(Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, & Hamilton Luske, US 1950, 74 min.)
A much put-upon young beauty serves as a virtual slave to her wicked stepmother and stepsisters, until her fairy godmother provides for one night of happiness at the local prince’s ball. Charles Perrault’s fairy tale is given the Disney treatment, complete with a chorus of helpful mice, and a tuneful song score that includes “Bippidi-Bobbidi-Boo.”
(Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, & Hamilton Luske, US 1950, 74 min.)
A much put-upon young beauty serves as a virtual slave to her wicked stepmother and stepsisters, until her fairy godmother provides for one night of happiness at the local prince’s ball. Charles Perrault’s fairy tale is given the Disney treatment, complete with a chorus of helpful mice, and a tuneful song score that includes “Bippidi-Bobbidi-Boo.”
(OSTRE SLEDOVANÉ VLAKY, Jirí Menzel, Czechoslovakia 1966, 93 min., Czech/subtitles)
At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, he embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot. Wry and tender, Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar® for Foreign Language Film. Preceded by TERMINUS (John Schlesinger, UK 1961, 33 min.)
Program Notes for Terminus and Closely Watched Trains
John Schlesinger, a world renowned director, best known for his Oscar-winning masterpieces including Darling (1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969), directed Terminus in his early years of filmmaking. Starting as a self-made artist, he accumulated experience through performing on stage and in television programs, acting in films, and directing television documentaries and commercials. Documentaries helped him build up a sense of decision-making and sharpened his observation of details. Producer Edgar Anstey saw some of these documentaries and recognized his talent. Anstey then asked him to shoot a film for British Transport Films, and the result was Terminus.
The 33-minute short documentary which depicted a single day of the busy Waterloo train station was shot in two weeks but took six months to edit. The dense narrative reveals a democratized little society on rail tracks. Themes covering childhood, marriage, work, crime and punishment, death and poverty were widely touched upon and finely zoomed in. Two kinds of documentary filmmaking were combined in Terminus: a “true” record of real life and a showcase of little stories that develop in the film. The different perspectives used—long-shots, close-ups, high and low angles—make you feel the robust and dynamic life in the station. The excellence of the film was supported by a Golden Lion Award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and a British Academy Award.
Also shot in the 1960s and related to the subject of locomotives is Closely Watched Trains (1966). The film was directed by Jiří Menzel, then a talented, young Czech filmmaker. Unlike Schlesinger, Menzel enjoyed tutorship when he set his feet in the profession. For a long time, he worked under the guidance of his teacher from the Film Academy, Otakar Vávra, and his older colleague Věra Chytilová.
However, Menzel was more influenced by Czech novelists than by his colleagues, among them the most prominent figure was Bohumil Hrabal. Hrabal was undoubtedly the best-loved Czech writer in the sixties. Among the writer’s many admirers was Jiří Menzel, and several of his films were based on Hrabal’s novels, including Closely Watched Trains.
The director and writer relationship on this film is unique. Before Hrabal established his fame in the literary circle, he wrote the novel Legend of Cain (Legenda o Kainovi), which was the original story that attracted Menzel’s attention back in 1949. In 1965, during the search for good material, Hrabal revised the Legend of Cain and developed it into Closely Watched Trains. Under close scrutiny of the two novels, the reader can find the sharp differences between them. In the former, the dominant theme is suicide while in the latter, the theme is sex. What’s more, the general mood changes from darkness to humor. It is the revised novel upon which the director and the writer created the script of the film. In fact, when Menzel received his Oscar Award for the film, he said words to the effect that credited most of the honor to Hrabal.
Menzel adapted Hrabal’s magic vocabulary for the screen, but still felt the stories needed a special touch in the adaptation. Menzel said, “Film is too imperfect to be capable of recording everything that takes place in our fantasy when we read Hrabal’s texts….It is necessary to compensate for the poetry of these imaginings. In my opinion, poetry of this movie is not the absurd situations themselves but in their juxtaposition, the confrontation of obscenity and tragedy.”
~Wang Ying, Student, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
For Further Reading
(Arthur Hiller, US 1976, 113 min.)
In one of the most successful ’70s comedies, editor and nervous traveler George (Gene Wilder) finds himself entangled in a murder plot on a train journey from Los Angeles to Chicago. He finds help in the form of street-smart car thief Grover (Richard Pryor, paired here with Wilder for the first time), and love with the villain’s secretary (Jill Clayburgh). The Hitchcockian story climaxes with a breathtaking special-effects train crash.
(THRILLER STORY, Alain Corneau, France 1979, 116 min., French/subtitles)
Frank, a 30-year-old loser (Patrick Dewaere, in a memorably volatile performance), falls for enticing 15-year-old Mona and the two plot together to kill Mona’s aunt for her hidden stash of cash. This steamy and intense thriller was adapted from a novel by the masterful American pulp fiction author Jim Thompson, whose other writings inspired the films The Grifters, The Getaway, and After Dark, My Sweet. Members admitted free.
