Speed Round

#82 – Sunrise (1927) 

Sunrise is a silent film that was released at the end of the silent era when artistic film technique had reached its peak. It won the first and only Oscar for “Unique and Artistic Production” and that’s a good description of the movie. The story, which seems like it should be unbearably sappy – a woman from the city tempts a farmer away from his wife, he tries to murder the wife, but they rediscover their love for each other – is rendered in such surprisingly interesting visuals that it all works somehow. The story doesn’t say much in itself, except for early 20 th century ideals about how virtuous women should be meek and forgiving, sexual women are dangerous and conniving, and men will do anything for either type of woman (and that women fit into those types). But the movie uses its visuals as more than then-modern showcases of special effects and camerawork. The techniques fit to tell a simple and pure story of love and marriage and it all fits together. The ending is also genuinely powerful.

#81 – Spartacus (1960) – Stanley Kubrick

Spartacus raises a loyal army of slaves and leads a rebellion against the Roman Empire, solely on the strength of his integrity and his cleft chin. The two together – the good character and the rigid masculinity – combine in Spartacus to form a noble manliness. A real man, as shown by Spartacus and the dedicated army he inspired, is equal parts hard and soft, and knows when to use each.

Spartacus is one of the great characters of film, and Spartacus is the best epic I have ever seen.

#80 – The Apartment

If Spartacus was the right amount of hard and soft, “Buddy Boy” C.C. Baxter is only soft. He allows himself to get taken advantage of by men more powerful than he is, lending out the key to his apartment so his superiors can use it for illicit rendezvous with women who aren’t their wives. He is walked all over, over and over, until one day finally… Well, I’m not sure the day really comes.

#79 – The Wild Bunch

“If they move, kill ‘em,” William Holden tells his gang at the beginning, but the instruction seems to apply throughout the whole movie. Because a lot of people move. The “Wild Bunch Ending” became a screenwriting term, referring to the chaotic bloodbath that seems destined to come where lawlessness lives. Peckinpaw shows the senselessness and inevitability of violence, shot with disorienting cuts and zooms and a soundtrack of gunshots and the screams of the dying. Trains and cars are starting to arrive in the west and it signals the death of a way of life that was rough and pointless. Death to death and more death.

#78 – Modern Times (1936)

When the worker is literally a cog in a machine, the worker has no rights. Charlie Chaplin was accused of being a communist and a socialist (and eventually condemned for it?). Whatever he was, he had sympathy for the workers, the people at the bottom of the food chain, the scraps at the bottom of the barrel, the bottom rung of the ladder. His character gets swept up into union protests and labour rights disputes, he works on an assembly line, and ends up in jail for reasons unclear. The system seems to grind and grind: as long as there is production it doesn’t matter how it’s produced, or even what it is producing. Modern Times is a satire and a cutting critique, as it gently points out and calls out the absurdity of the modern state and its systems, and it does it without saying a word.