In case you missed it, I am doing a project where I watch five movies from every year from five specific categories: action, animated, foreign, horror, and romance. The only real rule I set for myself is it must be from one of those categories. I may, depending on the choices available, watch multiple foreign movies, seeing as there are obviously foreign action movies, foreign horror movies, and foreign romance movies. It will not usually be my preference, but I'm sure it will happen. Foreign is such a wide ranging category that I will also probably watch a foreign romance movie and a romance movie, if you catch me drift. Can't be helped.
In part one, I put down my thoughts on the action movie Point Blank and the animated Jungle Book. Those are the only two movies I covered. If you don't want to click the link, I liked Point Blank and I did not like Jungle Book. Should have kept that one to my childhood I suppose. Today, I'll be covering the horror, foreign and romance movie selections of 1967.
Foreign
The Samurai (3/4 stars)
I had sort of assumed that foreign movies would be difficult to pick. Just so many more potential options and less likelihood I have seen them. But even so, 1967 was not an easy year. 1967 is considered one of the greatest years in film and that extends to foreign movies as well. Roger Ebert has eight movies from 1967 in his Great Movies collection. Five of them are foreign. Just to give you an idea, he only has 381 movies total, ranging from 1915 to 2007.
Written and directed by influential French new wave director Jean-Pierre Melville, The Samurai is something of a misleading title. It's not actually about a samurai. It's about a hitman. The plot is fairly straightforward, in fact I hesitate to say its' been copied because this plot may have been used before the movie. A hitman kills someone, almost gets caught, the people who hired him try to kill him to cover themselves. Truly one man against the world type of movie.
If one were being generous, one could call this movie deliberate. If one were not so generous, slow would not be inaccurate either. My only issue with the pace of this movie is the amount of time spent at the police station, which kind of just goes on forever and you know he's not actually going to get jailed. Well that's not exactly correct. It went on so long I started to wonder if the rest of the movie was going to be set in the police station, with him eventually being caught.
As for the rest, well the devil is in the details and I think the deliberateness is both the point and appropriate. That said, Ebert talks in his review about how action is the enemy of suspense, and how this movie builds suspense through character. While I won't say I felt no suspense, I wasn't exactly on the edge of my seat for most of this movie. So I do kind of feel the charm if you will didn't completely work on me.
Horror
Wait Until Dark (4/4 stars)
There is some debate on whether this is technically horror. This is not a debate I would care about, not specifically being a horror fan. This being "not really horror but horror" would in fact be more of a reason I would like it. However, the ending of this movie pretty clearly has the intended impact of a horror film and has influenced countless horror films. So I'm going to land myself pretty firmly in the "is a horror film."
And I loved every minute of it. One of the rare movies that is obviously adapted from a play that almost benefits from that fact. The main character, played by Audrey Hepburn, begins to feel trapped and suffocated, and so do we. A few things are quickly established in the movie and this is not a spoiler. A doll with heroin inside finds its way to Hepburn, unaware of what is in the doll. Three criminals go to retrieve it and can't find it. So they create an elaborate plan to get the information out of Hepburn.
The reason they can fool her at all is because she's blind, newly blind in fact. She also has no idea where the doll is. And the result is slowly escalating tension as you hope Hepburn figures out what's happening, and then hope she gets out of it. In fact, this movie may be one of the most successful movies ever at building up tension gradually up until the climax. And I really don't want to spoil it, but there's a scene - and if you've seen it you know the scene - that got me. Maybe the first ever version of this. I can't imagine how audiences in 1967 reacted considering I'm aware of the trope and it still got me. Anyway, I highly encourage you to watch this immediately. It's on HBOMax as of this writing!
Romance
Two for the Road (2.5/4 stars)
I honestly had no intention of watching two Audrey Hepburn movies in one year but I had already seen The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde and this was, from the information I had, easily the best choice on the docket. It clearly fits the category. I almost chose Belle de Jour, but the premise of that movie seemed to technically qualify here but seems to be a very different vibe from what you think when you think romance movie.
In any case, I had one major problem with this movie and one minor one: Albert Finney is a dick the entire movie. He's a dick when they meet, he's a dick later in life, and all their problems in their relationship are related to him being a dick. Which somewhat connects to my minor problem: Hepburn is falling in love way too easy for a supposedly realistic movie. She falls in love with Finney based off an evening hitchhiking where he's not very nice to her frankly and then falls in love with the brother of her husband's client in ONE DAY. This is hailed as a realistic movie, right?
Aside from that, it actually is fairly realistic, I'm just not totally sure Finney was supposed to be clearly in the wrong this whole time. Maybe he is. I don't know. He's a playboy and acts like it. He tells her it. He clearly has no interest in settling down or having a family, and eventually they settle down and have a family and he's unhappy about it. Shocker. Like I said, the fundamental flaw in this movie is that I never understood what the hell Hepburn could see in him.
But it gets the grade it does because it's (500) Days of Summer 40 years before that movie came out. We see their life non-linearly, only on times when they are on the road. They're on the road when they meet, when they decide to get married, when they're newlywed, when they have a kid, and when they're on the verge of divorcing. So creatively edited, creatively told, witnessing the highs and lows of marriage. Fairly groundbreaking for the time.
