NFR Project: 'Kannapolis, N.C.' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Kannapolis, N.C.”

Dir: H. Lee Waters

Premiere: 1941

137 min.

Between 1936 and 1942, the enterprising director H. Lee Waters made a series of films he called Movies of Local People. He went to at least 117 towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia and filmed anyone he could get in front of a camera. Then he developed the results and displayed them at the local theater before the feature film, for a cut of the ticket sales.

It was a gimmick. Presumably, if you were captured for all time on film, you and your family would pay to see yourselves on the local silver screen. Curiosity was the motivator. It was a novelty that pretty much all the small-town, middle-class “representative” citizens could enjoy.

Waters was not a documentary filmmaker. The only examination of the underclass in the films was his documentation of some parts of African-American life in these little places, which are now known as “town portrait” or “town documentary” films. The genre existed from the mid-1910s through the early 1950s, when it is arguable that affordable home-movie equipment took over the market. It’s a weird subset of cinema that simply seeks to get as many people posed or captured on the run, shot with a home-movie level of technical competence.

In color and in black and white, silently, Waters films Kannapolis crowds on the streets, marching bands, schoolchildren, babies, soda jerks, cops, mill workers. “When the Daltons Rode” is on at the local movie theater. A man demonstrates a refrigerator. People smile, people wave, people duck out of the way. Some studiously ignore the goings-on. Hundreds are frozen in time for the brief moments in which they pass by the camera. The editor, impatient, keeps cutting, cutting, cutting, moving without let or hinder on from one face to another, desperately thirsty.

It’s inadvertently valuable for capturing the state of vernacular society at that time and in that place. It’s difficult to estimate how many of these director/entrepreneurs there were. Not much of their output survives. Here’s home movies for the masses, a snapshot of days gone by.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Lady Eve.

 

NFR Project: 'How Green Was My Valley' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘How Green Was My Valley”

Dir: John Ford

Scr: Philip Dunne

Pho: Arthur C. Miller

Ed: James B. Clark

Premiere: Oct. 28, 1941

118 min.

Winner of Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography Oscars in 1941, How Green Was My Valley is a moving epic – one of John Ford’s most emotional films.

The film is adapted from the 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn. It’s the story of the Morgan family, Welsh coal miners in the late 19^th century. In their small village, they live and go down to work in the galleries underground. (The entire village and mine were created on 80 acres in a California valley.)

They are a poor, exploited lot, and the story is unremittingly tragic. The narrator (voiced here by the great Irving Pichel) is leaving the valley, and reflects on his childhood there. He is Huw, played by Roddy McDowell in his first He  film, at just the age of 12. He has five older brothers, who all work at the mine, and a sister, Angharad (Maureen O’Hara) who keeps house with their mother (Sara Allgood). The father of the family (Donald Crisp in an Oscar-winning performance) is stern but loving, and rules benevolently over his family.

Tragedies abound. The men go on strike; the father opposes it and the brothers move out. The miners mutter against the father; the mother defiantly addresses a meeting in the winter and falls into a river with Huw; both are severely injured, Huw more seriously. It takes the intervention of the kind minister Mr. Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon) to inspire Huw to walk again.

Two of the brothers lose their jobs, and move to America. Angharad and Mr. Gruffydd fall in love, but he won’t ask for her hand as he’s too poor. She is soon courted by the mine owner’s son, and reluctantly marries him.

Another brother dies in a mining accident, after which his wife gives birth. Huw is picked on in school, and is taught boxing. He beats his tormentor, which leads his malicious schoolteacher to beat him. It takes the interest of a couple of ne’er-do-wells to stop the schoolmaster from running Huw’s life. Huw declines university and goes to work in the mine, supporting his dead brother’s sister-in-law and infant.

Meanwhile, Angharad returns to the valley alone. Gossips speak of the love between her and Mr. Gurffydd, and finally he is expelled from the post. That same evening, another mine disaster strikes, and Huw’s father is dead. The film ends with Huw clutching his father’s body, covered with soot and despair. (A brief glimpse of all the men in the family meeting in heaven tries to lift the film out of its gloom.)

Ford is unparalleled here in his reliance on close-ups, his camera lingers on the subtle reactions of all the performers. Ford loves to gaze into the souls of the actors, and we watch as the tragedies challenge them, or grind them down. The script masterfully tames the material, and Arthur C. Miller’s cinematographic is luminescent.

A convincing portrayal of a vanished world and life.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Kannapolis, N.C.

Lee's 'Highest 2 Lowest' and Kurosawa's 'High and Low'

 

“Highest 2 Lowest”

Dir: Spike Lee

Scr: Alan Fox

Pho: Matthew Libatique

Ed: Barry Alexander Brown, Allyson C. Johnson

Premiere: Aug. 16, 2025

133 min.

 

“Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low)”

Dir: Akira Kurosawa

Scr: Hideo Oguni, Ryuzo Kikushima, Eijiro Hisaita, Akira Kurosawa

Pho: Asakasu Nakai, Takao Saito

Ed: Akira Kurosawa

Premiere: March 1, 1963

143 min.

As a speaker noted at the screening of Highest 2 Lowest, this was a project that had floated around America for 35 years. Evidently Spike Lee picked up this screenplay by Alan Fox prior to COVID liked it, held onto it, and reworked it after he got Denzel Washington to star as the stressed-out music exec threatened by a kidnapper.

Looking at Lee’s vision, it’s interesting to watch him choose to be expansive and inclusive in his approach to the film, crafting many different films in one. (His repertoire of film styles within include homemovies, fanciful wipes, and documentary-like snippets.) Where Kurosawa, austere in black and white, was reductive and quiet in High and Low, Lee makes Highest 2 Lowest open out, awash in color and enchanting images, and makes music a major part of the action, even providing a musical coda that underlines the redemption of the central character, David King (Washington).

The source in both cases is Evan Hunter writing as Ed McBain’s 1959 police thriller, King’s Ransom. For both Kurosawa and Lee, it is a study in character that asks important questions about honor, compassion, and justice. (Kurosawa’s Japanese title is literally Heaven and Hell.)

King lives high in a penthouse looking spectacularly over the Brooklyn Bridge and the approach to Manhattan. He’s a hitmaker, a colossal figure in the music business who’s orchestrating a deal to take over his record company.

Suddenly, a call comes in. His teenage son has been kidnapped. The kidnapper wants $17.5 million in Swiss francs. The Kings, father and mother, go berserk. Then their son appears. It was not he but his best friend, the son of King’s chauffeur, Paul Christopher (a brilliant Jeffrey Wright), who the kidnapper snatched.

The kidnapper calls back. He doesn’t care who he has, he wants the money or the kid will die. Will King give up all his assets for the life of another man’s son?

The same close examination of character takes place in the Kurosawa film. Here, the shoe tycoon Gondo (another great performance from Toshiro Mifune) and company float around their hilltop mansion, pondering and debating what to do about the kidnapped child of his chauffeur. Shooting in 70 millimeter, Kurosawa builds carefully balanced compositions out of the attitudes of the actors present, shifting in patterns and keeping Gondo on the opposite side of the screen from his interlocutors, like some modern-day Job.

The films match each other in a general sense, following the same course of action. Each man is told that he will be reviled personally and professionally if he does not pay up. Mifune and Washington both face their demons. Both performers are quite capable of communicating the moral quandry they find themselves in.

Once Lee’s mogul decides to pay the ransom, the film opens out and becomes a veritable travelogue of New York City. There is even time for the buffoonish police force to get entangled in a concert by the late Eddie Palmieri and his Orchestra. An intricate game of cat and mouse plays out on the city streets, but the bad guys get away.

Then Lee lets the action take another turn. King remembers that the kidnapped young man had heard an incessant rap refrain during his captivity. King matches it with a mix an aspiring rapper sent to him. He and Christopher, ignored by the police, track the suspect down on their own. Now we are in action-film territory. Denzel runs the suspect down, hears his confession (ASAP Rocky plays the strapped, weed-smoking kidnapper), chases him all over town, gets on the subway – hilariously, Lee gives rabid Yankee fans a chance to look into the camera and chant “BOSTON SUCKS!” -- gives him a beat-down, and saves the day.

Kurosawa also gets away from his chamber drama after the ransom is pledged. His film turns into a straight-ahead police prodecural. Gondo makes the drop, and the police force begins a coordinated investigation into the crime, marshaling a large contingent of specialists who analyze the scant information given to them and extrapolate who the kidnapper and killer is. In contrast with Lee’s lone-hero approach, in Kurosawa success is seen as the product of a professional, joint effort.

King’s outcome, redemption and the restoration of his fortune, stands in sharp contrast to Kurosawa’s Gondo, who loses everything. Kurosawa’s villain is a triple murderer; Lee’s villain is a misguided wanna-be. Both stare up at the successful businessmen living high above them; both boil in the summer heat of the slums. Both present themselves as worthy matchers of wits; both are deluded.

“Not all money is good money,” says King. Both Kurosawa’s and Lee’s protagonists realize their true value in the heat of the moment. Though their outcomes differ, their quiet return to life underscores their new state of peace. Gondo’s kidnapper, facing death, breaks into a tortured shriek, and a metal grate comes clanging down, ending the film; Lee’s villain merely curses out the obdurate King. In the compelling dialogues the protagonist has with his opponent, he outlines the difference in their essential characters, the juxtaposition of the older, saner man and the young hothead. Then we get the redemptive ending.

Kurosawa is edgy, unbalanced. Right wins out, but the disturbing and abrupt ending asks questions it has no intention of answering about sanity and morality. It resonates. With Lee, the alert and engaged hero outfoxes and outfights his opponent, and lives to make music another day. It’s an oddly Hollywood ending, but by this time the film had been a lot of things: a moral drama, an epic chase, an action thriller, a musical. Lee makes room for what he wants.

Lee’s is, ultimately, another great New York movie. His love for the city is obvious, and he makes the most of the territory. His performers are expert, his eye unfailing. He gives us a man redeemed. Kurosawa’s is a more tragic classic.