By Ben Reiser, Wisconsin Film Festival Coordinator and UW Cinematheque Programmer

(POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW)

Movies I saw in a theater more than once and what I learned the second time:

Mad Max: Fury Road - The second time through I adjusted my expectations and knew to follow Furiosa’s journey as the primary protagonist, and also knew not to expect Tom Hardy’s performance to be verbal as well as physical. I loved it the first time through, but appreciated it even more the second time due to those two factors.

Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens - I focused on and prepared myself for the act III change in tone and was able to greater appreciate the things that happen after one character’s shocking death. I also learned that seeing a rectangular film in an IMAX dome is not a good idea, at all.

Jurassic World - Sitting in the front row at an ultrascreen theater, even with the motorized recliner in full recline, is not a good idea, at all.

Movies I found interesting enough to watch a second time, but this time at home:

Kingsman: The Secret Service
It Follows
The D Train
Heaven Knows What
Tangerine

Movies I missed in a theater but am glad I caught up with at home:

The Visit
Steve Jobs
Manson Family Vacation
Project Almanac

Movies I really wish I’d skipped:

Ex Machina
Terminator: Genisys
Entourage
Chi-Raq

Older movies I saw for the first time this year that blew my mind:

Brighton Rock
The Saragossa Manuscript
About Elly
Senso
The Underworld Story
Zulu
Sea Fury
Angst
The Apu Trilogy

By Jim Healy, Director of Programming, UW Cinematheque & Wisconsin Film Festival

Of the many movies I saw for the first time in 2015, I've selected 20 that were my favorites. In alphabetical order they are:

ABOUT ELLY (2009, Asghar Farhadi)
BEYOND THE FOREST (1949, King Vidor)
BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015, Steven Spielberg)
CREED (2015, Ryan Coogler)
DAÏNAH LA MÉTISSE (1932, Jean Grémillon)
THE EMIGRANTS (1971, Jan Troell)
GREEN ROOM (2015, Jeremy Saulnier)
THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015, Quentin Tarantino)
INTRUDER IN THE DUST (1949, Clarence Brown)
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2015, Matthew Vaughn)
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015, George Miller)
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION (2015, Christopher McQuarrie)
PRIVATE PROPERTY (1960, Leslie Stevens)
RICKI AND THE FLASH (2015, Jonathan Demme)
RISATE DI GIOIA (aka THE PASSIONATE THIEF, 1960, Mario Monicelli)
SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE (2015, Richard Starzak & Mark Burton)
SON OF SAUL (2015, László Nemes)
SPOTLIGHT (2015, Tom McCarthy)
SUNSET SONG (2015, Terence Davies)
TANGERINE (2015, Sean Baker)

Here are another 100 titles that I really enjoyed:

ALL FALL DOWN (1962, John Frankenheimer)
ANGST (1983, Gerald Kargl)
ANT-MAN (2015, Peyton Reed)
THE ASPHYX (1973, Peter Newbrook)
AVENGING FORCE (1986, Sam Firstenberg)
THE BABY MAKER (1970, James Bridges)
BACHELOR MOTHER (1939, Garson Kanin)
BEWARE OF MR. BAKER (2012, Jay Bulger)
BEYOND THE LIGHTS (2014, Gina Prince-Blythewood)
BLUES IN THE NIGHT (1941, Anatole Litvak)
BORN FREE (1966, James Hill)
THE BRIDGE (1960, Bernhard Wicki)
BROOKLYN (2015, John Crowley)
THE BUBBLE (1966, Arch Oboler)
CARAVAN (1934, Erik Charrel)
CHUCK NORRIS VS. COMMUNISM (2014, Ilina Calugareanu)
COP CAR (2015, Jon Watts)
THE D TRAIN (2015, Jarrad Paul, Andrew Mogel)
DANGEROUS TO KNOW (1938, Robert Florey)
DANGEROUS WHEN WET (1953, Charles Walters)
DAUGHTERS COURAGEOUS (1939, Michael Curtiz)
DAY OF ANGER (1967, Tonino Valerii)
DEAD OF NIGHT (1945, Basil Dearden, Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti)
EATING RAOUL (1982, Paul Bartel)
END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1966, Jan Schmidt)
EVEREST (2015, Baltasar Kormakur)
THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG (1982, Lawrence Schiller)
FAMILY FILM (2015, Olmo Omerzu)
FEBRUARY (2015, Osgood Perkins)
FIVE FINGERS (1952, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson)
FOXCATCHER (2014, Bennett Miller)
THE GOOD DINOSAUR (2015, Peter Sohn)
THE GREAT RUPERT (1950, Irving Pichel)
HENRY GAMBLE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY (2015, Stephen Cone)
HERO’S ISLAND (1962, Leslie Stevens)
HESTER STREET (1975, Joan Micklin Silver)
HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN (1944, Delmer Daves)
HOME (2015, Tim Johnson)
IN NAME ONLY (1939, John Cromwell)
IRRATIONAL MAN (2015, Woody Allen)
JAUJA (2014, Lisandro Alonso)
JET STORM (1959, Cy Endfield)
JURASSIC WORLD (2015, Colin Trevorrow)
KEEPER (2015, Guillaume Senez)
A KID FOR TWO FARTHINGS (1955, Carol Reed)
KIDNAP SYNDICATE (1975, Fernando Di Leo)
KING OF THE WILD STALLIONS (1959, R.G. Springsteen)
LA PETITE LISE (1930, Jean Grémillon)
THE LADY IN THE VAN (2015, Nicholas Hytner)
THE LAST MOVIE (1971, Dennis Hopper)
LAZYBONES (1925, Frank Borzage)
LONDON ROAD (2015, Rufus Norris)
THE LONG, HOT SUMMER (1958, Martin Ritt)
LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY’S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (2014, David Gregory)
LOVE AND PEACE (2015, Sion Sono)
LUMIÈRE D’ÉTÉ (1943, Jean Grémillon)
MADAME BOVARY (1949, Vincente Minnelli)
MARIE’S STORY (2014, Jean-Pierre Ameris)
MISTRESS AMERICA (2015, Noah Baumbach)
MY SISTER EILEEN (1955, Richard Quine)
THE NIGHTMARE (2015, Rodney Ascher)
NINJA III: THE DOMINATION (1984, Sam Firstenberg)
OKAY, AMERICA! (1932, Tay Garnett)
ONE CROWDED NIGHT (1940, Irving Reis)
PADDINGTON (2014, Paul King)
PETE KELLY’S BLUES (1955, Jack Webb)
PICKUP (1951, Hugo Haas)
A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (2014, Roy Andersson)
POLLYANNA (1960, David Swift)
PRINT GENERATION (1974, J.J. Murphy)
THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1956, Val Guest)
THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE (1958, Vincente Minnelli)
RESULTS (2015, Andrew Bujalski)
ROOM (2015, Lenny Abrahamson)
THE RUSSIAN WOODPECKER (2015, Chad Gracia)
SAPS AT SEA (1940, Gordon Douglas)
THE SEVENTH CROSS (1944, Fred Zinnemann)
SHOW PEOPLE (1928, King Vidor)
THE SINS OF RACHEL CADE (1961, Gordon Douglas)
SPARTANS (2014, Nicolas Wadimoff)
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER (2015, Paul Tibbitt)
SPY (2015, Paul Feig)
STAR WARS EPISODE VII THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015, J.J. Abrams)
THE STEEL TRAP (1952, Andrew L. Stone)
STINKING HEAVEN (2015, Nathan Silver)
THE SYSTEM (1953, Lewis Seiler)
TENDER COMRADE (1943, Edward Dmytryk)
THE TREASURE (2015, Corneliu Porumboiu)
TURKEY SHOOT (1982, Brian Trenchard-Smith)
UNCLE KENT 2 (2015, Todd Rohal)
VARIETY (1983, Bette Gordon)
THE WALK (2015, Robert Zemeckis)
WHILE WE’RE YOUNG (2014, Noah Baumbach)
WHITE GOD (2014, Kornél Mundruczó)
WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS (1928, W.S. Van Dyke)
WILD TALES (2014, Damian Szifron)
THE WISE KIDS (2011, Stephen Cone)
WOMAN ON THE RUN (1950, Norman Foster)
YOU AND ME (1938, Fritz Lang)

This essay on Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Cornere was written by Matt Connolly, Ph.D. candidate in UW Madison Dept. of Communication Arts. Shop will screen as the final Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen, in the Chazen Museum of Art, on Sunday, December 13 at 2 p.m. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we are not able to screen the film on 35mm as originally announced. A DVD will be shown in its place.

By Matt Connolly

Writing in Film Comment on the striking paucity of films dealing with the workplace as a concrete reality of everyday life, Kent Jones notes at least one movie that honors the daily grind with neither an overreliance on cynicism nor an overdose of sentimentality. “What separates The Shop Around the Corner from almost every other work-centered movie is its honesty,” says Jones of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romantic comedy, adding that it’s “known for its ingenious and delicate romantic entanglements, but it would be nothing without this frank acknowledgment of human fallibility in the workplace, unencumbered by moral hierarchies.”

Jones is one of our very finest critics, and there’s little I can say in response to his broader analysis of The Shop Around the Corner’s nuanced portrait of retail labor besides an enthusiastic nod of the head. I can only add that the film’s great strength and singularity lies in how effortlessly it links the aforementioned “ingenious and delicate romantic entanglements” of its protagonists with the workplace in which they squabble, negotiate, and finally connect with one another. Few films so strikingly underscore the barriers we attempt to place between our work and our private lives, only to reveal (with great wit and insight) how inevitably fuzzy that line really is.

In true romantic comedy fashion, the eventual couple at the center of The Shop Around the Corner meet cute. Unbeknownst to them for much of the movie, they actually do it twice. Alfred Kralik (James Stewart), the top salesman at leather goods shop Matuschek and Company, has answered a newspaper personals ad placed by a fellow Budapest resident. He delights in their written exchanges on literature, culture, and ideas, and hopes that it will develop into a real-life romance. Around the same time, he meets Klara Novak (Margaret Sullivan), who comes to Matuschek and Company seeking a job and who is soon hired after selling a particularly undesirable cigarette box to a fellow customer. (The cigarette box plays a grating rendition of “Ochi Chërnye” whenever it’s opened, but Klara reframes the item as a candy box whose tune reminds one to watch their consumption of sweets.) Alfred and Klara quickly grate on one another at work, while both privately continue a rewarding written back-and-forth with their respective pen pals. (Klara has also found a smart and charming companion via the newspaper.)

Needless to say, Alfred and Klara are one another’s mystery correspondents—a charming contrivance in and of itself, but one that takes on evermore humorous and poignant dimensions as the film progresses. Alfred eventually discovers that Klara is the woman on the other end of the letters, keeping the revelation under wraps as he attempts to pursue her in person. Klara rebuffs these tentative advances by drawing withering contrasts between Alfred and the man with whom she’s been writing to. In a stinging rebuke, she dismisses Alfred as “a little insignificant clerk.” The moment lands with particular impact as it succinctly underscores how inconceivable it is to Klara that the poetic, intellectually engaged man with whom she’s been falling for might also occupy the same quotidian workplace as herself. (In fairness, Alfred feels much the same way about Klara before discovering her true identity.) Both Klara and Alfred so strive to distance themselves from the commonplace nature of their job that they’re largely blind to the fellow dreamer right beside them.

So much of The Shop Around the Corner rests upon a knowing—and knowingly empathetic—conception of how work fosters relationships at once tender and uneasy. It’s one of the film’s great unspoken jokes that, though we hear snippets of their poetry-laden letters to one another, it is Alfred and Klara’s snappish workplace repartee that let us know how truly aligned they are in intellect and emotional temperament. Their relationship exists within a wider network of friendships, alliances, and affinities throughout the staff of Matuschek and Company. And while at least one of these is revealed to be built on deception, most exude a kind of ambivalent warmth, illuminating the singular blend of affection and proximity that defines so many workplace bonds. The complex rapport between Alfred and shop owner Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan) particularly exemplifies this, with Hugo looking upon Alfred as variously a mentee, subordinate, romantic rival, and surrogate son.

The Shop Around the Corner fittingly concludes on Christmas Eve, a traditional time to gather with loved ones that’s also a typical financial windfall for retail stores. The delicate imbrication of professional and personal intimacies that the film charts so well find their logical conclusion in these last moments: the triumph of teamwork; the bonds of time and labor; the gradual dissipation of the group as each one says their goodnights and heads home to spouses and children, or parents, or friends, or an empty house or apartment. We are finally left with our two would-be lovers, chatting as they close up shop for the hundredth (or thousandth) time. It’s just another day of work—a prospect within which The Shop Around the Corner finds both the most prosaic of pleasures and the most precious of possibilities.

This essay on Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951) was written by Harry Gilbert, a graduate of Williams College (B.A., History). A 35mm print of The Prowler, will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen "35mm Forever" series on Sunday, December 6 at 2 p.m. The 35mm restored print screens courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by the Film Noir Foundation.

By Harry Gilbert

In a New York Times interview conducted a year before his death in 1984, Joseph Losey reflected on the ambivalent effects of the Hollywood blacklist. “Without it,” Losey mused, “I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I'd be dead. It was terrifying, it was disgusting, but you can get trapped by money and complacency. A good shaking up never did anyone any harm.” If Losey’s comments can be taken as indicators of his interests in social issues and investments in film as a mode of social critique, one could chart a trajectory that extends through the director’s oeuvre. In this respect, The Prowler (1951) is Losey par excellence.

The Prowler was produced at an historical moment in which the crime film was undergoing transformation. In the early 1940s, the plurality of crime films featured a “fugitive outsider” as the protagonist towards whom the camera structured the sympathies of the viewer. In this narrative, a working or middle class citizen, rather than the gangster or organized crime network of earlier crime films, comes into conflict with the law through false accusations or crimes of poverty, and subsequently resists social, political, and economic authority in an attempt to ascertain the true origins of the crime. Put differently, these films offered a critique of contemporary conditions that located guilt with hegemonic systems of power—the state and capitalism foremost among them—and situated the “fugitive outsider” as an ordinary person struggling to get by. This, when placed within the chiaroscuro sets of the urban environment, was film noir.

These films emerged during a period of violent and prolonged class conflict in Hollywood and the United States more broadly. Repression followed. Among other national and international factors, the House Un-American Activites Committee (HUAC) pressured unions to purify themselves of their more radical members and Hollywood studios to police—or blacklist—their more radical artists. This moment marked a shift in the dominant narratives of the crime film. By the 1950s, the police officer or detective became the protagonist, and the once sympathetic “fugitive outsider” became the criminal whose apprehension would show audiences the mechanisms of the criminal justice system and demonstrate the need to preserve order in the shadow of the Red Scare.

The Prowler, then, finds itself among a small group of films that persisted as once-effective avenues for social critique became increasingly foreclosed. Indeed, Losey goes so far as to provide a critique of the narrative shift itself. The story follows patrolman Webb Harwood (Van Heflin) to the suburban Los Angeles home of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), who had earlier reported a late-night prowler outside of her window. Both Webb and Susan aspire to attain the American Dream. Webb is just an “ordinary guy” from a working class background who “hates being a cop” and desires to one day own a motel so that he may “make money while he sleeps.”  Webb hopes to forge a path for himself that his father was too complacent to take. For Webb, the acquisition of a wife is a part of this process, and he will do whatever it takes to secure that asset.  Serendipitously, Susan grew up in the same town as Webb, but lived in the other, richer community. After a few years “knocking around” Hollywood, Susan marries disc jockey John Gilvray in a “happy,” “unexciting,” and, much to Susan’s dismay, childless marriage. 

The development of a physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive relationship between Webb and Susan—despite what critics might say, the film has not persuaded me to believe that any of the interactions between the two are consensual—drives a narrative that theorizes and indicts how systems of power create the contexts in which individual decisions are made and poses questions about who is most effected and why, often with uneasy or absent answers. In a contemporary moment where the issue of race, gender, sexuality, and police oppression has re-entered mainstream (i.e., white) discourse due to the political work of people of color, these questions remain just as pressing today as they did when the film was first released.

The Prowler positions the figure of the cop outside of the law and thereby questions the role of the police, the decidedly illegal yet state-sanctioned means by which the law is enforced or skirted, and the privileges and pressures the role ordains upon a person—in this case, a man. The film thinks through the distinct ways the police as an institution exerts violence, in particular the patriarchal violence against women, and generates sympathy for itself. This critique, however, is tempered in ways that (I think) are important to consider as a viewer of the film. How does the characterization of Charles “Bud” Crocker (John Maxwell) suggest an exceptionalism to Webb that exculpates the police more generally? And how might the conclusion suggest that the police force is capable of regulating itself and thereby reinvest in the organization’s inviolability?

Susan registers the configurations of patriarchal forces in the 1950s, and her decisions enable her to survive. How might the camera-as-prowler implicate the viewer in the male gaze, one which Susan attempts to control through an internalized belief in the justice of the police and a recourse to carceral feminism? What does it mean for Susan to seek the security of marriage because of the precarity of Hollywood and capitalist labor markets for women? And how does the body of Susan become a site for masculine impotency, and how does she negotiate the repressive and creative potentials of this (im)position?

This prowler only exists outside of the frame, yet this role names the film, establishes the film, and makes possible the relationship between Webb and Susan. How do we think about the always-already racialized figure of the prowler and their visual absence from the film? Who is the “stranger” in the context of 1950s Los Angeles, with a particular history of white supremacist violence, redlining and policing neighborhoods, xenophobia, and colonialism? Bud asks us to think about how “There’s history slathered over every square foot of this country of ours.” In a film that commences with the racialized figure of the prowler, and stages the extrajudicial practices of the police and the endorsement of these measures by the state, the specter of lynching and white supremacist violence is not far. In a genre that that takes the white working class man as its subject and capitalist systems as the antagonistic object of inquiry, does The Prowler move beyond and critique this racist logic, or does it rely on them?

To pose, answer, and complicate these questions, The Prowler assembled a team of politically aligned artists who were masters of film noir. Losey himself had already directed two film noirs released in 1951 alone: a remake of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and The Big Night. Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted in 1947 for Soviet sympathies and connections to the Communist Party, composed a screenplay credited to close friend Hugo Butler, whose name would also soon be found on the blacklist. Boris Leven, whose recent filmography included noir classics Criss Cross (1949) from Robert Siodmak and House by the River (1950) from Lang, served as art director and hired uncredited—read: blacklisted—designer John Hubley, famous for his experiments in animation, to craft the film’s sets.