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Arts & Entertainment Movies The Expatriate Experience In Movies: Some Personal Favorites
Arts & Entertainment Movies The Expatriate Experience In Movies: Some Personal Favorites | The Expatriate Experience In Movies: Some Personal Favorites |
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| Written by D. B. Rossett | |
| Saturday, 01 July 2000 | |
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"In honor of two classic expatriate celebrations, Canada Day and
American Independence Day, in this, the first year of a new millennium, I thought I'd list my favorite films of the past 50 years that have featured expatriate characters. While dictionaries quibble on the term, I like to think of expatriates as people who have left their native land to settle in a foreign place for a wide variety of adventurous reasons, but who haven't completely renounced their native culture or citizenship. Here are some gems. The African Queen (1951), Dir. John Huston There they are, two lonely foreigners, the cockney pilot of a small, barely functioning riverboat, and that Eleanor Roosevelt type do- gooder, getting on each other's nerves as they float down that dark African river. The meeting of the rough edged Bogart and the spirited Katherine Hepburn is the stuff of legend, but what makes it great is James Agee's wonderful adaptation of C.S. Forester's novel. This is the third of Bogart's expat trilogy, and despite his non-existent cockney accent, the most charming. One, Two, Three (1961), Dir. Billy Wilder Wilder's comedy about a Coca-Cola executive's exasperation at his daughter falling in love with a communist from East Berlin became immediately politically incorrect when the Berlin Wall went up just before it was released. Now with the wall gone, it plays as a charming and hilarious send-up of the limits of Cold War ideology. It makes my all time list, however, mainly because James Cagney, in his last leading role, plays the expatriate dad as a fast-talking wonder right out of a thirties screwball comedy. Notorious (1946), Dir. Alfred Hitchcock Most films about spies overseas have always had a slightly unsavory quality about them, either because the spy game is like quicksand, or the players are louses, or both. But this film has a nice twist. Cary Grant, an American operative in Buenos Aires, is in love with Ingrid Bergman, the woman he has persuaded to spy on her fascist, mother- fixated, husband, Claude Rains. When Rains begins poisoning Bergman, Grant, in one of Hitchcock's cliffhanger specials, finds a way to get her out of that house. It's a CIA agent's wet dream. An American in Paris (1951), Dir. Vicente Minelli "An American in Paris" won the Best Picture Oscar despite some dialogue that creaks. It may be, though, that this is the single instance where the dialogue really doesn't matter. First, there's the young Leslie Caron, paving the way for Audrey Hepburn by creating for the first time the foreign sophisticate gamine who bowls over red- blooded American expats. Then there's that last great uninterrupted extravaganza, choreographed and danced by Gene Kelly to the title piece by George Gershwin, lit and designed and photographed by the protean Minelli as a wonderful fantasy of Paris, Paris, Paris! The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Dir. John Huston Based on a novel by that most elusive of expatriate writers, B. Traven, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is the ultimate bad karma film. In the second of his great expat roles, Bogart plays a fellow without any redeeming social value. He is so desperate for that treasure, he turns on his buddies. Ultimately he gets swallowed up in his own worst nightmare, which comes at the hands of folks even more rapacious than he. In the process he must have become the gringo poster boy for Mexicans. The Third Man (1949), Dir. Carol Reed Orson Welles is an unrepentant narcotics trafficker in post-war Vienna, and Joseph Cotton is his old pal who is drawn reluctantly into his world. Graham Greene wrote the dark script about the dying embers of a friendship, and Anton Karas wrote that mesmerizing zither theme you'd recognize anywhere. One of the best-acted scenes in the history of cinema is that gem on the Ferris wheel. The end is one of the most haunting. Under the Volcano (1984), Dir. John Huston For Huston, the only foreign folks who were serious about living in Mexico were misfits much like himself. Albert Finney has spent a good part of his career playing dissipated characters, but his British consul lost to drink in exotic Cuernavaca is perhaps his best. Based on Malcolm Lowery's novel, it has, as its chief attraction, none of the usual Hollywood varnish that transforms lost men into reformed saints. For all that, it is probably not a movie you'd want to see on a date. The King and I (1956), Dir. Walter Lang For me more than anything, this is the story of a teacher arriving in a very foreign land and experiencing culture shock on countless levels, large and small. Though the depiction of a "quaint" Asian despot seems today to be condescending and anachronistic, the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs and the performances by Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner (whose personal egotism was never put to better use) make "The King" one of the most enduring enchantments in cinema. Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dir. David Lean This is the lodestone, the most impressive of all films featuring expatriate characters. "Lawrence" is the classic tale of the romantic foreigner who experiences the native culture to the point of assimilating it, only to discover that he will never be fully accepted by the adopted culture, leaving him completely at sea. It takes an eccentric actor like Peter O. Toole to play T. E. Lawrence convincingly, and he holds our attention throughout. Alec Guiness's dry, cunning performance as Faisal amuses us as it pricks at Lawrence's illusions. This is Robert Bolt's shrewdest script, and he was fortunate to have as a collaborator a film director who can make us die of thirst watching that lone nut cross an impassable desert. It is not only Lean's masterpiece, it is easily one of the greatest films of the 20th Century. Casablanca (1942), Dir. Michael Curtiz Humphrey Bogart is Rick, the amoral expat bar owner who is in it only for the money. Then that dame Ingrid Bergman shows up and he decides to do the right thing. This film tells us the only real romantic adventure can be found a long, long way from home, and that's the same place you grow up. You must remember this. |
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