Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

The Pianist (2002)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Wladyslaw Szpilman
Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde
150 minutes

A tale of an urban castaway that’s as powerful as it is restrained, The Pianist was Roman Polanski’s finest work in two decades. Originally published in 1946 under the title Death of a City, Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir of survival detailed the classical pianist’s six years under Nazi occupation in Warsaw. Seizing upon the book as his next film, Polanski selected South African born playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood — whose play Taking Sides also featured a composer caught in the maelstrom of World War II — to adapt a screenplay. France’s Le Studio Canal largely financed the €38 million (roughly $33 million) production in association with England’s Cadre Films and after Joseph Fiennes declined the role in order to remain on the British stage, Polanski arrived on Adrien Brody to portray Szpilman. The actor went from 160 to 130 pounds in six weeks to prepare for the part.

Filmed at Babelsburg Studios in Berlin, with additional shooting in the Braga district outside Warsaw, what sets The Pianist apart from WWII dramas like Saving Private Ryan or Enemy At the Gates is its simplicity and grace. Written immediately after the occupation, Szpilman’s story is resplendent in detail and confident enough in its truth not to employ artificiality or unearned sentiments. Turning genre conventions on their head, we meet Jews who are less than virtuous and at least one German who is more than pure evil, creating a landscape that provokes thought and feeling. A tale of genocide, the irony is that Polanski’s craftsmanship is so solid we wish the story kept going. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Adrien Brody (Best Actor), Ronald Harwood (Best Adapted Screenplay) and Roman Polanski (Best Director) all won Oscars.

In Warsaw of September 1939, pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is performing Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp minor for Polish radio when German artillery shells hit the city. Szpilman’s violinist father (Frank Finlay), mother (Maureen Lipman), younger brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard) and two grown sisters (Julia Rayner, Jessica Kate Meyer) rejoice with the news that Britain and France have declared war on Germany, but Poland quickly falls under Nazi control. Szpilman has time to take an adoring cellist named Dorota (Emilia Fox) for coffee before the city’s 360,000 Jews are evicted from their homes and sealed inside a ghetto in October 1940. Szpilman finds employment as a piano player in an upper class Jewish café and along with Henryk, rejects an offer from a family friend named Heller (Roy Smiles) to join the Jewish Ghetto Police.

When Henryk is arrested, Szpilman appeals to Heller’s ego to secure his brother’s release. He keeps his family from being deported by obtaining employment certificates for them, but these prove worthless when in August 1942, the Szpilmans are herded onto trains bound for Treblinka. Heller pulls Szpilman off the line, sparing his life, but the pianist never sees his family again. He survives by joining a Jewish work detail and buys enough time to arrange for his escape. Harbored by friends, Szpilman is reunited with Dorota, now married and expecting a child. Once the Polish uprising begins in August 1944, he’s near the brink of famine. Scrounging for food in the deserted city, Szpilman comes to face to face with Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann). Instead of being shot, the pianist is rewarded by an act of kindness after the German officer hears his music.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 107,318 users: 94% for The Pianist

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 85 for The Pianist

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In the month of July, I take a look at films released in my very favorite film stock and aspect ratio: black & white in anamorphic. Unless they’re being financed with credit cards, movies are rarely shot like this anymore because they’re impossible to sell to television. Yet these dreams sneak onto Turner Classic Movies every now and again …

Jules et Jim (1962)
Directed by François Truffaut
Screenplay by François Truffaut & Jean Gruault, based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché
Produced by François Truffaut
105 minutes

Constructed on the novelty that a woman might choose the ardor of two men — best friends at that — instead of limiting herself to one or the other, it seems appropriate that Jules et Jim still thrives as a triumph of romance over reason. This jewel of the French New Wave probably shouldn’t continue to resonate as deeply as it does, but its sensual pleasures still intoxicate. Mixing a cinematic cocktail of wisdom and exuberance, a first novel by 73-year-old Henri-Pierre Roché was adapted to film by 28-year-old critic turned filmmaker François Truffaut, who’d been an admirer of the book’s stylish blend of refinement and simplicity. Shot on stolen locations with a small crew on a budget of $280,000, the film was a box office smash in France and critically adored in the U.S., where Janus Films handled distribution.

By 1977, Truffaut admitted that Jules et Jim had become overrated, feeling his adaptation with writing partner Jean Gruault was too decorative and perhaps not brutally honest enough. Shot by Raoul Coutard in black & white “Franscope” — which was essentially Fox’s CinemaScope process, cribbed by filmmakers in Europe and renamed to avoid litigation — the film balances a sad, yearning quality in its rural scenes while moving at locomotive speed through ideas, whims and revelations in Paris. Jeanne Moreau is not my idea of Helen of Troy, but the mystique of Jules et Jim is that she represents any woman whose desires are dictated by the wind, which makes her desirable. The French dialogue moves so rapidly that more than one viewing may be mandated before the full breadth of the film’s pleasures take effect.

In Paris of 1912, a German named Jules (Oscar Werner) meets a fellow writer, a Frenchman named Jim (Henri Serre). Exchanging language and culture and bonding over a shared indifference toward money, the men becomes inseparable. Despite his vast acquaintances with ladies about town, Jim is unable to set his friend up with a woman; a nocturnal encounter with a girl (Marie Dubois) they rescue on the street is over for Jules by morning. His luck changes when Jules arranges dinner with Jim and three women his cousin studied with in Munich: one German, one Dutch, one French. The latter is named Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) and her elegant features remind the men of a statue they were just marveling over. After dating for a month, Jules introduces Catherine to Jim and the trio frolics across Paris.

During a holiday to the beach, Jules asks Catherine to marry him. She contends that she’s known more men than he’s known women, but that a union might be amicable. Jim covets Catherine from afar and World War I divides the trio by even greater distances. After Germany’s defeat, Jim travels to a chalet that Jules and Catherine share on the Rhine with their young daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin). Jules reveals that despite bringing order and harmony to their household, Catherine is bored easily and has strayed in their marriage with at least three men, while a fourth suitor — a guitar player named Albert (Boris Bassiak) who is an old acquaintance of the friends — convalesces nearby. Unique in some way to each man but unable to satisfy herself with any one of them, Catherine enters into an affair with Jim with dire consequences for all involved.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 5,805 users: 89% for Jules et Jim

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 1 of a bill featuring our friends the pod people.

Body Snatchers (1993)
Directed by Abel Ferrara
Screenplay by Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St. John, screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Produced by Robert H. Solo
87 minutes

With a mean and lean resume that included Ms. 45, the pilot episode of Crime Story, King of New York and The Bad Lieutenant, director Abel Ferrara was as bold a bet as any to bring a point of view to the third film adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1954 sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers. With Warner Bros. footing a $13 million bill, shooting wrapped in April 1992 … then nothing happened. Invited to the Cannes Film Festival in May 1993, Body Snatchers opened later that year in France and Germany before the studio snuck it into a dozen U.S. theaters in January 1994. According to Ferrara, the film fell victim to new studio management that had no stake in its success. At 87 minutes, it’s easy to imagine outtakes laying in a vault somewhere that might give the movie depth, but with few exceptions, it’s a flat, lazy effort given a shoddy release platform to match.

Body Snatchers isn’t so much a clunker as it just moseys around the block before the driver puts it back in the garage. Making a military base the landing site of the pods this time around, the script ignores what might have been a potent examination of the nuclear family and its meltdown to focus instead on faceless men in uniform who were acting like pods to begin with. Dinner table concerns in Smallville, USA seem as alien to Ferrara as alien beings and not much energy or thought is put into making either of them very compelling.  The makeup effects by the father and son tandem of Thomas & Barney Burman are excellent. There’s also pleasure in watching the shit hit the fan without a single computer generated image, but casting an actor as gifted off-the-cuff as R. Lee Ermey is indicative of how poorly managed this entire project was.

When her father Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) is dispatched to a U.S. Army base to inspect chemical and biological weapons containment for the EPA, teenager Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) is welcomed by a wild-eyed infantryman who grabs her in a gas station bathroom and warns “They get you when you sleep” before he disappears. Ill at ease with her stepmother Carol (Meg Tilly), Marti marks time on base befriending a heavy metal girl (Christine Elise). At work, Steve is approached by Captain Collins (Forest Whitaker) head of the base medical corps, who reports patients with extreme delusional fixations in his infirmary. Some of them are afraid to sleep. Marti’s 4-year-old half brother Andy (Reilly Murphy) even bolts his preschool when everyone in his class but him produces the same finger painting.

Retrieving Andy and bringing him home to his sister is chopper pilot Tim Young (Billy Wirth). Before the flyboy and the new girl in town can get better acquainted, Andy walks in on his mom decaying in bed, replaced by an imitation exhibiting zero emotion. Marti is almost replicated by an alien pod sprouting in the attic above her. Steve grabs his children and bolts on foot, despite the growing realization that almost everyone on the base has been replaced by an alien invader. This includes General Platt (R. Lee Ermey) who has trucks loaded with pods bound for army bases all over the country. The survivors attempt to stay awake long enough to do something about it.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 170 users: 62% for Body Snatchers

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 2 of a bill featuring high tech conspiracies in L.A.

Blue Thunder (1983)
Directed by John Badham
Written by Dan O’Bannon & Don Jakoby and Dean Riesner (uncredited)
Produced by Gordon Carroll
109 minutes

There haven’t been many movies about the LAPD’s Air Support Division. That might be due to logistics, or maybe the best picture you could possibly make in that milieu has already been done: Blue Thunder. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon was so incensed by the ghetto bird buzzing his L.A. abode that he was inspired to write a thriller — with USC Film School buddy Don Jakoby — about a Travis Bickle type going AWOL in a police helicopter above the City of Angels. Columbia Pictures loved the ballistic third act, the crazed lone nut in the first and second acts not so much, prompting rewrites in which the LAPD became good guys and government spooks were invented as bad guys. O’Bannon & Jakoby at the time lambasted the finished film, a box office hit that inspired two TV series in the ‘80s; Airwolf on CBS and the short lived Blue Thunder on ABC, one even cheesier than the other.

Blue Thunder is wound like a Swiss watch and designed with almost the same level of craftsmanship, briskly introducing us to Los Angeles, the rigmarole of the Air Support Division (dubbed “Astro Division” in the film to avoid hate mail flooding the LAPD) and issues of privacy on the approach to the year 1984. The action is set up gracefully and executed tenaciously, while a post-Watergate malaise gives the film an edge. John Alonzo’s lighting and Arthur Rubenstein’s electronic score were cutting edge for their time and hold up well, while the casting is superb. It’s easy to forget how strong a leading man Roy Scheider was, while the magnificent Warren Oates — in his final movie — chews up scenery like a buzzsaw. Director John Badham shot the film back-to-back with WarGames and was in a zone, fusing high concept, high tech, compelling characters and fun without crossing over into cartoon.

Maverick police helicopter pilot Frank Murphy (Roy Scheider) breaks in a new partner, the baby faced Richard Lymangood (Daniel Stern) who’s transferred over for some supposed peace and quiet in the haze above Los Angeles. While the men spy on a yoga practitioner in Encino known to perform in the nude, a city commissioner is attacked outside her home in Brentwood and shot. Reprimanded for his flight patterns by the loquacious Captain Braddock (Warren Oates), Murphy contends that the attack on the city commissioner was no attempted rape but a stakeout. A Vietnam vet compressed with PTSD, Murphy makes up with his oddball girlfriend (Candy Clark) and returns to the crime scene, where a memo he retrieves from the commissioner’s lawn has the cryptic word THOR written on it.

Assigned a special detail, Murphy accompanies Braddock and two feds to the demonstration of a prototype helicopter designed for crowd control in the Los Angeles ’84 Summer Olympics. “Blue Thunder” is equipped with a 20mm gun turret, turbine boost, whisper mode and surveillance devices that see and hear through walls. The test pilot is Colonel Cochrane (Malcolm McDowell), a nefarious operator Murphy knew in ‘Nam. In an attempt to rub out his competition, Cochrane sabotages Murphy’s chopper. Staying alive long enough to take Blue Thunder for a test spin, Murphy and Lymangood discover the feds have big plans for THOR (Tactical Helicopter Offensive Response), instigating social unrest in L.A. to justify military expenditures. Framed by Cochrane and the feds running the project, Murphy commandeers their toy and takes to the friendly skies.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 147 users: 65% for Blue Thunder

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Philip Kaufman (as Phil Kaufman) and Sonia Chernus, based on the novel Gone To Texas by Forrest Carter
Produced by Robert Daley
135 minutes

Paul Newman is Cool Hand Luke, Steve McQueen is Bullitt and Clint Eastwood’s screen persona is personified by Josey Wales. The finest material he ever chanced upon originated with Forrest Carter, who had approximately 75 copies of a novel then titled The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales printed by Whipporwill Publishers in Alabama. Without knowing any better, Carter mailed a copy to Malpaso, where the book would’ve been returned without being read if not for a soulful cover letter that struck producer Robert Daley. Eventually giving the novel a read, Daley absorbed it one sitting and recommended it to Eastwood, who was game to make the movie. Malpaso story editor Sonia Chernus asked to write the adaptation, which was injected with greater suspense by Philip Kaufman, who Eastwood tapped to direct before replacing several days into filming.

When talking about The Outlaw Josey Wales, the question is: What doesn’t the film do masterfully? The colorful saga stretches from farmland to battlefield, the Missouri River to the Indian Nations, a windswept outpost in Texas to an abandoned silver town where ghosts of war catch up to Wales. The characters are so compelling that even roles taken by Chief Dan George, Sam Bottoms or John Vernon (playing a non-asshole for once!) have the fullness of the heroes in any other movie. The script is a tapestry of deliciously crafted dialogue, goofy wit, idealistic spirit and riveting action. For all its frontier excitement, The Outlaw Josey Wales is ultimately an antidote to war, implying that communities are capable of living together by making peace that their governments seem unable or unwilling to. This is as vital a message for today as it was for the Bicentennial. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Wild Bunch aside, it’s the best western ever made.

On a plot of dirt in Missouri, farmer Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) stands helpless to protect his wife and son from a marauding Union outfit known as the Redlegs. Wales takes up arms for the Confederacy and once the war is lost, becomes the only member of his unit to reject the offer of commanding officer Fletcher (John Vernon), who’s accommodated disarmament terms with the Union. Fletcher is betrayed when the bloodthirsty Captain Terrill (Bill McKinney) summarily executes the men he’s turned in, but is well compensated to ride along with the Redlegs in the manhunt for Josey Wales and a young wounded rebel (Sam Bottoms). Wales and the boy outsmart the Redlegs at a ferry crossing, then a pair of bounty hunters in a marsh, but his young traveling companion succumbs to his wound before they can reach the safety of the Indian Nations.

Resigned to returning to Missouri to settle up with Fletcher, Wales runs into a wily old Cherokee (Chief Dan George) headed to Mexico to join others who refused to surrender. At a trading post, Wales inherits a Navajo woman (Geraldine Keams) he rescues from servitude. The trio beat it through Texas with Redlegs on their tail, stopping to assist Kansas pilgrims set upon by bandits. The two survivors — punchy Grandma Sarah (Paula Trueman) and her odd granddaughter Laura (Sondra Locke) — join Wales next. Followed by Comanche warriors, the band reaches the dried up silver town of Santa Rio, whose residents (Matt Clark, Royal Dano, Joyce Jameson) are ecstatic to receive settlers. Wales brokers peace with Comanche chief Ten Bears (Will Sampson) whose land they build on, but when a bounty hunter tips the Redlegs off to Wales’ location, the war finally catches up to him.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 31 users: 97% for The Outlaw Josey Wales

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Heartbreak Ridge (1986)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by James Carabatsos and Dennis Hackin (uncredited) and Joseph Stinson (uncredited)
Produced by Clint Eastwood
130 minutes

Firing locker room trash talk with the repetition and accuracy of a machine gun, Heartbreak Ridge is loaded with more R-rated one-liners than the careers of all the male action stars you could name combined. James Carabatsos wrote a first draft, which was doctored by the authors of the goofiest film Eastwood ever made (Bronco Billy) and the one with the greatest line of dialogue in action movie history (Sudden Impact), Dennis Hackin and Joseph Stinson, respectively. Greeted with dissent by some army veterans who maintained that the Marines never engaged Heartbreak Ridge and by a Marine Corps which did not square with the film’s language or Gunny Highway’s training techniques, Heartbreak Ridge may be trying to fit a size 12 foot into a shoe two sizes too small, but reality aside, it’s one of the more entertaining movies Clint Eastwood ever made.

The combat sequences — which utilize the U.S. military intervention in Grenada that the United Nations later voted illegal — are on auto-pilot, reflecting neither the terror of combat or hinting at any real consequences for the combatants. Heartbreak Ridge was the last in a line of war movies going back to John Wayne fighting Injuns in Fort Apache where the enemy was evil and when shot, went down like a bowling pin. For those able to cotton to the film’s outdated approach, its macho bluster is hard to resist. With an opening line of “I been pumping pussy since Christ was a corporal” the script never apologizes for being about a crusty Marine gunny and never lets up. Underneath lies a character that fits Eastwood’s screen persona like a glove, a man whose distaste for authority is matched by a loyalty to the ideals of that authority. Showing real signs of age, Eastwood gave what feels like the richest performance up to that point in his career.

In 1983, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway (Clint Eastwood) is allowed to walk away from drunk and disorderly charges — including urinating on a police car — due to his distinguished service in both Korea and Vietnam. Despite his contempt for authority and loose tongue, Highway is so gung ho about being a Marine that he earns a transfer back to his old unit: 2nd Recon Battalion, 2nd Marine Division in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Reuniting with a sergeant major (Arlen Dean Snyder) he survived a battle with at the so-called Heartbreak Ridge in Korea when they were army corpsmen, Highway runs afoul with Annapolis football hero Major Malcolm A. Powers (Evertt McGill) who’s displeased as much with Highway’s age and his record of insubordination, commenting, “Well I ask for Marines, the division sends me relics.”

The sloppy recon platoon Gunny Highway is assigned — “The Marines are looking for a few good men. Unfortunately, you ain’t it” — regrets the day they met him. This includes Corporal “Stitch” Jones (Mario Van Peebles), a loudmouth who ripped Highway off on the bus ride to Lejeune. Accustomed to serving as target practice for 1^st Platoon, Recon is whipped into combat shape by Highway. He has less success rebuilding a relationship with his ex-wife Aggie (Marsha Mason), a barmaid who tired of waiting at home for Highway to return from whatever war zone he volunteered for. Termed an “0-0-1” by Powers — 0 wins, 1 tie for Korea, 1 loss for Vietnam — Highway gets a shot at redemption when the Marines are deployed to Grenada to free American medical students stranded by a Communist coup d’état on that Caribbean island.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 12 users: 83% for Heartbreak Ridge

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Firefox (1982)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Alex Lasker & Wendell Wellman, based on the novel by Craig Thomas
Produced by Clint Eastwood
136 minutes

Arriving with fanfare in June 1982 and introducing Clint Eastwood to a generation of mallrats — who were either too young to get into R-rated movies or too busy pumping quarters into Q*bert to care — Firefox didn’t work then and today figures onto my list of the five biggest clunkers the screen icon ever made. Based on a novel that allegedly came to Eastwood by way of a helicopter pilot he contracted for aerial photography, it’s the exactly the type of high tech cloak and dagger business your barber might recommend. International thrillers like these can be compelling when written by Frederick Forsyth or Tom Clancy, but for starters, Craig Thomas is not in that literary weight class. His source material — as well as the adaptation and direction of the movie version — are cheaper and lazier than they have any excuse to be.

Whether or not it was conceived as Clint Eastwood’s response to the special effects extravaganzas of Lucas or Spielberg, Firefox manages one interesting conceit in a Russian Jewish underground and finds one fun moment, when Eastwood finally pilots the top secret fighter jet into the wild blue yonder. Nothing else elicits much more than a yawn. Visual effects producer John Dykstra held up his end adequately, but Eastwood’s explosiveness as an actor seems poorly suited to the spy genre or to acting in front of a blue screen. Blue Thunder — which followed Firefox into theaters by one year and would have been a classic with Clint in the lead role instead of Roy Schneider — infused excitement and an edge to a very similar storyline. Here, even composer Maurice Jarre turns in work that crashes on the test pad.

Somewhere in Alaska, U.S. Air Force major Mitchell Gant (Clint Eastwood) has his solitary jog interrupted when a young captain (David Huffman) descends on Gant and compels him to come out of retirement to pilot an experimental Mach 5 fighter jet not only invisible to radar, but equipped with a mind controlled weapons system. Known as Firefox, the jet is parked in a Soviet hangar in Bilyarsk. Fluent in Russian, Gant’s mission would be to infiltrate the base with the help of a dissident group and steal the aircraft. Traumatized by events in Vietnam — where Gant was shot down, captured and witnessed the death of a child in a napalm strike — and prone to panic attacks, he remains NATO’s best option for preventing the Cold War from tipping in favor of the Soviets.

In London, British intelligence expert Kenneth Aubrey (Freddie Jones) disguises Gant and issues him the identity of an American businessman trafficking heroin out of Russia. Proving a poor field operative, Gant bumbles into KGB checkpoints until being provoked into killing an agent in a train station restroom. His contact (Warren Clarke) manages to get Gant on the road to Bilyarsk, where the engineers who built Firefox (Nigel Hawthorne, Ronald Lacey, Dimitra Arliss) have suffered enough persecution from the KGB over their Jewish faith to sacrifice their lives to help Gant. Once in the air, Gant heads for a U.S. submarine on an ice pack in the Arctic Circle to refuel, but finds himself pursued by a prototype Firefox piloted by his Soviet counterpart.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 12 users: 42% for Firefox

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Iris Yamashita, story by Iris Yamashita & Paul Haggis, based on the book Picture Letters From Commander In Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Robert Lorenz
141 minutes

In his research for the $90 million World War II drama Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood had his interest piqued by the general who designed the ingenious defenses for Iwo Jima. Pitched as an audacious companion piece that would illustrate the battle from the perspective of the Japanese — budgeted at $20 million and shot largely on the Warner Bros. backlot — Letters From Iwo Jima turns out being vastly superior to the unwieldy Flags of Our Fathers and more complex than Saving Private Ryan or any other war movie of the past 20 years. Rejecting genre clichés like a beachhead, Eastwood’s film is both a vision and a discovery, of actors we’ve never seen before, of a place we’ve never seen portrayed on film in this way and a discovery of a culture and people reduced to caricature in other movies.

Letters From Iwo Jima owes its eyes and its heart to Iris Yamashita, a Los Angeles web programmer who’d won a screenwriting contest with a spec titled Traveler to Tokyo and whose work was referred to Paul Haggis, who Eastwood had hired to structure a screenplay. In addition to keeping the dialogue in Japanese, Yamashita paints a vibrant depiction of men sent to war; some descend into pettiness or barbarism, but for the most part, these are men who miss their families and want to go home, a quality they either already understand or soon learn they share with their enemy. Like all great movies, this one feels like it’d been waiting to be made, at least by an American filmmaker as intuitive and skilled as Eastwood. Letters From Iwo Jima is the best picture he’s directed without acting in so far.

Japanese archeologists sifting through the island of Iwo Jima in 2005 discover a mail pouch buried in the cave network abandoned in World War II. Moving back in time to 1944 — as outmanned and outgunned Japanese forces fortify the beaches of the volcanic rock against an impending American invasion — Private Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) runs afoul with his sadistic superior Captain Tanida (Takumi Bando) when he’s overheard making comments deemed unpatriotic. A baker and comparatively weak soldier drafted into the army, Saigo writes letters home to his wife Hanako. His friend Kashiwara (Takashi Yamaguchi) becomes stricken with dysentery while Nozaki (Yuki Matsuzaki) gossips about the newly arrived General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) who received his military training in the United States.

Notified that reinforcements have been destroyed off the Marianas, Kuribayashi shifts his defenses from the beaches to Mount Suribachi, where the Japanese begin digging a cave network that will hold out much longer than a frontal assault against the Americans. The contemplative general finds an ally in Lieutenant Colonel Takeichi Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), a charismatic cavalry officer who won gold as an equestrian in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Newly arrived superior Private Shimizu (Ryo Kase) reveals to Saigo and Nozaki that he received his training as a military policeman, raising concerns that he might be a spy; the truth behind Shimizu’s deployment to Iwo Jima reveals another side to him. Drilled that Americans are weak and inferior, once the invasion begins, Saigo and the others quickly learn otherwise. Their only honorable course of action is to embrace ritual suicide.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 195 users: 91% for Letters From Iwo Jima

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 89 for Letters From Iwo Jima

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The Beguiled (1971)
Directed by Don Siegel (as Donald Siegel)
Screenplay by Alfred Maltz (as John B. Sherry) and Irene Kamp (as Grimes Grice) and Claude Traverse (uncredited), based on the novel by Thomas Cullinan
Produced by Don Siegel (as Donald Siegel)
105 minutes

The Beguiled hasn’t exactly spent the last 40 years buried — Universal issued it on DVD in 2001 — but watching this genre defying film from the director and the star of Dirty Harry sure feels like an archeological find. Slow to begin, befuddled to end, the movie is nonetheless unlike any that had come before or any that followed it into theaters. It continued Siegel’s late career trajectory from mean little black & white B-movies to studio pictures with A-list stars and the budgets to immerse the audience fully in an atmosphere. The third of Siegel’s five films with Clint Eastwood is no exception — with the star playing against type as a hobbled Union soldier and cad who discovers his Southern nursemaids are far more treacherous than he is.

Siegel draws electricity by using flashbacks to suggest that contrary to what he portrays, Eastwood’s character is not to be trusted, while revealing the women to be high voltage lines themselves. The three screenwriters who labored over the script can’t sustain any of that into a feature length gothic — William Goldman would in his adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery — but in spite of a narrative that pokes around tension instead of ratcheting it up, The Beguiled does one thing: retain an eerie beauty. The film’s behind the scenes legacy was to introduce Eastwood to director of photography Bruce Surtees, who’d shoot some of Eastwood’s greatest films as a director and does superlative work here, bathing a Louisiana mansion in inauspicious shadows and poisonous candlelight.

Picking mushrooms in a forest strangely quiet in the aftermath of a battle between Union and Confederate forces in Louisiana, 12-year-old Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin) discovers a wounded bluecoat named John McBurney (Clint Eastwood). She drags McB to the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Girls, whose headmistress Miss Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) takes pity on the enemy soldier, at least long enough to mend his wounds before turning him over to a Reb patrol. Having gone many years between entertaining the company of a man, the women take a keen interest in their houseguest, who Martha keeps locked in the music room while he recovers. The inhabitants of the school include virginal teacher Edwina Dabney (Elizabeth Hartman), wanton teenage vixen Carol (Jo Ann Harris) and black maid Hallie (Mae Mercer).

Whether she fears for McB’s health if turned over to the South or he actually reminds her of an illicit relationship she once shared with her brother, Martha keeps their houseguest under her care. McB seeks to save his own hide by appealing to Martha’s idealism, claiming he’s a Quaker who was merely injured carrying a Rebel soldier to safety. He doubles his bet by plying his charms on Edwina, imagining he can avoid capture if she falls in love with him. The teacher becomes protective of McB, especially when Carol begins prowling around his bedside. Unable to keep his affairs a secret from the other women, McB is knocked down the stairs by one of his jilted lovers. Whether out of concern a broken leg might become infected or because she seeks to keep him dependent on her, Martha suggests they separate McB’s leg from the rest of his body.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 10 users: 90% for The Beguiled

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Space Cowboys (2000)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Ken Kaufman & Howard Klausner
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Andrew Lazar
130 minutes

There’s junk orbiting Space Cowboys, an adventure comedy so good on so many different levels and so pedestrian on the same number of levels. Ken Kaufman & Howard Klausner wrote the script on spec with Paul Newman & Robert Redford as casting notions before producer Andrew Lazar helped set the project up at Warner Bros. where Clint Eastwood went for it. What’s novel here — at least in relation to disaster movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon — is how all the familiar stoic mission recruitment moments, goofy training sequences or perilous space activity is handled by guys past their retest dates, relying on stuff beyond brawn to answer challenges. The ages of these characters afford some stellar casting opportunities as well, with Eastwood and his Kelly’s Heroes pal Donald Sutherland reuniting and shining among the cast.

The special effects (by Industrial Light & Magic and by WonderWorks), not only cut glass but move at just the right velocity, allowing the grandeur of men working in earth’s upper atmosphere to dance across the eyeballs. There’s a pertinent message here about seniors being left in the scrap yard like obsolete aircraft and how that rust can be shaken off. Space Cowboys gets off to wonderful start by introducing the characters as young men and catching up with them 40 years later, but then it coasts. The NASA sequences look shoddy, Tommy Lee Jones looks lost amid an ensemble (Jeff Bridges must not have been available) and the characters are surrendered to a plot about a Russian satellite. There’s no suspense and no question where this material is headed, but it’s well intentioned and well crafted enough to work while it’s playing.

In 1958 at Edwards Air Force Base, test pilots Major William Hawkins (Eli Craig) and Frank Corvin (Toby Stephens) must eject from their X-2 after “Hawk” pushed the jet to 110,000 feet. Their dreams of reaching the moon are scuttled by their boss Bob Gerson when a new agency called NASA is formed to assume upper atmosphere testing. 40 years later, an aging Russian communications satellite begins to fall out of orbit. Now a NASA project director, Gerson (James Cromwell) and engineer Sara Holland (Marcia Gay Harden) attempt to fix the glitch on behalf of the Russians by contacting Corvin (Clint Eastwood) — now four years past retirement age — whose guidance system design not only ended up on a Soviet satellite but has become so outdated, none of NASA’s engineers understand it.

Unwilling to allow the satellite to re-enter earth’s atmosphere for reasons he prefers not to disclose, Gerson is pressed by Corvin to send him and his original team into space to capture and repair the satellite. This includes Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones) now a cropduster who hasn’t spoken to Corvin in 12 years, structural engineer Jerry O’Neill (Donald Sutherland) who’s blind as a bat but still the ladies man and Tank Sullivan (James Garner), a navigator who became a Baptist preacher. Compared to the MIT trained astronauts (Loren Dean, Courtney B. Vance) piloting the space shuttle, Team Daedalus is obsolete hardware, but Gerson’s plan to get rid of them backfires when the space cowboys become media darlings. Sent into space, the astronauts discover they’re dealing with a device far deadlier than a communications satellite.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 113 users: 79% for Space Cowboys

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 73 for Space Cowboys

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