THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE / LA DOUBLE VIE DE VÉRONIQUE (1991)

Polish-born writer/director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s calling-card film; not his best (that’d be TROIS COULEURS: BLEU/’93), but plenty mesmerizing/confounding, with subconscious logic replacing normal narrative design.  The story involves two protagonists (one French/one Polish) who, a bit like the Holy Trinity*, are also one.  Polish Veronique (Irène Jacob, a young Ingrid Bergman type), who takes a miraculously fast ride from amateur choir member to soaring soprano classical soloist within days before being felled at her debut by a heart ailment.  (Or is it the high tessitura?)  While simultaneously, Parisian Veronique (still Irène Jacob) is more acted upon than acting in a metaphysical tale that brings her tru-love thru the psychic powers of an admiring Children’s Books author.  He ‘pulls’ her to a train station  restaurant meet-cute thru brain waves . . . or something.  It all seems perfectly logical while you watch, as if Wong Kar-Wai’s visual æsthetics were being realized before the fact by a Pole in Paris.  The film, more program music than program, as compelling as ever.

DOUBL-BILL/LINK:  *And speaking of Trinities, Kieslowski’s early film BLIND CHANCE/’87, gives us three takes on one storyline.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/przypadek-blind-chance-1981.html

A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST (1934)

The filming is downright primitive under Christy Cabanne’s non-interventionist helming in this Monogram Poverty Row production of Gene Stratton-Porter once popular novel.  (Five filmings from 1924 to 1990.)  But perhaps raw & obvious is the right way to go on this rural Pollyana tale of hard-luck kid Elnora Comstock (Marian Marsh) whose embittered, careworn mother (Louise Dresser) blames the child for the premature death of the father, drowned in the swamp on his way home for the birth.  Largely raised by the kindly, childless neighbors over the years, and by two rich benefactors (a local dowager and a sparkling Eastern college boy) who take pity on the girl, she rises above schoolyard taunts and tattered homemade clothes to graduation honors and beyond, even finding peace with her mother.  No surprises in how the story turns out, but plenty of surprises in Monogram putting together such a top-notch cast.  Admittedly mostly stars on their way down, but Marsh had been starring with John Barrymore & Richard Barthelmess just a couple of years back; Dresser co-starring with Will Rogers in last year’s STATE FAIR.  Ditto Henry B. Walthall earlier this year, in John Ford’s JUDGE PRIEST.  While Ralph Morgan (brother of Frank) usually busy @ Fox.  How’d Monogram ever afford them?  (But worth it, the film apparently did a lot of business.)  Currently available only in subfusc prints, but pretty interesting on many levels . . .  other than moviemaking!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  To see Dresser really go to town on this sort of role, try THE GOOSE WOMAN/’25.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/08/goose-woman-1925.html

L'ARMATA BRANCALEONE / FOR LOVE AND GOLD (1966)

Mario Monicelli’s warts and all (but mostly warts) spoof on noble knights and all things mediæval could have been titled VITTORIO GASSMAN AND THE HOLY GRAIL.  Twenty years before Monty Python got there, this large-scale farce on muck & loyalty still comes across with its big battles (bloody & bonkers) and a ridiculous, yet oddly believable, view of the pre-renaissance Middle Ages as human comedy.  Gassman, principled master to a motley crew of wandering swordsman (and one Jewish peddler) are heading to his home-base castle at Aurocastro; if they can only get there between warfare (Saracen Pirates; rival Christian Brotherhoods) and the tempting Waiting Ladies (engaged virgins to demur; devouring dominatrix to try on) they come across.  Epic Euro-comedies usually aim low and miss, but Monicelli aims down & dirty while taking the high road.  (Past pics include BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET/’58 and THE ORGANIZER/’63*, so dumb comedy not his style.)  No doubt, a lot of laughs get lost in (subtitle) translation, dialect riffs only native Italians will spot*, but more than enough comes thru for the non-cognoscenti.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Monicelli’s masterpiece, THE ORGANIZER, criminally under-seen.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/i-compagni-organizer-1963.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Popular enough in Italy for a sequel : BRANCALEONE ALLE CROCIATE/’70 (not seen here).  The original (recently restored) barely got a token Stateside release in 1981.

TRAMPS (2016)

A trifle from NYC indie writer/director Adam Leon about a pair of twenty-somethings, would-be grifters, strangers who meet cute (and anonymously) after a suitcase swap on a subway platform goes wrong.  He’s bagman/she’s getaway driver; attractive antagonists who’ll awkwardly discover romance. The film might be a Sundance submission that missed the cut (was it?), now streaming to help indie film fans over the long wait before the next festival.  Callum Turner, dropping his British accent, is a would-be chef living at home (in Queens?) with his Polish mom (she runs an informal horse-betting parlor from her living room) and an older brother who needs a favor: drop everything and cover me on a ‘bag swap.’  Naturally, Turner takes the wrong suitcase from some innocent person and winds up on a hunt for the ‘right’ suitcase with getaway driver Grace Van Patten.   It’s a long night’s journey for two soulmates, ending with everything back in place and a first big step together as a couple.  Leon shows a jagged, short attention-span style, calming down as we go along, but can only do so much to get us to care about these self-centered petty thieves.  The only way these stories work, especially when the tone is this light, is for the leads to win us over with natural charm.  Something Turner pulls off with a naturally friendly appeal, but Van Patten doesn’t show.  Too hard in her approach.  Perhaps a less informal filming style could give Leon the chance to literally light up her face in a way that might let us see what he sees in her.  Instead, she’s a pain.  And the best scene in the film is a brief funny anti-climax when we discover what was hidden in that briefcase, and how utterly unnecessary all the skullduggery was.  A real ‘shaggy dog’ story.

JERICHO OF SCOTLAND YARD (2005)

Another British police procedural?  Well, yes and no as it’s different than 90% of the others.  Also better.*  Instead of the current default model: troubled lead investigator/less quirky apprentice seconding/impenetrable North UK accents/equally impenetrable clues that don’t add up; this one is both set in the late-fifties/early-sixties, and to some extent uses the filming style of that era.  Though looser in camera technique and franker in violence & sexual content, but finding a bright period color palette with grain to match and multi-composition within the frame you might have seen from a British director like Mike Hodges (though he’s more ‘70s) or in the cycle of mid-‘60s Hollywood detective films that might have starred Paul Newman, James Garner or even those late-career urban crime dramas Frank Sinatra walked thru in a failed attempt to stay with-it and relevant on the big screen.  Like a particularly nasty one imaginatively titled THE DETECTIVE/’68.  And with Robert Lindsay in the lead here, we’re not so far from '60s Sinatra physically.  Only this film is good.  Those late Sinatra films are stinkers; out-of-touch squares trying to be hip.  They made four of these JERICHO films*, each about 100", only the first seen here, and it follows a typical format of having two seemingly unrelated crimes (one murder/one kidnaping) turning out to be connected when Lindsay and his team of vets and a beginner are pulled from the murder case of a Black ‘nobody’  to the kidnaping of a rich immigrant whose fortune, wife and kids are all facade/no foundation.  Physical period detail and (far less seen) gestural period acting given unusually close attention, not just costumes & cars, but posture & the entitled habits of social position.  The cast is all good (Tom Burke exceptional as a too loyal son), but it’s Lindsay’s show.  Busy in the UK, but not much seen here once a promising Stateside career collapsed after his Tony-winning B’way turn in ME AND MY GIRL was stopped in its tracks by Carl Reiner in the disastrous  BERT RIGBY, YOU'RE A FOOL/’89.  It’s never too late.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The quality of these Brit-Crime dramas hardly seems to matter as they’re all so similar.  Only the ones that turn too cute for words becoming truly unwatchable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Three more of these were made, so I guess that makes for a Quadruple-Bill.  Hopefully they're as good as this one.

COMPANY BUSINESS (1991)

A critical & commercial write-off for M-G-M on release, writer/director Nicholas Meyer’s Spy vs Spy Cold War dramedy now seems a modest, but tasty treat, an amuse-bouche for sophisticated palettes.  Meyer, who wrote THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION/’76 before saving STAR TREK twice (WRATH OF KHAN/’82; UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY/’91), has an unusual ability to hold tone across serious & comic boundaries.  (Not the same as being semi-serious or semi-comic.)  Here, refreshing a favorite old standby: the under-appreciated vet who gets a second chance unaware he’s being brought back not to succeed, but to fail.  Naturally, he proves them wrong, screwing up their devious plans by coming thru with the goods.  This one has former CIA man Gene Hackman, currently reduced to freelance industrial espionage gigs, called back to Washington headquarters to handle a Russian spy swap.  Mikhail Baryshnikov’s the token incarcerated spy Gene’s escorting back to Soviet agents in Germany (along with two million in cash as sweetener), or is until they smell something fishy just before handoff, escaping on a dangerous (or is it merry?) Euro-chase to stay alive and find out what’s really going on.  With top-tier tech work on location (mostly Berlin underground and Paris above) from D. P. Gerry Fisher; Ken Adam production design, Michael Kamen score (listen for a bit Tchaikovsky arranged for balalaika) and a super supporting cast, it’s easier than usual to follow along, twists and character reveals very satisfying.  No surprise with Meyer in charge, his main fault is being too clever for his own good, but the years have made this civilized entertainment only more civilized.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Baryshnikov, no longer a kid at 43, looks and acts better than in anything else he did that didn’t focus on dance, hated the film and never made another feature.  Pity.

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY (2017)

Late in the day gay-coming-of-age story: late for our mid-20s protagonist, late in a film cycle on the subject, and now nearly a decade after its release, but so well observed and acted, it hardly matters.  We’re in Yorkshire, England (where writer/director Francis Lee is from), farm country where a young Josh O’Connor (his face not quite settled, other than those protruding ears) is running the small family sheep farm by default, and nearly by himself, as his father is invalided after a stroke and Mom busy running the house.  He’s increasingly miserable, drunk most nights after pub visits where he’s up for shagging a local bar-mate as long as it doesn’t require more from him than the sheep get when he thrusts his arm up their bum as part of his farm duties.  But a temp hire of a slightly older/far more mature Rumanian immigrant (Alec Secareanu) upsets his routine because the stranger is happy to get the work, preternaturally gifted with the animals, and an (unconscious?) object of lust self-denied.  Met with unreasonable belligerence simply for being a good worker, the resentment explodes during an isolated spring lambing trip where a shove becomes a fight and the fight becomes a sort of mutual rape.  (I know, an old cliché, but the sex for a change looks something like sex.)  Naturally, the relationship doesn’t run smoothly (unspoken love at first fuck?), while an unexpectedly upbeat ending feels whipped up for drama and an easy exit.  But the handsome locations and leads make it easy enough to accept.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Lots of misleading comparisons with BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN/’05 on this one.  Instead, try MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE/’85, mostly for the evolving relationship between Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/my-beautiful-laindrette-1985.html

ACCENT ON LOVE (1941)

Highly prized/highly paid, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is probably the best known of the Hollywood Ten, the ‘card carrying’ members of the Communist Party who went to jail in the late ‘40s rather than ‘cooperate’ (‘naming names’ of other members) to Washington’s HCUA investigators.  The public justification was that they were, as a group under Russian orders, slipping Commie Doctrine and 'The Party Line' into film scripts to warp weak American minds.  (And good luck finding anything more dangerous than a communal rooming house for single women to share during the wartime housing shortage.  Gals voting on common space issues?  The horror!)  If they’d only gone back to 1941, they might have salivated over this ‘original’ Trumbo story (heavily indebted to Frank Capra’s film adaptation of Kaufman/Hart’s YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38; its stupid, lazy screenplay credited to John Francis Larkin) which touches a Marxist third-rail in having George Montgomery’s junior investment exec, toss fat-cat Capitalist father-in-law Thurston Hall to the side so he can be his own man, working with his hands (and a shovel) digging ditches for the WPA and sharing a tenement flat with Portuguese foreman J. Carroll Naish & famille.   (Carroll also Marxist, but in looks & accent Chico Marxist!)  Montgomery also dumping his wife for fetching immigrant Osa Massen.  All living in a crumbling tenement apartment building owned by (wait for it) father-in-law Hall.  Naturally, this being Hollywood, an overnight stay at the flat opens Pop’s eyes to inequality.  He even drinks a toast to FDR.  Yikes!  On the other hand, the film has a rare pro-divorce message.  (Take that Catholic Joe Breen, head of the Production Code.)  The film, so chock-a-block with touchy issues, it’s a shame execution such a washout under director Ray McCarey, kid brother of the great Leo McCarey.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Ray McCarey, starting in comedy shorts like big brother Leo, but then going on to make tons of forgettable features, unlike Leo who in his early shorts put Laurel & Hardy together and then relatively few films, but some were classics like THE AWFUL TRUTH and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’45  before drying up and offering MY SON JOHN/’52, possibly the most ridiculous of all the anti-commie fear mongering pics.  It’s the one where mom Helen Hayes thinks son Robert Walker has turned ‘red’ when she finds out he’s been playing tennis.  (Maybe Leo was doing penance for his brother’s soul.)   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-son-john.html

CONTEST:  *Ray McCarey not the only less prominent kid brother working on this movie.  Name the other creative sibling with a more famous older brother to win a MAKQUIBS Write-Up of a streaming pic of your choice . . . assuming I can get it online!

TEHRAN TABOO (2017)

Hard to imagine a more timely moment for writer/director/animator Ali Soozandeh’s (Iranian-born, now living-in-exile) look at religious hypocrisy & sex (passion or paid-for) in a tradition-challenged modern Islamic State.  Structured in the form of a loosely bound relationship relay among a cross-section of twenty-somethings: prostitute with kid in tow; techno-musician pushing against old forms & disinterest*; pregnant wife with two illegal abortions behind her; deflowered fiancée desperate for a hymen repair job; not the slice of Iranian life you’d expect.  Sexual bartering used and abused by taxi drivers, landlords & pencil-pushers, rising all the way up to doctors and judges.  A constant threat from government enforcers, zealots with  military or religious agendas, fronting a second line of offense behind the daily offers of bribes in cash and/or sexual favors.  A societal pressure cooker that forces top talent to flee and those who can’t to take to the streets . . . as currently playing out.  All of it despairing and believable, presented in a sort of modern digitally-assisted rotoscope technique (filmed live-action manipulated into animated form) that has its pluses (buildings, backgrounds and objects well suited to the system with interesting color-sweetened transitions) and minuses (people in general and faces in particular losing individuality the closer you get).  A pity as some of the twists and reveals that connect separate story strands together lend a satisfying puzzle-solving aspect, but only deliver a fraction of the emotion they might have.  Worthy, in a good way; but Soozandeh has yet to put out another feature.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Ali N. Askin’s wide-ranging score a big plus.