GRETEL & HANSEL (2020)

As director, Oz Perkins (Grandson of actor Osgood Perkins, B’way’s original Walter Burns in THE FRONT PAGE) has stuck to Horror with literary cachet, never more so than in this re-imagined lost-in-the-wood Brother/Sister act.  Topsy-turvy from the title down, here Gretel plays older, dominate sibling to kid brother Hansel.  Even before that, scripter Rob Hayes loads a backstory prologue to explain the Witch’s actions.  It’s a dark & spooky take on the old tale (more gooey than gory), split between medieval atmosphere and a modern vibe to the kids who generally speak & act like suburbanites, occasionally lapsing into foreign vowel enunciation (Irish?), lending a flat, anachronistic spin.  Intentional distancing?  Even the screen ratio (an eccentric 1.55 : 1) pulling attention.  Ultimately, it’s an intriguing defeat with Perkins losing grip of his story arc; 100 meticulous design details adding up to 100 meticulous design details.  Overcooked as one of the witch’s deep dish pies.  And the fascinating idea of the children not merely food supply, but heir(s) apparent, wafting away like a chilly breeze rustling thru the dry leaves.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Perhaps a story more in keeping with Perkins’ fixations; The Pied Piper of Hamelin?

DOUBLE-BILL: Nicolas Roeg’s version of Roald Dahl’s THE WITCHES/’90 (the one with Anjelica Huston) closer to the mark.

EXPERIMENT PERILOUS (1944)

Riding in the wake of GASLIGHT, a big ticket M-G-M item out just six weeks earlier, this copycat RKO production substitutes Hedy Lamarr, Paul Lukas & George Brent for Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer & Joseph Cotten to predictable result.*  The leads remain: sadistic/controlling husband; fragile, tormented wife; handsome stranger to the rescue; but here, the plot a pedestal with nothing to display.  Part of the problem is structural, we never see the wife before her decline so there's no sense of what's been lost; and a pedestrian good-guy-chasing-bad-guy climax that misses the psychological thrill of Bergman’s erstwhile victim taking revenge on erstwhile torturer in GASLIGHT.  Worse, a generic, overdressed Gothic production that boxes in director Jacques Tourneur.  No match for the visually beguiling use of claustrophobic vertically-oriented interior space director George Cukor got out of M-G-M’s art department & camera work.  A rare artistic (as opposed to commercial) win for the big guy on the Hollywood block.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *A few years back, Lamarr would have starred in GASLIGHT at home studio M-G-M.  Still under contract, but fading, she was loaned to RKO for this copy while Bergman was expensively borrowed from David O. Selznick.  Lamarr returned for HER HIGHNESS AND THE BELLBOY/’45 (not seen here), her last under M-G-M contract.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html

MANK (2020)

Not since AMADEUS/’84 has an acclaimed period piece been such hogwash.  David Fincher, missing critical objectivity working off a decades old passion-project script by his late father Jack (his sole credit), takes another look at the trials & tribulations of getting CITIZEN KANE to the screen, focusing on Herman Mankiewicz’s original screenplay.  A topic long & drearily debated, even after it was sorted out (in the ‘70s!) after critic Pauline Kael ascribed too much credit to Mank, an accreditation throughly debunked by Robert L. Carringer.  Truth is, that’s neither here nor there as far as this film’s troubles go.  Those stem from its motivational motor, a fanciful claim that ties KANE’s skewering of newspaper magnate W.R. Hearst and movie star mistress Marion Davies to Mank’s outrage over tactics used by Hollywood moguls to defeat Socialist Gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair in 1934.  Truth is, that’s neither here nor there as far as this film’s troubles go.  Those stem from Fincher’s inorganic stylistic flourishes with old-time Hollywood looks & sound.  (1930s flashbacks with ‘40s Big Band Swing just the tip of the iceberg.)  Truth is, that’s neither here nor there as far as this film’s troubles go.  Those stem from Father Fincher’s habit of indiscriminately loading in famous Hollywood tales without concern for proper time, place or source.  Mank’s kid brother, writer/producer/director Joseph Mankiewicz gets a doozy: Kicked out of M-G-M for making a pun about producer Mervyn LeRoy going over budget on THE WIZARD OF OZ.*   This isn’t storytelling, it’s name-dropping.  And, be it noted, a year after KANE, Mank had his biggest commercial success (plus an Oscar® nom) with PRIDE OF THE YANKEES/’42.  Two years after KANE, uncredited work on THE HUMAN COMEDY, a pet project of M-G-M chief Louis B. Mayer.  All while drinking himself to death.  Fortunately, there’s a good cast: Gary Oldman, better as Mank than he was as Winston Churchill*; and a touching combination of cunning & simplicity from Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies.  (But why drop her famous stutter?  Davies, terrified of the Talkies, found she didn’t stutter at all on dialogue.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Joe was still producing at M-G-M years after OZ. . . maybe because no one ‘got’ his witty gag.  The Finchers miss it, too.  Tweaking Mervyn LeRoy with LE ROI S'AMUSE refers to the Victor Hugo play (later Verdi’s RIGOLETTO).  Other inside jokes similarly blunted.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Heck, Oldman wasn’t even the best Churchill that year.

DOUBLE-BILL: Naturally, CITIZEN KANE/’41.  As Pauline Kael correctly pointed out in her article, it’s more fun than just about any other ‘great’ film.  And if Welles made deeper, richer pics later on, none had the narrative thrust Mank’s ROSEBUD gave KANE thru simple Pop psychology.

THE FOUNTAIN (1934)

Well intentioned, but lugubrious, this near actionless WWI downer opens with a prologue that has a trainload of British POWs unload in technically neutral Holland.  Atmospherically lit by cinematographer Henry Gerrard (his penultimate film before dying next year at 35), this first reel of standard wartime prison life quickly gives way to sedate drawing room drama when the camp gives the men restricted freedom if they swear to remain in Holland ‘for the duration.’  Brian Ahearn, in a good early role, is one lucky Brit officer, an academic happy to be out of the war, he’s even happier to land at the home of one time love interest Ann Harding, now living at a grand estate, married to German officer Paul Lukas.  Seems she never loved the man she married, so no surprise when things quickly heat up between the former couple just as Lukas shows up, horribly wounded, near death, looking far more glamorous in this dreadful condition than he normally does on screen.  (An old Hollywood custom: Beautification Thru Illness.)  All handled in long-winded, genteel fashion.  And while it’s not bad talk, the discussion on pity vs. true love, loyalty, honor and sacrifice not without interest, no one bothered to make it particularly dramatic.  Well played though, and wonderfully scored by Max Steiner who liked his big romantic theme well enough to reuse it in GONE WITH THE WIND for Melanie Wilkes.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Ann Harding isn’t often heard from these days, a pity not much helped here.  For that, compare her 1930 Early Talkie version of Philip Barry’s HOLIDAY  with Kate Hepburn's in ‘38.

MLK/FBI (2020)

Straightforward and satisfying, Sam Pollard’s narrow-focus documentary on Martin Luther King, Jr and the ‘60s Civil Rights Movement doesn’t put blinders on, larger social justice issues are also caught in his net, but concentrates on J. Edgar Hoover’s misuse of F.B.I. resources to harass King as organizing principle, giving a new take on an old story.  Not that much of what’s in here hasn’t long been inferred/assumed, but with new declassified  documents, Pollard is able to confirm the difficulties & pressure Hoover used against King.  Told largely using recent audio interviews on the soundtrack and ‘60s archival footage on screen, the story remains riveting as ever though much still remains missing.  Not only from secretly recorded tapes (many of them ‘bedroom tapes’) due out in 2027, but in knowing how much Hoover believed of his own motivating story.  Did he truly think the Civil Rights Movement was some sort of Communist Front?  Was it unprincipled expedience?  Or pure & simple racism?  And we really need more on the close relationship between King and friend/confident/advisor Stanley Levinson, white, Jewish,  card-carrying Communist back in the day.  With hardly a photo on the relationship and even less film footage.  Yet it’s this relationship, along with King’s serial infidelities, that was seen by the FBI as his two major Achilles Heels/points of attack.*  All pretty fascinating . . . and more than a little depressing.   Not only on the FBI side of things as the fast fallout between LBJ and MLK once King could no longer keep silent on Vietnam, equally dramatic, especially as heard in a blunt taped phone conversation with LBJ and Hoover.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *JFK, LBJ and MLK had more in common than being known by three initials, they also were all drawn to the danger of extramarital affairs.  The film’s fourth leading figure, J. Edgar, had sexual proclivities of a different nature.  Still, lots of sex going on under the radar here.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: A tour de force on stage for Bryan Cranston,  Robert Schenkkan’s pageant play ALL THE WAY (about LBJ pushing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 thru Congress) became noticeably less involving as a film in 2016, but does provide a different angle on this story.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/all-way-2016.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In a great archival shot, the uniformity of tall, fit, white, black-suited FBI agents seen walking thru ranks of equally uniform well-coiffed, neat, white secretaries seated at desks in an immense office space looks like something from Alien Planet Earth, circa 1962.

UPGRADE (2018)

Smart little futuristic thriller from fast-rising writer/director Leigh Whannell about a hands-on analog guy in a hands-free digital tomorrow who loses his wife & wakes up paraplegic after an inexplicable hit-and-run set up.  Luckily for him, his last delivery (he restores old-school GTO roadsters) was to a Steve Jobs/Elon Musk type who has just the widget (experimental/untested) needed to rewire his bod back into action.  Once on his feet, he turns to revenge, hunting down the perps who ruined his life, getting a little too much help from that implanted microchip which soon threatens to take complete charge over the human frame it’s lodged in.  Zippily handled and often very funny (in a sick, violent way), the film is to some extent held back by needlessly bad acting (Whannell excelling on the  technical side) and by a host of derivative homages: expected (BLADE RUNNER; JOHN WICK) and ‘un’ (THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN; the old Edmund O’Brien version of D.O.A.).  Even the voice of 2001's HAL-9000 shows up, imitated for ‘Stem,’ the controlling spinal plug-in speaking inside the head of our recovered victim.*  Whannell also can’t get past his own decidedly unsurprising ending, though he tries teasing it out with a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too twist.  (You can all but hear studio execs debating which ending is the better bet for a possible sequel.)  Plenty fun in spite of missteps, perhaps even more valuable as portent of things to come from the talented Mr. Whannell.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *No titles, but this modest film already better than some of its precursors.

THIS LOVE OF OURS (1945)

WARNING: All Spoilers WriteUp!  Absurd three-hankie soaper supposedly adapted from master Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello.  In brief: Leaving his clinging daughter to her morbid fixation over her late mother, widower doctor Charles Korvin goes to an out-of-town conference where a night on the town brings him face-to-face with his past . . . his very much alive wife (the girl's mother) Merle Oberon, currently working as piano-playing partner to nightclub ‘insult caricaturist’ Claude Rains.  Hours later, our doctor is saving the depressed Oberon from a botched suicide.  Surviving this near miss, Oberon’s now determined to reclaim her role as mother even if it means pretending to be Doc’s new wife and never telling her teenage daughter the biological truth.  Flashback to the happy young couple just getting started as a family when town gossip places Oberon with another man.  Rather then ask about it, Dr. Korvin grabs their little girl and disappears.  Now, fate has brought a second chance.  Back in the present, the girl only resents Step-mom, Doc won’t speak up, ‘new’ Mom hides behind her fake identity and accepts blame for all unfortunate changes at home, and Rains glumly says ‘I told you so.’  Then, a birthday party brings an unexpected guest, the mystery man who broke up the family.  And he doesn’t even recognize Oberon!  Not that he didn’t care, but that he couldn’t see.  Yikes!  Turns out he was a blind man at the time, but now can see and eventually (thru touch) remembers Merle as his former (wait for it) not lover, but piano instructor!  Yes, it was all a most unfortunate mistake.  Now, if only they can get the girl to understand.  Perhaps Claude Rains, in making her wish come true by fashioning from verbal description a caricature portrait of her late mom, can bring resolution.  Sure enough, when he does, it looks just like . . .  guess who.  What a Freudian nightmare of a happy ending.  With director William Dieterle completely at a loss on how to pull this off, you’re left to imagine how John M. Stahl, Frank Borzage or Douglas Sirk might have done it.  Sure enough, Sirk almost did, starting development on a Rock Hudson remake, NEVER SAY GOODBYE/’56, before handing it off to director Jerry Hopper.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: That remake, NEVER SAY GOODBYE (not seen her), sounds pretty clever, setting the whole farrago as a romance split in two by Iron Curtain/Cold War sympathies.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Unlike most Hollywood stars of her generation, Merle Oberon keeps fiddling with her hair style within a single film.  Here with about five different looks.  Exhausting!

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)

Perhaps because an earlier BBC mini-series functioned as a something of a practice run, this Sci-Fi Horror from Hammer Studios is unusually well thought out/put together . . . and nods toward H.G.  Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS don’t hurt either.  It opens as construction at a London Underground station is halted by the discovery of a fossilized skull, a leftover from some primitive ancestor.  But further digging reveals further mysteries, an impregnable pod, a decaying army of alien life forms, inexplicable mind-control & force fields emanating from some energy source.  Could the pod itself be a living danger?  Naturally, military & police discount all evidence before their eyes to politicians & police eager to play down any panic inducing threat, even as scientists & historians warn of apocalyptic implications.  Remnants of a Martian attempt to colonize the Earth Five Million Years Ago as their planet was growing inhabitable?!!  (Note alternate American poster title.)  A bit glib & too brightly lit at first, director Roy Ward Baker & scripter Nigel Kneale soon find their groove with help from an exceptional cast who seem to be enjoying taking this one seriously (James Donald, Andrew Keir and Barbara Shelley in red plaid or green summer dress, just right for research!).  With simple but well turned effects (other than the plasticky aliens) and a legit fear factor in the smash finale, this could be Hammer’s top pic.  Certainly their best sans Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing.

DOUBLE-BILL: Author Nigel Knead much preferred this QUATERMASS to the earlier pair with Brian Donlevy as the professor, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT/’55; QUATERMASS 2/’57.

TONIGHT WE SING (1953)

Innocuous biopic of Sol Hurok, classical music manager extraordinaire for most of the last century, a final credit in a career of innocuous, mostly musical films produced by America’s Toastmaster General, ex-vaudeville comedian George Jessel.*  (Innocuously directed by Mitchell Leisen for 20th/Fox just before CinemaScope came in to help these pageant-like shows.)  David Wayne causes little stir as Hurok, talent-challenged music lover, and Anne Bancroft (before Hollywood figured out what to do with her) even less as his wife, always taking second place to the talent.  And talent is the reason to watch these things . . . or not.  Here, lens-friendly soprano Roberta Peters and Jan Peerce’s tenor emanating from handsome non-starter Byron Palmer may not have voices for the ages, but Tamara Toumanova as Anna Pavlova pirouettes to beat the band while Isaac Stern is in youthful prime as violinist Eugene Ysaye, even getting an acting scene.  But the real draw is Ezio Pinza, past prime, but still sounding like a God, as Feodor Chaliapin.*  The great basso cantante of his era fell flat in Hollywood after his classical-to-pop breakthru on B’way in SOUTH PACIFIC with two major M-G-M duds.  Limping to 20th/Fox for redemption, he’s spot on if you don’t mind an Italian accent on the Russian singer.  Very funny too, especially in a late scene where he explains himself to a despairing Hurok.  Alas, too late as the film didn’t catch on and Pinza went back to B’way for success in Harold Rome’s touching musical FANNY.  (Pinza died before the run ended and the filmed version had Charles Boyer in the role with all the tunes repurposed as background score.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Jessel owned the single most bone-headed decision in all Hollywood lore when he ankled on the late-‘20s film version of his recent stage hit because the studio refused to pay him extra for the newfangled synch-sound system they were planning on trying out.  The movie?  THE JAZZ SINGER/’27.  Al Jolson took the part.

ATTTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Pinza knew Chaliapin well, playing Pimen to his Boris Godonov at The Met in the ‘20s, singing in Italian with the rest of the cast while Chaliapin alone sang in Russian.  Later, Pinza took on Boris, still in Italian.  Here, he sings it in Russian.

LA SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE (1942)

Magnificently produced, if highly fanciful, biopic of French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz, made during the Nazi occupation, but not given general release till after the war.  (Apparently, Propaganda Minister Goebbels found it too covertly French patriotic!  Nazi approved films were meant to lull the locals, not stir them up!)  Imaginatively directed by Christian-Jaque, whose best known work lay ahead (UN REVENANT; FANFAN LA TULIPE), it’s handsomely lensed (and sepia tinted) by Henri-Georges Clouzot/Julien Duvivier regular Armand Thiraud, with deluxe production design from Andrej Andrejew and solidly cast from Jean-Louis Barrault’s Berlioz on down.  What’s missing is a believable script.  So many great stories to choose from (easily found in his famous MEMOIRS*), replaced by weary clichés of misunderstood genius.  Who’d skip over Berlioz locked at The Academy writing a cantata to win a Prix de Rome while outside the 1828 Paris Uprising is tearing down the city.  And though we cover his infatuation with Shakespearean Irish actress Harriet Smithson, they ignore the fact that she only spoke English and he only French!  (They married anyway.)  And where’s her sudden arrival at the first performance of his SYMPHONY FANTASTIQUE?  Ground zero of the Romantic Era.  Or the death of Berlioz’s beloved son at sea.  His losing fight to have his masterpiece, LES TROYENS, performed at somethng like full length at L’Opera.  (Tellingly, a roaming shot  of his most famous scores doesn’t even include it as TROYENS all but disappeared until  the 1950s.)  Even when we do get a famous moment, it’s out of context/out of order, meaninglessly tucked away.  Very frustrating to watch, though worth a look as you can so easily see what might have been.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *David Cairns’ essential 2-volume Berlioz bio (best read in reverse order), even better than the MEMOIRS or Jacques Barzun’s classic BERLIOZ AND THE ROMANTIC CENTURY, with Volume One climaxing at the SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE premier.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Hollywood biopics of classical composers are equally bad.  Though SONG OF LOVE/’47, with Katherine Hepburn, Paul Henreid & Robert Walker, as the Schumanns & Brahms (I know, I know, it sounds terrible), is a lot better than you expect.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/02/song-of-love-1947.html

AIR MAIL (1932)

The story’s familiar from later films about planes in threatening skies and tough ex-pilot managers working out of cramped control rooms (think Howard Hawks’ CEILING ZERO*, like this written by Frank Wead*, or ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS/’39 with its classic Jules Furthman script), but this well made John Ford film earned its wings first.  Made on the cheap at Universal, it looks swell with lenser Karl Freund pushing in for emphasis more than was Ford’s wont, excellent models, process work & effects for the period, astounding stunt flying and superb staging for the ensemble scenes.  The assignment something of a punishment from home studio Fox after Ford went on a bender when he should have been wrapping up ARROWSMITH/’31 on loan to Sam Goldwyn.  You’ll tumble to the plot as soon as you see Ralph Bellamy's manager sending his air mail crew out on the next dangerous run, missing dates with main squeeze Gloria Stuart, getting bad news on his eyesight from Doc, and resentfully greeting flashy replacement pilot Pat O’Brien.  With standout support from Slim Summerville as a comic relief mechanic and Leslie Fenton as a pilot with a past, Ford, perhaps because of the tight budget, neither dawdles nor overdoses on booze jokes.  A damn good little picture, ignored in Ford surveys yet showing plenty of future themes including a ‘Print the legend’ moment after a horrifying plane crash death, and a fascinating early touch of racial conscience-lifting with Stuart teaching a class of Native American kids in a room James Stewart might have recognized from similar use in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE/’62.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *In CEILING ZERO/’36, Pat O’Brien takes the Bellamy spot and James Cagney scores as the O’Brien cock-of-the-walk pilot.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above: CEILING ZERO; ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.

https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/09/ceiling-zero-1936.html 

https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/only-angels-have-wings-1939.html

OR: *Ford’s bio of Frank Wead: THE WINGS OF EAGLES/’57. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/wings-of-eagles-1957.html

DA 5 BLOODS (2020)

Francis Ford Coppola went to Vietnam and found a Heart of Darkness.  Spike Lee goes to Vietnam and finds The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  That’s the gobsmacking idea behind this shockingly self-indulgent, over-praised, woefully inadequate tall, tall tale about the four surviving ‘Bloods,’ Black infantry vets who return to ‘Nam for love and money.  Love in the form of the remains of the fifth ‘Blood’ (Chadwick Boseman), the noblest soldier of them all, left behind where he died.*  Money in the form of a chest of gold discovered on their downed helicopter which they buried near their comrade-in-arms.  With glances at many a previous Vietnam film, as well as THREE KINGS (with which it shares a cinematographer), BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE*, the afore mentioned SIERRA MADRE and more!  The film so overloaded with fanciful plot reverses, bloody gun battles and award-lusting acting turns, it sinks under its own weight an hour & a half before it expires.  (Like the men with their backpacks full of gold bricks.)  You start looking forward to one of Lee's signature didactic sidebar pauses just to break things up, a racially charged injustice factoid (relevant or not) or an archival clip to relieve the narrative onslaught of this testosterone addled shaggy dog story.  Enough Black filmmakers are around now so we no longer call someone, as Lee was called after SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, the Black Woody Allen, or after CLOCKERS, the Black Martin Scorsese.  But when a film is propped up with so many this-is-important signifiers of historical gravitas, he just might be the Black Stanley Kramer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: And even when Lee does stage an effective moment, it’s undercut by Terrence Blanchard’s weirdly inappropriate mournful music soundtrack.  ALSO: What’s with all the shape-shifting screen ratios?  The bulk of present day scenes shot standard ‘flat’ (1.85 : 1); flashbacks in squarish Academy Ration (1.33 : 1).  Why the occasional shots in 2.35 : 1?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Make that Survivors +1 as there’s a son with Dad issues tagging along.  He’s really there to dance an Irish Jig upon finding the gold, just like Walter Huston did in his son’s pic,  John Huston’s TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *The reference really less John Ford/LIBERTY VALANCE then Bernardo Bertolucci/THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM/’72.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/strategia-del-ragno-spiders-stratagem.html

AVEC LE SOURIRE / WITH A SMILE (1936)

After starring in Early Talkies & increasingly sophisticated musicals @ Paramount, M-G-M and 20th Century Pictures, plus a one-off in Britain, Maurice Chevalier finally made a sound film in France.*   Something of belated debut as he was pushing 50, not that he looked it, this pleasant little comedy from Maurice Tourneur (of all directors) tosses a few songs in the mix, but you’d hardly call it a musical.  Chevalier’s a carefree flâneur, getting by on charm, bluff and a winning smile.  Short of cash when he meets a pretty girl, he quickly raises some to join her for lunch by returning a lost dog for the reward.  Mind you, first he has to steal the dog.  He’s that sort of fellow, it’s that sort of storyline.  And it’s onward & upward after that, eventually earning a spot directing top Paris music revues until his luck runs out.  But he’ll soon be back in the game, girl in tow, from his new perch on the Riviera.  Breezy, with nice momentum from Tourneur, using simple shot choices, the film misses proper musical numbers for Chevalier, only a few casual songs and one showcase number for him to sing in a variety of styles.  The sole production number for chorus & dance girls at the revue.  The film nails the attitude, but comes up short on content.

DOUBLE-BILL: Chevalier was careful choosing his post-Hollywood directors (Tourneur, Julien Duvivier, René Clair, Robert Siodmak), but only returned to form in the ‘50s in Billy Wilder’s LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON/’57 and Vincente Minnelli’s GIGI/’58.  From this middle period, try Clair’s MAN ABOUT TOWN/’47 (in its French cut as LE SILENCE EST D’OR), with a plot Alan Jay Lerner largely lifted for AN AMERICAN IN PARIS/’51 which he wrote with Chevalier in mind as the older man uncomfortably engaged to emotionally indebted Leslie Caron.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Before subtitles & dubbing came into common practice, Chevalier often made alternate French-language versions of his films, just not in France.

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER (1982)

Writer Hugh Whitemore & director Alan Bridges’ film of Rebecca West’s WWI novel, her sole feature adaptation, tends to be snubbed as an also-ran Merchant/Ivory British upper-crust period piece.  Perhaps that’s a good thing, its leaner, less stuffy, slightly abstract narrative leading us thru a quietly heartbreaking story without some inferred docent pointing out what we should be looking at.*  In any event, the acting of the six leads alone makes it a must.  Alan Bates is the shell-shocked soldier come home with a twenty-year memory loss.  He knows the old family estate and his cousin Ann-Margaret (working in a believable Mid-Atlantic accent), but not Julie Christie, his painfully beautiful, society-oriented wife.  Instead, his mind harks back to the rather plain girl he loved & lost: Glenda Jackson, now grown, aged, childless and quietly married to Frank Finlay.  Christie’s lack of sympathy, refusal to understand and willful irritation at Bates’ medical condition unfathomably cruel, the root of her problem not a loss of affection or even the possibility of a rekindled affair, but stemming from a sense of embarrassment (even outrage) to see Bates involved with a woman below their station.  So while Jackson, with help from Ian Holm’s psychiatrist worries over hope & happiness (along with her growing distance at home with her own husband), Christie is entirely wound up in class privilege and entitlement.  She could deal with a tramp as a mistress or a social equal as rival, but with Jackson, the only explanation is love of a kind she has never known, too devastating for her to try and understand.   Beautifully observed and played, the film deserves far more attention than it receives.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Not to get too down on Merchant/Ivory, at their best traveling without a Baedeker to lean on in A ROOM WITH A VIEW/’85.  OR: More Jackson & Hugh Whitemore in the art-house hit, STEVIE/’78, about British poet Stevie Smith, filmed in a lightly stylized theatrical mode, with Mona Washbourne nearly stealing the pic (from Jackson!) as Stevie’s fading elderly Aunt.

BEGGARS OF LIFE (1928)

Wildly entertaining late silent makes a perfect entry point to the form for anyone who enjoys the great silent comedians and wants to keep exploring.  (Look for the shorter 84 minute version, in pristine condition from KINO, edited down for the original 1928 music & effects synch soundtrack release, rather than the optional 100 minute unaccompanied silent cut currently available only in subfusc prints.)  William Wellman, in one of his best efforts, working especially well with cinematographer Henry Gerrard, shows imagination & narrative economy on made-in-the-camera dissolves & double-exposures in the opening reel to aid exposition as handsome, likeable tramp Richard Arlen offers work in exchange for breakfast to a dead man.  Yikes!  Hadn’t realized the guy was shot, killed by pretty young ward Louise Brooks when he tried to rape her.  Top that meet-cute!  Soon the pair are on the run, hoping to hop a freight to Canada before someone recognizes Brooks from those Wanted Posters already going up.  With Brooks dressed as a boy to avoid detection*, they try joining a hobo circle but are soon found out only to be rescued by Wallace Berry, something of a King of the Tramps thanks to his toughness and a small barrel of hooch.  He’s no pushover, merely trying to have Brooks for himself.  But with the police out in force to nab Brooks on that murder charge, the whole little hobo army hops the next train west.  More adventures and grand escapes ahead, along with consistently superb location work, dangerous stunting, train wrecks, tunnel escapes and growing complications in the relationships of our three leads.  Berry a towering presence here, with surprisingly delicate effects lifting his usual gruff, but sympathetic bad guy up a level or two.  With Arlen & Brooks an enchanting couple on screen.*

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *But not so happy off set, according to Brooks in her classic LULU IN HOLLYWOOD memoir which devotes a chapter to the film.  Fascinating stuff.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Maxwell Anderson made the same Jim Tully novel into an unrelated play (OUTSIDE LOOKING IN) on B’way in 1925 with Charles Bickford in the lead and James Cagney in a bit.

DOUBLE-BILL: Author Tully’s only other Hollywood credit a fascinating chain-gang prison meller with Pat O’Brien, LAUGHTER IN HELL/’33, made in the wake of I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG/’32.  OR: *Wellman must have liked Brooks’ look disguised as a boy, repeating it on future wife Dorothy Coonan in WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD/’33.

MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM (2020)

On the stage, in his decalogue of plays covering the Black Experience in 20th Century America (one for each decade), playwright August Wilson often seemed to be vamping in search of a theme before unleashing a series of carefully placed/spaced/paced dramatic monologues, spoken ariosos to cauterize some great ‘original’ racial sin that had been hiding in plain sight since the curtain went up.  When the original cast was still around, the effect could be devastating, but if the plays ran long enough to get replacements (not a given on later works), detonation never arrived.  And this makes for unusually difficult screen transferals.  Filmed ‘as is,’ you get canned theater without the frisson of a live happening; reworked into a more naturalistic presentation, and you have to be brave enough to lose the big speeches, Wilson's raison d’être.  This well received version of one of the earlier/better plays in the cycle, sees director George C. Wolfe & adapter Ruben Santiago-Hudson splitting the difference between the two approaches, achieving artificial & suspense free results.  They open by tossing aside a classic delayed star entrance for Viola Davis’s Ma Rainey with a misconceived prologue: a phony ‘cinematic’ start with an apparent chain-gang escape that actually leads directly into a blues concert in the swamp-lands.  But it only unbalances things as Rainey, in  losing an aura of anticipation and mystery as unseen presence, gives the play entirely over to Chadwick Boseman’s ambitious musician, his talent constrained as backup man when Rainey (with Davis slathered in makeup as apparently was true of the real Ma Rainey) goes to the studio to make some 78rpm records.  (Inappropriately shot in classic Hollywood ’Golden Hour’ lighting in spite of drab/cloistered studio conditions.)  There’s a lot of dreary forced drama about the Blues singer’s prerogatives, but the main interest (certainly for Wilson) lies in how a display of force against white privilege (studio & music rights held by white owners & white manager) feed Black frustration and how the inevitable violent eruption is taken out not on the white perpetrators, but on their own Black Community.  Powerful on stage, here, under Wolfe, and in spite of Boseman’s handsome work, feeling arbitrary.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *No doubt, the shock ending more effective on stage in 1984 with Charles Dutton in the role.  Though it’s great to see Boseman, in what proved to be his final role, working a less deferential mode than he often was assigned to play.

FELLINI'S CASANOVA (1976)

Coming off AMARCORD/’73, Federico Fellini was in a very strong commercial position when he made this take-no-prisoners film about the many affairs and perversions of that real life Don Giovanni, diplomat/musician/escape-artist/memoirist Giacomo Casanova.  (Mozart’s DON GIOVANNI librettist Lorenzo da Ponte knew Casanova who was even at the opera’s premiere, but unlike Federico, had the wit to have him go winless all thru the opera.)  Focused almost entirely on the search for sex, love & royal commissions thru European aristocracy (from lux to deadend), the film opens with the first of many showstoppers, a Venetian Carnavale, duly followed, if not topped, by courtly staged entertainment (public & private) alongside sexual conquests & contests of stamina (private & public).   As positioned for Giuseppe Rotunno’s camera, Donald Sutherland’s Casanova in coitus might as well be exercising in a rowing machine while the big production numbers play like the disastrous out-of-town try-out in Vincente Minnelli’s THE BAND WAGON.  Alas, Fellini without self-critical perception on his own excesses on this never-ending 18th Century fashion show, more Baron Munchausen than Casanova.  For those who hang on, things improve as Casanova’s luck & fortune desert him, the more downbeat & monochromatic life gets, the handsomer Fellini’s mise en scène.  Best in a post opera sequence with stagehands coming out in the darkened theater to ‘fan’ out the chandelier candles.  An enchanting effect.

DOUBLE-BILL: A passionate night with an automaton inevitably brings THE TALES OF HOFFMAN to mind.  The Offenbach opera a superb vehicle for Fellini’s overelaborated late career mode . . . if only Powell/Pressburger hadn’t already overelaborated on it in 1951!

LOST / TEARS FOR SIMON (1956)

Standard-issue police procedural on the hunt for a lost toddler gets by on local color (Locality: London; Colour: EastmanColor) and an oddly complacent tone.  (Other than Mom, the anxiety level might be better suited to a stolen house plant than a lost curly-headed tot.)  David Knight and Julia Arnall, off-key and off-putting, are the parents, an American couple in London running down various rabbit holes and generally getting in the way of sensible Detective Inspector David Farrar.  With a new lead to follow in every reel, classy cinematographer turned journeyman director Guy Green keeps things moving (there’s a neat surprise to end the second act), but the film’s main interest lies in Harry Waxman’s location work in the city and beyond, from a time when color photography wasn’t a given.*  With the shiny, grain-free EastmanColor coming up fresh as paint on recent digital downloads.

DOUBLE-BLL/LINK: *Waxman had much the same task in SAPPHIRE/’59, now working his EastmanColor in the backstreets of London for director Basil Dearden on the far more interesting police investigation of a racially motivated murder case.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/07/sapphire-1959.html

MINARI (2020)

Inspired by his own backstory, writer/director Lee Isaac Chung finds straightforward beauty in this family farm story about Korean immigrants (father/mother/two kids) who take a big leap of faith after ten lean years, moving from baby chick sorting in California to working their own 50 acre lot in Arkansas to grow Korean style crops.  (Chick sorting on the side as they get started.)  No real surprises, but lots of crises for ambitious dreamer Dad and more practical Mom, plus young son with a heart condition that needs watching and a remarkably well-adjusted older sister.  Add in a pair of wildcards in Bill Patton’s farmhand, a man living in a constant state of religious ecstacy; and the late family addition of Youn Yuh-jung’s non-traditional maternal Grandmother in a standout perf.  But really, all the cast exceptional, neighbors & local church-goers, too.  And while there’s a natural melodramatic slant to a structure built largely out of a series of crises solved (weather, water sourcing, marital face-offs, fire, isolation, canceled produce orders, Mountain Dew), Chung pays for every moment of sentiment with honest, even heartbreaking dramatic loss, and locates a Neo-Realistic core in spite of all four principals having long lists of credits.  Lots of awards on this one; well deserved.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: Chung already slotted to write/direct a Live Action remake of YOUR NAME/’06, Makoto Shinkai’s hugely successful anime.  Good choice!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kimi-no-na-wa-your-name-2016.html

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Similar story elements in Jean Renoir's best Hollywood film, THE SOUTHERNER/’45.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-southerner-1945.html

SIGN OF THE PAGAN (1954)

Sandwiched between two Rock Hudson vehicles, director Douglas Sirk made the WideScreen Christian historical he probably hoped to avoid.  His first CinemaScope project, a big brawny epic about Attila the Hun (Jack Palance slathered in Max Factor) taking on a divided Roman Empire (Constantinople only gets a friendly visit) and coming up against Centurion Jeff Chandler’s military tactics and his own fast developing Christian conscience.  After a lumpy start on unconvincing, museum diorama soundstage sets with understaffed invader hordes, things improve once we head to the great (California) outdoors with the film finding its footing arguing a la Edward Gibbon on the role Christianity played in The Decline and Fall . . . not of Rome but of Attila!  Not an uninteresting idea, though straying so far from what we know about Attila (dying not in battle, but from wedding night revels!) as to be largely useless.  Palance is really the whole show here.  And, once you accustom yourself to his oversized playing, spectacular.

DOUBLE-BILL: Vet helmer Michael Curtiz also debuted in CinemaScope this year in another religious-themed historical, THE EGYPTIAN/’54, a handsomely designed, starrily cast Pre-Christian dud about a doctor who turns from Egypt’s many Gods to Monotheism.

PUBLIC HERO NUMBER 1 (1935)

Even before her well-deserved breakout in THE WHOLE TOWN’S TALKING/’35 hit theaters, Jean Arthur, here on loan from Columbia to M-G-M , shows staggering comic confidence, as well as great chemistry with undervalued co-star Chester Morris, in this slightly mad, highly enjoyable genre mash-up.  Or does once she finally shows up in the third reel.  Before then, twenty minutes of prison drama for undercover Fed Agent Morris, posing as a convict as part of his mission to infiltrate and take down the notorious Purple Gang.  (The real Purple Gang, a Jewish mob outfit in Detroit, lends nothing but their name.)  Once out, Morris meets-cute with Arthur when he runs the bus she’s on into a ditch during a rainstorm.  Soon, they’re off to pick up alcoholic mob doc Lionel Barrymore, needed to get a bullet out of fellow prison escapee Joseph Calleia, Purple Gangster/half-brother of Jean Arthur.  Who’d thunk?  After this revelation, the film doesn’t exactly soar on believability, but under director J. Walter Ruben and lenser Gregg Toland there’s relentless pace, romantic banter and enough odd plot turns & clever visual bits to keep you from thinking too hard about what’s going on.  More Warners gangster pic, less posh M-G-M crime cautionary, and all the better for it if not quite first-rate.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: While Arthur was moving up in Hollywood, Morris was about to get downgraded, leaving M-G-M for third wheel roles and leads in B-pics.  A real loss.  See him at his best in an Early Talkie prison classic, THE BIG HOUSE/’30.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-big-house-1930.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Shocking to watch Lionel Barrymore playing such a hopeless drunk at the very moment younger brother John was off screen for a full year, trying (without success) to dry out.  Sister Ethel also alcoholic, but largely able to control their father's curse.  Lionel’s addictive nature leaned toward drugs like morphine, supplied by the studio to help him fight crippling arthritic pain.

TITAN A.E. (2000)

Visually ambitious, narratively challenged, this Space Age animation, aimed at the Y.A. market (and above), has acquired cult status* following a financially disastrous rollout that halted careers and closed an animation unit.  Just another day at the office for animator Don Bluth.  (Two decades and counting since his last feature.)  Dripping D.N.A. from STAR WARS and A WRINKLE IN TIME, it’s filled with YOWSA action set pieces (some with intriguing combinations of hand-drawn animation and tactile objects), but encumbered with leftover plot, dialogue and characterization, not much helped by its starry vocal cast.  A front-loaded NOAH’S ARK tale, it never recovers from a super-charged action prologue destruction of the Earth & Moon.  What could top it?  Then on to the usual chase scenario for a lost parent who holds the key to regenerating a replacement planet, along with three leading characters awfully similar to Luke, Han & the Princess from . . . what was that film?  Oddly, with so many life forms in the mix as support, our leads' tall, trim whiteness, a quarter century after A NEW HOPE, sticks out all the more.  Famously, Bluth left Disney when he felt production standards were slipping, but for all his talents, he never had much of gift for story (or story editing, Walt Disney’s greatest talent as filmmaker), short-circuiting even his best projects.

AMBP: *Note the cultists got a 15th Anniversary poster.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Two years on, Disney animators came a’cropper on similar problems in TREASURE PLANET/’02, a Space Aged TREASURE ISLAND, dismal box-office/cult following.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/treasure-planet-2002.html

(A.J. Cronin's) HATTER'S CASTLE (1942)

Best known for social-issue tales from British coal country (THE CITADEL/’38; THE STARS LOOK DOWN/’40), here A.J. Cronin serves up ripsnorting melodrama with Gothic trimmings charting the comeuppance of small town hatter James Brodie, a loathsome tyrant on the order of Edward Moulton-Barrett of Wimpole Street.*  A terror to wife, son & daughter (an early lead for Deborah Kerr), he’s an equally bad influence on the town’s businessmen in spite of running his shop (the only hatter in town) into ruinous debt, made worse when modern competition opens next door.  Ignoring medical attention for his cancer stricken wife from new doc James Mason (also in an early lead), goading his boy into trouble at school, bringing his barmaid mistress home to run the ‘castle,’ his rage even responsible for getting Kerr knocked up by opportunistic/two-timing lover Emlyn Williams since she’s too scared of her father to scream for help.  Raging storms, train disasters, bankruptcy, suicide, attempted patricide, a very full plate of sin & sorrow.  Megged without much flair by Lance Comfort, yet with flashes of technical brilliance that stand out in relief next to the rest.  All of it, held in terrified thrall to Robert Newton's large scale work as the tyrannical father.  Never one to be accused of underplaying, Newton could be shockingly effective in the right role (making flesh creep as Bill Sykes in the David Lean version of Dickens’ OLIVER TWIST/’48), here he sometimes loses focus with his villainy too generally applied, but more often reaching a heaven-storming evil thrill.  And it’s nice to see a British film made without stiff upper-lip reserve, even if it occasionally swings for the fences and misses.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *As mentioned, above, THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET/'34. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-barretts-of-wimpole-street-1934.html

THE DARK HORSE (1932)

Neat B-pic from Warners leaves a lot of potential on the table, but has good fun as far as it goes.  Sleek & sleazy, Warren William is just the man to run a political campaign for ‘Dark Horse’ gubernatorial candidate Guy Kibbee, an unelectable delegate picked at random to end a deadlocked convention.  Too bad William’s stuck in jail, behind on alimony payments to heartless/avaricious ‘ex’ Vivienne Osborne.  But that won’t stop Party secretary Bette Davis from singing his praises (the two all but engaged).  And with a Get Out of Jail Card from the Party Bosses, William starts in educating Kibbee and gearing up the publicity mill.  If only the ‘Ex’ weren’t still looking for trouble, making a big play for Kibbee (and a big payoff) at a secluded country cabin.  A perfect storm of a scandal; and William can only cover things up with what’s bound to look like a disloyal move against tru-love Davis!  What’s a political operative to do?  Nicely handled, just not enough on the political schooling of a novice nor on the thwarted romance.  Best for seeing Warners trying to figure out how best to use Ms. Davis (she could have played either gal), with good comic support from Frank McHugh and a snappy pace that's probably less director Alfred E. Green’s than editor George Marks’.  Standard stuff for the day, but a good standard; with Davis (still platinum blonde) very appealing under Sol Polito’s lighting.

ATTENTION  MUST BE PAID: Lots of Pre-Code touches including a game of strip poker for an unmarried pair, and a painful gag involving barbed wire and Guy Kibbee’s crotch.  Ouch!

DOUBLE-BILL: Seven years on, Kibbee was still governor in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON/’39.

MIKAËL / MICHAEL (1924)

Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC/’28; DAY OF WRATH/’43) made this unusual film at UFA Germany.  Unusual in subject matter, that is, a relatively frank gay-themed story, perhaps only possible at the time from Weimar Germany.  (Two other rare gay oriented silents, DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS/’19 with Conrad Veidt and GESCHLECHT IN FESSELN / SEX IN CHAINS/’28, also Weimar based.)  Beautifully designed in Secessionist style by Hugo Häring and lensed by Karl Freund, assisted by Rudolph Màte, what luck to have it so well preserved, restored and near atonally scored in a 2016 edition from the F.W. Murnau Foundation.  Fellow Danish director Benjamin Christensen stars as an aging master painter, painfully losing his young male model (pale/fair Walter Slezak in his slim youth) to a wicked Countess whose portrait Christensen is unable to bring up to his exacting standards.   Adapted by Thea von Harbou between scripts for husband Fritz Lang (DIE NIBELUNGEN; METROPOLIS), it’s one long descent for the elderly artist with Dreyer in the zombie mode of his late period, doggedly charting Christensen’s abject acceptance of loss of affection, loss of art, loss of finances, from the unworthy boy he loves in spite of his selfish behavior depressingly believable.  (The vibe between these two very Oscar Wilde/Boosie.)  Finally, a late masterpiece comes out, bringing artistic apotheoses even if no lessons have been learned.  Compelling in its deterministic attitude, snail-like pacing and objectivity, best for Dreyer completists and for the suggestive sexual inclinations with an incestuous note when Christensen refers to Slezak as ‘being like a son.’

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Lenser Freund takes a role on screen as an art dealer, his roly-poly physique a match for Walter Slezak in his Hollywood character actor days.  (Slezak was the German passenger in Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT/’44)  Odd to think that Freund’s next film, Murnau’s THE LAST LAUGH/’24 would revolutionize camera movement with a new sense of roving freedom, after this film which hasn't a single pan or moving shot in it.  (Freund also an evolutionary force, inventing basic three-camera sitcom setup techniques when he was lighting cameraman on I LOVE LUCY in the ‘50s.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: And speaking of I LOVE LUCY, see Dreyer’s next, back in Denmark for MASTER OF THE HOUSE/’25.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/12/du-sal-re-din-hustru-master-of-house.html

OR: For something by Christensen, skip his Hollywood films to see him as writer/director/actor at his best (and weirdest) in the bizarre documentary-style witchcraft investigation of HÄXAN/’22.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/09/haxan-witchcraft-through-ages-1922.html

GUNDA (2020)

Artful in its simplicity, with patience that pays off, Viktor Kosakovskiy's quotidian gaze at farm animals, mostly a sow & her brood of 20 or so newborns, with side glances at a careful chicken and a herd of majestic cows, all stunningly wrought in steely digital black & white, is a miracle of empathy that documents without anthropomorphizing.  Shot in steady long takes made at ground level, it gives startling intimacy to every small action, leading us along without verbal guideposts or compromise on facts-of-life decisions.  Our sow has teats for just so many piglets.  Bad news for the runt of the liter.  Toward the middle, you might start to feel you’ve gotten what you could from this cast of barnyard characters, and from Kosakovskiy’s technique.  Just the place for two brilliant set pieces, one with Mom going on strike against those relentless feeders: No More Free Lunch!  (She’ll give in to their squeals soon enough.)  And finally, a devastating, magnificent last shot.  Ten uninterrupted, unmanipulated minutes, giving witness to what in effect is The 5 Stages of Grief for Mother Pig when her insistent young brood suddenly isn’t around anymore.  As subtle & moving a piece of theater as you'll find.  A privileged pig moment.  Something any actor would kill to play and be wise to study.  The film is an astonishment.

INTERNATIONAL LADY (1941)

While his next three writing assignments saw Howard Estabrook adapting stories by Alexander Dumas, William Saroyan & Thornton Wilder, this WWII spy yarn is boilerplate nonsense.  Released before Pearl Harbor, it begins with the war already on in a London Blitz meet-cute between concert singer Ilona Massey (secret Nazi agent broadcasting info via musical code) and U.S. Consulate lawyer George Brent (secret undercover FBI agent).  But this budding romance turns trio when music critic Basil Rathbone (secret undercover Scotland Yard man) horns in.  The flirtation level is mad, and when Massey isn’t around, the men’s whispered confidences play like boy-to-boy tête-à-têtes which also comes off as flirting.  It's as if Noël Coward updated DESIGN FOR LIVING for wartime.*  With even more complications once they all go Stateside (carrier pigeons; Nazi cabals; a sharp-shooting assassin; radio broadcasts in musical code); you might wish they had decided to revive DFL!  Brent, Rathbone & Massey’s brittle style might be just right for Coward.  No such luck; with journeyman director Tim Whelan unable to stop the plot from falling apart and lenser Hal Mohr unable to do much with unadorned interiors or Massey’s froideur.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Coward’s DESIGN FOR LIVING, very freely adapted in 1933 (and not necessarily for the worse) by Ben Hecht & Ernst Lubitsch for Gary Cooper, Fredric March & Miriam Hopkins , has seen its rep only grow over the years. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/design-for-living-1933.html

SODOM AND GOMORRAH (1962)

From big-budget to cheap exploitation, the late ‘50s/early ‘60s saw Hollywood churn out Biblical epics.  (Mostly filmed in Italy & Spain.)  Vet directors like Raoul Walsh & Henry Koster (sure to come in on budget), but also such nonconformists as Nicholas Ray & Robert Aldrich getting on the bandwagon and busting the bank.  Ray’s KING OF KINGS/’61 (once dubbed I WAS A TEENAGE JESUS) now has its defenders, but Aldrich’s Old Testament yarn finds few champions . . . including Aldrich.  And you can see his point.  The usual problems: risible dialogue, mix-and-match international accents & acting styles, a notable lack of skin & sin for all the talk, and a storyline that has Lot locked into a Moses template, leading a flock of suffering Hebrews to new land by the River Jordan.  A bigger problem stems from the jealous rivalry of Sodom's brother/sister act with siblings Queen Anouk Aimée & court schemer Stanley Baker stealing focus from ostensible leads God-fearing Stewart Granger as Lot & lovely non-believer Pier Angeli.  A pity, since even with a lack of objectionable acts (so many Sodomites and not a single misused orifice!); much of the design (from Ken Adams, later of James Bond); most of the action set pieces (extended battles that actually show strategy along with a cast of thousands); and Aldrich’s nifty habit of nudging the pace forward; all help keep momentum going over a pretty lively two-and-a-half hours.  Or perhaps the film is just helped by low expectations.

DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Who but roughhewn, no-nonsense Aldrich could have segued the same year from ‘Whatever Happened to Lot and His Family?’ to WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?

SHADOW OF THE LAW (1930)

Early Paramount Talkie has a visually imaginative start under director Louis Gasnier before running out of creative steam after the second reel, wasting whatever promise it had.  William Powell gets things started, walking an apartment neighbor home (Natalie Moorhead, one floor above) only to wind up defending her from a violent lover and watching in horror as a punch hurled in self-defense sends the brute flying backwards out the window to his death.  (Cool special effects fall!)  After a speedy trial, it’s a life sentence as the mystery neighbor lady takes a powder, leaving Powell on the hook for murder.  Escaping prison, Powell establishes a successful new life under a secret identity, but when he finally finds the vicious dame who left him to rot and begs for help, she tries blackmail and then more lies, leaving him in the lurch once again.  Moorhead is something of a find here, shockingly amoral in her unexplained determination to ruin Powell’s life and leverage a comfortable lifestyle.  While Powell is predictably ahead of the Talkie acting curve, his easy wit and clipped style fully formed.  (Plus, for the couple of reels he’s in jail, appearing without his signature mustache to utterly miserable effect.  Gable & Colman were still themselves clean shaven; Powell simply disappears.)  Not without interest up thru the jail scenes; falling flat thereafter. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Compare the prison scenes with George W. Hill’s THE BIG HOUSE, out the same year and looking amazingly advanced for the period, a real wallapalooza in Early Talkie cinema.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-big-house-1930.html

AGATHA AND THE TRUTH OF MURDER (2018)

Writer/producer Tom Dalton’s speculative fiction about the real-life 11-day disappearance of mystery book doyenne Agatha Christie, well enough received to generate two follow-ups (AGATHA AND THE CURSE OF ISHTAR/’19; AGATHA AND THE MIDNIGHT MURDERS/’20 - each with a different Christie, neither seen here), is pretty bad, even amateurish.*   The main idea has Christie, suffering writer’s block as her husband moves for divorce, working her way thru the crisis by taking on an unsolved murder case which she handles (surprise, surprise) as if it were one of her novels.  Dalton largely follows the general pattern of AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, inviting all the likely suspects to an isolated spot in hopes of gaining an inheritance, leading to deaths & investigation until the murderer or murderers revealed.  Nothing wrong there, it’s execution, clues & logic that go missing.  One misperception that is cleared up is the idea of a limitless pool of great British character actors.  Starting from the top, with Ruth Bradley’s Christie coming across as a sort of Michelle Dockery stand-in.  (And why go for Dockery?  Christie famously big-boned, tall & horsey.)   Everyone else also subbing for some better/better-known Masterpiece Theatre regular.  Add in a lack of period flavor & style (cars & clothes not bad, but ‘20s attitudes & speech completely missing) and it becomes hard to even call this one a missed opportunity.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: An alternate solution to the disappearance in AGATHA/’79; Michael Apted directing the Mutt & Jeff team of Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman (not seen here).

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: As mentioned in the credits, this was made without input or approval from the Christie Estate.  And they approved Kenneth Branagh’s ORIENT EXPRESS/’17 and DEATH ON THE NILE follow-up?  Yikes!  And that cutesy misguided MISS MARPLE series for Geraldine McEwan & Julia McKenzie?  Best head back to the great Joan Hickson, given Agatha Christie’s personal imprimatur to play Marple.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/agatha-christies-miss-marple-1984-92.html

I CARRY YOU WITH ME / TE LLEVO CONMIGO (2020)

Beautifully handled, and just plain beautiful, Heidi Ewing makes a smooth transition from documentaries to narrative film charting the real-life relationship of two illegal Mexican immigrants, a gay couple now successful New York restauranteurs, and the hell they went thru to get here, neatly laid out in clear non-linear fashion.  Covering about twenty years, excluding brief childhood flashbacks, one of the men is leaving a young son behind to find work in the States, the other, with his own family issues, will follow after waiting over a year.  Nothing in their difficulties will come as a surprise (either on the sexual front, crossing the border or in finding themselves Stateless in America), but Ewing makes nothing but right moves editing their story, casting for various ages (the men play themselves in the present day sections), and in finding just the spot to make her compositions come alive.  She’s even better in her use of color.  (Also quite the thing for Manhattan bridges; one snowy shot with the Brooklyn Bridge outlined behind a real keeper.)  Don’t let the familiarity of the story arc get in the way, it doesn’t for Ewing who finds fresh, raw, true emotion in every moment and between some refreshing relationships, even the old one between the nice gay guy and his chubby gal pal.  Nothing in here feels cliché.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Elia Kazan brought some of the same passion & longings to his own family history in AMERICA AMERICA/’63.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/america-america-1963.html