Francois Truffaut opens THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN (1977) with that eponymous figure’s (Charles Denner) funeral, attended entirely by women. We then bounce around in time as Bertrand pursues, admires, ogles or flirts endlessly, the only consistency being that he won’t commit (which he blames on losing Great Love Leslie Caron) — though a lot of the women are fine with that. I found this one a charming comedy even though it’s extremely stalkery, like the elaborate strategy he uses to find Nathalie Baye in the opening segment. “Women’s legs are compasses that circle the globe and give it balance and harmony.”
Alvin York was a man who had one of those stranger-than-fiction lives: backwoods Tennessee hellraiser turned pacifist churchgoer, decided after much soul-searching not to claim Conscientious Objector status in WW I, then went on to capture more than 100 German prisoners in one battle. In 1941, with a new war on the horizon, he agreed to let Warner Brothers make the biopic SERGEANT YORK, which despite being set in WW I is very much about Why We Need To Fight in WW II.
Howard Hawks directs the story which spends most of its time on York (Gary Cooper) in Tennessee, which means lots of familiar film stereotypes about the simple, plainspun mountain folk (particullarly post-war when York is awestruck by his exposure to civilization). It’s an odd entry in Hawks’ canon: none of the grim fatality of The Dawn Patrol, nor the tough professionalism of many of his male heroes. Though that said, York’s matter-of-fact practical approach to capturing the Germans isn’t that far off. JW Williamson’s Hillbillyland does a good job situating the film in mountain-folk tropes (the nice guy who won’t fight until he has to, for example), dismissing stories about the movie (no, he says, York did not demand Gary Cooper play him) and pointing out York was considerably less the naive simpleton than he’s portrayed. Walter Brennan plays York’s wise old preacher. “It appears that a fella’s got to have his roots planted in something besides himself.”
TYG and my date movie last weekend was THE MOUSE THAT ROARED (1959), an adaptation of Leonard Wibberly’s novel about how Grand Fenwick, the world’s smallest country, declared war on the United States with an eye to how generously America would invest in them after the war. Only thanks to a quirk of fate and the world’s most powerful nuclear bomb, they won …
Peter Sellers plays Tully, the somewhat clueless protagonist, as well as the scheming Prime Minister and the reigning duchess of Grand Fenwick, aided and abetted by Leo McKern (another scheming politician), First Doctor William Hartnell (Tully’s no-nonsense sidekick) and Jean Seberg as a scientist’s beautiful daughter. This is fluff, but it’s fluff I’m fond of. “It’s shameful that Grand Fenwick sent us a declaration of war and it took the FBI to find it!”
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