Casualties of War (1989): As is typical of De Palma, it begins with Hitchcock, specifically Vertigo (1958): a Vietnam vet nodding off on the San Francisco streetcar sees the lookalike of a peasant girl he saw murdered during the war. He (Michael J. Fox) falls back asleep and has a "bad dream" recapitulating this sorry episode in American history, when young soldiers stole away a Vietnamese girl in the night for sick pleasure and shot her after she had served a purpose. The protagonist is the one character in his company who protests against this, but by a kind of Faustian tie to his nation (he detests his comrades' actions, but is afraid to lose his privilege as an American by rebelling against military hierarchy) he proves impotent in stopping it. 

If the mark of De Palma's best films is his self-contained visual sequences, often wordless, of stylistic bravura that imbue each shot or camera flourish with an eternity of tension, this film has to be considered disappointing. Its lasting impression for me is mostly declamatory arguments about ethics between sweaty actors standing around in jungle brush. I didn't know De Palma could be so self-serious. The film's constant need for audience identification in the form of Michael J. Fox's guilty, head-shaking liberal moral-compass is a surprising blunder for a veteran filmmaker – perhaps driven by fear of a negative reception from the American public. It didn't work either way: the movie was not a hit.

Score: 2.5/5

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007): A seething, Karamazovian melodrama by octogenarian Sydney Lumet about two unhappy white-collar brothers whose scheme to rob their parents’ jewelry store goes horribly wrong. The father relentlessly investigates the crime in the aftermath, unaware that he is looking for his own children. As some Letterboxd reviews note, the script seems indebted to the Coen Brothers’ post-modern crime stories of flawed, unremarkable people from generic American milieus interconnected in violent webs of monetary greed. The ugly, “gooey” quality of the image, thanks to its 2000s digital intermediate process, also helps its resemblance to the Coens’ contemporaneous films, No Country for Old Men (2007) and Burn After Reading (2008). What I prefer about Lumet’s film is that these flawed characters are still treated with an air of tragedy as opposed to disdain, as humans with some subtlety, some moral centre, some emotional and behavioural modulation, as opposed to the alienating caricatures that pervade much of the Coens’ work (No Country is an exception), whose clumsiness and stupidity is something to be sneered at. Compare William H. Macy’s character in Fargo to Ethan Hawke’s in this, for example. I like humanist art.

What makes the film great is not just the acting, which one would expect with this director and these performers, but wise old Lumet’s Polanski-like ability to contain abysmal, demonic suffering and evil in benign forms — an interrogative fist balled on a table or stones poured on a glass coffee table. Unlike Polanski, however, Lumet has a greater emotional range, balancing the abyss with the touching: the sad image of Hawke and Hoffman in the latter’s office, laughing in daylight over their doomed plans as Hoffman sits perched on his desk like Mephistopheles, will not be forgotten by this viewer.

Where the film is less successful is its structure: the film is told non-linearly, alternating between the perspectives of multiple characters before, during and after the robbery. While I understand the vision of this — the robbery happens early on and the rest of the film is essentially a dirge for these characters — the film loses some of its tension through this discursiveness and is not as riveting as it could have been. The editing transitions between perspectives also are unaccountably chintzy. These are fitting flaws for Lumet, a talented director but not one free of failure throughout his career.

Score: 3.5/5

Blackboard Jungle (1955): An idealistic war veteran-turned-schoolteacher (Glenn Ford) takes work at a vocational school in inner-city New York. His class of teenage boys is dysfunctional and violent: on his first day, a student pelts a baseball at his head, and he prevents a rape in the library after-hours. The older faculty seem resigned to let this situation continue. On the school’s halls are hung army recruitment posters. 

The film is mostly recognized today as a relic of 1950s American anxiety about juvenile delinquency. However, as the director-writer himself stated, its point is not really an exploitation of social issues, nor a documentary look at inner-city schools (the exteriors are filmed on MGM’s backlot) as it was received at the time. At its core, it is simply a well-filmed play about a man trying to bring knowledge to a resistant mob. (The numerous allusions to Christ made throughout the film aren’t a coincidence.) Richard Brooks, who began in the theatre like many good Hollywood directors of that time, brings out the excellence of his actors with blocking, framing, and camera movement that is always finely tuned to the emotional gridlock and power dynamics between adults and youth. For the most part, it’s good drama, although at times the filmmakers’ keen civic conscience does becomes too visible and results in preachiness. The climax sees one of the delinquent students incapacitated by a classmate jousting an American flagpole against their chest. There is little sarcasm to be found in this moment, that’s just how the movie is. The anarchic energy of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” played over the opening credits announces a more subversive film that never really arrives.

Score: 3/5

Something quite different from Brooks’ Hollywood stylization is Der Lehrerzimmer (2023), which was nominated for the Best International Language Film Oscar. As opposed to the transparent, "democratic" mise-en-scene of classical Hollywood, this director has opted for a suffocatingly parochial visual combo of a 1.35 aspect ratio and shallow depth of field. Blackboard Jungle depicts its environment as a literal battlefield, while Der Lehrerzimmer, with a touch of Kafka, depicts public school as a bureaucratic nightmare creating blind abuse and pain between student, parents, and teachers. 

A wave of unsolved thefts is being investigated by the faculty at a German public school. One young teacher, taking matters into her own hands, secretly records her unattended jacket in the teachers’ lounge to catch the thief. She gets what appears to be the blouse sleeve of a front-office lady rifling through her belongings. However, the woman's face is not shown in the footage, and due to several strategic blunders by the faculty she is able to deny culpability and press charges against the school. At stake in the ensuing conflict is the ruin of the young teacher and the accused woman’s bright young son, Oscar, who is in the teacher’s class and whose mind is unsettled by the whole affair.

To me the film has three glaring issues. The first is a lack of visual imagination. The second is the lack of transcendence in the story: the director, wanting to avoid sensationalist cliché, makes the film’s crisis rather humdrum. I don't see why this can't be a valid idea, but here it does not come off successfully, and the film has a bit of a ‘so what’ feeling. By the end – spoilers – the kid has to switch schools and maybe there’s a lawsuit incoming. Big deal. Thirdly, the modernist soundtrack is overused as a crutch. I was reminded of fellow German Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which also overuses its soundtrack to give a sense of dramatic unity that isn’t really there.

Score: 2/5