Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1941)

An inexplicably underrated comedy by one of the great American directors, Preston Sturges's Christmas in July (1940) has all the wit, humor, and grace of his more well-known masterpieces like Sullivan's Travels and The Lady Eve (both from 1941). At a brisk sixty-seven minutes, the film is also a terrific example that the best comedy is to be told as economically as possible, everything trimmed out of it but the absolutely essential (see: Duck Soup [1933]).

As Christmas in July opens, a young couple (skillfully played by Dick Powell and Ellen Drew) is on the roof of a New York building listening to the radio, when the announcer lets on that he's about to name the winner of the $25,000 Maxford House Coffee Slogan contest, which Jimmy (Powell) has entered. Down at the radio station, they tell the announcer (the wonderfully expressive Franklin Pangborn) that the jury is having a little difficulty picking a winner, so the program ends without any resolution. Back on top of the building, Jimmy and Betty (Drew) argue about the chances of him being named the winner when the jury actually decides. He thinks that the contests he has lost (three to be exact) guarantee that his slogan--"If you can't sleep at night, it isn't the coffee, it's the bunk"--will take the big prize. She admits she doesn't get it, but tries to be encouraging anyway. To make a long story short, something Sturges certainly does in this film, a few of Jimmy's co-workers send him a phony telegram telling him he's won, which thrills not only him and his young gal, but also his boss (Ernest Truex), who gives him a raise and a brand-new office once he hears the slogan. Needless to say, it all works beautifully for a while, and Jimmy and Betty buy gifts for everyone in their working-class neighborhood, but this being a Preston Sturges film, and Dr. Maxford of Maxford House Coffee (Raymond Walburn, easily the most hilarious person in the film) being nobody's fool, eventually, like the film, it all must come to an end.

Sturges, a supremely intelligent filmmaker in addition to his more obvious comedic talents, in Christmas in July paints a picture of capitalism, not as simply a horrible thing that's to blame for all the world's ills, but as a system with inherent injustices that generate a lot of unhappiness on good and sincere people like Jimmy and Betty. But this is also a world in which generosity and kindness can shine through in spite of everything, and it's because of Sturges's deep compassion that the moment when Jimmy hands a doll to a girl in a wheelchair doesn't seem at all trite or opportunistic, but instead as the very heart of why we care for this character. Immediately thereafter, the film's hilarity continues. This combination of grace and cheerfulness is all too rare even among the best films.

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

By Ingmar Bergman's standards, Persona (1966), the most famous of all his films, is experimental in its use of the medium. For an artist best known for the theatricality of his films, with their spare mise-en-scène and emphasis on dialogue, Bergman's techniques here--beginning with a disorienting opening sequence that's like something out of Buñuel--are certainly peculiar, but as Andrew Sarris rightly pointed out in his review of the film for the Village Voice in 1967, "students of Stan Brakhage are more likely to yawn." All of this is to say that Persona, for all of its "Pirandellian pyrotechnics," as Sarris calls them, is first and foremost a film about what its two characters say or don't say and the position of their faces within the frame when they say or don't say these things.

We first encounter the two characters in a clinic of some sort. Alma (Bibi Andersson), a nurse, is asked to take care of Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), an actress who after a performance of Electra had a nervous breakdown and has since given up talking. The doctor of the clinic suggests that they both go stay at her summer house. Once there, Alma, confronted with a troubled woman whose silence masks some deep agony that neither of them fully comprehend, talks and talks and talks: first in vague platitudes ("I think you should be of importance to others," she says) then in achingly personal anecdotes (the memorable recounting of an orgy on the beach). Throughout these carefully-observed scenes, filled with shadows and puncutated by bursts of eerie music, Bergman builds his characters' personalities little by little, until eventually he starts pulling it all apart with equal exactness, blurring the line between the performances of the two actresses as they discard old roles and take up new ones.

Persona, in addition to being a great film, paved the way for some of the most interesting works by two contrasting directors, Robert Altman and David Lynch. In their 3 Women (1977) and Mulholland Drive (2001), respectively, they take up Bergman's subject--the curious psychological implications of the relationships between women--and ground them in very different settings. Bergman's film, deceptively simple and incomparably exquisite, is truly unforgettable.

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) opens with the close-up of an eye, calling to mind a similar shot at the beginning of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), but unlike that sequence, which also includes a series of brightly-colored swirls and spirals, this one serves as the first proper shot of the film and the introduction of the protagonist, a young, beautiful, and absent-minded manicurist named Carol (Catherine Deneuve) who is startled when the woman she is attending to asks her if she's fallen asleep. Soon we see Carol walking down the streets of London to a restaurant, same distracted look on her face, and Polanski frames these shots either extremely close to her face or from enough of a distance so we can see the various men who stare and call out to her.

A handsome English boy, Colin (John Fraser), spots her through the restaurant window and comes in to sit with her. He tries to make conversation, offers to take her to a different restaurant ("You can't eat stuff like this!" he says, looking down at the fish and chips on her plate), but all that Carol manages to say in return with her noticeably limited English (she's Belgian) are a couple of vague responses. After work Carol goes home to the apartment she shares with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), whose accent is much less pronounced. They talk in the kitchen while Helen gets ready to cook a rabbit. Carol, somewhat distressed, asks her if she's really going away with her boyfriend for two weeks. From the opening shot of the eye up to this scene, nothing much has happened (that is, there's not yet an established narrative or plot), but Polanski, by the way he frames Carol's peculiar behavior--her daydreaming at work and while she walks home, the way she talks to Colin, her contempt for her sister's boyfriend and the fact that he's taking her away--is building, however slowly and carefully, a frightening portrait of a fractured psyche.

Deneuve, whose most characteristic roles during this period included being Jacques Demy's muse in pastel-colored musicals like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), succeeds in this role by holding back, letting Carol's eventual collapse surface in suggestive gestures and glances, all captured in the stunning black-and-white photography of Gilbert Taylor. Just as integral to the illusory mood in a film where the line between real and imagined horrors is all but erased is the soundtrack, sometimes filled with the ominously upbeat jazz of Chico Hamilton, at others everything is silent save for the ticking of a clock in the apartment. Repulsion, Polanski's greatest achievement, if not scary in the rather empty way most horror films are, is an unforgettable visceral experience and without a doubt one of the most unnerving films ever made.