What’s Screening: August 6 – 12

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival finishes up this week, with engagements at the Roda, the Rafael, and the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. And the Oakland International Black LGBT Film Festival runs Tuesday, Thursday, and the following Saturday at the Elmwood. Once again, festival screenings are at the bottom of this newsletter.

A High and Low, Pacific Film Archive, Saturday, 5:30. After his two great action comedies (Yojimbo and Sanjuro) and before his last black and white historical epic (Red Beard), Akira Kurosawa made one of the best crime thrillers of the 1960’s. Toshiro Mifune (who else?) stars as a successful businessman who thinks he’s off the hook when a kidnapper snatches the wrong boy, leaving the businessman’s son safe. But the kidnapper still insists on the ransom (large enough to destroy Mifune’s tenuous hold on his company), forcing the man into a moral dilemma. Can he let another man’s son die for his career? Much of High and Low takes place in a single living room, and Kurosawa uses the wide, Tohoscope frame brilliantly in the confined space. See my Kurosawa Diary entry.

C- Boxcar Bertha, Pacific Film Archive, Friday, 9:10. No matter what the director credit says, this is a movie by Roger Corman, not a film by Martin Scorsese. Like everything Corman produced, it’s painfully cheap, with sets and locations that look underpopulated and underdressed. Stars Barbara Hershey and David Carradine get underdressed themselves in a couple of scenes. Like the nudity, sex, and violence, the movie’s left-wing political leanings feel like a brazen and obvious commercial decision. In this Bonnie and Clyde rip-off, a beautiful young woman, her labor-organizer lover, an African-American, and a New York Jew go on a crime spree in the depression-era rural south. Carradine comes closest to playing an interesting character—an idealist not comfortable with his life of crime. The story meanders, and the pacing is slow—not for atmosphere, character, or even suspense—but because (I assume) they had to stretch the small amount of film they shot to feature length.

C+ To Catch a Thief, Cerrito, Thursday, 8:30. More like a vacation on the Riviera than the tight and scary thriller one expects from the master of suspense. Not his best work by a long shot, but it has a few good scenes and thus sufficient fun. Besides, 106 minutes of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Monaco, photographed in the beauty of VistaVision, can’t be all bad.

Three Italian Classics, Roxie, Tuesday through Thursday. Yes, I’m devoting one paragraph to L’avventura (Tuesday), Swept Away (Wednesday), and Death In Venice (Thursday), films that arguably deserve considerably more than a paragraph each. Simply put, I haven’t seen any of them since the 1970s, and so would hesitate to grade them. At the time, I didn’t care for L’avventura or Death In Venice, but I liked Swept Away. Maybe I should revisit all of them.

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

A Arab Labor: Season 2, Rafael, Monday (closing night), 8:30. Three episodes from the hit sitcom’s second season–episodes 1, 3, and 8–turned out every bit as biting, insightful, and hilarious as the first season episodes screened two years ago. The further adventures of Arab-Israeli journalist Amjad Alian, trying desperately to fit into a society that rejects him, just keep getting stranger. (Did you know that dogs in Israel only bark at Arabs?) But this time, especially in episode 8, writer Sayed Kashua and director Shai Capon  had the confidence to dial down the laughs when dramatic points required it.

B+ Stalin Thought of You, JCCSF, August 7, 4:00. The very idea that a satirical cartoonist could survive the Stalin years seemspreposterous, but Boris Efimov survived throughout the entire Soviet era, and died in 2008 at the ripe age of 109. How did he manage? By aiming his poisoned pencil only at those that the powers-that-be didn’t like. Kevin McNeer’s documentary, built around interviews with the still-clear-minded-at-103 Efimov, takes the form of something like a confession. This artist stayed alive and employed throughout Stalin’s reign, and that couldn’t be done without moral compromises. His brother, a successful journalist and at one time editor-in-chief of Pravda, wasn’t so lucky. McNeer keeps the story lively with newsreel footage, illustrations, and old animations based on Efimov’s drawings.

B Saviors in the Night, Roda, Saturday, 7:00, Rafael, Monday (closing night), 6:15. Director Ludi Boeken and his three screenwriters have made a respectable, well-made drama, based on true events, about German Jews hiding from the SS, sometimes in plain sight. The movie is dramatic, suspenseful, and gives a real sense of how war and Nazi propaganda effected a tight-knit, rural, German farm community where everybody looks after everybody else. The story of people living in constant danger holds you in suspense. You very much want to see these people come out of the war okay. Especially interesting are the teenage characters, flirting and fighting, and enthusiastically embracing fascism and anti-Semitism before eagerly going off to war as if it was a grand adventure.