Play it again, Sam

by Sam Adams

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED: Walker's megalomaniacal adventurer (Ed Harris) didn't go over well in 1987. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In Pierrot le fou, Jean-Paul Belmondo's renegade TV producer announces his intention "not to write about people's lives any more, but only about life — life itself. What lies in between people: space, sound and color." Although the lines are delivered in the hoarse voice of a toothless old coot, it's not much of a leap to assume that he's speaking for his director, Jean-Luc Godard.

By 1965, Godard's waning interest in conventional narrative had all but evaporated. Pierrot has characters, namely Belmondo and his outlaw lover, Anna Karina, and a fitful narrative that prefigures Bonnie and Clyde. But, driven by his increasingly radical Maoist politics, Godard had come to see storytelling as no more than a means to explore the existential stuff of life, and he was eager to cut out the middleman.

In the movie's most famous exchange, cinema-fist auteur Samuel Fuller appears as himself, at a cocktail party where the guests speak in advertising slogans. "A film is like a battleground," he tells Belmondo. "Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word, emotion." Shot in bold primary colors by Godard's mainstay Raoul Coutard (who supervised the Criterion DVD's eye-popping transfer), the movie's pop-art tableaux are frequently intercut with comic-book panels. But Godard seems ambivalent about whether the broad strokes of popular culture represent life distilled to its essence or a diversion from it. The movie tips its hat to sources high and low: children's books, Laurel and Hardy, but also James Joyce and Louis-Ferdinand Céline (as well as paraphrasing liberally from Godard's Contempt and Band of Outsiders). But even if you don't get all of Godard's citations, and it's doubtful anyone could, the balance seems just right. The movie is vibrantly alive in every moment, a tragic intellectual slapstick comedy that never takes its foot off the gas.

Lions Gate's Jean Luc-Godard Collection includes four of Godard's rarely discussed features from the 1980s and '90s: Passion, First Name: Carmen, Detective and Hélas pour moi (Woe Is Me). As with the studio's Renoir and Buñuel sets, there's no apparent logic to the selection, but their appearance is welcome all the same.

In Alex Cox's Walker, Ed Harris plays William Walker, the American soldier of fortune who ruled Nicaragua from 1856 to 1857. Released in 1987, Cox's tragic satire was a transparent parable directed at Reagan's Nicaraguan misadventures, complete with Brechtian anachronisms like Coke bottles and copies of Newsweek. "It is the fate of America to go ahead," Walker proclaims to his ragtag band of cutthroats, a warm blanket of ideology and self-delusion shielding him from the chaos around him. As guerrilla fighters mow down his troops, he strides untouched through the streets of a small town, intent on making a show of strength no matter how many lives it costs.

Harris acts like an action hero dropped unawares into a bloody farce. The deliberately jarring elements aren't supposed to jell, but they don't always clash productively, either. Still, at least some of the movie's scathing reviews (which Cox reads from on a hidden featurette) were conditioned by its political content, perceived as a smug rebuke by an entitled outsider. Criterion is gambling that 20 years is room enough for reappraisal, and that the cycles of history have made its depiction of the tragic but inevitable results of the United States' attempt to spread democracy by force sadly relevant again.

Folly and delusion take center stage with happier results in Ernst Lubitsch's The Smiling Lieutenant, part of Eclipse's four-disc Lubitsch Musicals set. Maurice Chevalier plays the central figure, a dandyish Austrian soldier, but the movie's real stars are the women he's caught between: Claudette Colbert's sultry beer-hall bandleader and Miriam Hopkins' dowdy princess. In love with Colbert but betrothed to Hopkins through a series of miscommunications and royal intrigues, Chevalier flits from one to the other like a wayward songbird, coasting on Continental charm. The songs are few and far between, and, apart from the climactic "Jazz Up Your Lingerie," not particularly memorable, but the movie's wicked charms are irresistible, presaging the daring, even shocking forthrightness of Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise. If you're familiar with the saucy, dominant persona Hopkins established in later films, waiting for her makeover into a sovereign sex bomb is mildly agonizing, but the delayed gratification pays off. Her career was later killed by the production code, since there was nowhere for her to function in a world scrubbed of women who come on too strong, in every sense.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)