Tag Archives: The Rules of the Game

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

“Downton Abbey” Fans, Don’t Despair — These Films Can Help

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poster_downtonabbey3What the hell are we going to do now? On Sunday, season three of Downton Abbey is ending and we have seven months of lousy alphabet television to look forward to. NCIS, CSI, 5-O, I can’t keep them all straight.

The Seattle Times ran a nifty list of Downton-esque books to read, but what if you crave the visceral visual treat of aristocrats and servants behaving shockingly?

Herewith, a list of films that will soothe Abbey addicts meantime. (Go see our friends at Scarecrow Video if you need a hand.)

Gosford Park (2001). This is a no-brainer for the Downton Abbey fan. Robert Altman’s murder mystery (the director cared so little about the solution to the murder, the secret is literally tossed away near the end) was written by Downton Abbey creator and chief writer Julian Fellowes. Set in the mid-1930s, the film stars a host of British acting royalty headed by Maggie Smith. She serves the story here as she does on Downton as a foil and ironic commentator. She always reminds me of Bill Murray’s comic reactions in Ghostbusters. No matter what hideous creature arrives at the door, simply cut to Maggie and she nails it.

Charile Chan in London (1934). One of the subplots of Gosford Park features a producer of the Charlie Chan films seeking inspiration for a film set in London. Well, there actually is a London-set Charlie Chan movie and it’s one of the best of this long-running series, a sparkling murder mystery swiftly solved by the great detective.  The series is much maligned these days for its lack of political correctness (Chan is played by Swedish actor Warner Oland). But in recent years, Yunte Huang has written a wonderful book explaining why would we should stop worrying and learn to love the honorable detective.

The Rules of the Game  or La règle du jeu (1939). Off to the Continent! This film is on every list of the greatest movies of all time, sometimes heading the list. Director Jean Renoir’s undisputed masterpiece is both a serious and comic treatment of the foibles and sometimes-awkward nobility of the French aristocracy. Some rich French nobles and their poor servants arrive at a country chateau for a weekend shooting party. Before long, they begin to shoot each other. This is a brilliant film and much more fun that nearly any other film on the “greatest ever” lists.

The Shooting Party (1985). Why does this film never show up on television? You can see Live Free and Die Hard and Armageddon eight days a week, but this neglected masterpiece simply can’t be found. James Mason, in his last film appearance, plays the master of a splendid country estate who plans a shooting party on the eve of World War I. There are several scenes between Mason and John Gielgud that define great acting. This film must be on the list for any serious Downton fan.

Maurice (1987). Downton is coy about its treatment of contemporary issues within the Edwardian setting. Maurice, starring a young Hugh Grant, is based on a novel by E.M. Forster that the author insisted be published only after his death. Directed by James Ivory, it is the story of a young Edwardian nobleman who comes out amid a stilted, mannered society.

The Remains of the Day (1993), Howard’s End (1992), and A Room With a View (1987). Director James Ivory has made a career of documenting the collapse of English aristocracy but the survival of British nobility. These three films are the cream of his crop. Remains is told from the servant’s point of view – think of a Downton spin-off focusing on Carson and Hughes. It’s wonderfully repressive. Howard’s End might be Mary and Edith’s future — a frightened, bitter woman collapsing in fear. View is a lovely romance. All are worth your time.

All these films provide ample entertainment and distraction for the crushingly long season-break of Downton Abbey. They will hold you.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Renoir and Errol Flynn: Cinema Essentials at the Grand Illusion and Central Cinema

Original poster art for Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game.

It’s a great weekend–and a great week–to be a movie geek in Seattle, with two of this ‘burg’s best independent theaters each unspooling movies that rightfully belong on any self-respecting film lover’s Bucket List.

The Grand Illusion Cinema celebrates the beginning of their eighth year as Seattle’s “weirdest, most wonderful non-profit, volunteer-operated cinema” with a party–and a screening of director Jean Renoir’s 1939 gem, The Rules of the Game tonight (the film will continue on for a six-day run at the GI). Renoir’s film follows a week in the country with several members of French aristocracy as various socialites (and their servants) dine, hunt, and carry on affairs.

The Rules of the Game is one of those rare vaunted Greatest Films in Cinema History that deserves its rep, richly. During its original release, it roused the undisguised contempt of the French upper class for its scalpel-sharp dissection of that strata’s lack of conscience. Critics at the time panned it, and the movie’s original negative was destroyed entirely during a World War II Allied bombing run (thankfully the movie received a painstaking restoration from surviving prints, to its full length with Renoir’s blessing in the late 1950s). But like a lot of misunderstood-at-the-time films, The Rules of the Game plays more resonantly now than ever.

This eighty-year-old movie courses with the sensibility of a contemporary indie flick. The gallery of characters–capricious socialite Christine (Nora Gregor), her equally fickle husband Robert (Marcel Dalio), and ostensible voice of reality Octave (well-played by Renoir himself), among them–initially feel like the kinds of archetypes that would pop up in a textbook Depression-Era American comedy. But instead of spinning these people into a rote pattern of irresponsible action/awakening of conscience/quaintly romantic happy ending, Renoir shows them yielding to their more base passions with frequent disregard for the emotional consequences. And with no Hollywood-style finger-wagging or manufactured repercussions for their actions, viewers are left to observe (judge) these people for themselves.

There are laughs and a lightness of touch, to be sure,  but the movie’s also a layer cake of subtext.  The hunting party scene in the film’s middle portion, which jarringly contrasts alluring tracking shots with a truly harrowing massacre of animals, is cogent semaphore for France’s denial of the horrors of World War II (and for that matter, the upper class’s pillaging of the resources around them). Meantime, the movie’s tragic coda furthers the metaphor of a county too wrapped up in its own hedonism to see the horrific writing on the wall. And if that’s not a lesson that could still use heeding today, I don’t know what is.

Errol Flynn makes Kevin Costner look like a potato-headed mook as Robin Hood.

Central Cinema provides a terrific contrast to Renoir’s masterpiece by beginning a three-day run today of The Adventures of Robin Hood, the glorious 1938 adaptation of the well-worn English folk tale. No heavy message here, folks; just a rip-roaring great time.

Errol Flynn‘s megawatt charisma and raffish charm still define popular culture’s most heroic thief and archer; Olivia DeHaviland makes for the most gorgeous heroine this side of, well, anyone; great character actors (Claude Rains, Eugene Pallette, Alan Hale Sr.) enrich the proceedings stratospherically; and Flynn’s Robin Hood faces the most worthy of adversaries in the form of Basil Rathbone’s magnetically-sinister Sir Guy of Gisborne. See The Adventures of Robin Hood in all its breezily-perfect, eye-popping Technicolor glory on a big screen, and by comparison, today’s hollow action flicks will look like grunting cavemen in aluminum-foil diapers.