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Here is the first Digging in Cloudland post, free for all subscribers, and longer than those going forward. Paid subscribers will receive weekly recommendation posts and occasional audio missives, including some of my reactions to films at the Venice Film Festival. Please feel free to share this new service to others, directly or on social media.
Films Mentioned in This Post:
1. Thief (1981)
2. Miami Vice (2006)
3. The Comfort of Strangers (1990)
4. Summertime (1955)
5. September Affair (1950)
6. Avanti! (1972)
Mann’s Longing for the Sea
There is one more day of August, one more day of what is inarguably summer, and one more day to watch Thief (1981) on the Criterion Channel. Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the few masterpiece debut features, alongside Badlands, The Virgin Suicides, Breathless, and The Parent Trap. The heart of the Thief is a ten-minute diner scene between Tuesday Weld and James Caan, full of yearning, regret, love, and perfect outerwear. Weld’s character has left crime for the straight life. Caan’s character says he wants the same, after just one more job. He shows her a collage of his ideal life cut out from magazines and newspapers.
“What are all these dead people?” she asks him.
He tells her that inside prison, people are on ice; they can’t even die right. He explains, “Here people grow old, they die, children come after.”
Longing may be the key to all of Michael Mann’s best films, as he described on August 24, 2024, to a rapt audience at a 35mm screening of his Miami Vice (2006) at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, presented by Katie Walsh and Blake Howard’s podcast Miami Nice. Mann described the key to that gorgeous film as the first date boat trip to Havana, prefaced by Colin Farrell looking out toward the sea. When someone asked about that gazing-at-the-sea motif in his films, including a postcard in Collateral (2004), he seemed to realize the theme at that moment.
“That’s my own personal affliction,” he said softly.
Americans in Italy
In anticipation of my first time in Venice, where I’m writing this while attending the Venice Film Festival, I rewatched David Lean’s Summertime on Criterion. It’s fine. Beautifully photographed, it follows the accidental amorous adventures in Venice of Katharine Hepburn, who plays a secretary from Akron, Ohio who has saved up for a dream vacation. She has perfect American panache, deep moral hang-ups, and a regionally incorrect mid-Atlantic accent. The best thing about the movie is that she calls everyone “cookie,” including a local young opportunist named Mauro, who says he thinks she is a little peculiar. Other than the scenes between these two, the film follows the typical mid-20th century cliché of an American woman coming to Italy to discover sex. Rome Adventure (1962) with Suzanne Pleshette is a charming example of this same predictable plot. Why can’t a woman come to Italy and discover—I don’t know—paganism? I suppose the best movie so far this year, La Chimera, comes the closest to this ideal, though it is about a British man rather than an American woman.
Another Venice-set tourist film currently on Criterion was new-to-me: Paul Schrader’s underrated The Comfort of Strangers (1990). An unmarried British couple (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett) revisit Venice to try to evolve, save, or maybe even finally end their relationship. They are discovered by a strange couple played by Christopher Walken as an Italian and Helen Mirren as a Canadian. (It may come as no surprise that Mirren’s accent is more successful.) The film perfectly captures the romantic and slightly sinister feeling of being lost in the endless mazes of narrow Venetian streets, as important to the feeling of Venice as the waterways. In this way, as well as its trade-roots and artisans, the city reminds me more of Marrakech than any other Italian city; this connection is emphasized in the decor of Walken’s and Mirren’s apartment. What this haunting movie also gets exactly right is the feeling of desperately trying to save a relationship with a trip.
Two other movies about Americans in Italy are less known and worth seeking out. Billy Wilder’s Avanti! (1972) may not be the best Wilder, but it is the most Wilder (along with Kiss Me, Stupid) in its sly and slowly accumulating anti-morality, which builds until the viewer (and title) are brought somewhere unexpected. After watching, you may be tempted to abandon your life entirely and annually from July 15 to August 15.
Another film about a couple inspired by Italy to change their life is September Affair (1950), starring Joseph Cotten and Joan Fontaine, and directed by my favorite of underrated auteurs, William Dieterle. Two strangers meet on a flight from Rome to New York. They take a detour on an unexpected layover in Naples and miss their flight. When the flight crashes and they are presumed dead, they abandon their previous lives and responsibilities, moving to a Florence villa to start a new life together. I direct you to a perfect review on Letterboxd by a friend of Cloudland, Emily West.
What is film for if not to build spaces that otherwise exist only in our imagination, physical spaces for ghosts, like the Florence villa in September Affair or the luxe and louche apartment in The Comfort of Strangers.