“Time to empty our slop pails and run a little water over our faces, then back to our cells for the entire day.”

– Fontaine

The main character is a “short girl” [I do not agree with the infantilizing wording] on Short Girl Appreciation Day, USA.

The great Gloria Swanson (4'11” – 5ft 2 / 1,49 m) – fabulously decked out by Edith Head (5'1” / 1,55 m) with an endless parade of platform shoes – in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950).

“I am big. It's the pictures that got small.”

– Norma Desmond

Also starring, Buster Keaton, who was 5'5” / 1,65 m.

Someone named Greg for National Greg Day, USA.

“Sie können sich einen anderen Beruf aussuchen. Sie sind ein toter Mann.”

Eating hard candy on National Hard Candy Day.

 

Lucio is the class clown, a ne'er-do-well relying on his police-dad's rank and classmates' homework. One of these classmates, a smart little girl, promises him fancy lollipops in exchange for protection. And she has a secret for him too, about the origin of the candy, and the nice man giving her those and other nice things. Under oath, she tells Lucio everything and then promptly disappears. With his friend gone, killed as he later finds out, and an oath weighing on his heart, what can Lucio do when another girl goes missing?

“Only a child can kill the monster.”

– narrator

Cornell Woolrich's haunting tales of childhood lost leaped from Ireland to Argentina. With some similarities with Fritz Lang's M (1931), this fairy-tale feels more oppressive; due to the helplessness of a boy's power in an adult world and his understanding of grown-up responsibilities. A restored version in wider circulation is long overdue.

– This guy's got a lot of class.

– Yeah? If he's got so much class, what's he doin' with you?

“Have you seen Mr Tavernier tonight?”

Travel mountains on International Mountain Day. A starving community has come to the agreement that the elders approaching the age of seventy are to be carried up Narayama mountain to die. The day prior to the mountain's festival, sixty-nine year old Orin prepares to leave, carried by her son Tatsuhei.

“This winter… I'm going to the mountain. My mother went to the mountain, as did the mother-in-law of our home. So I have to go too.”

– Orin

In Keisuke Kinoshita's highly stylised 楢山節考, the arguably cruel (and most likely fictional) practice – of 姥捨て [ubasute, abandoning an old woman] – is superbly abstracted. Narration, dramatic lighting, colour filters and very obviously a soundstage underline that what we're watching is not a film, but a kabuki play.

A Judith or Judy for National Judith Day.

By times, The Savage Eye has more in common with mondo than with drama. Judith's betrayed, by her husband. She takes a plane out out out. To Los Angeles, where an angel – it's their town after all – talks to her. About her life, the old one and the new. She tries to reinvent herself with new clothes, a hairstyle, a manicure. It fills the longs days, that too. She attends bloodsports. A burlesque, with her new lover, a married man. There are bleeders and drinkers and jumpers. Sticky sheets. New eyes and fiery tongues, courtesy of Jesus. What is Judith's life if not a stranger's.

“I dream of resurrection in a party dress.”

– Judith X

Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick's lonely exploration of a gritty, hopeless LA was filmed over 4 years by photographers Haskell Wexler, Helen Levitt, and Jack Couffer in wonderful, merely wordless cinéma vérité. It feels naked and raw, and broke ground for the American New Wave that came crashing in almost a decade later.

Leave it to popular media to create a fashion for helplessness. In the 110 years that have passed since William Randolph Hearst's titular heroine fought her way to #emancipation in The Perils of Pauline (1914), “the damsel in distress” is still very much the go-to trope for movie writers. Sadly, instead of debunking the belief that women need to be protected by men from men, it's now embraced by third wave feminism. Just yesterday – November 25, 2023 – I saw a call to arms from a leftwing feminist group to “protect girls” from the primal evil that is manhood. Oh how we did better once.

“I don't know what to do with her Highness. Say right and she'll go left, say left and she'll go right. And though she is a girl, she has never shown me a tear.”

– old lady-in-waiting

In Kurosawa's 隠し砦の三悪人, a couple of greedy peasants escort a man and woman across enemy lines after the man has promised them a share of the gold they're carrying. Unknowingly, the fools not only protect their bounty, but a general and princess trying to escape an enemy clan so they can rebuild their kingdom. And also unbeknownst to the tricksters, Makabe and Yuki are not as helpless as they may seem.