Great Movies You Might Not Have Seen, Part 3

This is the third in a series.

Part 1 introduced the series, and covered:

1. Tokyo Story

2. Ikiru

3. Kiss Me Deadly

4. The Rules of the Game

5. Man on Wire

Part 2 covered:

1. Shall We Dance?

2. Afghan Star

3. The Station Agent

4. The World's Fastest Indian

5. October Sky

And now, five more.

Black Orpheus

(Free on Kanopy)

This is another movie that is not exactly obscure, but many people haven’t heard of it, so here it is. Besides, whenever anyone asks me my favorite movie, I always say, “There are two: Black Orpheus and Jules et Jim.” Both are by French directors, whatever that proves. My third would be The Godfather, so I’m not totally a francophile.

In 1959, Brazilian music and Carnival were hardly known to American audiences. Antonio Carlos-Jobim’s A Day in the Life of a Fool has become a jazz standard and is most of the soundtrack.

I watched this again last night to see if it was still my favorite. I think it is. It’s mythic and poetic, and consciously so, even within the script (the clerk at the city office and Orpheus himself both know the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and speak about it). Orpheus’ boss is named Hermes. There’s a dog named Cerberus near the gates of “Hades.” In the myths, Eurydice is bitten by a viper, but there’s no sign of that in the movie. Who cares?

The child characters, Benedito and Zeca, are crucial to the plot. They really believe that Orpheus can sing the sun into rising, and they have the final scene in the movie.

How much should we try to map all the characters onto actual Greek mythical figures? I’m not too interested in doing that. Mira, the greedy, shallow, jealous “fiancée” of Orpheus, acts as a foil and an engine of the drama, but what she means in terms of mythology: I really don’t care. You don’t “understand” poetry by assigning literal meanings to everything; poetry (and music and art) are there to say things that can’t be said in words.

The New York Times used to have a movie critic named Bosley Crowther. There’s a good reason why you probably haven’t heard of him: he was a doofus. I’m not even going to link his review, but let’s just say he was not a fan.

You also don’t make a movie about poor people in another country as a documentary, unless that’s your intention. So for those leftist critics, yes: poverty in Brazil is real, and the beautiful scenery does not compensate for it. Get a life if that bothers you.

When We Were Kings

Rent on Amazon Prime. Trailer:

This is an Academy Award winning documentary on The Rumble In the Jungle, Muhammed Ali’s famous fight in Zaire with George Foreman, he of the Foreman Grill

(He was a boxer before he made his real money endorsing kitchen appliances.)

Foreman was utterly terrifying in his earlier days, and everyone in the boxing world gave Ali no chance at all in the bout in Zaire (the Rumble in the Jungle). The fight attracted a who’s who of big names not from the boxing world, e.g. Spike Lee, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and James Brown. Foreman made the mistake of bringing his German Shepherd with him, which just signaled “colonial master” to the inhabitants, but Ali attracted crowds chanting, “Ali bomaye.” At one point, Foreman asks one of his handlers what that meant. “Ali, kill him!” he’s told. “OK, we got a hostile crowd here” he thought.

You know what happened: the term rope-a-dope has passed into the vernacular. No matter how many times you watch the decisive 8th round where Ali knocks him out, you’re always dumbfounded. This guy whom people worried about: he was going to get killed in the ring! actually brings down the fearsome Foreman, after encouraging him to punch himself out for seven rounds.

Aftermath

George Foreman has earned enormous respect for his growth and humility since that fight. He’s on Twitter, where people call him Champ, and he’s disarmingly honest about the arrogance that led him to lose to Ali.

Lage Raho Munna Bhai

Rent on Amazon Prime.

Bollywood is huge. You know that. Hindi films sold an estimated 341 million tickets in India in 2019. But there are so many films, and you probably have the impression that they’re all three hours long and feature interminable, unmotivated dance numbers. How can you possibly choose one, if you’re even curious?

Well, I was curious. Fortunately, our distributor, Swank Motion Pictures, had a few Indian films available, and I asked around among the many, many Indian employees at Google which ones Westerners might like. I didn’t want to show something like Monsoon Wedding or Slumdog Millionaire, which are completely made for Westerners. I wanted one made for Indians.

We settled on this one, and we were not disappointed. Wikipedia tells you all about it. The plot hinges on an underworld boss falling in love with a radio host and posing as a Gandhi expert to win her love, which does pose some ethical problems for a guy who makes his living in crime. If this seems far-fetched to you: you haven’t seen many Bollywood flicks.

This is a very funny movie, and it does have some dancing, but even the dances are funny. Watch this, and then if someone asks you if you’ve ever seen a Bollywood film, you can proudly say Yes!

Helvetica

Free on Kanopy. Rent on Amazon Prime.

A movie about a font: how boring is that? Not that boring, I promise. We showed this at some kind of graphic art conference at Google; I can’t remember the conference.

If you have zero interest in graphic design, then this probably isn’t the movie for you. Otherwise: the movie was made on the 50th anniversary of the invention of Helvetica, and it has interviews with graphic designers on the significance of Helvetica to our modern age. Once you see it, you’ll notice the font everywhere.

The New York Times review says:

The film’s provocative, lively interviews with graphic designers and theorists — including Massimo Vignelli, who created directional signs for the New York City subway system, and David Carson, author of “The End of Print” — assess Helvetica’s impact on human life and thought. Some praise it as a conceptual breakthrough; others blast it as a lowest-common-denominator typeface whose use both reflects and perpetuates conformity.

Whomever you end up siding with, you’re guaranteed to spend the next few days scanning the world for Helvetica like a child on a cross-country car trip playing I Spy.

The Night of the Hunter

Free on YouTube.

I just wrote about this movie in my post on Roger Ebert. I quote from Roger’s review in there, and he says it much better than I possibly can, but I’m going to stick to my own words here.

This is a genuinely creepy movie. Robert Mitchum, who is not the first actor you’d think of to play a horror role, gives an unforgettable performance as the convict who heard, in prison, about a fortune hidden on a widow’s estate, and is determined to have it. The widow’s two children are afraid of him, and they have very good reason to be.

The movie was made in 1955, but it does not seem particularly dated. The image of the preacher with “love” tattooed on one hand and “hate” on the other has passed into legend (Bruce Springsteen even wrote a song about it), without the movie itself being nearly as famous.