The three greatest films of all time
Wednesday 05 November @ 11:45:02 |
 (According to David Rubenstein)
by DAVID RUBENSTEIN
Not that anyone has ever asked me, but I’ve always been ready to tell anyone who did what I thought were the four greatest movies from the notably fertile pre-Reagan era that was so decisive in breaking the Hollywood stranglehold. Now that I finally have the opportunity, I can only remember three of them.
 “Titticut Follies” by Frederick Wiseman
Everybody knows that lists are mostly bogus anyway, but here they are, the occasion being that one of them, “Titticut Follies,” is playing at the Walker Art Center tonight (if you happen to have grabbed this paper on Wednesday, November 5). If you miss it, more of Frederick Wiseman’s amazing documentaries will be showing at the Walker for the next couple of weeks. (Schedule and summaries are in last week’s Pulse.) The other two films that I mention below should be available at the finer video rental stores in town.
The Seduction of Mimi
Mimi is a man, and the subject here is economic seduction, by the mafia or if you are inclined to extend the metaphor, by the corporate maw—benefits, retirement and all. Mimi gets the job but loses the girl, an anarchist flower vendor. This is a deceptively light comedy by Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller, a Fellini protégé who cut her teeth working with a puppet troupe doing adaptations of Kafka short stories for children. Wertmuller has been called a feminist and socialist but sometimes offends both, while connecting to a wider audience A recent remake of her best known film, “Swept Away,” starred Madonna, and prompted one reviewer to say its strongest point was that the microphone boom never got in the frame. “The Seduction of Mimi” (1972) is “great” because of the lurking grandeur of its theme, one explored more explicitly in another old great, “The Bridge on the River Kwai”: namely the tragic self-deception that manifests itself in trying to do a good job for a bad cause.
The Harder They Come
This 1973 film, starring reggae musician Jimmy Cliff, is great for the social archetype it embodies—the country youth coming to the corrupt city—for its portrayal of the church, for introducing the Jamaican lilt to a generation of honkies and not a few people of color, and of course for the music, which is inseparable from the driving intelligent poetry of its lyrics. As Proverbs 30 says (speaking of lists), “There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I do not understand.
The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maiden.” To this I’ve always wanted to add a fifth: why Bob Marley became an icon while Jimmy Cliff was all but forgotten.
 Titticut Follies
This late ’60s film is about the preparations and performance of an annual show put on by inmates at the Bridgewater, Massachusetts State Prison for the Criminally Insane. I haven’t seen the film in more than 30 years, but many scenes are unforgettable. An inmate summoning all his Irish charm and raconteur skills in a desperate attempt to talk his way out before a group of apparent dullards on a parole board, or something like it—he starts to mimic the European accent of one of the shrinks at one point and they never notice—and then sinking back into his long depressed silence on the ward when he fails. A crass doctor standing next to an inmate being force fed—I recall a funnel being used—with a long, dangling ash on his cigarette, precariously close to the works. A scene in the exercise yard, in which you first hear and than see a man standing on his head, railing against the pope. But the show is the thing here, and perhaps the most memorable character is the master of ceremonies, a guard, or more of a uniformed caretaker, with a rugged but gentle Italian face. He apparently had dreams of being a showman, and in this institution he gets a chance to play—no, wrong word—to be, the master of ceremonies each year at the Follies. When the movie is near done, after the show is over, the camera follows him as he trudges up (as I recall) an open steel staircase, his face gone slack, for another year of institutional life. For old TV aficionados, it’s a visual trope reminiscent of Jimmy Durante’s exit routine, when he walked into more and more distant circles of spotlight, turning back to face the camera each time with a little wave, as he disappeared into infinity.
 “Titticut Follies” lends itself to all kinds of reflections and profundities. There is the suggestion of a thin line between the asylum and the world, between sanity and mental chaos, and that it’s only some ineffable combination of chemistry, will, good fortune and blind luck that keeps us, the chosen ones, on the bright side of the line.
It will be interesting for me to see how much of what I think I recall about this movie is there as I recall it, but overall I have no doubt “Titticut Follies” is a documentary that transcends documentary, and a politically charged expose that transcends politics, to become a moving untranslatable work of art.
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