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Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More
Helen Uffner has dressed Broadway, Hollywood and TV shows for more than 40 years. But high-rise developers and Amazon distribution centers are making it impossible to store her extraordinary vintage collection.Helen Uffner began her love affair with old clothes as a young teenager, wandering into estate sales near her family’s home in Queens, unnerving her father, who had immigrated to this country as a Holocaust survivor and worried that people would think he could not afford to outfit his daughter properly. As a high school student in the mid-1960s, she would go to auction houses in Greenwich Village to buy vintage clothes and antique jewelry, using her babysitting earnings. With the prospect of a career in period fashion lacking promise, she sensibly joined a management consultancy after college. Soon enough the sexism got to her so she quit and decided to monetize her passion, drawing from the large collection she had already amassed which, at the time, focused on Victorian lingerie.Over the next 40 years or so, Ms. Uffner established a celebrated business renting out vintage clothes to theater, film and television productions from an inventory considered unparalleled. Initially, she ran the business out of her apartment — supplying the wardrobe for “Out of Africa,” “Zelig,” “The Color Purple.” By the late 1990s, when that model was no longer sustainable, she moved to a 6,000-square-foot space in the garment district, which made it easy for Broadway costume designers to visit and for actors to come in for fittings. Within a decade though, the unforgiving pace of real estate development in New York would threaten her viability, and now, in an all-too-familiar scenario, the pandemic economy was taking an extinction-level toll.It was a paradox though because even as the performing arts have suffered immeasurably during the past two years, film and television production in New York City has mostly returned to prepandemic levels and is ramping up. In September, Netflix opened a 170,000-square-foot studio in Brooklyn, and Ms. Uffner has been involved with one of the most anticipated series of the year, “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes’s follow-up to “Downton Abbey,” set in turn-of-the-century New York (and starting Monday on HBO).Challenges began for Ms. Uffner in 2006, when the landlord of the building she occupied in Midtown “invited” her, as she put it, to break her lease early. He was selling the building and wanted her out, but moving thousands of racks of clothing was going to be an ordeal. At the same time commercial rents were soaring and the city’s garment industry had all but disappeared, large loft-like spaces given over to corporate offices. Eventually, in 2008, Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing moved to Long Island City, after its proprietress faced fines of $1,000 a day if she did not vacate her existing space.The transition was not easy. Fashion houses, which also rent from the collection as a means of inspiration, began returning things by FedEx, Ms. Uffner told me, “as if we were in another state.” But over the next several years, Long Island City became popular enough that it was now a place where a marketing executive at Ralph Lauren might actually live. So by 2018, Ms. Uffner inevitably found herself in the same predicament she had faced earlier — the building she was in near Queens Plaza would be redeveloped and she would have to move. She ultimately settled into another space in Long Island City only to confront the drama all over again — her current building is planned for demolition to accommodate the construction of a high-rise.In the past, Ms. Uffner had several competitors, also independently owned, but nearly all have fallen away. If she shut down, the impact on the costume industry would be profound. Tom Broecker, an Emmy Award-winning costume designer who has relied on Ms. Uffner for decades described her collection of women’s wear from the early 20th century as extraordinary. “In the entire world, Helen is the only person who has cotton dresses from that period,” he told me.Even a move to Industry City, in Brooklyn, where the city has been trying to revive garment manufacturing, would be difficult from his point of view. In addition to film and theater projects, Mr. Broecker works on “Saturday Night Live,” where he might have to come up with a piece of old clothing in a span of two hours, making a trip from Rockefeller Center to a semi-inaccessible quarter of Brooklyn unfeasible.Understanding the importance of her enterprise to New York’s creative life, the city via the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment has said it is trying to help Ms. Uffner relocate, but without broad commercial rent regulation, there is little that can be accomplished. Over the years, she told me, landlords have added fees to monthly rent bills with impunity. In the beginning she was paying rent, electricity and property tax. In a subsequent space, the landlord added gas, and then came requirements to contribute to the local business improvement district.While Covid has tanked the price of office leasing, vast warehouse space of the kind Ms. Uffner needs is at a premium because of the demand coming from Amazon and other e-commerce sites that have become even more attractive to consumers during the pandemic. The city suggested a space in Hudson Yards, she told me, that was going to cost more than five times what she was paying.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More
Escaping execution by the Nazis for “cowardice” as a soldier, he found success in films because he found ways to portray “the new, good German.”Hardy Kruger, the first German actor to become a Hollywood star after World War II, died on Wednesday in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 93.His agent, Peter Kaefferlein, confirmed the death.For much of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Kruger — tall, blond and ruddy-cheeked — was the most visible German-born actor on American screens. He appeared in dozens of movies, among them “Flight of the Phoenix” (1965), with James Stewart; “Barry Lyndon” (1975), with Ryan O’Neal; “The Wild Geese” (1978), with Richard Burton and Roger Moore; and “A Bridge Too Far” (1977), with an all-star cast that included Sean Connery, Robert Redford and Laurence Olivier. But his screen presence had significance beyond the box office.Mr. Kruger, who was nearly shot for cowardice as a teenage soldier in Nazi Germany’s army, had left his war-ravaged homeland to pursue an acting career in Britain, where he initially met hostility in a country whose own war wounds were still raw. But he went on to play an important role in soothing the anti-German feelings that had spread during the war.“Hardy Kruger was more than an actor,” said the citation accompanying his Legion of Honor, which the French government awarded him in 2001. “He was an ambassador for Germany.” The German film critic Herbert Spaich said Mr. Kruger had succeeded in American films because he found ways to portray “the new, good German.”Mr. Kruger in 2008 at the Bambi Awards ceremony in Offenburg, Germany, at which he received a lifetime achievement award.Patrik Stollarz/Getty Images“Against the background of the disastrous Third Reich, he helped Germany create a new image for itself in the world,” Mr. Spaich said. “It was because he also had something international about him. He wasn’t restricted to only playing a German. He also had some of the sporty young-guy style that was so in demand in the U.S.”After leaving Hollywood (his last American role was as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the 1988-89 mini-series “War and Remembrance”), Mr. Kruger became an adventurer and conservationist, wrote novels, bought a farm in Africa, hosted a popular television series and campaigned against neo-Nazi movements.Eberhard August Franz Ewald Krüger (his surname originally had an umlaut) was born on April 12, 1928, in Berlin, to which he felt deeply connected throughout his life. His parents, Max and Auguste (Meier) Krüger, enthusiastically supported the Hitler regime and sent him to a Nazi boarding school. There he developed a lifelong interest in flying, which led to his selection as an actor in a 1944 propaganda film, “Young Eagles.” During the shooting, Mr. Kruger met two young Jewish actors, whose stories about Nazi crimes moved him.Along with his schoolmates, he was forcibly inducted into the army in 1945, then failed his first combat test, a firefight with American soldiers in which half his unit was wiped out.“When brown dots far away shot at me, I shot back,” he explained later. “When the dots came closer, I couldn’t shoot anymore because I saw the faces of human beings.”After a summary court-martial, Mr. Kruger was convicted of “cowardice in the face of the enemy” and sentenced to be shot. Just before the sentence was to be carried out, an officer took pity on his youth — “I was 16 but looked like 12” — and pardoned him. Soon afterward he abandoned his unit and lived in a forest. He ended the war in an American prisoner-of-war camp.“My generation was robbed of its youth,” he later said.Amid the devastation of postwar Germany, Mr. Kruger found work in theaters, acting in productions of “Bus Stop” and “The Glass Menagerie.” After a few years, he decided to seek a film career abroad. He moved to London, dropped the umlaut in his last name and practiced his English.No German actor had sought a career in Britain since the end of the war, and Mr. Kruger at first found himself unwelcome. He recalled a British actress telling him, “You have to understand, there is hardly anyone here at Pinewood Studios who hasn’t lost a lover, a husband, a son, a brother at the front, in an air raid or at sea.”In 1957, Mr. Kruger landed a lead role as a pilot in the film “The One That Got Away.” The news of his selection set off an uproar, but the director, Roy Ward Baker, stood by him.Mr. Kruger in the British World War II film “The One That Got Away” (1957). No German actor had sought a career in Britain since the end of the war, and the news of his casting set off an uproar. The film’s director, Roy Ward Baker, stood by him. Photo by ITV/Shutterstock “I will always be grateful to him, first for giving me a role in the film in the first place and second for the way he dealt with a problem during filming,” Mr. Kruger recalled years later. “I was having a war of words with the British press, and the producers wanted to abandon the film. But Roy Baker threatened to terminate his seven-year contract if they did.”The film’s success made Mr. Kruger famous and allowed him to begin fulfilling his American dream. He refused to play Nazi war criminals, he said, and “cliché figures like what you see in Otto Preminger’s ‘Stalag 17.’” Yet war is the background in many of his films. Several times he played a German troubled by conscience — for example, a monk living in occupied France in the 1968 French film “Franciscan of Bourges.”“I only played six or seven Germans in uniform, and none was a Hollywood cliché,” he said. “Why should I not try to show the world that there were also Germans who were good people?”Mr. Kruger was married three times. Survivors include his wife of 46 years, the American writer and photographer Anita Park, and three children from his previous marriages, Christiane, Malaika and Hardy Jr. Both Christiane and Hardy Jr. have acted in films. Mr. Kruger won three lifetime achievement awards in Germany: at the 1983 German Film Awards, the 2008 Bambi Awards and the 2011 Jupiter Awards. “Sundays and Cybèle,” a 1962 French drama in which he starred as an emotionally wounded war veteran, won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.In 2013, shortly before his 85th birthday, Mr. Kruger joined with several friends and colleagues to launch a project that uses sports and recreation to lure young Germans away from right-wing extremism.“I decided I had to do something,” he said. “We can’t forget that the seed is there.”In the 1980s and ’90s, he hosted a series of television documentaries in which he introduced Germans to faraway places like Chile, Macao, Tanzania, the Marquesas Islands and Utah. He described the episodes as “short stories written with a camera.”He also enjoyed telling stories from his Hollywood years.Mr. Kruger, right, was second-billed to John Wayne, third from left, in the 1962 film “Hatari!”LMPC via Getty ImagesDuring the filming of the 1962 adventure film “Hatari,” Mr. Kruger famously defeated his co-star, John Wayne, in a drinking bout. Years later, he admitted that he had prepared himself beforehand.“I knew he could hold a lot, so I stopped in the kitchen and drank several spoonfuls of cooking oil,” he recalled. “That helped. At the end I had to carry him to his room.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More
A lonely boy finds an ally when he discovers a caged tiger in a forest behind his home, but imagination is somehow short-lived in this children’s movie.In the children’s drama “The Tiger Rising,” a lonely boy whose mother recently died finds a spiritual ally when he discovers a caged tiger in a forest behind his home in rural Florida.Rob (Christian Convery) is a shy 12-year-old whose skin disorder has made him a target for his classmates. They call him, in an example of the movie’s flavorless affectations, Disease Boy.Rob stumbles upon the tiger when he wanders the woods alone, but the quiet boy is an unlikely companion for such a wild creature. It’s only when he befriends a spirited new student named Sistine (Madalen Mills) that Rob’s imagination is given room to grow.Loneliness bonds the two outcasts, and together, they find an outlet for their frustrations by visiting the tiger. They want to set the animal free, even if it’s against the advice of the one adult Rob and Sistine trust, Willie May (Queen Latifah), a maid whom the children think of as a prophet.The director and screenwriter, Ray Giarratana, mixes elements of whimsy and childhood longing into “The Tiger Rising,” based on the book by Kate DiCamillo, with drawings that come to life and vivid dreams of tigers running wild. The fantasy sequences provide the film with momentary zings of energy. But imagination is short-lived, as the movie seems to wring every drop of sentiment from its scenes of lonesome dreamers.Here, children are angels who overcome demons, Black women are endowed with otherworldly wisdom, and tigers are symbols of spiritual emancipation. The metaphors are so obvious that the film becomes trapped in its own cage of archetypes and clichés, and unlike the tiger, there is no champion to open the gates to a more original cinematic world.The Tiger RisingRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
Adapted from a book by Annie Ernaux, the movie puts a female gaze on sexual obsession.When a sexually obsessive affair begins, it can be all indulgent erotic bliss — for a little while. Eventually the outside world and its annoying circumstances impinge, and complicate things. So it goes in “Simple Passion,” the director Danielle Arbid’s adaptation of a book by the acclaimed French writer Annie Ernaux.Hélène (Laetitia Dosch), a literature professor and single parent, and Alexandre (Sergei Polunin), a married, mildly thuggish employee at the Russian Embassy in France, discover a strong physical connection almost immediately. Their affinity is conveyed in energetic sex scenes that flood the screen with the intermingling flesh of the performers.If their dialogue doesn’t immediately communicate that they see their affair in different ways, the soundtrack does. When Hélène’s dressing for a tryst we hear Gilbert Bécaud’s peppy pop tune “C’est Merveilleux L’Amour.” As Alexandre tools around in his high-powered car, we hear Suicide’s droney, doomy “Cheree.”While keeping a stalwart female perspective, “Simple Passion” follows an arc so standard it could be called banal. The couple’s lack of compatibility outside of what the filmmaker Preston Sturges once called “Topic A” creates friction. Alexandre criticizes Hélène for wearing what he considers a too-tight skirt. Hélène commits the strategic error of proclaiming she loves him while they’re having sex. She also becomes so distracted that at one point she almost runs over her own child while backing up her car. That’s new, at least.When Hélène flies to Moscow in pursuit of her lover, her wanderings on snowy streets are accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song.” The choice feels forced, like a stand-in for the dramatic work Arbid and company don’t pull off. Similarly, the picture’s resolution, with a voice-over relating the satisfactory conclusion of some kind of interior journey, is utterly unconvincing.Simple PassionNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More
This documentary reconstructs the life of Mallory Smith, who died at 25 after a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis.Making a documentary that doubles as a final testament is no easy task. But with access to family members, doctors, personal reflections and hospital footage (which includes a surgery), “Salt in My Soul” poignantly reconstructs the life of Mallory Smith, who received a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis at 3 years old. She died in 2017 at 25, just as she had started to undergo an experimental treatment aimed at destroying the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that had made her course with the illness much more difficult.Despite the challenges of living with the disease, she became an accomplished athlete, a Stanford graduate and an indomitable life force, judging from the testimonies of those close to her and from her own words. The director, Will Battersby, draws on audio and video that Smith recorded and a journal she kept privately over a decade. (She gave her mother the password to be used after her death.) Her writings were condensed into the 2019 book “Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life.”The movie becomes many things: a memorial; an awareness-raising tool about cystic fibrosis and the possibilities of bacteriophage therapies; and a consideration of how it’s possible to live as Smith said she endeavored to — assuming she would die the next day while still, as she put it in a diary entry, “prolonging my life + planning for my future.”Smith thought that knowing she didn’t have much time gave her a perspective most people lack. Her journal, a friend suggests, gave her an outlet for her frustrations that permitted her to stay outwardly optimistic.“Salt in My Soul” is extremely painful to watch, especially as it shows the roller coaster of Smith’s recurring hospitalizations. But it does paint a vivid portrait of who she was and what she believed.Salt in My SoulNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More
In this drama about the killing of a Black man, the intersection of race and policing is considered from the perspective of a Chinese American police officer.Written and directed by Aimee Long, “A Shot Through the Wall” considers the modern dilemma about race and policing in the United States from the perspective of a Chinese American police officer in New York. When a rookie, Mike Tan (Kenny Leu), chases a teenager through an apartment building in Brooklyn, Mike accidentally fires his gun, killing a Black man.After the shooting, Mike is seen agonizing over his actions, though his immigrant parents, Chow and May (Tzi Ma and Fiona Fu), are supportive. At work, his superiors assure him everything will blow over — until a video revealing Mike’s identity goes viral, prompting widespread demands for justice and the possibility of a sentence that includes jail time. Mike then seeks the help of a high-powered attorney who encourages him to flaunt his Black girlfriend, Candace (Ciara Renée), to blunt any accusations of racism.Though attentive to calls for police accountability, and the media’s role in reducing complex issues into simple narratives, Long’s schematic script ramps up theatrics at the expense of more challenging insights.Nevertheless, the brisk, eventful melodrama has an undeniably absorbing appeal, and the strongest moments in the film occur when Long illuminates Mike’s family life with subtle details about the relationship between two generations of Chinese Americans — as when May’s English is smugly corrected by her daughter.Alienated and desperate upon realizing the exploitative strategies he needs to perform in order to avoid a conviction, Mike illegally purchases a weapon and betrays his loved ones before coming to his senses. By the final act, however, Long pulls the rug out from under us in a way that implausibly drives home the film’s perfunctory ideas about gun violence, police incompetence and the victimhood of communities of color.A Shot Through the WallNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
With clenched jaws and furrowed brows, this plodding procedural attempts to glorify Neville Chamberlain, played here by Jeremy Irons.Shortly after “Munich: The Edge of War” opens, a young couple have an anniversary lunch at a restaurant. It’s 1938, and the husband, who works in the British Foreign Service, tells his wife that Hitler is threatening to invade Czechoslovakia, and if that happens Britain and France will be obliged to respond militarily. Just as the husband delivers this sober news, the wife — wearing an indulgent smile and the openly bored look of someone listening to the weather report — perks up. The waiter has brought their Chablis finally.Unlike that wife, Hitler at least gets some grudging respect and decent dialogue in this potboiler about the diplomatic efforts to stop Germany. Based on the best seller by the British novelist Robert Harris, the movie weds fact with fiction for a story about estranged friends, Hugh (George MacKay) and Paul (Jannis Niewöhner), occupying opposite side of the geopolitical divide. Hugh works at 10 Downing Street and is married to the aforementioned cliché, Pamela (Jessica Brown Findley). Paul serves in the foreign ministry in Berlin and has a tart, politically astute lover, Helen (Sandra Hüller).For the most part, this movie comes across as a feature-length attempt to glorify Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who engaged in the much-debated diplomatic strategy of appeasement in the run-up to World War II. Played by a sadly juiceless Jeremy Irons in funereal mode, the Chamberlain here is a quietly heroic figure who perceptively negotiates with Hitler to avoid another war. Yet while Chamberlain is the story’s champion — a noble defender, historical bone of contention and revisionist argument rolled into one phlegmatic figure — the movie’s more energetic and visually engaging heroic duties have been relegated to Hugh, Paul and the supporting players in their orbits.The movie opens with a glimpse of the good old days at Oxford when Hugh and Paul were in love with the same Jewish free spirit, Lena (Liv Lisa Fries). Years later, Hugh is in obsequious functionary mode at Downing Street and hovering attentively over Chamberlain (“well navigated, sir”) while Paul is busily conspiring to boot out Hitler (a spidery and strange Ulrich Matthes). For much of what follows, Hugh and Paul occupy their respective narrative territories. As the plot thickens, the filmmakers — the movie was written by Ben Power and directed by Christian Schwochow — try to build tension by cutting back and forth between the two lines of action that eventually, predictably converge.All this editing busywork doesn’t help enliven “The Edge of War,” a plodding bureaucratic procedural that features many, many characters strategizing in various spaces with furrowed brows and clenched jaws, mostly in relentless medium close-up. Every so often, these talking heads prove they have bodies and rush or just walk down a corridor and into an office, car or plane, where they continue to scheme, furrow and clench. On occasion, someone has a drink or makes love or goes outside for a breather. In Britain, ordinary citizens are either agitating for peace or preparing for war; in Munich, German soldiers salute one another, hailing Hitler in front of shop windows defaced with anti-Semitic threats.As the story grinds to its spoiler-free finale, it becomes increasingly clear that the movie would have been vastly improved if the filmmakers had ditched the dueling band o’ brothers story line and instead focused on Paul and his efforts to assassinate Hitler, always a surefire audience pleaser. Hugh is largely a reactive character — a minor planet orbiting Chamberlain’s fading star — and enough of a dreary presence and conceit that you start to feel grudging sympathy for his ridiculous wife, if not the people who put such snortingly terrible dialogue in her mouth. For his part, MacKay is playing a witness to history, which may explain all his energetic eye widening; too bad the character has no detectable inner life.Paul is the better, more effective figure partly because he faces the more obvious and immediate threat, one that’s largely conveyed through Hitler’s paranoia (and, well, Hitler himself), Nazi iconography and your own knowledge of history rather than the reams of dialogue or the filmmaking. This danger gives Paul’s part of the story juice as does Niewöhner’s fine impression of a pressure cooker leaking steam. Adding much-needed interest too are the women in Paul’s life. They’re stereotypes and certainly objectionable — Lena is more symbol than person — but at least they don’t read as insults to half the world’s population. As Helen, Hüller may not have much to do, but her vitality and intelligence are irrepressible.Munich: The Edge of WarRated PG-13. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More
