While it doesn’t hit me every night, there are at least a few times a month where, after my kid is asleep and I have enough energy where I think I can make it another couple of hours, all I want to do is to watch a good black-and-white movie. Perhaps it’s the generally slower pacing of the films or maybe it’s even the black-and-white look itself, which offers a contrast to the bright colors that blaze into my eyes for the hours a day spent on my phone and laptop, but something about monochrome photography soothes me. And when I get that particular black-and-white itch, there’s really only one streaming service I rely on to scratch it and that’s HBO Max.
With its access to the library held under the banner of Turner Classic Movies, HBO Max offers all kinds of black and white movies. There are sharply funny farces from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as satisfying noir mysteries and horror stories that are still being emulated by filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro. There’s also a decent — if not voluminous enough by my standards — selection of old foreign films, some of which don’t even feature Godzilla.
Here, I tried to pick out three black-and-white films that are entirely different from each other, one of them was even made in the last ten years, just in case a film from the first half of the 20th century seems too long ago to even fathom.
Rashomon
Rashomon has one of the most unusual legacies in film history. Along with Ikiru, Seven Samurai, and a few other films, Rashomon is considered one of the best works by director Akira Kurosawa. His ability to tell epically scaled stories threaded with intricate human drama makes him one of the most important figures in cinema history — Japanese or otherwise. Rashomon has also appeared on nearly every major list of “greatest films of all time,” yet it may be best known for creating a popular storytelling trope used most widely in sitcoms.
You know those sitcom episodes where everybody tells their own version of something that happened and each telling is different because of the skewed perspective of the character? Those are generally called “Rashomon Episodes” and they’re copying the storytelling device popularized by Kurosawa’s 1950 film. In the movie, a samurai, his wife and a bandit have an encounter in the woods which ends in the samurai’s death. Each of these characters, plus a witness, then tells their version of events to an offscreen judge. (If you’re wondering how the dead samurai tells his version of events, it’s done through a creepy, cackling medium which takes the film’s unreliable narrator trope to the most extreme level.)
While Rashomon is a landmark film, it needn’t be watched out of sheer obligation as it’s also a very entertaining one. While a good deal of the acting would be considered broad by modern standards, it’s still an intriguing journey as each of the storytellers has their own motives for concealing the truth. The bandit (Toshiro Mifune) is boastful; the widow (Machiko Kyō), who was raped by the bandit, is ashamed; and the samurai (Masayuki Mori), even through the medium, is prideful and domineering over his wife. Even the seemingly unbiased witness (Takashi Shimura) is revealed to have a potential reason to skew the truth. Best of all, we never find out the “real” story as it’s up to the viewer to decide, which is one reason why this film has been talked about for over three quarters of a century.
To Be or Not To Be
If you’re at all familiar with the comedian Jack Benny, you probably know him for playing himself (or rather, a fictionized version of himself) on The Jack Benny Program, the sitcom/variety show that dominated both radio and television for over 30 years and influenced everything from The Muppet Show to Seinfeld. While Benny reached the top of both of those mediums, film success mostly eluded him, something that was a running gag on The Jack Benny Program. Benny did, however, star in one really good movie and that was 1942’s To Be or Not to Be.
To Be or Not to Be was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, whose best known works in his decades-long career were 1943’s Heaven Can Wait and 1940’s Shop Around the Corner. To Be or Not to Be, while an English language film, takes place in Poland in 1939 during the Nazi invasion. It centers around a Warsaw theater company headed by the vain, self-centered Joseph Tura (Benny) and his unfaithful wife and fading star Maria Tura (Carole Lombard). During the occupation, the Turas and the rest of the theater company wind up in a caper where they must infiltrate the Nazis in order to protect the families of Polish airmen in England.
At the time, many people criticized Lubitsch for making light of a war that was still going on in Europe. But in the years since, the likes of the British Film Institute and the American Film Institute have praised the film for being a funny, satisfying farce that makes the Nazis the butt of the joke. Over 80 years later, many of those jokes are still quite effective for how they diminish Adolf Hitler as a leader so insecure he says “Heil myself” and feels the need to bribe little German boys with toy trucks in order to sniff out parents who are critical of the Third Reich. Benny’s slow-burn comedic timing also remains funny, as does the intricate farce which sees the theater company having to don disguises to trick the Nazi occupiers. Yet, with all that comedy business going on, the film still manages to find foreboding moments to convey the seriousness of the situation, particularly for its Jewish characters.
The Lighthouse
2019’s The Lighthouse is a great example of what can happen when you just let great artists cook. In this particular case, those artists are director Robert Eggers and actors Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.
Taking place in the 1890s, The Lighthouse is about a new, young lighthouse keeper (Pattinson) who is studying under a veteran lighthouse keeper (Dafoe) for a four-week stay on a remote island off of New England. With his breakout success being The Witch and his most recent hit being Nosferatu, Eggers is best known as a horror director and The Lighthouse certainly has elements of psychological horror in the way it delves into a tale of cabin fever-induced hallucinations. Yet the movie is also really, really funny. As movie critic Tim Grierson described it for Mel magazine at the time of release, “The Lighthouse is a terrific comedy about having a terrible roommate” as a lot of the movie is about the two men driving each other crazy in bizarre and often perverse ways.
Dafoe plays a superstitious, tall-tale telling, salty old sea dog who is also a really demanding boss. Meanwhile, Pattinson plays a frustrated guy who is cracking under the pressure of the demanding work and the isolation of being on the island. Between the two of them, there’s a lot of drinking, laughing, yelling, and masturbating and one of the guys has sex with a mermaid.
It’s a trip.
