Entry 4:

Dear Phillip,

I share your love of Mizoguchi and Murnau and Dreyer, but it used to seem that there was a kind of cross-fertilization that occurred between their kind of rarefied filmmaking and the oneiric pop movies that I also love. After all, Murnau and Dreyer made two of the best horror movies, and the ripple effect from Nosferatu and Vampyr can be felt long afterwards in far less distinguished productions. (I'm not including Shadow of the Vampire, an arch in-joke that I didn't much care for.) And Mizoguchi was among other things a commercial filmmaker, part of a vibrant industry that admittedly found room for subjects and tempos alien to Hollywood modes, but commercial nonetheless. I guess what I miss is the sense of a continuum between high and low, of visual ideas jumping from context to context, even if it takes the form of a cheapjack artiness that is easy to laugh at. In fact the equivalent of yesterday's poverty row B movies are still being made, many of them in Hollywood for many millions of dollars: They just aren't as much fun as they (sometimes) were when they were made on the cheap by filmmakers who seemed to be taking some pride and pleasure in what they were doing.

I wasn't repelled by The House of Mirth--Terence Davies has a beautiful eye, and there are moments in it that will linger in memory somewhat like a silent film. At other moments I would have been happier if it had actually been a silent film; actors like Eric Stoltz and Dan Akroyd just don't seem happy with Wharton's dialogue. Akroyd in particular seems dangerously close to evoking the kind of melodrama that Wharton's plot, reduced to its bare outlines, might be in danger of resembling. But I agree with you that the movie has (dare I use the word) integrity, a refusal to compromise, and consequently a feeling of all-over solidity rather than of being patched together from a collection of bright ideas. The grave sustained rhythm may be what some found trying.

Re Russell Crowe and Gladiator: Were we supposed to feel something about him, beyond the fact that he isn't somebody you'd like to come up against in a barroom brawl? Gladiator was a disappointment, I confess; my guiltiest of guilty pleasures are the wide-screen epics of the '50s and '60s, and I would have thought that in this day and age a director like Ridley Scott could at least improve on The Fall of the Roman Empire. I think I had envisioned something like a cross between The Godfather and I, Claudius, something serpentine and brutal and, one would have hoped, splendid to look at. Instead he didn't even measure up to Anthony Mann's somewhat misbegotten epic. For all the money they spent on those digital effects, it still looks like an architect's drawing.

As for those rock 'n' roll movies, I was so busy listening to pop music that I never got around to seeing them. (Actually I was watching Bing Crosby musicals.)

Best,
Geoffrey