The Water Mill: Lord Have Mercy

There's a world of a difference between the comic book movie and the the fable on film. For whereas the former is typified by hero worship and snide asides, the latter distills human behavior into small scale tragedies of a much more personal nature. Unlike the more-or-less invincible leads of their Marvel-made counterparts (kryptonite notwithstanding), the leads in folktale cinema suffer dearly when they take a loss. There is no full recovery, anymore than there is a conquering of evil. Which one is more like real life, I ask you? Those superhero movies piss me off.

Lee Man-hui's The Water Mill is an exquisite example of the folktale film, an aching mix of Cinderella, Samson, and The Gift of the Magi. How else to explain this tale of a strongman (Shin Yeong-gyun) who comes across a slipper in the river, only to bump into his soon-to-be beloved (Ko Eun-a) the day she's missing a shoe. Their subsequent romance is fraught with issues: she's married, in debt, and doomed. The first issue is resolved when her husband dies; the second, is made right when her new lover sells himself to pay off her I.O.U. But the third item, well, that's going to require stealing undergarments and praying to the west wind. And when's the last time you've heard of that approach working out?

Descendants of Cain: Not Scary Red Scare

Maybe we're supposed to sympathize with the Old Guard landowners in Yoo Hyun-mok's Descendants of Cain. But I sure didn't. Well-intentioned Park Hun (Kim Jin-kyu) may have parlayed his roles as sympathetic squire into beneficent school teacher but he's also been stringing along O Jang-nyeo (Moon Hee), his masochistic housekeeper who's been lusting for him all these yearsduring which her absent, wifebeating drunk of a husband (Choi Bong) has been making a dubious name for himself in the party. Park is that latest in a line of kind lords of the manor but are the impoverished villagers really supposed to come to the defense of the "good" slave-owner? Who in their right mind wouldn't rejoice at a land re-distribution plan?

The refusal to cast the protagonists as good guys and the antagonists as villains is what makes Descendants of Cain so effective. The lowest of the low can have his moments of truth-telling; the best educated can also be the most delusional. The new social order may mercilessly judge all members of the upperclass regardless of their moral center but it also finally challenges a system that accords wealth, health, and -- to some degree -- happiness as a birth right guaranteed only to the moneyed minority. Fights break out but I, for one, was surprised by who stabbed who.

Awards: Blue Dragon Award for Best Film (1969); Buil Film Award for Best Film (1969).

Assassin: Anti-Commie Propaganda Kills Me

Is Assassin an intentionally bad piece of propaganda? It might be. Director Lee Mun-hui employs bad dubbing, jerky jumpcuts, strange close-ups, and one gratingly monotonous soundtrack incorporating a single note plunking over and over as if he intended to make a message film nobody would watch. The storyline may be focused on backstabbing Communists but more than critiquing the flawed global politics of South Korea's neighbors to the north, this movie made me me cringe with its winter-summer seduction between a general and a young woman with daddy issues, and the cat-and-mouse game between baby-voiced girl and a sinister guy who's hiding a gun.

Both women end up in bed — one to screw, one to sleep — but neither is safe when that clock strikes twelve. Because Lee's agit-prop, anti-Red world is filled with murderous men with no morals: a hired killer (Jang Dong-hwi), a revolutionary extremist (Nam Kung-mon), a North Korean defector (Park Am), an anonymous truck driver, and likely that guy (Oh Ji-myoung) who's toying with the home-alone kid. An extended scene which involves an apple caressed by a leather glove only furthers the idea that Assassin was meant to be absurd. Will anyone forsake Bolshevism after watching Assassin? Doubtful. Did Lee go on to redeem himself with later films? I'm happy to say he did. (Please watch The Road to Sampo instead.)

The Marines Who Never Returned: Bang, Bang, Clap, Clap, Ho, Ho, Ho

I shouldn't like war movies. I shouldn't like Henry V either. But I do. That doesn't mean I think guns are cool and colonialism is anything less than evil. It's more that while many real-world wars are pissing matches in which the poor and working class are fodder for the rich-and-powerful, big screen wars relate an altogether different reality. Is it propaganda? Probably. Yet defying logic and politics, here I am, watching Lee Man-hui's The Marines Who Never Returned on YouTube's Korean Film Archive and pretty much digging it, bayonets and all.

A Lee pic is always full of surprises. The action might get hyperrealistic in one scene (service men walk in on a pile of corpses) and then turn super silly in the next (a brothel madam is won over by unusual tactics). I doubt a military troop would have an orphan as their pigtailed mascot or that they'd be so at ease with a guy that they think acts like a girl. But hey, it's the movies. Anything is possible. Especially at Christmas time! And what a gift Lee is as a director. The world seems less limited, less constricted, less predictable when he's behind the camera. These marines are sentimentalists and Secret Santas, and I for one am here for it.

The Road to Sampo: Three on a March

Evidently filmmaker Lee Man-hui was an experimentalist to the end. His final work, the improbably joyous The Road to Sampo, turns a grim-on-paper road movie into a repeatedly giddy celebration of life. I found it inexplicably irresistable. So what if it's winter and jobs are scarce and everyone's broke and the world is cruel. I've been there and there's still friendship. No one promised anyone an easy life. And in Sampo, the trio of good-natured, insta-buddy vagabonds somehow find a way to counter a litany of downturns...together. Bulldozer Roh (Baek Il-sob) can't find a job; barmaid Baek-hwa (Mun Suk) can't find love; and elder excon Jeong (Kim Jin-kyu) seems unlikely to find the life he left behind. That doesn't mean they should stop searching. Plus, if they're hungry along the way, they can always crash a funeral for food and drink.

Which isn't to imply that The Road to Sampo is a pilgrimmage with marker events. Huge swaths of the film are devoted to watching these three trudge through the snow. Sometimes, they come upon a house and you think, what's there, but they move on. It may sound boring. In actuality, it's a blast. When Jeong comments about the younger two being like children, he's basically explaining how to get through the day to day. Don't get jaded. Don't get hard. Keep your innocence. Play when you can. Approach the unexpected with open eyes and an open heart. (Best done with a soundtrack inspired by Morricone.)

The Devil's Stairway: Nursed to Death

Did you think it was bad when Shelley Winters drowned in A Place in the Sun? Well, that's nothing compared to what's in store for the unwanted girlfriend in The Devil's Stairway. Lee Man-hui's hospital thriller sets up pretty quickly that the romance between an enterprising doctor (Kim Jin-kyu) and a clingy nurse (Moon Jeong-suk) is going to go sour before the spit on their lips has time to dry. And part of the fun is having Lee tease us with the possible murders that don't play out: a strangling, an overdose, another fall down that deadly staircase, an intentionally botched abortion, a grisly end utilizing various pieces of shiny medical equipment... The options are endless!

We know our hero is also our villain. But are you truly a bad guy if you're haunted by your actions? Oh, of course you are. You're just a bad guy with a conscience. Which is marginally better than a bad guy without one. How do you know he's got second thoughts? The Devil's Staircase has a deliciously insistent soundtrack with heightened foley sounds, well-placed vibraphones, and cacophonous orchestral works that drop out just in time to underscore the madness. Insanity sounds best without background music (and when shot in expert black and white).