Favourite Watches of April

How Green Was My Valley

We never see the washed-out 50-year-old narrator except for his wrinkled hands in the beginning; we see him only as an innocent 12-year-old whom he chooses to fill the images of his memories with. There are often low-angle shots that suggest a child’s perspective of admiration. Each scene is an extension of those memories, beautiful to a haunting degree and full of songs and dances. There is also a subplot of a boxer from his valley beating up his cartoonishly discriminating teacher; I wouldn’t put it past the theory that it’s another fabrication to justify and bring catharsis to his underlying regret of abandoning school. Every image Ford composed in this movie is so assured without any weariness, full of poetry that arises out of the sentimental truth within the narrator’s head. The final image sees Huw and his father on one side of the hill and all the other brothers, either dead or emigrated for a better future, on the other. Huw describes his father as someone who cannot die, real in memory as in flash; someone who only lives his life in memory is already dead; Huw’s been with his father for a long time already.

To Have and Have Not

Obviously, cinema is not real life, but I sleep better at night knowing Bogart and Bacall were married for 12 years and raised two children together. So calm and elemental; a light that ignites two faces and water that remains steady even in the deadliest circumstances, just like the innate goodness within Hawks’s stubborn professionals

Crossing Delancey

So good at balancing between its finely tuned human moments and the more absurd, spontaneous stuff. Case in point, an insane cab sequence is shoved between two of the most pivotal scenes of the film. The settings and characters are so vividly sketched that even every decision made by Liz appears to be a given script-wise, they all feel fully instinctual and completely her own, as if she will make a different decision on a rewatch. The smaller moments, such as Liz getting take-out at a deli or interacting with a book vendor on the street, are intertially placed within a fairly simple plot that does not meander, but thicken the tonal atmosphere. Every human interaction, the rhythm, the dramaturgy, just clicks effortlessly. I need to give Chilly Scenes of Winter another look.