DEPARTMENT Q THE ABSENT ONE / FASANDRÆBERNE (2016)

Currently streaming on NetFlix as DEPT. Q, the Scots-set/English-language redo of this series has a glamorously distressed Matthew Goode leading a motley squad thru Cold Case files; this is the second of the four Danish films it came out of.  (First one covered here:   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/03/department-q-keeper-of-lost-causes.html.)  Mikkel Nørgaard again directs Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the intense, self-destructive lead detective and Fares Fares is his relatively cool-headed second second.  This case pulls up a twenty year old double murder involving a cover-up by rich & powerful types, a posh private school for the entitled where everyone met & mingled, sexual blackmail, a fallen woman with secrets to hide (if she can just stay alive), and of course that school days double murder.  A nasty piece of business compared to the first case, but effective in its darker manner.  But it does lay things on pretty thick.  The bad guys don’t kick a dog, but they do bring a zebra to their sporting club for the annual hunt.  Not seen here, but apparently 3 and 4 are stronger entries in the series.  Still, this will do in a pinch.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Elsewhere on the internet, this time from Sweden,  DET SOM GÖMS I SNÖ  /  THE TRUTH WILL OUT/’18; ‘21 might be another version of the same Cold Case set-up.  Pretty good, though, if without a glam lead.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Just once, it’d be nice to see one of these over-obsessive types keep a promise to show for a family event: a school recital, Mom’s birthday dinner, Grandpa’s operation, a child’s hockey game, church choir practice!  In spite of beeps, buzzers & texts invading our sets, they can't set an alarm on their smart phone?

DERSU UZALA (1975)

After a career threatening triple blow (latest film on Tokyo have-nots, DODES'KA-DEN/’70, not just rejected, but killing his new Directors’ Commune with their first release, then an apparent suicide attempt), Akira Kurosawa returned to active filmmaking with this Russian-Japanese production.  A straightforward, intensely moving tale of Man, Nature & Friendship, epic and intimate, more importantly, beautifully realized.  Dersu Uzala (Maksim Munzuk), a solitary hunter in the uncharted Russian East (his family lost years ago to smallpox), he’s both aging & ageless, when he comes across a military surveying unit, led by Captain Vladimir Arsenev* (Yuriy Solomin).  With cunning awareness and superior knowledge of the ways, whys & wheres of the forest, Uzala soon becomes invaluable guide & guru, ready for almost any situation, even as the men tease him for his honesty & innocence.  But it’s the fast-developing bond with the Captain that leads the film thru a series of adventures and close calls.  Captured in immaculate scenes that have the rapture of early silent cinema, of something caught in the moment.  (We might be watching Lumière Brothers' ‘actualités’ from 1895 or an early D.W. Griffith California short made near the time of this story.)  The film structured in two halves and an epilogue, matching the two expeditions Captain Arsenev had with Uzala as guide, and the failed attempt to bring the now truly aging woodsman into the comfort of city civilization.  Fitted with one life-scaled, yet majestic set piece after another, though nothing (perhaps in all film) tops the storm sequence in the first half when last year’s stiff stalks of grass, are gathered at a frenzied pace by the two exhausted men to create a sort of grass igloo as overnight protection from a fast-coming blizzard and certain death.  The sort of patient excitement thrillingly realized thru-out the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Kurosawa’s return to form lasted thru his next film, KAGEMUSHA/’80.  After that, overreach and a great man’s scrappings.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kagemusha-1980.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *The story adapted from Arsenev’s memoirs about his expeditions, including his time with Uzala, while military surveyor to the Czar.  Editions in English available online.

FIRST TO FIGHT (1967)

Useful in showing just how cluelessly out-of-touch major studios had become by the 1960s (especially on mid-list releases), not good for much else.  This formulaic WWII tale (very loosely fact-based) was made for an audience that no longer existed.  It follows a Guadalcanal survivor, now a Medal of Honor Marine, sent home after battle on a bond-selling/morale-boosting tour across American where he finds love & marriage before returning on active duty to discover he’s lost his nerve.  Chad Everett, one of the last old-school studio contract players, blows any shot at movie stardom (he’d settle comfortably into series tv*) proving charmless in love & war as he aggressively courts chilly tour organizer Marilyn Devin, a ‘Tippi’ Hedren type who’s sex-wary after losing her husband at Pearl Harbor.  Directed with zero flair by Howard Hawks protégé Christian Nyby, this Warner Bros. release apes the bright, cheap-looking ‘60s Universal house style (underdressed interior sets, flat lighting, soundstage exteriors that look like Revell scale-models).  The film briefly livens up when sixth-billed Gene Hackman comes on in the third act to witness Everett’s battlefield collapse.  Lots of noisy ordinance exploded, but you can still hear old Hollywood dying not with a bang, but with a whimper.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Chad Everett hit big on tv with MEDICAL CENTER, but he’s mostly remembered for a testy appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, guest #2 after Lily Tomlin.  Women’s Rights in the air at the time (1972) and Everett, talking about all the animals he owns on his farm, includes the wife.  Yikes!  She’s the most important one he owns!  Ha ha.  Tomlin jumps up; walks out; big media the next day.  (See many clips on youtube.)  Few remember there’s even worse to come.  Post Tomlin, the show goes on with guest #3: World Famous poet, Mr. Age of Anxiety W.H. Auden, who hasn’t the slightest idea who any of these people are.  Or that Everett has just read a poem about his wife he had in a magazine.  Instead, Auden goes into benign entertainment mode, delighting all with a few of the short ditties he wrote for fun. ‘John Milton; Never stayed at a Hilton; Hotel; Which is just as well.’  At which point, Everett leans in to mention his literary output, saying  ‘We poets’ as he gestures toward Auden.  This is why people miss the ‘Seventies.  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That ‘whimper’ would include the film’s soundtrack, loaded with replays of ‘As Time Goes By’ from CASABLANCA/’42, seen in an extended clip in the wrong frame ratio.

REMEMBER (2015)

Effective, gimmicky, clever (too clever?), Atom Egoyan’s Holocaust-haunted movie, from an original screenplay by Benjamin August, plays like the Auschwitz revenge mystery Agatha Christie never got around to.*  And if that idea offends, perhaps not a film for you.  (Maybe even if you’re not offended.)  But on its own terms, with an ending O. Henry might have worked up for THE TWILIGHT ZONE, not without interest and a unique point-of-view.  In a modern Jewish assisted-living/Old Age home, Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau are the only survivors from the Auschwitz death camps, last to remember the block warden who murdered their families.  A man both have sworn to kill in revenge if they ever find him.  Landau now too frail to take on the mission/Plummer still physically able, but with his wife recently dead, rapidly sinking into dementia.  But with four possible matches scattered out West, his mission is also a race against time.  The best parts of the film come in simply watching Plummer navigate travel obstacles and his own cognitive decline.  (A great ironic bit reveals he’s crossed the border back from Canada when a security guard finds his gun, but its no big deal since this is America, where any feeble confused gentleman can carry a ‘glock.’  Here, the film’s grand lack of subtlety works like a charm, elsewhere, as he keeps finding the ‘’wrong’ fellow with the right name on his hunt, the basic gag wears thin.  Then there’s the big triple lutz twist ending (it’s a ‘Luke, I am your father’ moment) too neatly explains inconsistencies in Plummer’s character, and lands us in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS denouement territory.  I don’t mind that it’s cheap dramatics, I mind that Egoyan & August think they’re being profound.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Plummer, Landau and Bruno Ganz have all died since this came out.  But not before giving us another 27 credits.  Add on the still active Jürgen Prochnow and that number jumps to an impressive 39.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Or perhaps HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY.

SMART GIRLS DON’T TALK (1948)

Other than Virginia Mayo (and lenser Ted McCord), everyone in this tough little crime film were standard B-pic Hollywood journeymen.  Director Richard Bare largely did shorts before moving to tv series; scripter William Sackheim penned Bs before his decades as tv-movie producer; plus a cast of also-rans.  Happily, a lot of these folks underappreciated journeymen.  Particularly leading man  Bruce Bennett, consistently interesting as an expendable third-wheel, here getting a showcase assignment as the operator of a classy Manhattan boité with a posh gambling room in the back.  Seeing his place robbed in the opening scene, he can hardly go to the  police (they’d shut him down), instead, swallowing his loses, and paying off his guests, he’s the cool head in the room, sending his gang out to get even.  Enter Mayo, overstating her losses, she's a society type in decline.  These two quickly ‘see each other plain’ and immediately hit it off.  And what makes the film work is that Bennett is far from the nice ‘bad guy’ he seems to be, he’s a BAD bad guy.  And when Mayo’s kid brother, doctor-in-training Robert Hutton, shows up in town and becomes involved in a revenge murder, everyone’s true colors spill out in deadly fashion.  The film’s biggest problem is that Sackheim’s structure needs a strong fourth lead and the film only comes up with three.  It makes the ending pretty unsatisfying.  Pity.  Still worth a look.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Next year, M-G-M producer Arthur Freed made one of his rare non-musicals, an A-list example of this sort of thing with very big stars and an all too tidy Richard Brooks script in ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY/’49.

THE BLACK PHONE (2021)

Call it ABDUCTION OF A WIMPY KID: Paranormal Edition.  Designed for a new generation of DONNIE DARKO/’01 fans*, it probably works for them; elsewise, not so much.  Talented teen actor Mason Thames, currently training a dragon on screen, is the best thing about this indifferently played serial killer number about a man wearing a Hallowe’en fright mask and tempting boys off the street with black balloons.  Nothing peculiar or suspicious there for neighbors to notice, right?.  But the ruse works on Thames, led astray when he’s already in trouble at home: drunk, violent single-dad; tough customer little sister; and Thames the family wuss in spite of his talent as a baseball pitcher.  That’s how he met an earlier victim, a star batter he almost struck out.  Fortunately, li’l sister’s nightmares detail fresh leads for the police, and his creepy holding cell has a working phone with a direct line to dead previous victims.  But can this Hansel ‘grow a pair’ and trick Ethan Hawke’s Wicked Witch?  More moody than scary; with a 1978 setting that looks right, but feels wrong.  Something director Scott Derrickson, who would have been 12 at the time, ought to know.

ATTENTION MUST BE PATD/LINK:  *Bear in mind, this site is DARKO agnostic.  Underwhelmed at first sight, just as that film, a sizable flop on initial release, was building a formidable cult following.  A trajectory PHONE seems likely to reverse.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/donnie-darko-2001.html

SHANGHAI BLUES / SHANG HAI ZHI YEN (1984)

Hark Tsui’s popular slapstick-romance (rom-slap?), in many ways a typical ‘80s Hong Kong comedy (very bright/very breezy/loud & overplayed – now restored; see poster), opens in sweet & sour fashion, as real tragic events (the late ‘30s invasion of Shanghai by Japan) set up a meet-cute for two lost souls taking shelter under a bridge during the bombardment.  Promising to return to the spot after the war, the two are soon lost in the city’s confusion.  Eight years pass before they return to Shanghai, where they separately discover the bridge underpass now taken over by disabled war vets & vagrants.  Instead, they unknowingly find apartments in the same crumbling tenement building.  She’s on the third floor; he’s just above on the fourth. But will they even recognize each other, or find others before reuniting.  That’s the basic setup which Tsui rings his slapstick variations and chases on; with all sorts of comic characters (most with nightclub connections) missed meetings; misunderstandings, missed clues, etc.  But it’s the madcap milieu of bustling, fast recovering Shanghai and the constant flow of comic action amid street events, pedicab chases, parades, shopping & meals, close calls in apartments that function as mazes, pushed to their limits thru Tsui’s use of compound slapstick gags that recklessly pile up.  The mayhem more Frank Tashlin anarchy than Blake Edwards elegant precision.  Put together piecemeal style via matched edits that rely on concept rather than execution to make their mark.  At times you wish he’d slow down to better introduce his mixed up farcical plot and mismatched friends & lovers.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Around the same time, Jackie Chan was bringing this sort of Hong Kong action slapstick (minus the romance) to world cinema.  He’s still at it.  But the one that makes me laugh the most is KUNG FU HUSTLE/04.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/04/kung-fu-hustle-2004.html

LOOK-OUT SISTER (1947) BIG TIMERS (1945)

Back in the mid-‘40s, these two ‘race pictures’ (one a short feature/one a long short) would have been booked at segregated big-city theaters.  Think Harlem.  Conveniently coupled on an Alpha DVD (subfusc in sound & image here & on various internet sites), both come from the short-lived/Fort Lee-based All-American News, and both from (white) journeyman director Bud Pollard.  BIG takes first-billing on the DVD since it stars slow-talkin’ comedian Stepin Fetchit, the once wildly popular shufflin’ ‘Darkie’ character who tended to slip tiny victories past ‘the man’ to get his way thru what might generously be called ornery mock stupidity.*  Here he’s porter at an upscale Sugar Hill apartment that’s been ‘borrowed’ for the day to host an engagement party for the daughter of a working-class mom trying to impress the wealthy family the girl’s marrying into.  It’s really an excuse for a series of novelty acts, jazz bands and singers off the ‘chittlin’ circuit.’  And like the light-skinned/relaxed hair All-Girl Jazz Band playing in support, this one might ‘pass’ if the talent were better.  (The last solo singer best of the lot, with a bit of Pearl Bailey about her.)

Best skip this one; instead, enjoy the hour-long SISTER, where a fabulous Louis Jordan (sax-man/singer) and his swingin’ band work thru a passel of jump-jivin’ numbers, each better than the last, all while saving the Black-owned dude ranch/health spa where Jordan dreams he’s taking a cure and living a Western adventure.  Yippy-ki-yi-yay!  Popcorn junk, of course, but darn entertaining, worth booking at any theater.  If only someone could work up a decent restored print. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Hollywood put out All Colored pics, especially if they were musicals with a spot for Lena Horne.  See STORMY WEATHER, a mediocrity, but what a line-up of talent!  Or the truly wonderful CABIN IN THE SKY, both 1943.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/stormy-weather-1943.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/cabin-in-sky-1943.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One plus for BIG, the numbers appear to have been recorded ‘live,’ LOOK-OUT mostly pre-recorded.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Fetchit’s act needed a straight man he could toy with, someone who nearly catches on to how he's being duped.  Best seen in some mid-‘30s Will Rogers films.  Especially when these two start singing duets, often not even in the same room together.  There’s racial commentary and brothers-united-under-the-skin knowingness to these routines.

MY PAL GUS (1952)

‘Blanket’ lighting, airless soundstage exteriors, faceless supporting players, only leading man Richard Widmark and power-couple scribblers Kay & Michael Kanin pull this up from programmer status to B+ production.  Widmark plays a single Dad whose ex (Audrey Totter) abandoned him & their two-month old before he broke thru as a captain of industry type.  (It’s the candy industry, but still.)  A hard charging deal-maker, he thinks he can solve all problems with cash, so barely notices his now six-yr-old (George Winslow, the tot with the bull frog voice*) has become a tantrum throwing terror.  With no Mary Poppins in sight, he sticks the boy in Joanne Dru’s private schoolhouse program only to find out he can’t buy his way past her parental participatory policies.  Anyone for opposites attract?  Two acts later, the boy’s under control, Widmark’s fallen for ‘teach,’ and there’s not much left for drama.  Earning their salary at last, it’s Kanins to the rescue, with a third act that squeezes in three acts in one as Totter shows up to claim motherly rights in kid & cash after missing five+ years.  Turns out their Mexican divorce ain’t valid.  Smartly worked out* (Totter always a vivid baddie), with divorce court adding a bit of suspense even under Robert Parrish’s hands-off megging.  Not a lot of chemistry between the leads, but Widmark looks neat as a pin in well-tailored business suits.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *The set up (a kid so terrible you want to send him right back) must have been designed as a variation on THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF, but the Kanins held off since 20th/FOX was using that story the same year in O’HENRY’S FULL HOUSE/’52.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/01/o-henrys-full-house-1952.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Young Winslow’s freakish baritone (remembered from Howard Hawks’ GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES/’53) was the exact opposite of a Boy Soprano, but with a career trajectory ending exactly the same way: in puberty.