The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film’s earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory.
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JAMILA WIGNOT—The accounts and photos, along with comments by contemporary historians, also help bring out the inhuman working conditions that led to the fire. The women worked 14-hour shifts on the 8th and 9th stories of a building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in lower Manhattan (while the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, Russian-born Jewish immigrants themselves, sat above them on the 10th floor) for $2 a day. Because it was a shirtwaist (women’s blouse) factory, rags and other highly flammable material littered the floor.
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Italian neorealism, conceived in Italy during the 1940s and concretised in the immediate postwar, when the nation was still in ruins, by three unique artists, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, is a cinema that holds an implacable but poetic mirror to the human condition under the most extreme circumstances. Working with ludicrous budgets by Hollywood standards, often employing non-professional actors, these men let their subjects do the talking and the effect was powerful and memorable. The canvas included all the curses that humanity has harvested from its fall into class-divided society: slavery, feudalism, and now capitalism, the latter ensuring war, pervasive unemployment, poverty, and untold misery for millions. But the neorealist movement also gave us visions of faith and love, and the need for moral political action, and therefore hope in a future that seems to be increasingly in doubt by the younger generation.
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P GREANVILLE—We found this quality print of The Wages of Fear and wanted to share it with our audience. Two French films of the immediate postwar qualify as all-time thriller classics, with noir overtones. One was the deserveddly acclaimed Du rififi chez les hommes (also known as Rififi, or Big brawl among the men), a crime thriller created by Jules Dassin, who, despite a French surname and look, was actually a terrifically gifted Jewish American expat living in Paris, a refugee from the anticommunist insanity gripping the US in the early ’50s. Rififi came out in 1955. The other is this film, Le Salaire de la Peur, authored by Henri-Georges Clouzot in the 1952-3 stretch. Salaire also boasted a story that has whimsical fate at its core, and a great deal of unexpected male bonding between characters pushed into extreme circumstances. Both films were and remain highly original in plot and construction, having generated an inevitable cottage industry of mediocre imitators.
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DAVID YEARSLEY—In the opening scene of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby of 1968, an old apartment manager named Mr. Niklas shows a young couple through the building which is, unbeknownst to them, home to a coven of witches. As they walk through the foyer, Mr. Niklas discovers that the husband is an actor and asks, “Have I seen you in anything?” It’s a sly bit piece of casting that this line should be uttered by one of the great character actors of moving pictures—Elisha Cook, Jr. As in the unsettling amalgam of manic intensity and slightly askew trustworthiness he delivered in Rosemary’s Baby, Cook gave his characters a ruffled quirkiness that made many of them immortal.
