in our minds." Even freed from his masters, this suggests that the samurai was still burdened with the honor expected from one of his ilk though it fails to benefit him in any tangible way. Alone, hungry, and unemployed, he moves on.

The town he arrives in has been overrun by merchant-class opportunists -- a sake dealer and a silk dealer who have each conspired with gamblers in an effort to amass muscle power and outdo the other. Ever aloof to those he claims to despise as weak and defenseless, Sanjuro appears to play heartless games of mischief as he sets the merchants and their men against each other. The open conflict this generates between the two factions acts as representative of the hard realities of that time. Despite his outward enjoyment of the goings-on, though, his alternate side emerges to reveal the inner hero. Tough love is deeply ingrained in his bluff sense of altruism, and deep down he's a role model as well as the protector of an abandoned people he loves.



Samurai as Mediator: the Strategist vs. the Humanitarian

Perhaps the most curious aspect of Yojimbo, Kurosawa's carefully constructed removal of Sanjuro from the story's more criminal elements, deters the audience from seeing the samurai too closely, nor too disjointedly. Effectually, the audience sees much through his eyes while still being allowed the advantage of telling camera work that plays all over Mifune's physique. In a studied scene in which he learns all about the town and its oily operations, Sanjuro and the old man who feeds him pace around the interior of a hut in the foreground while the middle ground remains largely empty of action and seemingly devoid of life. In the back ground, in deep focus and employing a playful Japanese sense of mise-en-scène, the merchants' men grease the official inspector's palms with money and flood his tea cup with sake. "In this town, I'll get paid for killing," Sanjuro ruminates as he watches these subtle announcements of the deterioration of his culture, "and this town is full of men who are better off dead."

Yet, Sanjuro still finds humor in the buying-off of the officials; it's the deeper aspects of cultural erosion that trouble him. The silk merchant's prayer chanting for the death of the sake merchant denotes the perversion of religion. McDonald's observation succinctly grasps the tension of these scenes: "As the coffin maker's hammer and the silk merchant's prayer drum beat together on the sound track, we realize that religion, traditionally the answer to death, is no longer an answer or a solace; that, ironically, death is the 'answer' to 'religion.'" The palpitations of the steady march of time in an era of decline reverberate throughout Yojimbo's stark landscape, signalling a sort of death pall that Roger Ebert summed up well when he wrote, "Shutters, sliding doors and foreground objects bring events into view and then obscure them, and we get a sense of the town as a collection of fearful eyes granted an uncertain view of certain danger." [2] As the audience, perhaps, we are immune to that fear; it has, though, at very least become a tangible and calculable presence among the marginalized and deserted townsfolk.

Further exacerbating the face of death in isolation is the dual irony presented by Sanjuro auctioning off his services as bodyguard to the highest bidder. For one thing, all things monetary are beneath a samurai's dignity; that he must pretend to an ignominy that he doesn't come by honestly holds irony enough. His choice of masters, though, betrays his true ingenuity. Seemingly, by offering these services at all, he validates the self-importance that these bosses draw to themselves while what he's really doing is using it against them to complete the ruse. It is the people who must be protected from the war-mongering merchants who have superceded their place in society and shunned the farmers and artisans whom they once depended upon. It is the emerging middle class that Sanjuro elects to pick out, then, by using their own vanity and opportunism against them however he can in order to save the true people of Japan.



Samurai as Paragon: the Transitional Navigator

No mere sorter of souls, though, Sanjuro's egalitarian view shines through, especially with regard to the decisions all men must make. He never pretends to be more than what he is: unemployed. His fellow samurai, although in a seeming position of disgrace and laziness, prompts his respect as a fellow loner and entrepeneur. The swift reduction of the merchants' houses essentially reduces its leaders to opposing vices. Humor remains the ultimate mediator between murderous intent and natural justice. By not backing down from a pistol clearly aimed at him, Sanjuro cedes the right of way to destiny, even if it means death, and even if it's his own. This singular aspect of the samurai's prescience of mind and honor in times of crisis touts the grand ideal that that sort of warrior has inspired generations since. His tacit gravitation to where he's needed most could be argued as the happenstance of a life spent defending royalty and personifying nobility. That would be a good argument. It would be better, though, were we to see that the farmers and artisans left behind by the collapse of the last Japanese Dynasty made the people, in this time of sorrow and change, his new and implicitly truest royalty.

[1] McDonald, Keiko I. Swordsmanship and Gamesmanship: Historical Kurosawa's Milieu in Yojimbo. Literature Film Quarterly, 1980, Vol. 8 Issue 3, p188, 9p; (AN 6906904)

McDonald interviewed both the famed Kurosawa writer Donald Richie and Yojimbo cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa and drew heavily on Richie's Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character and The Films of Akira Kurosawa.

[2] The incomparable Roger Ebert.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Dir. Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris
Writ. Michael Arndt
w/ Greg Kinnear, Alan Arkin, Steve Carell, and Toni Collette

Co-directors Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris's mini-epic family romp acts much like the mirrors set in tiny rooms to gain a sense of space. Like many indie films, Sunshine uses time and plot sparingly, yet it does so in such a way that leaves the viewer with the feel of a full film. Greg Kinnear plays a father and self-help speaker trying to push his spiel national. Nursing home reject and Grandpa Alan Arkin is a bad boy druggie and sexpert who coaches his pageant queen-hopeful granddaughter (Abigail Breslin) Olive's dancing.

Enter Uncle Frank, an irresistibly terse Steve Carell, a disgraced literature professor freshly returned from the hospital on suicide watch to bunk with his morbid, mute fifteen-year-old nephew. When asked why he's stopped speaking, Dwayne (Paul Dano) points to a wall-sized caricature of Friedrich Nietzsche in reply. It's off to the funny farm from there, each character's personality colliding with the next as though this were a stage play in which everybody's a little bit twisted. And then there’s the Mom (Toni Collette) who wants nothing but honesty in her family and what's best for her kids.

The stage-play elements of the opening might normally come off as a bit trite, but this cast makes it work. In a noteworthy moment, the camera kneels along with Dad. Bracing his young daughter's shoulders, he wrings from her the promise that their trip to California to enter her in the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant will end triumph. Olive puts on a brave face and the family piles into the reliable old microbus for a cross-country run.

From there, we are plunged into the soups of human trials that smacks a bit of The Grapes of Wrath and films like Home for the Holidays. This family’s emotional challenges and achievements are so earthy and unpretentious, the humor so warm and sweetly lighthearted that big things become small and manageable. Where another viewpoint might have mired their problems in a more depressing model, Michael Arndt’s debut script takes daunting family issues like suicide and drug addiction and provides them with a very human and watchable perspective.

But despite all of their traumas, the connection between family members remains its main attraction. Whether it’s a depressed nephew standing on a pier hearing his uncle proclaim Proust a loser, or at-odds family members heaving-to as a unit to start the family bus, their frailties dissolve within a context few comedies bother to provide. It takes Sunshine to a level that soars.

These aren't people simply motivated by family obligations, though, any more than a random hodge-podge of emotional dysfunction. They're folks who have been tried by fire and have come out on the other side to want what's best for one another. Without even trying, the film tugs at the Little Miss Sunshine in all of us through its characters, asking us to be better people and to start by remembering to enjoy the world and those around us. When you're trying to snag the elusive limelight in a beauty contest, that's precisely the kind of crew you want in your corner.