Les Cousins

Les Cousins (1959) was directed by Claude Chabrol and belongs to the French New Wave movement which emerged in the 50s. I enjoyed it for its twirling camera shots and oblique angles and Fellini-like party scenes. It must've pushed the limits in terms of how much lewdness and debauchery could be shown on screen at the time. Quite a few characters are introduced, some essential to the plot, others for decoration, but more than is typical for a 50s film. This is Stéphane Audran's first major appearance and although she plays a small role, she stands out for her good looks and her character's sauciness.

The provincial Charles (Gérard Blain) moves in with his cousin, Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), who has a flat in Paris. Both are law students but with opposite personalities. Paul is decadent and lecherous and neglects his studies outright, whereas Charles the naive mama's boy prefers books over his dissolute new friends. Charles refers to himself as the "plodding" type. Paul sleeps with the woman his cousin has fallen for, Florence (Juliette Mayniel). I read there were two endings planned, one positive which has the cousins reconcile, the other pessimistic and tragic. They chose the latter.

The Prowler

This is one of the creepiest films noir I've seen. Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) is a sleazy cop dispatched to have a look around the home of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), who has reported a peeping Tom. The prowler is gone, and Susan's husband (John), a late night radio personality, is at work. Garwood falls for Susan right away, especially her wealth, and he comes across John's life insurance policy. An affair lasts for a spell before Garwood gets a sinister idea and dumps Susan in order to carry out his plan. John is next to take on the part of "prowler" but not deliberately. The crime has been set up, and Garwood shoots the unsuspecting husband dead.

Susan at first accuses Garwood of murder, then she's seduced by his slick charm and is convinced the killing was an accident. She marries him, too, just weeks into widowhood. Their honeymoon goes south when they go north to a ghost town called Calico and Susan tells her new hubbie she's had their bun in the oven for four months. What? Four months! That means everyone will know they were sleeping together before John was murdered. They try to come up with a solution. My favorite: give the baby up for adoption and then adopt it so they'll have the papers to prove it's not really theirs. (Um, huh?)

The Prowler (1951), directed by Joseph Losey and produced by Sam Spiegel, was scripted by Dalton Trumbo, who was on the Hollywood blacklist that year so the film was credited to someone else, but interestingly it's Trumbo's voice we hear every time John speaks on the radio. It's John's signature sign-off "I'll be seeing you, Susan," off an old album, that spookily interrupts the newlyweds' baby planning, and Susan breaks down and goes into labor. Their new life falls apart quickly, and as Garwood's crumbles fastest he tries to escape the police (Halt! Halt! Halt!) by climbing up a gravelly hillside while displaced stones roll down behind him in an unsubtle shower of foreshadowing. Awesome.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) is Robert Olen Butler's collection of short stories which received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993. There are seventeen in total, each narrated by a different Vietnamese immigrant living in Louisiana after the Vietnam War. All are about fourteen pages long except for the roughly eighty-page "The American Couple" which I thought was the best of the bunch. It digs deeper into the characters and depicts a woman's perspective of veterans, one of whom is her Vietnamese husband and the other an American. These men meet while they and their wives are on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and their intense relationship, firmly tied to their past wartime roles, triggers an extraordinary and extreme role-play in which they playact a sort of bitter capture the flag game. And this happens where the 1964 film The Night of the Iguana was shot—a place we're told looks similar to beach and mountain areas in Vietnam.

As for the other stories, some I liked and others I've forgotten. Cultural differences, a major theme in most if not all of them, for me made the book a good read. What felt awkward, though, was they're not actual accounts from Vietnamese people but instead the creations of a white American fiction writer. With so much diversity among the authors being published today, I doubt Butler would win a Pulitzer for the collection if it were to come out this year. But he did serve in Vietnam and was a translator there, and his writing and the detail convinced me that he genuinely understands and has a great appreciation for the Vietnamese people. And I respect him for the backbone and empathy he'd need to express what he believed were in a way true perspectives of men and women of a culture so unlike his own.