The Third Man, Sunset Boulevard, and Witchblade

I had plans in the evening to go see some films at the Stanford Theatre, though. Michael Walsh and I had talked about going, but I hadn't heard from him in several days and since he doesn't have a phone, I couldn't call him. Bill said he'd be interested in the first film, and Trish said she might show up for the second when she got off work.

In the end, though, only Bill showed up. But it was a good time anyway. We talked about science fiction we're reading before the movie.

First up was The Third Man (1949). American writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is down on his luck and his friend Harry Lime invites him to postwar Vienna - under joint control of the US, British, French, and Soviets - for a job. But when Harry arrives, he finds that his friend was run over by a truck. Was it an accident, or murder? He asks several of the witnesses, and while most people agree that only two people were there with him, one fellow says there was a third man present. Along the way, Martins meets and (of course) falls in love with Lime's girlfriend, actress Anna Schmidt (Aida Valli), who has passport problems. The film also features Orson Welles, although he neither wrote nor directed it.

The story is pretty clever; I didn't see the twist coming until fairly late. I'm not a big fan of Cotten, but he does a servicible job here, thrown into a slightly comedic role due to circumstances which strand him in Vienna. The others actors are uniformly fine, although none (even Welles) stands out as a truly great performance.

The star of the film, though, are the wonderful sets and (I presume) location footage of a bombed-out postwar city. I don't know where it was actually filmed (maybe they were all sets!), but the architecture of the buildings, and the huge mounds of rubble through which some of the chases occur are very impressive, even in black and white. The eccentric music, all performed on a zither, lends it an especially quirky touch. The final chase through the sewers of Vienna is excellent. The final scene is a somewhat unexpected twist which fits in perfectly with the tone of the film.

Bill left after The Third Man, but I stayed to see Sunset Boulevard, a decidedly twisted film somewhat in the mold of Hitchcock's Vertigo (which it predates).

Down-on-his-luck Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden, looking an awful lot like Bruce Boxleitner) is running from the auto repo men, when he hides out in the dilapidated mansion of silent film actress Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Desmond is working on a screenplay for a comeback film, Salome, and Gillis takes her up on her offer of a place to stay to revise her script for her. Desmond falls in love with Gillis, despite 25 years' difference in age, and he becomes trapped by the plush lodgings and fear that she'll commit suicide if he leaves. Nonetheless, he can't completely abandon his old life, and in the process of occasionally escaping from the Desmond estate, he meets young script reader Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson). It all ends up in murder - which isn't giving anything away, since the film tells us that in its first three minutes.

Holden does a great job playing the straightforward, funny, but inwardly tortured Gillis, but the film is stolen by Swanson's performance as the unstable Norma Desmond, who desperately wants to recapture her lost youth. She plays the role of the spoiled rich woman to the hilt, with a caricature of the sneer one sometimes imagines big stars of that era treated their fawning followers with. She makes you feel for her, even as her behavior repulses you.

The film features a minor role by director Cecil B. DeMille as himself (and he doesn't embarrass himself on-screen, either), and cameos by Buster Keaton. H. B. Warner, and other filmmakers of the era.

The film as a whole is like watching a train wreck: You're fascinated and horrified at the same time. And the film uses little narrative tricks to make it all seem more surreal, even as the characters ground it firmly in believability. The film concludes with one of the classic lines of classic Hollywood.

It's a bizarre trip, but well worth seeing.

Update 10/19: Subrata points out to me that Gloria Swanson, who played Norma Desmond, was a real silent-film star, and a clip of one of her films is used in this movie. Erich von Stroheim, who plays Desmond's butler, was a real silent film director, who directed Swanson several times. I'm not sure which is more impressive: The clever use of these two figures, or that they can both act!

After the movies, I went to the Peninsula Creamery where I had dinner, a milkshake, and did some reading.

Then today it was back to work. As it turns out, I had a very productive day, hitting a major milestone in my current project (it works! It works!), and stayed later than I usually do because I was so focused on getting to that milestone. It's been a while since I've been so Tron'ed in to my work that I forget what time it is. It's always a pleasant feeling and a strange one at the same time.

When I came home, I watched my tape of the TV-movie Witchblade, which aired several weeks ago. It's based on a cheesy comic from Image Comics which involves a woman who finds an ancient mystical weapon and parades around in very little clothing, usually with plenty of bad artwork.

The movie was not as bad as the comic, and actually involved hardly any cheesecake. Sara Pezzini (Yancy Butler) is a cop on the trail of crime lord Gallo (George Jenesky), who killed a friend of hers. Along the way she finds the Witchblade, which makes her immensely strong, indestructible, agile, and vicious. She learns that she's the latest in a long line of (exclusively female) wielders of the Witchblade, including Joan of Arc, and sets out to track down Gallo, at personal cost.

The film is sort of like Homicide lite with fantasy elements: It's a cop drama, with contemporary rock music inserted from time to time. The editing is fairly rapid-fire, although some of the imagery is pretty nice. What bugs me, though, is that it's nothing more than a cop drama with some fantasy elements: The effects surrounding the Witchblade are mundane, the story doesn't involve more than a vague hint of the truly exotic, the acting is okay but hardly impressive. It seems like only Men In Black has gotten this sort of schtick right, i.e. been more than just a mildly different cop or agent drama.

So it's not bad, but it's not enough to make me want to watch a series of it, if one results.