Two movies by William Wyler, my new favorite director.

Stalker is a lot like a Catholic Easter vigil: it tries to encompass the whole history of human salvation in just under three hours, and though for the most part it is infuriatingly slow, sitting through the whole thing will leave you with a feeling of catharsis afterwards.

Loosely speaking it is science fiction, but it is more interested in exploring new concepts than new planets or life-forms. If anything, I would compare it to the slower parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, although really it is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. A Scientist, A Writer, and their “Stalker” guide are breaking in to “The Zone,” a realm that mysteriously appeared one day in the middle of the city. Once they get there they will try to reach a room in the Zone’s center, a room wherein the hidden-most desire of anyone who enters is immediately fulfilled. But rather than the plot, Tarkovsky mostly focuses on the conversations the three men have along the way, many of which concern the finer points of human destiny and seem like they could have been included in Notes from the Underground. Usually I don’t like such ventures in film, but here the ideas are so novel and conveyed with such intensity that I couldn’t help being drawn in. It helps, of course, that all of this is beautifully shot and passionately acted.

I think the key to understanding why Tarkovsky made the film the way he did comes in the midst of one of the Writer’s soliloquies. Talking about his uneasy relationship with his many admirers, he looks directly into the camera and says that they just want “to gobble” up his works one after the other—but they don’t want “to know.” I appreciated this, since I myself usually have the tendency to wolf down one movie after the next. It’s worth remembering that great film can bring you knowledge, and especially the best kind of it, which is self-knowledge. If you have a great deal of patience (and I mean a great deal!), then you will be rewarded by watching this.

I would count this as a good, but not great Hitchcock film. Let's take all the good things about it as read; here I will just mention what I took to be a couple of flaws. First, when the two main characters have just fought the magician in the storage car of the train, and they are trying to figure out in whom to confide, it is obvious that they should go find the ambiguously gay English twosome. But instead they choose the odd brain doctor. This struck me as a transparent ploy to drag out the plot. Maybe I am being overly critical here, but still, this seemed pretty out of place for a film that is supposed to be such a masterpiece of suspense-building.

More troubling to me was the film's didacticism in the shootout scene near the end, with its over-the-top allusions to the war. The one character says that they should just surrender to the authorities, and then he gets shot down with his white flag in hand. This is the second Hitchcock film I've seen in a row (the other was "Rope") that overdosed on preachiness near the end.

Both of these things are not to say that I didn't thoroughly enjoy watching this--I just wouldn't rate it among his best work.

6/10

The Heiress is a movie that flouts all the movie conventions of its time. The awkward daughter (Olivia de Havilland) never blossoms into a beautiful princess; her romantic-albeit-penniless wooer (Montgomery Clift) is really a bit of a scumbag; the strict and overbearing father who stands in the way of their union (the great Ralph Rrichardson) turns out to be a man of character; the kindly and supportive aunt is a bit of an airhead.

A lesser movie would wear its anti-conventionalism on its sleeve, and then betray itself in its final act. In the Heiress, on the other hand, it takes quite a while for the four main characters to develop (even when they finally do there are still ambiguities), and remarkably, the film stays true to itself till the very end:

“Catherine!” BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM “Catherine!” BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM “Catherine!!!” BAM BAM BAM

9/10

I put this in my Netflix queue because it was by the same guy who directed the brilliant and startling political thriller "Z." I didn't make it through more than 20 minutes of this one, however. Once Jack Lemmon enters the picture, and starts ranting about what a good-for-nothing writer his son is, you can tell exactly where things are going. Though of course, this did win an Oscar for best screenplay, so . . . .

A separate point is that you can see a dozen films from the 1920s or 30s, with all the old-fashioned clothing, hairstyles, slang, social situations, and so on. But why is it that nothing looks more dated than a film from the early 80s?

2/10