HELL DIVERS (1931)

One-stop shopping for circa 1931 state-of-the-art airborne Special Effects*, from real daredevils tempting death in the sky to first-rate/well-integrated backscreen projection trickery to truly wild model work, easy to spot, but impossible to sneer at.  (You wonder how much period audiences believed and how much they just ‘went along’ with.)  All in the service of a superior military yarn from Frank ‘Spig’ Wead*, his usual story about a couple of frenemies, one upstanding/one a fuck-up, with a big sacrifice at the end to make up for all the bad behavior.  Here, Wallace Beery, aging Navy aircrewman, set in his ways, but able to fix a plane with a Swiss Army Knife and a bundle of balsa wood meets his match in fast-rising Clark Gable with his newfangled ways of modern science & efficiency.  (Gable just as fast-rising at the studio in his breakthru year, jumping from sixth to second billing after SECRET SIX, also with Beery & director George W. Hill, among 13 films in ‘31.  Pre-stash, BTW.)  To the film’s credit, they don’t downplay Beery’s mean spirited ways, he’s a louse, and lucky to have Hill in charge, one of the few M-G-M directors at the time with real action chops.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *How M-G-M dropped the ball in so many tech departments over the decades (other than sound where slightly deaf Douglas Shearer - brother to Norma/brother-in-law to Irving Thalberg - kept their lead) has never been explained.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Real footage of planes landing on an aircraft-carrier deck looks insanely dangerous.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK  *Another plug for one of John Ford’s least seen major efforts, his ‘Spig’ Wead bio-pic, WINGS OF EAGLES/’57; a unique film from any standpoint, half boisterous flyboy Air Force drama/half blistering Scenes From A Marriage reportage. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/wings-of-eagles-1957.html

TOL'ABLE DAVID (1921)

Still freshly felt & moving in its centennial year, Henry King’s idyllic, irony-free Americana, near flawless till its slightly overloaded climax, gets the best out of all who worked on it.  Joined by silent ‘everyman’ actor Richard Barthelmess, fresh off five for D.W. Griffith (BROKEN BLOSSOMS/’19 to WAY DOWN EAST/’20) at ‘Inspiration Pictures,’ King’s new independent outfit (shortly to sign Dorothy & Lillian Gish), this first release was largely shot on location in rural Virginia; and it shows, opening a window to what even then was a rapidly fading world of small farm communities & local support systems.  Every clapboard house & Dry Goods store porch an offering of plain rough beauty.  A world young David (26 yr-old Barthelmess, rail-thin/believably teen) lives not merely in harmony with, but in something of a state of grace.  Careworn cattle-raising parents & a big brother he idolizes for his height, strength, family life & grown-up job running the government mail delivery.  There's even a neighboring girl to moon over.  But a shadow is about to pass over his life when the neighboring girl’s three cousins, on the run from the law, invite themselves in for a visit.  Saved from jail by the State Line, these are dangerous men, threatening to the girl, the worst of them (a terrifying Ernest Torrence) a full-fledged psychopath who’ll quickly destroy the Barthelmess family in three tragic encounters.  It’s the trick in making these sentimental old dramas work; you pay dearly for those blissful moments.  A narrative balance Hollywood storytellers would soon forget, especially post-WWII, mistaking honest hard-won sentiment for sappy sentimentality.  The Griffith influence very strong here, too much so at the end (at least for modern audiences) when the mail must get thru at any cost.  Leaving the destruction of life’s certainties around Barthelmess, played at the end of the second act in tableaux of silent, stricken grief, the film’s true dramatic peak.  Stunningly achieved.  Surviving prints in pretty good physical shape for such a wildly popular film.  Look for editions that use Robert Israel’s fine 1999 score.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Now largely overlooked, Barthelmess’s classics would be remade with Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda, Emlyn Williams & Richard Cromwell, all coming up short of his standard.  Here, playing a teen, Barthelmess is a ringer for young Jake Glyllenhall in many shots.

DOUBLE-BILL: Harold Lloyd’s greatest film, THE KID BROTHER/’27, is an all but unofficial remake, with plenty of laughs and not short on thrills or sentiment.  Probably the better film . . . but why choose?

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Mick LaSalle examines Barthelmess as actor & social provocateur in his fascinating, if overstated, DANGEROUS MEN: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man.

TRANSIT (2018)

More award-winning mediocrity from writer/director Christian Petzold, not too far off his last award-winner, PHOENIX/’14, where he grafted ‘40s melodrama (war victim searches for Pre-War life in Post-War Berlin sporting a new, surgically unrecognizable face) with kitchen-sink realism.  (Huzzahs on the Film Fest Circuit.)  Now, in early WWII Paris a morally ambiguous young man assumes a dead writer’s identity, hoping to slip out of France from Marseilles.  Instead, he meets & falls for the dead man’s widow, already in a new relationship yet unable to believe her husband has died.  Well, somebody’s gonna use those letters of transit to Mexico, but who?  Petzold purposefully obscures the simple plot (name tags would have helped), and stumbles over a subplot involving an asthmatic boy & his deaf/mute mother as everyone in Marseilles waits for their boat of passage.  (Berthold Brecht’s lost CASABLANCA rewrite?)  And yet, something of a masterstroke in presentation reps a breakthru for Petzold who flaunts all period protocol: sets, technology, costumes, makeup, and films as if it’s all happening in 2018.  Jarring at first.  What year was the Nazi Occupation?  But it soon pays off, releasing us from the distancing effect 80 years of social & physical changes make.  Done all the time on Shakespeare & modern opera stagings; why not WWII?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Adapted from an Anna Seghers novel written at the time.  She’s best known for THE SEVENTH CROSS, filmed in 1943 by Fred Zinnemann with Spencer Tracy.      https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-seventh-cross-1944.html

TRIBUTE TO A BAD MAN (1956)

After a bad run in the early ‘50s, James Cagney was just off a great 1955 (three hits & a smash cameo: LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME; MISTER ROBERTS; RUN FOR COVER; SEVEN LITTLE FOYS), when he was called in to replace Spencer Tracy on this Robert Wise chamber Western.  (Tracy claimed he ankled to avoid a rough location shoot; more likely a disastrous reception on PLYMOUTH ADVENTURE/’52 had him swearing off even aging romantic leads.)  Tracy not the only swap out: second lead/surrogate son lost fast-rising Robert Francis (CAINE MUTINY; LONG GRAY LINE), dead in a plane crash, replaced by charisma-challenged Don Dubbins, as the young drifter who saves Cagney from an ambush.  No wonder the production feels downsized, missing bonding scenes between Cagney & the kid, learning the ropes of how to break wild horses for sale back East.  The setup has Cagney’s self-made horse baron living ‘in sin’ with saloon gal Irene Papas (her Hollywood debut), running his ranch with an iron hand & a ready noose for thieves or cutthroats.  Judge, jury and executioner.  Toward the end, he viciously breaks three outlaws as if they were horses, only to wind up breaking himself . . . in a good way.  A neat story construction that only points up missed opportunities.  Still, what’s in here is good enough, cleanly shot by Wise (Robert Surtees, D.P.) and unusually scored by Miklós Rózsa on a rare Western.  With strong support from Stephen McNally, James Bell, Jeanette Nolan and, as a rival’s embittered son, a vivid turn from Vic Morrow in only his second pic.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Cagney’s previous Western, Nicholas Ray’s RUN FOR COVER, even better.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/08/run-for-cover-1955.html  OR: Watch one of those Robert Francis films (see above) to imagine this film with a big inter-personal dynamic boost.

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1996)

At the height of the restrictive Hollywood Production Code, Preston Sturges set the bar for getting away with suggestive material in THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK/’43.  Critic James Agee memorably noting what went over the censors’ heads: ‘the Hays office has been either hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep.’  And something similar happened when the MPAA gave this sex obsessed, darkly violent animated version of Victor Hugo an easy pass with a Family Friendly G-Rating. Who knew it was quite so kinky?  Apparently, everyone!  (LINK: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/movies/the-hunchback-of-notre-dame.html)  But how’s the pic holding up?  Quite well for the most part.  Physically staggering, you probably need to go back to Disney’s bitter failure with SLEEPING BEAUTY/’59 to equal its production.  Part of the Disney Animation Renaissance (LITTLE MERMAID/’89 to TARZAN/’99), it softens & compresses Hugo (they all do), a near stage-ready musical, very SWEENY TODD when evil Minister Frollo solos, very LES MIZ elsewhere.  Kevin Kline’s sympathetic Captain (amoral in the book) & Demi Moore’s wild gypsy (period-challenged proto-feminist) get the worst of it, but most other decisions on book & character bold & workable.  One day, an adaptation will be true to Hugo and kill off all the good souls in here, even that trickster goat!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Composer Alan Menken particularly pleased with the opening number setting up all the back-stories and situations.  And with high-flying Jester Paul Kandel pulling out a high D at the end, he should be.  But why no song for Quasimodo and his beloved bells?  A memorable scene with Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo introducing them in the 1939 classic,  an all but perfect song cue.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/hunchback-of-notre-dame-1939.html

WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1928) / KONGO (1932)

Fascinating and appalling . . . mostly appalling.  On B’way with Walter Huston in 1926; a late silent for Lon Chaney in ‘28; then back to Huston as a ‘32 Talkie (incorporating some silent footage).  The Chaney pic, in his familiar masochistic mode, directed by horror specialist Tod Browning, adapted by Waldemar Young, expands last act revelations from the play into a fleshed-out prologue to show rather than tell us how stage magician Chaney lost his wife, lost the use of his legs, and came to ‘Darkest Africa’ to seek a cripple's revenge against the ivory trader who done him wrong.  (Lionel Barrymore in the silent; C.  Henry Gordon in ‘32.)  Weapon of choice?  The villain’s lovely young daughter, raised in a convent, now debauched via drugs, drink & prostitution.  If only that equally depraved doc (silent Warner Baxter; talking Conrad Nagel) would come to the girl's rescue and stop the jungle natives from dragging her off for human sacrifice.  Yikes!  (Pre-Code barely does this one justice.)  That’s stunning Mary Nolan in the silent, a real life drug addict, dead at 46; Virginia Bruce in the remake, reveling in hellish spasms.  Both films effective, both with the usual stereotypical Black Natives; plus rape & leech cures in the Talkie.  The more freely adapted silent earns points for storytelling & pace, in fact, more of everything even though it's two reels shorter.  While little known Talkie megger William J. Cowen does good work with lenser Harold Rosson, yet hardly worked again.  Seen together, a great mini-course on different ways to develop a one-set play into a film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Surprisingly, both Chaney & Huston born in 1883.  Huston in staggeringly good shape at 49 in the remake, Chaney already dead two years from throat cancer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The unusually square frame ratio on the Chaney a result of adding a synch-sound music & effects track to a silent pic before Hollywood started letter-boxing to keep the preferred 1.37:1 ‘Academy’ image ratio by holding space for the soundtrack on the left-hand side on the film strip.  Many early sound films, especially remastered copies made from films that used the Vita-Phone sound-on-disc system, ended up this shape even though none were purposefully shot in the nearly square - 1.1:1) format.  And loads of silents only survive today in prints now permanently missing a crucial 8% of picture info on the left-hand side of the screen.  We’re lucky to have even that; elsewise, they're only available in The Pacific Ocean 'Archive.'

DOUBLE-BILL: After WEST OF ZANZIBAR, go EAST OF BORNEO/’31 for more jungle adventure, casual racism & deadly crocodiles, but B-pic production values.

MY FORBIDDEN PAST (1951)

Loaded with Hollywood pros in front & behind the camera, this box-office bomb would be inexplicably amateurish if you didn’t know Howard Hughes was now running R.K.O., micro-managing it into a death spiral.  Robert Mitchum was luckier than most at the beleaguered studio, but not in this mossy meller where his New Orleans research doctor is jilted by tru-love Ava Gardner; stopped by class & pride even though her keepers, Aunt Lucille Watson & Cousin Melvyn Douglas, are strapped for cash in the grand family manse.  Worse, Mitchum returns to town married to pretty fortune hunter Janis Carter.  And just when Ava turns out to have inherited a fortune from ‘the wrong side’ of the family!  You can see a faint trace of the rip-snorting romance this one might have been: accidental murder, a juicy trial, hints of family scandal soon figure into things.  But the production is strikingly unprofessional with continuity jumps, ‘wrong’ reverse angles & missing lines.  Hard to fathom solid craftsman Robert Stevenson directed.*  No doubt, Hughes hacked away over many nights until this was as senseless as it was moldy.   The 1'10" running time a good half-hour shorter than usual for these things.*   But kudos to Douglas for his cheery showing as an utterly amoral swine; he nearly makes up for Watson’s Mom, in her final feature, fraudulent as ever.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Steady-at-the-helm Stevenson may just be the most successful Hollywood director you’ve never heard of.  Strictly by admissions rather than receipts, and keeping in mind that so many in his audience were kids at half-price, only Spielberg competes with the man behind all those top-grossing Disney titles (OLD YELLER to FLUBBER; MARY POPPINS to THE LOVE BUG and THAT DARN CAT; many, many more).  Before Disney, too, his best probably the Joan Fontaine/Orson Welles JANE EYRE/’43.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Like Ingrid Bergman & Gary Cooper in Edna Ferber’s SARATOGA TRUNK/’45 at 2' 15".  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/saratoga-trunk-1945.html

JOHNNY COME LATELY (1943)

James Cagney’s second attempt at indie productions was better prepared than his first, but equally stillborn.  He’d put out two films during a contract dispute with Warners in the mid-‘30s, but they were done on the cheap, and looked it.  This time out, Cagney was coming off YANKEE DOODLE DANDY/’42 and was more careful with his behind-the-camera talent: John Van Druten on script; Theodor Sparkuhl to lens; Leigh Harline for the score.  Helmer William K. Howard may have fallen off the A-list while falling off the wagon, but he had considerable style to offer (THE CAT AND THE FIDDLE/’34; TRANSATLANTIC/’31).  And still, JOHNNY is doomed from its start.  Everyone we meet in this sleepy Currier & Ives town is too cute for words, including the tramps who waste the opening reel laboriously setting the scene.  There’s no energy supply (in a Cagney film!) as Jimmy meets-cute with senior stage doyen Grace George as the sharp-eyed bitty who runs the local paper.  Oh, she’s a darlin’, too, but local business & political corruption has just about put her out of business till Cagney takes charge and turns everything around, shaming a few leading, but recalcitrant citizens into doing the right thing.  Then taking off like Mary Poppins when the wind changes.  It’s an unlikely, frustrating pic, not at all bad in places, and happily waking up halfway in when Cagney throws a chair thru a window.  Worth watching just to see the great Hattie McDaniel taking over all her scenes and for Marjorie Main making like Mae West.  But it certainly is in love with own do-goodness.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Cagney memorably tackled a similar period pic @ Warners with Raoul Walsh, Olivia de Havilland & Rita Hayworth in THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE/’41.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/07/strawberry-blonde-1941.html

THE ADVENTURES OF GERARD (1970)

A mess, but not without a certain knockabout charm.  The idea was to twist Arthur Conan Doyle’s rollicking stories of Napoleonic officer Etienne Gerard into something on the order of TOM JONES (the movie, not the book) meets MONTY PYTHON (that series just getting under way).  But the producers working in Italy’s CineCittà Studios made a bizarre choice in Polish New Wave director Jerzy Skolimowski who spoke neither English nor Italian and whose previous budgets would have been less than this film’s craft services.  So, no surprise to find the first half of the film all but impossible to follow with Gerard (lightweight, if pleasing Peter McEnery) barreling thru Spain, breaking the fourth wall for comic asides as he faces deadly local militia, British Red Coats & anyone else taking up arms against pasty-faced Napoleon (Eli Wallach!?).  Everything’s a bit out-of-scale here, except for love interest Claudia Cardinale, she’s perfectly in scale!  Also pretty funny, especially when last seen literally up a tree.  By then, a wayward plot has seeped in (Gerard’s secret message may be a ruse!!) and something like narrative momentum is taking hold just as armies start doing back flips over retaining walls and fighting breaks out.  More absurd than (a)political, the film has dated less than many of the anti-war/anti-authoritarian period epics popular at the time.  And it would have collapsed if it were even slightly better.

DOUBLE-BILL: Skolimowski’s had what must have been a frustrating career directing in the West.  He filled in dead spots with acting gigs.  But try his superb MOONLIGHTING/’82, riveting stuff about illegal Polish workers in London during changing times at home, starring a very young, very effective Jeremy Irons.

BYE BYE BRAVERMAN (1968)

Neil Simon meets WAITING FOR GODOT in this Road Pic about four New York Jews over one long day*, carpooling from the Promised Land of Manhattan to a pre-gentrified Old World Brooklyn for a Memorial to mutual pal Leslie Braverman after his unexpected death at 41.  If they only knew which Funeral Home it was at.  (So many to choose from!)  Director Sidney Lumet was still a few films away from finding his feature film form, and those stagy/tv-ready Filmways Studios sets aren’t much help.  But lenser Boris Kaufman blooms out on location, with more grain & less color saturation to set an urban tone, while tv sketch writer Herb Sargent (THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS; SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE) on his sole film script, loads on every Jew-centric male bonding sketch idea he ever had.  And what a cast for comic harmonizing on life’s lack of fairness, tsuris, and the best ‘30s movies (they’re all experts).  With George Segal (Paul Rudd’s dad?; or does he just look it); Jack Warden & Sorrell Booke as the more secular/Reform Jews, and Joseph Wiseman (unhappy riding in a Volkswagen) the more observant Conservative.  Other actors only get single scenes, and Sargent isn’t exactly generous toward the ladies.  But cabbie Godfrey Cambridge & Rabbi Alan King, given something to chew on, aren’t shy about pulling focus.  Messy, but memorable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Simonized Samuel Beckett not as unlikely as it sounds.  Simon would adapt Anton Chekhov’s THE GOOD DOCTOR for B’way just five years after this.  And as for casting GODOT with this crew: Warden/Estragon; Wiseman/Vladimir; Segal/Lucky; Sorrell/Pozzo. 

THE ADDAMS FAMILY (2019)

Unpalatable computer animated reboot of the lightly subversive Baby Boomer ‘60s sit-com.  Though fondly remembered (largely for its cast), the tv show really hasn’t aged well, but it did get paperback collections of the wonderful Chas. Addams New Yorker originals reprinted and they haven’t aged at all.  Alas, this iteration, even more than the anodyne live-action ADDAMS films from the’90s, offers nothing but rapacious commercial consideration, nearly as bad as recent attempts to exploit DR. SEUSS intellectual property; needless, charmless feature-length abominations in a race against copyright expiration.  This one tries an origin story as prologue (character relationships, marriage, spooky gothic house), before the main action lays on de rigeur ‘Be Yourself’ nostrums as a one-size-fits-all moral.  Lessons in community & family acceptance noisy to hear, tiresome to follow, hideous to look at.  Quite the comedown for animators Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon whose shiny, plastic æsthetic proved far better suited to the real antiestablishmentarianism of Seth Rogen’s SAUSAGE PARTY/’16.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/sausage-party-2016.html)  There, the physically unappetizing look served as backup commentary.  Here, it’s merely unappetizing.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The Addamses keep getting Tim Burton manqué when the director of functional dysfunctionality they deserve (and don’t hold your breath) is Japanese master (Cannes Palme D’Or winner) Hirokazu Kore-eda.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=kore-eda

THE LONG ARM / THE THIRD KEY (1956)

From a fine run of trim, unostentatious films Ealing Studios house director Charles Frend put out in the mid-‘50s*, this one, an exemplary Police Procedural, sees Jack Hawkins' Scotland Yard Detective-Superintendent (and devoted family man) working in the field and thru the files to find a link on a series office robberies with no sign of forced entry and always on days when the safes are loaded with cash.  An inside job on unrelated businesses?  What’s the connection?  Unfussy, but consistently interesting within its believably quotidian middle-class limits.  Labor-intensive/analogue investigation so much more involving & photogenic than looking over a detective’s shoulder at his computer screen.  Nicely shot, too, Gordon Dines giving his locations a silvery nighttime glow rather than the usual noir stylings.  But most of all, a showcase for the distinctive quizzical charm of Jack Hawkins' chief detective.  Such good company; with a BAFTA Best Actor nom as reward.  Unusual for a genre pic, and well deserved.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: John Ford must have seen this, having Hawkins more or less reprise the role in his little seen GIDEON OF SCOTLAND YARD/’58.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/gideons-day-aka-gideon-of-scotland-yard.html   OR: *Frend showing his range moving from sharp war drama in THE CRUEL SEA/’53 to religious-angled family crisis on LEASE OF LIFE/’54 then the eccentric British coastal town comedy of ALL AT SEA./’57.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-cruel-sea-1953.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/lease-of-life-1954.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/all-at-sea-aka-barnacle-bill-1957.html

APOCALYPTO (2006)

Almost certainly Mel Gibson’s best as director, even if it does open with a quote from Will Durant’s THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION.  (What library sale was Mel at?)  This Mayan saga does a great job over its first act, not only in showing how a small tribe of intra-dependent family units lived & thrived, hunted & partnered in their forest domain, but in particularizing two separate Mayan groups who pass thru.  A defeated clan, thin, sickly, ill-clothed & ill-fed, seeking a new start in a new village, followed by a warrior army from the great Mayan city that lies days away, men who presumably destroyed that crushed clan and now bring destruction to our hunter/gatherers.  But something goes wrong with the film after our tribe joins the defeated men for sacrificial rites at the grand temple of death (blood, ripped out hearts, beheadings*),  leading to a long chase which makes up the second half.  Gibson’s story turns into a sort of Mayan ‘Perils of Pauline’ serial, with a cliffhanger ticked off every few minutes: Saved in the nick of time by Solar Eclipse; Saved from rising waters in a flooded pit (while giving birth!); Saved by waterfall leap; Close call from quicksand; Saved from an angry Mama Jaguar; Saved from giant nemesis with a Rube Goldberg hunting trap; many more.  Ending with a surprise ‘reveal’ that shows the continuing influence on an impressionable 12-yr-old Mel who never forgot seeing PLANET OF THE APES/’68 on the big screen.  By now, if you’re not holding back giggles, you’ve earned a complete 11-volume STORY OF CIVILIZATION set; available (used) for 20 bucks on Amazon.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Shot in a variety of systems (digital; 35mm; 16mm) that gives unintentional smear to some motion (a digital artifact?), in addition to intentional blur on forest runs.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  * Not my screwy thought, but Mel’s, who offers post-beheaded sight from a victim’s P.O.V.  Turns out, death comes via hand-held camera.

SKIPPY (1931)

1931 saw 8-yr-old Jackie Cooper jump from Hal Roach ‘Little Rascal’ to top Hollywood child star with SKIPPY and THE CHAMP.  Equally acclaimed in their day (four Oscar® noms apiece), King Vidor’s sentimental boxing weepie is now far better known, helped by a posh 1979 remake: Jon Voight, Faye Dunaway, Ricky Schroeder; dir. Franco Zeffirelli.  A pity, since SKIPPY seems the more interesting work.  A classic slice of a pueris ii Americanus, think Mark Twain (lead boys Skippy & ‘Sooky’ very TOM & HUCK), Tarkington PENROD, even PECK’S BAD BOY.  Child specialist director Norman Taurog, with an ultra-naturalistic, loosely structured take on boyhood rites-of-passage now looking pretty stylized, got his Oscar here, and it still works on its own period terms.  Especially when the third act turns dark and the kids stop projecting so much.  And while the main story arc comes from Skippy’s well-to-do dad learning to take notice of his boy’s needs, the real interest comes watching Skippy spending his days idling his way down the social ladder in boyhood adventures on literally the wrong side of the track in an all-too-believable Depression-Era ShantyTown (mixed race BTW).  A neighborhood he treats as a guard-rail free playground, alive with possibilities & dusty ragamuffins to hang out with.  Bonding fast with ‘Sooky,’ the new kid in town (enchantingly played by Jackie Coogan’s kid brother Robert), stakes are raised when the town dog catcher grabs Sooky’s mutt and the boys have to raise three bucks for a licence.  A fortune to them, and a gift to the film which suddenly takes on dramatic purpose and starts to feel timeless rather than dated.   Still very much a period piece, but at its best, a magical one.

DOUBLE-BILL: An instant sequel, SOOKY/’31 brought back everything but the magic.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Under cinematographer Karl Struss, we’ve moved past Early Talkie limitations, but not yet hit high Golden Age Hollywood gloss.  Just enough rough edges left technically to hold off sentimentality and keep ‘the cutes’ at bay.

MACGRUBER (2010)

Another ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch-to-feature-film box-office dud, though unlike previous mega-flops (STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY/’95; IT’S PAT/94) showing unexpected resilience with a just announced sequel & series a decade after its quick theatrical-run death.  Why the resurrection?  It’s certainly no overlooked gem.  Will Forte’s goofy MACGYVER parody shorts on SNL were spot on compared to this Mike Myers/AUSTIN POWERS (or is it Rowan Atkinson/JOHNNY ENGLISH) wannabe.*  Clumsily directed by Jorma Taccone, who’d done the tv shorts and never another feature . . . well, not till the current reboot.  The jokes hit-and-miss with gal sidekick Kristen Wiig leaning into a ‘70s Jane Fonda look for most of her laughs; and straight-man/sidekick Ryan Phillippe showing us he's prettier than Channing Tatum. . . . or Wiig  Only a few MacGyver routines in here (the ones where he uses whatever’s at hand to concoct defense weapons before an abrupt BlackOut goes all Wile E. Coyote on him).  Instead, Forte keeps stripping down to his fit, hirsute torso and letting us know who’s dick he’s hot for.  You can almost hear Forte at the writers’ table: ‘Hey, great idea for a laugh.  In this scene . . . the guy’s buck naked!’   Also on hand, the sad remains of Val Kilmer as a silly villain, which leaves Powers Boothe’s military boss to garner a bit of comic dignity.  So, back to our initial question; why the current resurrection?  Perhaps folks fondly recall the short, funny sketches.  Or are we already nostalgic for 2010?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Those who didn’t find Mike Myers/AUSTIN POWERS nearly as fun (or as funny) as the ‘60s spy films they spoofed might try Rowan Atkinson’s JOHNNY ENGLISH, big international hits which sunk Stateside.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/10/johnny-english-2003.html

THE FAN (1949)

Short on aptitude for the task, Otto Preminger was all thumbs on the three Ernst Lubitsch projects he inherited @ 20th/Fox.  But perhaps because this Oscar Wilde play, in spite of the cascading aphorisms that made it such an improbable silent success under Lubitsch (LINK: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/lady-windermeres-fan-1925.html), tilts to drama, it’s the best of the Lubitsch/Preminger trio.*   Structured in needless flashback from present day London, the eponymous fan belonged at the turn-of-the-last-century to young wife Jeanne Crain, under terrific social strain as husband Richard Greene appears to be ‘supporting’ wicked adventurous Madeleine Carroll, just as bachelor pal George Sanders starts pitching woo.  (Carroll, only 43, in her last film role.)  Using a bit of blackmail to leverage her way back into proper society, Carroll’s past will catch up to her, and ‘mother-love’ ennoble her via sacrifice & renunciation.  Cherry-picking Wildean witticisms and bon mots (mostly divided between Wilde surrogates John Sutton as Cecil Graham & Martita Hunt’s Duchess of Berwick), the script zips thru the story in record time.  (Barely an hour left between all those flashbacks.)  But as it’s Wilde at his most barefaced melodramatic, Preminger’s lack of finesse is a reasonable good fit.

DOUBLE-BILL: 1949 was Jeanne Crain’s big year: PINKY (her Oscar-nom, and more hidden paternity); then LETTER TO THREE WIVES.  That's Preminger, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Elia Kazan and, briefly John Ford (who started, then left PINKY), directing in a single year.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE YEAR: *By studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck’s reasoning: Preminger & Lubitsch were both German Jews; both Ex-Pats; both theatrical proteges of Euro-titan Max Reinhardt.  True enough, but also chalk & cheese.  The other two films were A ROYAL SCANDAL/’45, with Preminger taking over and taking credit after Lubitsch had a heart attack (it's a remake of minor Lubitsch silent masterpiece FORBIDDEN PARADISE/’24); then taking no credit for finishing THAT LADY IN ERMINE/’48 after Lubitsch died mid-production.  According to star Douglas Fairbanks Jr., pointlessly reshooting half of what Lubitsch had completed, making everything worse.  While no great success, it’s loaded with too many delightful things to ignore.  (Leading lady Betty Grable, alas, not one of them.)

GUNDALLA (2019)

The first hour of this Indonesian Super-Hero Origin story is compellingly dark, imaginatively plotted & cleverly structured, so well handled and involving that the film’s second half, over-elaborated with special effects, action set pieces & commonplace character conflict, feels like an insult to the emotional investment we’ve worked up.  From talented writer/director Joko Anwar, something of a puzzle, and a lesson in the law of diminishing returns.*  The opening is just great as young hero-to-be Sancaka (Muzakki Ramdhan) loses father & mother thru a series of unfortunate incidents: workers’ strike riots, a comrade’s treachery and corporate sponsored disappearance.  Bullied & bruised as an orphaned street kid, wary even of helping hands, a few lightning bolts start him on a super-hero’s journey that land him in the middle of urban & political warfare by the time he’s matured.  Djakarta’s frequent stormy weather a big help!  Canny compositions, a cast you don’t need a scorecard to follow and combat that stays on a human-scale (for a while), lend a naturalistic vibe to this live-action comic book.  (Not far off one of those Literary Comic Classics, say, Zola’s GERMINAL as Graphic Novel.)  But once Sancaka (well played as an adult by Abimana Aryasatya) gains full power & tacky costume, while various conspiracies close in (Armies of Orphan Thugs controlled by a government minister with a half-melted face!), GUNDALA grows progressively less specific, less special.  Worse, a sequel-teasing epilogue defrosts some ancient villain as new nemesis.  Too bad they didn’t think to go back in time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Anwar shows exceptional facility spotting unexpected framing devises inside already framed compositions, like a stealth editing tool.

LADY OF THE NIGHT (1925)

Very young (23) and very pretty (especially sans make-up), Norma Shearer doubles up to play Good Girl & Bad Girl, each falling for the same swell guy in this modest charmer.*  Neatly helmed by Monta Bell (an Ernst Lubitsch manqué who didn’t survive the transition to sound), there’s just a bit of double-exposure trickery (plus a hug between the two Normas achieved with a quick cut to a double) in a parallel storyline that uses matching dissolves to join the stories of Rich Motherless Private School Norma to Orphaned Reform School Norma as one matriculates into Society’s Swirl while the other gets coarsely done-up for her nightly rounds at the Dance Hall.  That’s blandly handsome Malcolm McGregor as the inventor both girls covet, but will he sell his patented safe-cracking technology to robbers or store owners?  Bad Norma pushes him toward the high road, but since no good deed goes unpunished, watches helplessly as she starts losing him to Good Norma, daughter of a rich banker who buys the system.  Only problem, Good Norma sees the heartbreak in Bad Norma’s eyes, in spite of clueless/classless longtime steady George K. Arthur, and refuses McGregor's marriage proposal.  Cue renunciation scene.  Shearer chews the scenery a bit more than necessary, but generally carries it off.  (She’d briefly hit her full potential working with Ernst Lubitsch for real in THE STUDENT PRINCE/’27.  LINK: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-student-prince-in-old-heidelberg.html)  But this film knows what it’s up to and puts it over in confident late-silent fashion.  Excellent tinted elements in a nicely scored & restored TCM edition.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Mary Pickford set the standard for this setup playing a wealthy sheltered invalid and an orphaned scrub girl on the invalid's estate who both fall for the same gentleman caller in STELLA MARIS/’18.  It lacks the polish of this late 1925 silent, but Pickford is something of an astonishment.  Miss an early title card and you might not realize she’s playing both roles.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Odd that physical similarities between the two Normas play no part in the storyline.  Perhaps scripter Adela Rogers St. John didn’t write it specifically for one actress to play both roles.  BTW, Rogers St. John, William Randolph Hearst’s favorite ‘girl reporter,’ was the role model for just about every girl reporter in all those ‘30s & ‘40s newspaper pics, hard-boiled, but soft underneath.  She’s Jean Arthur in MR. DEEDS/’36, scores more.

SEVEN THUNDERS (1957)

Hunky dark Steven Boyd & hunky fair Tony Wright are WWII P.O.W. escapees hiding in Nazi occupied Marseilles as they wait (and wait) for their resistance contact to give the ‘all clear’ on a boat out of France.  And while the typical wartime tropes are cleanly handled by underrated Argentinean director Hugo Fregonese (Boyd falling for cute gamine Anna Gaylor; Wright feigning an affair with his lady landlord to get out of a jam; extended confinement making them stir-crazy & reckless), the film also has two wildcard aspects that add real interest: one a miss/one on target.  The miss involves a sadistic doctor in town (a weirdly cast James Robertson Justice) pretending to help desperate Allied soldiers, only to drug their cognac for an easy, grisly murder.  Apparently fact-based, so too a second outlier idea where Nazi frustration over controlling Marseilles’ Old Town (think The Casbah in PÉPÉ LE MOKO*), safe home to Anti-Nazi hold-outs, leads to annihilation.  Unable to penetrate the odd design of its cuckoo architecture and maze-like layout, they choose to blow up the entire arrondissement.  And since they’re Germans, it was documented with lots of archival footage incorporated in the film's climax.  It adds a fresh angle to an old story; technically well integrated for the period, too.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *As per this French poster, definitely The Casbah of Marseilles.  (Avoid the Stateside cut, THE BEASTS OF MARSEILLES, which lops off about 25".)

CAPTAIN BOYCOTT (1947)

Like fellow filmmaking Brits, The Archers and the Boulting Brothers, Sidney Gilliat & Frank Launer were a prolific mid-last-century writer/producer/director team, but they regularly worked & took credit separately.  Of the two, Launder seems the more visually oriented, never more so then in this film and its predecessor, I SEE A DARK STRANGER/’46.* Cleverly worked out historical fiction, BOYCOTT spins romance & adventure around the birth of non-violent resistence in 1880s Ireland against Cecil Parker’s eponymous Captain*, charging exorbitant rents on his vast acreage to take over family farms.  Stewart Granger, not long before going Hollywood, is leading an armed revolt, wooing farm-usurping country gal Kathleen Ryan, and working a lousy Irish accent when he hears Irish politician Charles Parnell (Robert Donat with remarkable billing for a five minute speech) and is inspired to change tactics, pressuring Captain Boycott into submission thru shunning rather than shooting.  But not everyone in the community is convinced to put down their guns and simply turn their backs after British troops are sent in to ‘protect’ land, property, even ownership rights at the big horse race.  A tense third act sees all parties overplay their hand to fine dramatic effect as focus shifts slightly away from Granger to politically active local priest Alastair Sim, an actor who can pull focus even without help from a script.  Interesting stuff, especially on the historical side, neatly handled.

 DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, I SEE A DARK STRANGER. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/04/i-see-dark-stranger-1946.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Rather like a Molotov Cocktail, not invented by Soviet Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, but designed to be thrown at him, so ‘boycott’ wasn’t a political tactic invented by Captain Boycott, but was given his name after being used against him.

J'AI PERDU MON CORPS / I LOST MY BODY (2019)

Adored, acclaimed, awarded, French writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s first animated feature is also ill-conceived, pretentious and ‘RotoScoped.’  Well, perhaps not RotoScoped, the digital software system used is called Blender . . . it just looks RotoScoped.  A two-track narrative that reveals itself as a single, parallel time-line fable, we follow a scatterbrained romantic kid who’s following (more like stalking) a young woman he failed to deliver a pizza to; and a disembodied right hand, sentient and on the lam in the big city, as it attempts to crawl its way back to . . . well, you’ll guess soon enough.  And while we’re meant to admire/identify with the boy’s passion & fortitude, he’s largely defined by absentminded incompetence at all tasks, from dating to pizza delivery to woodworking.  The last from an apprenticeship he serendipitously picks up with both hands (while he’s got ‘em) only because his putative boss is Uncle to the object of his affection.  Unhelped by a drab palette & dull matte finish, the constant nudging to find charm in every adolescent hem, haw & its underlying ‘Go-For-It’ moralizing never resonates.  Instead, this garçon seems to get pretty much what he deserves.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: Oscar®-nom’d, it lost to TOY STORY 4 (not seen here) against an oddly weak slate of animated features that saw a second foreign animation also nominated, also from NetFlix, also a big disappointment, KLAUS/’19.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/klaus-2019.html

NOW AND FOREVER (1934)

Three of the biggest ‘30s stars tweak still developing screen personalities in this darker-than-expected character piece.  Gary Cooper, who basically never played a bad guy, here a cad, if a likeable one; a ‘con’ man living on credit at a lux Shanghai hotel and paying his overdue bill with a bit of stealth-accounting legerdemain.  Partner Carole Lombard (officially his ‘wife’ under newly strict Production Code enforcement) along for the ride, but pointedly not a partner-in-crime and wearying of life on the run.  Appalled when Coop reveals his latest financial plan: ‘selling’ the 6-yr-old daughter he's hardly even met to his late wife's brother, Lombard splits for Paris, Coop heads Stateside to sign over parental rights.  Who knew he had a kid?  Who knew he had a dead wife?  Who knew he was such a heel?  But then, he meets the girl.  It’s Shirley Temple.  He’s enchanted.  An indulgent flop as father, Cooper’s still working dodges before heading to Paris, Temple in tow, for a reunion with Lombard.  But attempts to go straight only go so far with his cash flow, so it’s back to scamming, now with a jewel thief who's targeting a rich old gal who’s met-cute with Shirley and keeps ropes of fabulous gems just lying about.  With convenient, but cleverly worked out dovetailed plotlines, rising director Henry Hathaway, not long off Western programmers, keeps Temple on a tight lead*, even cutting away from her sole party piece to move the plot along.  And dispatching the film’s sweet-and-sour ending as if this were a YA Lubitsch film. An impressive showing all ‘round.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Shirley had already started her reign over at FOX, but presumably had a final commitment to Paramount.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Hathaway solidified his gains on his next two, both with Cooper, the superb LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER and the odd, poetic near-miss PETER IBBETSON (both ‘35).  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/lives-of-bengal-lancer-1935.html

LA NOSTRA VITA / OUR LIFE (2010)

Strong, moving, naturalistic family drama from Italy, fine but flawed, an award-winner for writer/director Daniele Luchetti and lead actor Elio Germano, without Stateside release it remains too little known.  Germano plays a hustling construction sub-contractor, working a crew of ‘guest workers’ (‘illegals’ from Romania) as part of a housing project not far from Rome.  Tied down, not unhappily, by a pregnant wife & a couple of young boys, with a large, loving extended family in the area, his situation is shaken up by a pair of tragedies that leave him bereft and suddenly ambitious, grabbing an opportunity to move up and supervise a new building.  Serious risk for serious reward if he gets it right, but professionally & personally he’s in over his head from the start.  His hustling ways only taking him so far as his men threaten to leave just as finances from a shady friend are ‘called in.’  Satisfying on many levels, the interaction with his family and the family of a man who died on-site exceptionally interesting, beautifully observed and very Italian.*  (Laissez-faire Italian style parenting particularly hair-raising!)  The flaw?; Luchetti’s shooting style, too tight/too jittery, overdosing on nervous jagged energy right from the start, leaving him nowhere to go when the story’s dramatic traps begin to snap shut.  You adjust to it, but the film might be twice as effective if he held back in the first half of the film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Also very Italian in how the men run the gamut in looks, whereas the woman are all knock-out beauties.

THE CONSTANT HUSBAND (aka MARRIAGE A LA MODE) (1955)

This multi-marriage roundelay, written & directed by Sydney Gilliat, has the shape of comedy, but generates very few actual laughs.  Rex Harrison wakes in Wales without memory, an amnesiac who follows his tracks back to wealthy wife Kay Kendall, stylish & cool as an English cucumber.  Delightful!  If only further digging didn’t uncover five more gorgeous wives; Rex some sort of serial bridegroom.  Taken to court as a bigamist, beautiful barrister Margaret Leighton not only defends him, but looks set to join the happy sorority.  Yikes!  A swell cast of British vets (Cecil Parker, Robert Coote, Michael Hordern, Raymond Huntley) are there to season the pot and add male resentment none of the wives demonstrate.  It sounds like a hoot, but other than a few telltale behavioral laughs during the trial, not much clicks.  Harrison, a master farceur for Preston Sturges in UNFAITHFULLY YOURS/’48, had better luck with Gilliat as a cad redeemed by war in THE RAKE’S PROGRESS/’45.  But don’t put all the blame on Gilliat; farce is tough business on screen.  On the other hand, legendary on-set matchmaking with Rex falling hard for love of his life/third wife Kay Kendall.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: An earlier Harrison marital farce, Nöel Coward’s BLITHE SPIRIT/’45, with David Lean calling the shots, only slightly better.  (After its preview: David Lean to Nöel Coward: ‘Well, Nöel, what do you think of it?’; Noël Coward to David Lean: ‘My dear, you have fucked up the best thing I ever wrote.’)  Later, Harrison tried an actual Georges Feydeau farce in a D.O.A. version of A FLEA IN HER EAR/’67.  Instead, see Harrison & Kendall triumph over tame drawing room material in THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE/’58.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-reluctant-debutante-1958.html  OR: As mentioned, UNFAITHFULLY YOURS.

RENDEZVOUS (1935)

For a couple of years (1934; ‘35), William K. Howard represented a rare authorial voice among directors at producer-oriented M-G-M.  (Howard skipped around studios during his ‘30s heyday, apparently brought down by a drinking habit.)  Easy to spot his ‘voice’ in this WWI espionage dramedy, especially in the larger set pieces.  (In movement & editing at a suffragette parade doing double duty as a walking date; a ship embarking with thousands of troops seen past the principal players, emphasizing the enormous human scale behind the threat; quickly pivoting from playful romantic banter to a chilling ‘noises-off’ murder.)  He’s held back by a script that doesn’t know when to drop the jokey tone (Rosalind Russell’s scatterbrained gal an annoying menace to the film's darkening drama).  But the rest of the cast, led by William Powell (exceptional as always) playing a brilliant code-breaker trying for action in Europe rather than having to fight a ‘desk war,’ is unusually well chosen, neatly serving a story loaded with twists that still surprise, still make you jump.  Even the decoding sessions imaginatively visualized, like watching a hand-operated ‘enigma’ machine, easy to understand and fun to see in action.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: With nine writers credited, hard to know who’s responsible for what.  Let’s blame Bella & Sam Spewack for the comic misfires, playful banter their specialty on B’way.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Two pics back, Howard directed Powell with a debuting Russell & regular co-star Myrna Loy in an ill-fitting courtroom drama, EVELYN PRENTICE.  So, when Loy walked out for a better contract, M-G-M had Russell on hand to take Loy’s spot. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/07/evelyn-prentice-1934.html

THE IMPOSTER (aka STRANGE CONFESSION) (1944)

In Hollywood exile over the war years, Jean Gabin went from three or four films per year in France to a mere two in five; no wonder he looks so grumpy.  This one improves over the first, MOONTIDE/’42, switching from it’s doomed attempt to graft French Poetic Realism in Hollywood (Archie Mayo inadequately replacing announced director Fritz Lang), to a heroic tale of defeated French soldiers regrouping in Africa to build an airfield and, as reward, reclaim Gallic Gloire on the field of battle.  With Julien Duvivier writing/directing, you’d expect more French flavor, but between meager resources @ Universal Pictures and a rather theatrical supporting cast awkwardly joined to Gabin’s naturalism, it’s nearly as unconvincing as the earlier film.  No doubt, finding a courageous angle on the French military wasn’t a given in 1944, so Duvivier came up with a renewal fable for Gabin, saved at the last minute from execution when a bomb destroys his prison, giving him a chance to reinvent himself as a man with a purpose, fighting for his country under an assumed identity he’s stolen off a corpse.*  Surprisingly talky until the final battle scenes, it gets by on speed & construction.  Duvivier doesn’t sit around, confronting difficult moments with blunt efficiency (note brusque, ritual public demotion when the truth comes out), but can’t make the pieces fit.

SCRWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Like French directors from Renoir to Truffaut, Duvivier’s ear doesn’t always pick up odd line readings in English.  Something that doesn’t affect his other Hollywood pics.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *The opening, with prisoner Gabin saved from execution by a bombing, was used to better effect later this year in UNCERTAIN GLORY/’44 (Errol Flynn; Raoul Walsh).  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/uncertain-glory-1944.html

CONTEST: What makes this French poster a Collector’s Item?  First correct response earns a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up on any (easy to find) streaming film of your choice!

COP CAR (2005)

Small scale/high stakes variation on an old tale: robbers stepping accidentally out of their league when a bag of loot turns out to be big-time Mob money.*  Smart, mean, suspenseful, funny, writer/director Jon Watts knows when to push and when to lay low as a pair of 10-yr-old buds stumble upon an unattended sheriff’s car in the middle of nowhere.  Joy ride, anyone?  What they don’t know is that cunningly villainous Sheriff Kevin Bacon may be six degrees of separation away from his vehicle, burying a body from a cocaine deal gone bad, but is soon returning to deal with body #2; still in the trunk when the boys drove off ten minutes ago . . . and not yet dead.  Yikes!  (Non-chronological time-line neatly tucked in here . . . along with our syntaxual error.)  Multiple POVs and action arcs wonderfully teased out for us by Watts, purposefully leaving some suspense on the table for a ‘family friendly’ style, using old-school movie craftsmanship and vast differences in scale to tie story & character development to the SouthWest landscape.  All accomplished without snarky putdown or attention-grabbing pandering jokes, trusting viewers to pick up on the film’s violent black humor & comic deliberation.  Technically, less School of the Brothers Coen or Tarantino and more throwback to the patient organic slow-burn build-up of a Budd Boetticher.  Why it even knows when to stop.  Satisfying & fun.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: In spite of a small gross on its $800,000 outlay, Watts leapt directly to SPIDERMAN and a 175 mill budget.  (Apparently, money well spent in HOMECOMING - not seen here.)  A similar financial bet now playing out as NOMADLAND’s Chloé Zhao jumps into the Marvel Universe on ETERNALS/’21.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Don Siegel twists the traditional Mob Money template in CHARLEY VARRICK/’73.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/charley-varrick-1973.html

STRAIGHT IS THE WAY (1934)

Misbegotten M-G-M programmer, running less than an hour (a sure sign the studio knew they had a stinker), taken from a modest B’way success directed & co-written by George Abbott with Muni Weisenfrend (later Paul Muni*) as a Lower East Side Jew, home after five years in jail and trying to stay clear of his protection-racket pals.  Bizarrely cast as a (now lost) silent in ‘28 with John Gilbert & teenage Joan Crawford, we now get patrician Franchot Tone & reasonably cast Karen Morley sharing a tenement flat with unlikely Yiddishe Mama May Robson who lights the Sabbath Candles & keeps the gefilte fish on ice.  If only upstairs neighbor Gladys George stuck to mob boyfriend Jack La Rue instead of pinning her hopes (and various appendages) on Tone.  A fight on the roof; a crumbling brick barrier; a five story fall (the one good shot in the pic); a wronged dame your only alibi against a murder rap.  Easy to find cast & crew for something like this over @ Warners, but hopeless @ M-G-M.  Here, painfully inept megging from Paul Sand (who he?); and Franchot, on the verge of a career defining 1935 (MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY; LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER; marriage to Joan Crawford), wondering how he got this assignment.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Also in the cast on B'way, future acting teacher legends Lee Strasberg & Sanford Meisner.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Gary Cooper on Franchot Tone: ‘I’ve been with some good ones, but maybe the best was Franchot Tone.  I made two pictures with him & he stole both of them.  Something went wrong with how he was handled; or who knows, maybe it was Joan Crawford.  But he had everything – great at comedy and also at serious stuff if given the chance.  Now LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER is one hell of a picture, but you could take me right out of it and it would still be one.  But it couldn’t be much without Tone.’   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/lives-of-bengal-lancer-1935.html

EL AMOR BRUJO (1986)

Over his long career, but particularly in the ‘70s, ‘80s & ‘90s, Carlos Saura found international success with an anodyne approach to high Spanish culture.  Meticulously made, beautifully produced, you wouldn’t call it tourist trap cinema, more State-sponsored exhibit, destined as centerpiece at some putative World’s Fair Spanish Pavilion.  Here, Manuel de Falla's highly-charged half-hour concert piece for orchestra & mezzo-soprano EL AMOR BRUJO gets the treatment, expanded into a feature-length dance work with bits of dialog & added gypsy flamenco turns.* Betrothed as children, now grown into their wedding day, bride & groom come up against long-time/third-wheel male suitor.  (Plus short-time female third-wheel new to the story.)  Murder; ghostly haunting; pas de quatre recoupling; dawn of a new day resolution.  Shot on a stylized junkyard shanty town, Saura briefly mines the real possibilities of de Falla’s ravishing music in a group community dance (‘Ritual Fire Dance’), but otherwise holds to the bus tour schedule.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Working from frankly lesser material (second-tier/dialog-free French theatrical), Ettore Scola shows how to do something along these lines in LE BAL/’83.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Reconceived in 1925 by de Falla from his flop 1914 original (a third longer, with cabaret singer, chamber orchestra, dialog), the new version caught on immediately, as a ‘ballet pantomime’ or concert piece, with full orchestra, mezzo-soprano and no dialog.  Saura’s expansion apparently taken from the better known 1925 edition.  Ernest Ansermet’s early stereo classic with Marina de Gabaráin from 1955 has long been the ‘go-to’ recording.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  If you ever wondered what Adrien Brody would look like as a fiery flamenco dancer, here’s your chance.  (see poster)

THIRD FINGER, LEFT HAND (1940)

Myrna Loy, on a break from her final (largely uninspired) six pic run of comedies with William Powell, co-stars with Melvyn Douglas, stuck in an even longer series of underwhelming rom-coms, as M-G-M tries to make NINOTCHKA out of a sow’s ear.*  Conceptually, not a bad idea: Manhattan magazine editor Loy pretends she’s married to an absentee husband to keep unwanted attention at bay, frustrate a randy publisher & stay the hand of his jealous wife.  But a meet-cute with Douglas’s MidWest artist, in town to see a gallery owner, leads to a brief affair that has Loy thinking twice about her life choices.  Then he discovers she’s ‘married.’  Huffy at being taken for a ride, things are made worse with misunderstandings & phony explanations before Douglas figures to make things really uncomfortable by posing as the fake husband.  If only second-rater Lionel House’s script followed thru on any of its plot lines or comedy arcs, instead of dropping them after scoring a gag or two.  Or if Robert Z. Leonard’s direction had pace or visual interest.  Must M-G-M country homes  always look like foreign embassies?  Things are just as wasteful among the strong supporting cast, even Lubitsch fave Felix Bressart (between stellar turns in NINOTCHKA and SHOP AROUND THE CORNER) is given nothing to work with.  (The gag?  He’s been writing fake letters from the nonexistent husband.  One more dropped bit.)  Even auto-pilot needs someone to turn it on.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: When done right, great romantic comedy looks so effortless, you imagine it is effortless.  Good luck with that!  Ten times harder than just about any drama.  For Loy in the form: early THIN MAN pics, or partnering Cary Grant (and Douglas) in MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE/’48.  OR: *Douglas against Garbo in Lubitsch’s NINOTCHKA/’39 for an entirely different level of achievement.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/12/ninotchka-1939.html

SWEET SIXTEEN (2002)

Ken Loach returns to North Country, Britain (near Glasgow?), land of limited opportunity & impenetrable accent to chart what might be called the exuberant hopelessness of sixteen-yr-old Liam (debuting Martin Compston, now lead in popular police anti-corruption drama LINE OF DUTY).  Out of school, he’s making solid cash as a low-level drug dealer with BFF ‘Pinwheel,’ but very much the dominate player.  Trying to expand the business, he starts working territory held by his mom’s hot-headed boyfriend with the expected violent results.  Small, but a pitbull when attacked, Liam attracts the attention of a local drug lord and soon has something of a cottage industry going using pizza deliveries as cover.  Yet, all the cash, all the ambition, all the violence is being channeled not for himself, but into buying a home for his mom, currently incarcerated and about to get out.  The idea that what he thinks Mom wants will not turn out to be what she actually wants never occurring to him and leading to tragic consequences.  Loach handles this with something between Neo-Realism & ‘Dogme’ techniques, and while much is very effective (though relationships hard to sort out under those accents!), the film often feels pre-determined (no doubt accurately reflecting the situation), but also dramatically pre-digested for maximum misery.*  In its own way, as manipulative as a focus-tested Hollywood product.  Something that keeps this film a good way off KES/’69, Loach’s miraculous early North Country feature, one he no doubt tires of always coming up short against.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, KES/’69.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/kes-1969.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The ending pure Italian Verismo Operatic.  Very ‘La commedia è finita!’