Pitfall (1962)

Instant Favorite.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

From the start of the movie you follow two deserters that are mine workers. A guy dressed in white is spying on them unnoticed from a distance. Then The miners move on to new jobs but the man in white follows still unnoticed....This movie is much more about moods I think than the actual story. It is a slow moving movie especially the first half of it. But I was absorbed about wondering who was it following him and why. I did also like the boy as the silent observer where I wondered if he would interfere with the story at a time and in what way.I would not recommend this movie to everybody. I did enjoy it a lot but I would not consider it as a masterpiece. If you are are interested in slow but moody B&W pictures then it may be for you. If you want a bit more action then choose another movie.

As the ghosts of two of the victims of the man in the white suit chase his Vespa, they yell, "You can't kill someone for no reason." Whatever that reason is, it is never shared with us. It's sad enough that the characters in this movie are so lost, but that someone would care enough about them to seek them out and kill them. The man in the white suit has a book and after carrying out his hit, or setting one up, he quietly writes things in that book. Is he the grim reaper? Does he represent organized crime? Is he a solo player? He is magical in a Satanic sense. He comes between two warring labor unions, creating enough distrust to destroy what they fight for and them also. One of the strangest characters is a little boy, the son of the first victim, who seems only intent on eating throughout the movie. At one point, he catches a frog, smashes it on the rocks, and then pulls off its skin. He seems immune to emotion and we only know that he is a little eating machine. This is a film that you will think about for a long time if you can find it. It is unsatisfying on the one hand and highly provocative on the other.

I'll skip the synopsis and go right for the flaws. The little boy was sketched as a weak caricature. Our hero, the murdered man, was given some very weak dialog. The subplot about the divided miners' union was verbose. The confrontation between the two union heads came to an unbelievable conclusion. The man in white was not as much of a mystery as the film seems to think he is. At the end, with four principles dead, we expect them to meet at last and discuss what has happened with one another, but instead the movie watches the boy run crying down a road, and damn it, the movie isn't about the boy! -----paragraph----- The film sets up the murdered man to slowly come to realize the fact that there will be no justice for his murder and that it is better, once one has died, not to torture oneself by watching the world he has left behind. That the movie ends before he comes to this realization makes the ending very unsatisfying. Of course, the film doesn't allow him to realize as much as the viewer feels he should. Perhaps that is the greatest flaw. Or perhaps it is the fact that the two union heads fight each other to the death when at least one of them should know that it is more important for them to unite against a common enemy. Then there's the man in white. The movie seems to think he's a mystery, but it's pretty obvious that he's a representative of the mining company looking to crush the unions. The murdered man, our hero, does not realize this, nor does the movie seem to think the viewer does, but the viewer does know, and with all the murdered man has heard, by all rights he should, too. Instead, he spouts weak dialog about his murder. He recites his stilted inner monologue like a man in a stage play, and it doesn't work. Really, he's too complacent. He passively watches people talk about him. He does not put up any kind of fight to make the living world hear him. He doesn't undergo the process of accepting that he cannot interact with the living world. At the end, he's even trying to speak to a living man, even though he should have come to realize that it's impossible. And, as I said before, he hasn't made any progress toward accepting the fact that he must forget the world of the living and accept his fate. His story arc feels very unfinished. The script needed a rewrite.

This film is very difficult to find in the West. It's not on video and you'd probably have to be lucky and find it at a film festival or a revival house. It's the first collaboration between director Teshigahara, writer Kodo Abe, and composer Toru Takemitsu, who went on to make the more widely available WOMAN IN THE DUNES and FACE OF ANOTHER. It's not quite as strong as WitD but is on par with FoA. This is a satire about a deserted town who's inhabitants are ghosts swallowed up by corruption. Teshigahara's direction is solid and Takemitsu comes up with another appropriately dissonant score balancing tension and humor. It's worth seeing for anyone interested in the three principal collaborators, particularly since opportunities to see it are rare. Takemitsu in particular could almost single handedly make a movie worth watching.