Avalon: Modal Verbs May (Permission) x Can (Ability)

This scene seems to be especially made for teachers of English who are teaching the difference between CAN and MAY. This grammar point can be quite confusing for Brazilians, because both modals have the same translation - poder - in Portuguese, so the meaning can be unclear for us. This segment helps students understand the difference.

I. Match the verbs with the definition:

1. CAN

2. MAY

( ) It is if you are capable of doing something.

( ) It is asking for permission.

II. Watch the movie segment and check your answers.

III. Now read the dialog between a Brazilian teacher of English and a Brazilian student. Then complete the blanks with Can or May.

*Cultural note:

The native language spoken in Brazil is Portuguese.

T - Hello, students.

S - Hello, teacher. __________ I go to the restroom?

T - Not now. After class, OK?

S - Okay. _______ I speak Portuguese*?

T - Only if it is really important. Is it?

S - No, it isn't. __________ I do the homework now?

T - Not now. It is HOME work, dear.

S - Okay, teacher. But _______ I do the homework or is it very difficult?

T - The homework is easy, relax.

S - ____ I speak English like an American?

T - Well, not now, but in a near future...

S - Great! _______ I drink some water now?

T - Okay, but be fast.

WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - AVALON

Answer key:

I. 1, 2

III. may, may, may, can, can, may

Capsule Reviews: The Smiling Lieutenant, Ménilmontant, The Miracle Woman

The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931)

A delightfully wicked musical that puts the Lubitsch touch on full display, The Smiling Lieutenant has the sophistication and subtly charged sensual construction one expects of the artist. Maurice Chevalier is a joy as the titular lieutenant Niki, putting his massive grins and thick accent to hysterically suggestive use with some lines that show Lubitsch, as ever, pushing himself to the limit of decency. Claudette Colbert, playing Niki's naughty true love, asks him whether the princess he's unwittingly been forced to marry is blond or brunette. "I don't know," replies Chevalier with a caddish grin, removing all doubt as to what hair he's really talking about. The songs are all jovial, but if you pay attention to the lyrics you realize they could be sung in a pub after a pint or four. It all ends with a demented (yet classy, natch) spin on Cyrano as Franzi teaches Anna how to make our lieutenant switch his affections, and a significant fade-out puts a wider smile on Niki's face than ever before. The way Miriam Hopkins looks when she finally grabs her husband's attentions? Hell, I'd be singing too. Grade: A-

Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)

The phrase "avant-garde Russian silent cinema" is redundant; I've yet to see a Russian film from the '20s that was anything less than confrontational and experimental, even when it amounted to nothing more than naïve propaganda. Ménilmontant named for the Parisian suburb where it was shot, may technically be a French work, but one need not be told that a Russian emigré directed it to know its true national roots. Opening with an unexplained, terrifyingly edited and grisly axe murder of the parents of two young girls, Ménilmontant soon morphs into an abstracted tale of grief and isolation, following the sisters as they grow up and slowly drift apart when one of them gets a lover. A host of silent-era techniques—including double exposure, superimposition, impressionistic close-ups, mood-setting pillow shots of buildings and nature, and, of course, montage—create a manic state of bewilderment and poetic terror as the women discover what a harsh world it really is out there for a lady. This neglected masterwork feels like a proto-feminist, modernist fairy tale as made by Dziga Vertov. With potential like that, who needs intertitles? Grade: A+

The Miracle Woman (Frank Capra, 1931)

An improvement over Capra and Stanwyck's first collaboration, chiefly because Capra, having figured out how to work with Stanwyck's style, now knows how to get even more out of her. The story itself is simple, but it's noteworthy that Capra would rework its basic theme—a protagonist giving up prestige and wealth for morality and/or love—several times after Hays office cracked down but always with the more acceptable male lead instead of a strong-willed female played with fiery, if fabricated passion by Stanwyck. Oddly prescient in its depiction of ludicrously ostentatious evangelism (shame Jerry Falwell never stuck his fat ass in a lion cage for a stunt), The Miracle Woman boasts three unforgettable setpieces in its first 20 minutes. The second half doesn't match the brilliant staging of Stanwyck's opening sermon, theatrical debut as a charlatan (she emerges on-stage over roused men like the dancing robot in Metropolis) and the averted suicide of the sweet blind man, an otherwise grating presence who often plays like a self-treating Patch Adams. I was also mildly disappointed that its rich potential for social commentary gave way to the usual Capra story of an affirming romance. Nevertheless, Capra's increasing visual sophistication, Stanwyck's dynamic performance and a flirtation with the dark side of Pre-Code immorality make this one of the director's more enjoyable pictures. Grade: B

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)

With some 60 films to his name a mere 16 years after starting in the film industry, Kenji Mizoguchi certainly had enough on-the-job training to get his act down. Nevertheless, 1939's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums represents such a stylistic leap it almost seems less an evolution than a complete rebirth. It is not the master's first great work — in fact, I might even continue to argue for the powerful (and more defiantly upbeat) The Straits of Love and Hate, released two years earlier — but it is the true emergence of Mizoguchi the master, ironing out the style of immaculate compositions and increasingly sophisticated historical detail (courtesy of designer Hiroshi Mizutani, who had started working with Mizguchi on Straits) that would become his forte.

Admirers routinely (and correctly) note the nobility of Mizoguchi's female characters, but that implies placement on a pedestal that, despite their recurring Madonna/whore dynamics and martyrdom, these fully human characters do not reside upon. Not all of the women in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is a saint; many, in fact, are gossipy and territorial, geishas tugging at men as if quarreling over a kimono. But even these sweet-talking gaggles do not feel like mere props in Mizoguchi's world, instead perpetuating a clear but unforced social commentary on the insular nature of the occupational caste system that defines each person in his period pictures. The men of the film, Kabuki actors in late-1800s Japan, are also isolated by the social restrictions of their professions, forced to adhere to strict codes of conduct even when far nobler actions prove to be outside that set of manners.

Opening on a theatrical troupe preparing for a performance, Mizoguchi establishes Kikuosuke (stage actor Shotaro Hanayagi in his film debut), the lead of the production and the adoptive son of the troupe's resident master, a famed actor named Kikugoro. The performance clearly pleases the crowd, but Kiku's on-stage antics are exaggerated, and the rest of the troupe mocks him off-stage. To his face, of course, they are nothing but complimentary, something Kiku accepts even if he suspects the falsity of the praise everyone lavishes upon "young master." Only Otoku (Kakuko Mori), the wet nurse for Kiku's brother (and the belated biological son who prompts Kikugoro's disdain for the one he adopted), is honest with the man. She meekly advises Kiku "Don't let the flattery go to your head," and the ham, refreshed by her candor, soon falls for her. Naturally, this cannot be. Better for Kiku to squander money carousing with geishas than to fall in love with a servant of a different variety.

Mizoguchi's framing is so precisely and carefully composed that it borders on the avant-garde. Extremely long takes feature frequent camera movement, repositioning the frame into yet another painterly composition. He confines the action to one plane, generally the middle distance, and routinely he opens up the frame by way of a sliding wall, turning the middle plane into the foreground as the action suddenly moves backward into another room. Even the theatrical productions exist around Mizoguchi's camera: the show the first troupe puts on climaxes with a false embankment pushed back by foreground design and given more proximity by a backdrop that gives the setup a feeling of relative closeness. His refusal to use a close-up, even when the film moves into more melodramatic territory of female sacrifice, is telling. He prefers to let each composition soak in meaning rather than forcing the overused emotional shortcut of the close-up. His camera, frequently tilted just enough to move outside of eye-level, and he pivots the camera to arrange the mise-en-scène diagonally around the characters to create tension and uncertainty.

As the film progresses, Kiku, having renounced his family to live with the banished Otoku, moves further and further down the ladder with each failed performance. Through it all, Otoku continues to encourage him, even finding the silver lining in their suffering, saying it will improve his art. When Kiku's mother confronted Otoku about a potential relationship, she cut off the poor woman's defense of supporting and nurturing by saying "You're Kozo's wet nurse, not Kikuosuke's." That's exactly what she comes to resemble as the narrative continues, always the one to hold Kiku to her bosom and provide comfort. Compare her unwavering support to the slow dimming of the film's lighting by cinematographers Yozô Fuji and Minoru Miki: by the film's final act, in which a now much-practiced Kiku at last establishes himself as an actor and Otoku sacrifices their relationship to help her husband win back his father's graces, the lighting is full-on chiaroscuro. Even when Mizoguchi has the woman confirm to the expected gender roles, he makes inescapably clear through his compositions how disgusted he is by them and how devastating such norms are to those with true devotions.

The social critique here is more subsumed into the narrative than in his previous efforts, more fluidly integrated into his formal mastery. That flecks his theatrical touch with a more downbeat cynicism that stabilizes, even lightly chills his work. When Kiku finally gives his breakthrough performance, the one that will lead him back to the city and his family, Mizoguchi pulls back and frames Kiku's moment of triumph in extreme long shot, capturing the rapturous response of the audience but also dwarfing the man within the frame, proving how unworthy this moment was for the six years of isolation and hardship through which the actor put himself and his wife. But nothing compares to the sinister rhythm of the final shots, cross-cutting between Otoku dying of tuberculosis after being belatedly approved of by Kikugoro as her now-feted husband gloriously sails down a canal just outside the window she does not have the strength to get up and look out of. The juxtaposition of her wilting body, at last fully consumed to send her love into stardom, and Kiku officiously bowing and waving to adoring crowds that despised him until so recently, is one of Mizoguchi's most memorable endings, and terrible in impact.

Capsule Reviews: The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Lost Weekend, Ladies of Leisure

The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)

On the basis of film noir, were I husband in the '40s, I'd never allow my wife to speak with another man. Not out of jealousy, mind you, merely self-preservation instinct. The Postman Always Rings Twice is a film about comeuppances both undeserved and well justified. A wife plots against her kind, if too-often drunken, husband to run away with a drifter, who has no qualms turning on her when the police put the squeeze on him. Double-crosses and the long-reach of karma arrive through cynical, razor-sharp dialogue and the always scheming faces of John Garfield and Lana Turner (even the wise prosecutor played by Leon Ames has his manipulating plots). Not as atmospheric as my favorite noirs, the Postman Always Rings Twice is nevertheless a finely crafted vision of a world where love and hate can invert on a dime and justice always catches up with the criminal, even if it has to fabricate a new crime to do so. Grade: B+

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)

Marred by a simplistically moralizing final act, The Lost Weekend is nevertheless one of Wilder's most aesthetically inventive films and, for a time at least, a remarkably nonjudgmental view of a taboo that had yet to be seriously explored in cinema. From a crucial opening shot of a whiskey bottle danging outside an apartment to theremin-scored nightmares that detach our poor alcoholic from any semblance of sanity, Wilder's camera is devilish in its visualization of the despair of the alcoholic. But it's Ray Milland's agonized performance that continues to impress most of all. Milland talks fast, fidgets incessantly and constantly darts his eyes back and forth, not only seeking out the next drink but in paralyzing fear of being found out. He's the addict trying to "maintain" when everyone around him knows of his addiction and even strangers could never mistake his stumbling gait for anything less than substance abuse.

Wilder's writing is ripped from the headlines but nevertheless informed by his singular gift as a screenwriter. A lengthy monologue near the start gets at the comforting and inspiring effects of alcohol on the alcoholic, but Wilder adds comedy to it by cutting away from Don to his impatient brother and girlfriend ranting about them before returning to show Don still boring the bartender to death with his spiel. There are also some disturbingly felt scenes of true human terror, such as Don pleading with a ringing telephone to stop, not only to ease his hangover but because he assumes the person on the other end is the devoted girlfriend he cannot face. Scenes like that bring the film to the edge of greatness, and it's a shame the climax drops a top-tier Wilder picture down a rung. And who would expected the weakest part of a Wilder film, any Wilder film, to be its conclusion? Grade: B

Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra, 1930)

Capra's first collaboration with Barbara Stanwyck makes a quick case for the fruitfulness of their relationship: she adds an edge his films lack without her, while he sentimentalizes her overpowering presence just enough to show how genuinely appealing Stanwyck is as a person, not merely a sexual virago. Capra's style is evident even in this early talkie, courtesy of Joseph Walker's backlighting of the ladies (finely honed in Stanwyck's poses for Ralph Graves' trust fund kid/aspiring painter) and tranquil nighttime shots that use diegetic sound to alternately romantic and suggestive effect. The two of them were also smart enough to ignore Harry Cohn's attempts to glamorize Stanwyck by instead making sure to capture the far more appealing realness of her look. This fine-tuning of Capra and Walker's long-running partnership is as rewarding as Stanwyck's performance, which, as Pauline Kael would later note of her effect on all melodrama, gave a naturalism to even the most saccharine treacle.

And God does this movie serve as much a demonstration of Capra's excesses as his skills. Capra came up with a first draft based on a Broadway play that screenwriter Jo Swerling found so awful he didn't even want to waste his time rewriting it, and even his best efforts fail to make the film feel like anything less than a pat emotional shortcut of a melodrama. But Capra also helped shape Stanwyck into the actress she became, catering to her first-take style even as he challenged and teased it to make sure that one take was as golden as it needed to be. And that care paid rich dividends: after misleading Stanwyck as to how Graves would play a confrontational scene, she had to play off a much tougher and angrier moment than she expected, and Stanwyck responds by tearfully holding two fingers up to Graves' mouth to silence him. The way she slowly drags her fingers down Graves' lips is more pained than any expression of hurt she just silenced with her morose gesture. A moment of visual poetry in a film that too often counteracts its unspoken grace with simple-minded plot progression and starched dialogue. Grade: C

P.S. Also enlivening this otherwise tedious narrative is Stanwyck's equally streetwise, slowly plumping roommate played by Marie Prevost. She gets the biggest laugh of the film out to dinner with a man who's gentlemanly compliments are belied by the look of concern on his face as she orders enough food to feed an entire speakeasy. She tops off the order with a cup of coffee, and the poor, dumb waiter has the thickness to asks "small or large?" Prevost picks herself up in almost aristocratic dignity and replies, "Do I look like a SMAHLLLL cup of coffee?" drawing out that "small" to hysterical effect.

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

There is something indefinite about Barbara Stanwyck's overpowering effect, a subconscious response triggered by an almost imperceptible shift in body language. A lightly cocked eyebrow, a slight repositioning of a leg, all tiny, calculated moves designed for a delayed response to a beauty that, mere moments ago, didn't seem remarkable but is suddenly intoxicating. She made the perfect seductress, someone who doesn't announce herself from afar but waits to ensnare men as they pass by, forcing a double-take that draws them in more wholly and madly than the bombshells. Those ladies wielded their bombshell-selves like the artillery for which they were named, but Stanwyck got up close and personal. If love is a battlefield, she was a black-ops guerrilla. There's a line in Joseph McBride's Capra biography that calls her beauty "proletarian," which is indicative not only of the unexpected power of her uncommonly common looks but of the forceful impact of that beauty when it was unleashed.

Yet despite this singular power, Stanwyck possesses the capacity to portray this Venus flytrap man-baiting as something other than sinister sexual warfare. Sure, everyone remembers her turn in Double Indemnity, one of the bar-setters for the femme fatale icon, but compare her man-devouring turn there to her more enamored brush with hapless innocence in Ball of Fire, where she in no way softens her appeal but manages to fall for a man so resolutely innocent that she must overcome pangs of shame for being with him. Even when she was naughty, which was always, Stanwyck could find ways not only to unearth some nugget of guilelessness in her tramps but to suggest that her forthright seduction was a valid expression of sexual identity. I would say this was incredible given the time period in which she worked, but never mind all that: when's the last time a film made today gave its females such nonjudgmental sexual freedom?

Baby Face, a Pre-Code film to rival The Public Enemy in its sheer onslaught of "How did they get away with that?" sights and sounds, does not contain Stanwyck's greatest performance (not that such a thing is easy to suss out), but it may be the most indicative and representative of her talents. The story of a speakeasy dame raised a tramp by her father, who began prostituting her to his patrons when she was just 14, Baby Face is a depiction of Nietzschean self-realization through sexual aggression. A regular sets off the young woman's evolution when he hands her a copy of Will to Power and urges Lily (Stanwyck) to "use men to get the things you want." When her degenerate father dies in a distillery explosion, Lily has the freedom to pursue her dreams, and she promptly heads to the big city to quite literally sleep her way to the top.

Stanwyck is electric from the first moment. We don't see the little girl being exploited by her father, only the hardened, streetwise moll who's grown up not to take any crap from men even if she still lies down with one every night. She won't let her father fire her friend, the black maid Chico, and when the man tries to shame her Stanwyck wracks herself in fury when she explodes back at the man who would try to make her feel guilty for the woman he made of her. Alfred E. Green's camera is quick to note her legs, scanning up them in a POV shot of a sleazy politician, but even if he didn't try to emphasize them, Stanwyck certainly would have made sure we couldn't ignore 'em. At all times, Lily knows just how to position her legs for maximum tease, including and especially when she plays the part of the wilting flower. After that initial POV pan, Green does not overplay the legs again, but even in the flash of time he gives Stanwyck to arrange herself, she can snap to a man-killing position. After a time, men get wise to her game, but when she shows of those gams, the reaction shots of suddenly thick-tongued gentlemen show her dismantling even those who think they know her.

Stanwyck's body control is so precise one gets the sense she can individually control every synapse. When she arrives in New York, she heads to a bank looking to get a job, ignoring the women marching out in a huff at having been stymied by the boss' assistant. But when Lily walks in there and begins cooing in the portly man's ear, carefully leaning in to pull her blouse tight, the man's head whips around so fast I hope he has health insurance. When a rising executive and the forthcoming son-in-law of the bank's V.P. catches her with a married worker, he moves to fire her, but Lily pushes against him and looks up sweetly, her pupils dilating into wide-eyed innocence with the ease of flaring nostrils. Stanwyck puts no conviction into her voice when she butters up these men, but only because she doesn't need to. She doesn't want to either: having internalized Nietzsche, she won't play the weakling any more than she needs to in order to stay on the path to domination. After a time, Lily even stages getting caught so that she can meet and consume the man on the next ladder rung.

Green's camera gives ample evidence that the director was smart enough to stand back and just let Stanwyck do her thing, but he injects some magnificently cheeky shots here and there. Besides the aforementioned journey up Stanwyck's body, Green marks the progression of Lily through the men at the bank with a recurring shot of a the camera moving upwards as Lily moves up a floor with each conquest. He makes this motif even funnier by scoring it to "St. Louis Blues," though sadly it would be another two decades before Louis Armstrong would record a version with his All-Stars bawdy enough to fit the visual suggestion. Though he obviously does not show anything explicit, Green almost seems to be in a contest with himself to see just how much he can show before cutting away or fading out. It's no wonder this film was cut up when it was re-shown in the wake of the Hays Code, and still surprising in its audacity after being restored in 2004.

Yet despite the overwhelming sexual power Green and Stanwyck assign to the character, neither rushes to cast her as a villain for her steady progression through men. Like Nietzsche, Lily is beyond good and evil. She's not a monster, merely someone who has internalized the need to establish herself. She must assert her position, and to do so necessitates moving over a host of men, even if she has to step on a few relationships and promising careers in the process.

Green highlights a passage in one of Lily's Nietzsche books advising the reader to "crush out all sentiment," and for a time the film does just that. It depicts a murder-suicide, rampant scandal and even Lily's refusal to help her final conquest, the bank's playboy inheritor Courtland Trenholm (George Brent, who may well have taken the part just to list a character name like that on his resumé), when the bank fails and gossiping directors choose him as a scapegoat. This is a movie where John Wayne himself is but one of many men Stanwyck chews up and discards, leaving him distraught with confusion and desire. (In fairness, it must have been incredibly confusing to John Wayne, even before the stardom that wouldn't arrive for six more years, to be the jilted one.)

In the end, however, the film softens Lily through an eleventh hour change of heart that sends her back to the last lover she ruined. This is a recurring event in Stanwyck pictures, where suddenly she finds herself in the position of at last discovering the most malleable, lovesick man who can improve her station and discovers, sometimes too late, that she finally returns a man's affections. But Green manages to complicate even this seeming capitulation, adding a haunting sense of gravity to the final exchange of looks and faint smiles as a failed suicide attempt leads to a hint of reconciliation. It's still at odds with the rest of this flagrantly transgressive movie, but even its sentiment has a gonzo edge to it. Baby Face may not necessarily be a great film, in the way that nearly all Pre-Codes seem to grimy to ever take on the mantle "great," but it's a damn sight more entertaining than movies seem to allow themselves to be anymore. Keep your explosions and your titillation; the sight of Stanwyck marching over the stiff (*ahem*) bodies of felled men is as dynamic and in-your-face as cinema gets.

Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981)

After I found Real Life so brilliant, layered and prescient that I scuttled my planned review entirely so I could revisit it first, I insisted on jotting down some thoughts for Albert Brooks' next film, Modern Romance. This proved to be something of a mistake, perhaps, as Brooks' second film has even more human brilliance within its cynical narrative than his previous work of genius. The title of Modern Romance, like that of Real Life, is at once to-the-point and subversively ironic, much like Brooks' brand of humor. It is also a slyly ambitious name, aspiring to serve as a summarizing overview of the status of something as important as the current state of love in society. With Brooks at the wheel, the film earns its title.

Brooks continues to cast himself as someone who works within the filmmaking industry, only this time he's not a hotshot director but an editor-for-hire named Robert Cole. This occupation proves critical, as he spends his days recontextualizing films by deleting obvious lines and adding in perspective-altering cutaways. In his romantic life, however, Bob is ruled by narrow preconceptions fueled by jealousy, and for someone who surely knows about the Kuleshov Effect, he rarely stops to consider that every shred of ostensible evidence he uses to accuse his girlfriend of something has less objective meaning than subjective belief.

We meet Bob in a diner with his girlfriend, Mary (Kathryn Harrold), where he prepares to break up with her as she sighs with obvious familiarity of his mood swings. Brooks' rant is like a Robert Fripp guitar solo: dissonant, scattershot yet honed to laser precision. He can bounce from a long-winded digression about the film he's working on back to the matter at hand with such speed that even the tangents seem calculated to delve into the shared subject of each spiel: him. Brooks would make a great Dmitri Karamazov, constantly spinning off into his isolated, neurotic realms but always returning at a moment's notice to some self-absorbed, jealous screed. As an actor, Brooks is always desirous, desirous of affection, of attention, even of authority he does not seem to feel even as the director, writer and star of his pictures. Mary listens patiently to this self-absorption but has clearly had enough, and she accepts Bob's break-up request yet again, storming out in a justifiable huff. This could be the end of a cleverer-than-most rom-com, but Brooks uses it to kick off a riotous yet torturous look into the dynamics of relationships in the wake of the sexual revolution.

Brooks is brilliant at playing characters with clearly defined emotional goals — get the girl, make a name for himself, rescue his clownfish son — but hopelessly entangled paths to those destinations, paths he himself mucks up. For 90 minutes, he alternates between hopeless desire for Mary and rejection of her perceived flaws. For a good half of the film, she is not even present for these oscillations of devotion. One is tempted to label Bob bipolar, but even that term implies some sense of transition. Instead, Bob exists in a state of perpetual calm and chaotic despair, always happy for finally ending a relationship he contends never worked but fussing over wanting to reconcile and preventing himself from dating anyone else. Or, of course, letting anyone else see Mary.

Without getting on a soapbox of old-fashioned values, Brooks positions this tumultuous, microcosmic modern relationship as the result of founding a partnership on sex alone. Bob, pouring his heart out to his assistant editor, Jay, summarizes his time with Mary: "We fought and fought, then we had great sex. We never really could talk." Without missing a beat, Jay asks, "Do you need to talk?" It's a funny, typical response, but it shows how blind adults are to the difference between communication and sex. Having emerged from a more repressive system that placed sex on a pedestal, these people continue to view it as the ultimate prize, and hey, if you're getting laid, what more do you want?

Adrift in a time that isn't nearly as sexually liberated as his generation has been led to believe, Bob perpetuates old gender dynamics in a yuppie world. Men may no longer be able to get away with physical abuse, but Bob can still torment Mary with his uncontrollable jealousy, which he likes to believe is a show of his devotion. He calls her workplace and rants when the person at the other end says she's with a client or a colleague, and when his friends ask if they might be allowed to take Mary out themselves, his spittle could burn through metal as he hisses such hysterical, nonsensical insults like "Why don't you go live in an ash can?" And though Brooks maintains a look of general, if horrible, calm on his face, his aggression comes out in subtle ways, such as the casual way he nearly punches his radio buttons when love songs come on each station as he angrily changes channels without his facial expression ever changing. When he manages to worm his way back in with Mary, he immediately starts fighting again, engaging in passive-aggressive behavior when she leaves in dresses he finds too revealing. "There's people who only rape. That's all they do," Bob says in a sing-song voice that gets laughs but doesn't gloss over how insane he's acting.

This is a modern man, who tries to appear even more modern by covering his pain with yuppie hobbies like jogging and a sudden shift to health-freak eating (wherever he goes, he tells salesmen that he's just broken up, and one can see them physically trying to restrain their eyeballs from swiveling to reveal dollar signs where the irises should be). And yet, this modern yuppie has less insight into a stable, mutually beneficial relationship than his mother, who calls a disinterested Bob and retorts her son's comment about him having nothing in common with Mary by noting that couples have to work to find things in common instead of just expecting to find someone who share's all one's likes. Underlining what a regressive brute he really is, Bob stands outside a phone booth waiting to call yet again to see what Mary is doing, but he is forced to wait while a much older gentleman calls his own wife and accuses her of sleeping around to fit his own demented fantasies.

But even with his ability to juggle these dark impulses within the comedy, Brooks does lighten up from time to time and throws in a few raucously written and ingeniously directed sequences to let the audience vent some discomfort. When Bob takes out another woman on a date, the camera points through the windshield as they drive for a time, the gentle music on the radio setting a mood of ease and progression for the hung-up man. Then the camera cuts to show the car returning to the woman's apartment complex where Bob suddenly blurts out that he's "dating too soon" and drops the poor, flummoxed woman off at the curb. Brooks even digresses to spend some time in the editing suite, where he gets in some welcome relief in the form of a director (played James L. Brooks, who would return the favor when Broadcast News came around) who fusses over every extraneous, suspense-spoiling line that Bob and Jay cut and forces Bob to endure all his arty talk about what he wants what appears to be a cheap-ass Star Wars/Star Trek knock-off to mean. Later, the director invites Bob and Mary to a party, where it is obvious that everyone in the room, save Bob, is on coke. And he's still the most high-strung person there.

But the best part of the film, occurring near the beginning, is a night alone spent with a pet bird, a telephone that probably should have been disconnected and a couple of Quaaludes. Brooks turns the scene into a hysterical, yet poignant and realistic, portrait of a person trying to get through a bad night with substances. Brooks slurs and stumbles his way around his apartment, calling friends to profess love both Platonic and romantic, dancing to music he angrily throws off his turntable a few seconds later. A colleague calls and praises Mary, only for Bob to awkwardly mention the break-up, which leads to the aforementioned spew of hatred when the man then asks if he can make a move. "That is incestuous!" Bob yells with fading coherence.

A keen sense of irony hangs over Modern Romance, from the use of "You Are So Beautiful" over the title credits after the opening fight to the "Where are they now?" text crawl that completely undermines the deliberately false optimism and resolution of the film's ending. Yet the one area where Brooks is surprisingly sincere is in his openly acknowledged delineation between "movie love" and "real love." People say such things in the movies all the time, but that doesn't stop them from having the very same pat endings they critique. Technically, even this film has one of those conclusions. But Brooks sets out to make Modern Romance a genuine overview of the romantic relationship in social transition, a transition that, even today, does not yet look to have reached its unknown destination. Even when Brooks gives us our happy ending, he makes it seem hollow before the text informs us this roller coaster kept traveling its ups and downs. This is a complex situation, and it's no wonder "movie love" shies away from it. But as Modern Romance proves, real love can make for much more engaging, brilliant cinema than the easy way out.

Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958)

Elevator to the Gallows is a brilliantly constructed misdirection, moving so quickly into a premeditated murder that, in retrospect, it's only natural that the film should so quickly switch gears due to mishaps. Malle soon plunges into a series of things going awry that introduces characters solely to trap them in their own morbid downfalls. The film sometimes gets labeled as a film noir, yet the film's sense of macabre irony is far more indicative of the coming genre deconstruction of the Nouvelle Vague than just another thriller. Indeed, for all the icy beauty of the picture, Elevator to the Gallows is often a dark riot, made by a director with a multilayered, daring grasp on cinema even with this marvelous debut.

The film begins with the hushed, torrid whispers of lovers speaking to each other on the telephone, reaffirming their romance and putting the final touches on a plan to kill the husband of the woman, Florence (Jeanne Moreau), who is also Julien's (Maurice Ronet) boss. With silent precision, Malle immediately cuts to the act in question, an absurdly grandiose maneuver that has Julien scaling the modern office building walls of glass to sneak into Simon's floor without detection, allowing him to kill the old industrialist and frame it as a suicide. Undetected, Julien climbs back down to his office and leaves, getting out to his car and putting the key in the ignition before he takes one last look at the building and...notices he left the rope danging. All it takes is one slip-up.

Having retrieved the rope, Julien gets in the elevator to leave, only for the last person to leave and shut off the power, trapping him inside for the weekend. As Julien sits in his cage, a local punk, Louis, steals his car and drives off with his girlfriend Véronique, who dangles out of the car window and catches the eye of Florence, who assumes that Julien has run off with another woman.

From there the film divides into three distinct storylines, each informed by others but held separate to craft microcosms of loneliness and cynicism.  Julien comes to resemble a prisoner in an extreme security facility, suspended over an inky pit as he frets over his crime being discovered. Ronet's performance is, obviously, the most confined and intimate, but he injects quietly churning fear into every peering scan around the elevator shaft for some means of escape. Louis and Véronique, meanwhile, find themselves in the company of wealthy German tourists. The young man tries to spout off self-righteous rants about France's imperial engagements in Algeria and Indochina, yet his lust for capitalist trinkets like fast cars leads to even worse crimes than grand theft auto. Louis' ironic, hypocritical actions serve to break him from any societal faction, isolating him as a directionless kid looking for a thrill at any cost.

Moreau, however, steals the film, spending most of her time walking with frozen panic, moving through alley and dive hunting for Julien. Moreau's face is a minor miracle, a collage of pain, jealousy, confusion and outrage arranged in terrifying and heartbreaking stillness. Miles Davis' score, a terrifically minimal and melancholy piece even by his standards, is never more haunting than when it backs scenes of Moreau wandering Paris' modern, shiny yet strangely bleak streets.

Postwar and pre-New Wave, Elevator to the Gallows exists in a world of thick irony: past crimes provide alibis for newer ones, and exonerating evidence also contains damning proof of other violations. Its repeated namechecks of Algeria and Indochina are deliberately framed as empty platitudes for a generation that nevertheless finds itself the survivor of conquest now made to "defend" conquered lands from sovereignty. Though even the people who bring up these outrages do not truly care about them, they subconsciously reflect a growing sense of unease in De Gaulle's France, a place where capitalist pleasures are beginning to lose their effect on people who have yet to find a new direction to lead them. In that sense, the film is transitional not merely in its pre-New Wave style but as a social document. And yet, Malle still finds the space in this relentlessly cynical movie for some visual humor, cuing the audience in on the coming disarray early on with the sight of a black cat walking outside a building where it has no reason to be other than to be symbolic. It's obvious, shameless, and hilarious, and it's the first wry tweak to grace a film by one of cinema's most steadfastly unpredictable artists.