Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dietrich and Jannings turn in fine performances that are vital to the success of Sternberg's visual subtleties. Dietrich makes the plot plausible by injecting enough warmth into her role to justify Rath's falling in love with her. She manages to remain sympathetic until the last sequence and, even in a skirt scalloped up to the waist in front, she maintains dignity. Her singing alone is worth the price of admission. See this film before it's retired...
...made a bizarre request: "that my flesh be removed from my bones and the flesh destroyed," with the skeleton to go to the University of Melbourne "for preservation and possible display in the Grainger Museum." But the remains of the eccentric creator of Country Gardens, interred in the family plot in Adelaide after his death last February, may never get to Melbourne. Explained his U.S. attorney: "By law a person cannot bequeath his body. The remains belong to the next of kin, which in this instance is Mrs. Grainger...
...MONTH OF SUNDAYS, by Louis Kronenberger (186 pp.; Viking; $3.75), is a witty farce with only a semblance of plot: Mrs. Vizard opens hostilities against Mrs. Bannerman because the latter serves Brown Betty for dessert. The scene is Serenity House, a resort version of Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, whose guest list makes the crowd at Bleak House look like a convention of bond salesmen. There are, among others, the social arbiter Mrs. Cortelyou ("When above 79th Street, do as they do above 79th Street"); the warring psychiatrists Dr. Onan L. Digges ("the Saniflush of the Unconscious") and the "Freudy...
Ikiru begins with an aging civil service employee's discovery that he has a fatal case of gastric cancer. The narrative twists through some five months, ending just after his death. The plot and characters are common place and simple. The film is an unpretentious Japanese story of a no more momentous event than the quiet death of an old man who has spent most of his life rubber-stamping documents no one cares about. Yet Ikiru is a powerful film, well worth the cost of a ticket and the time away from the books...
Ikiru describes a death occuring over the space of five months. But literally translated, the title means "to live." Watanabe's last day would be the final entry in a plot summary, but skillful use of flashback makes possible a switch between the presentations of his death and the struggle for the park, Ikiru's last scene is not Watanabe dead, but Watanabe watching children in the park he has forced through city hall. It is a very moving ending to a superbly acted and photographed film...