The Great Movies III

And later, although he tells her, "You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another," he is attracted to her, lured as men sometimes are to what they know is wrong and dangerous.

Film noir is known for its wise-guy dialogue, but the screenplay for Out of the Past reads like an anthology of one-liners. It was based on the 1946 novel Build My Gallows High by "Geoffrey Homes," a pseudonym for the blacklisted Daniel Mainwaring, and the screenplay credit goes to Mainwaring, reportedly with extra dialogue by James M. Cain. But the critic Jeff Schwager read all versions of the screenplay for a 199o Film Comment article, and writes me: "Mainwaring's script was not very good, and in one draft featured awful voiceover narration by the deaf-mute. Cain's script was a total rewrite and even worse; it was totally discarded. The great dialogue was actually the work of Frank Fenton, a B-movie writer whose best known credit was John Ford's Wings ofEagles."

Listen to the contempt with which Sterling silences his hired gun, Stephanos: "Smoke a cigarette, Joe." And "Think of a number, Joe." Listen to Joe tell Jeff how he found his gas station: "It's a small world."Jeff. "Yeah. Or a big sign." Kathie saying: "I hate him. I'm sorry he didn't die." Jeff: "Give him time."Jeff's friend the cab driver, assigned to tail Meta Carson: "I lost her." Jeff. "She's worth losing." Jeff to Kathie: "Just get out, will you? I have to sleep in this room." Kathie to Jeff. "You're no good, and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other." And in the movie's most famous exchange, Kathie telling him: "I don't want to die."Jeff. "Neither do I, baby, but if I have to, I'm going to die last."

The movie's final scene, between the hometown girl Ann and Jimmy, Jeff's hired kid at the gas station, reflects the moral murkiness of the film with its quiet ambiguity. I won't reveal the details, but as Jimmy answers Ann's question, is he telling her what he believes, what he thinks she wants to believe, or what he thinks it will be best for her to believe?

Fan's Labyrinth is one of the greatest of all fantasy films, even though it is anchored so firmly in the reality of war. On first viewing, it is challenging to comprehend a movie that on the one hand provides fauns and fairies, and on the other hand creates an inhuman sadist in the uniform of Franco's fascists. The fauns and fantasies are seen only by the eleven-year-old heroine, but that does not mean she's "only dreaming"; they are as real as the fascist captain who murders on the flimsiest excuse. The coexistence of these two worlds is one of the scariest elements of the film; they both impose sets of rules that can get an eleven-year-old killed.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006) took shape in the imagination of Guillermo del Toro as long ago as 1993, when he began to sketch ideas and images in the notebooks he always carries. The Mexican director responded strongly to the horror lurking under the surface of classic fairy tales and had no interest in making a children's film, but instead a film that looked horror straight in the eye. He also rejected all the hackneyed ideas for the creatures of movie fantasy and created (with his Oscarwinning cinematographer, art director, and makeup people) a faun, a frog, and a horrible Pale Man whose skin hangs in folds from his unwholesome body.

The time is 1944 in Spain. Bands of anti-Franco fighters hide in the forest, encouraged by news of the Normandy landings and other setbacks for Franco's friends Hitler and Mussolini. A troop of Franco's soldiers is sent to the remote district to hunt down the rebels, and is led by Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), a sadist under cover as a rigid military man.

Commandeering a gloomy old mill as his headquarters, he moves in his new wife, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), who is very pregnant, and her daughter from her first marriage, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero). The girl hates her stepfather, who indeed values Carmen only for breeding purposes. Soon after arriving, Vidal shoots dead two farmers whose rifles, they claim, are only for hunting rabbits. After they die, Vidal finds rabbits in their pouches. "Next time, search these assholes before wasting my time with them," he tells an underling. He orders Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), his chief servant, to cook the rabbits for dinner: "Maybe a stew."What a vile man.

Ofelia encounters a strange insect looking like a praying mantis. It shudders in and out of frame, and we're reminded of Del Toro's affection for odd little creatures (as in Cronos, with its deep-biting immortality bug). The insect, friendly and insistent, seems to her like a fairy, and when she says so, the bug becomes a vibrating little man who leads her into a labyrinth and thus to her first fearsome meeting with the faun (Doug Jones, who specializes in acting inside bizarre costumes). Some viewers have confused the faun with Pan, but there is no Pan in the picture and the international title translates as Labyrinth of the Faun.