MY BILL (1938)

Poached from Paramount in ‘32, Warner Bros. signed Kay Francis to a long-term contract at Hollywood’s top salary only to see her popularity wane, partly due to stricter enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code in mid-‘34 and partly a matter of changing tastes.  Neither conducive to the sophisticated dramatic strengths bought out by ‘Our Lady of Decolletage.’  Demoted to B-pics by Warners in hopes humiliation would lead her to ‘ankle,’ she laughed them off, continued to do what the studio asked, and took the paycheck at the end of each week.  Here, Jack Warner tried driving her off the lot with something far more devious for a glamour gal: giving Kay a brood of four kids (one of them fully grown!); blouses buttoned up to the neck (nor a plunging back in sight); and middle-aged character actor John Litel as beau in this remake where she’s a cash-strapped mom in a little MidWest town.  An early credit for director John Farrow (Mia’s heavy drinking dad), Francis’s young widow sees three of her four kids move in with her disapproving sister-in-law, with only young son Dickie Moore sticking.  (An enchanting little boy, he calls her ‘Sweetheart’ and bats the thickest eyelashes seen on screen before young Liz Taylor came along.)  The story probably played better in 1930 as COURAGE (now lost), but without a Depression background it’s all a bit ridiculous, and more than a bit convenient dramatically.  (Litel as bank manager has long loved her and plays deus ex machina.  Problems solved.)   Friend Carole Lombard gave Francis an A-list lifeline with a co-starring assignment away from Warners, but nothing seemed to take.*  And Kay, only 33 here, faded out by the mid-'40s.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Here’s that Lombard film with Francis playing bad wife to Cary Grant: IN NAME ONLY/’39.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/08/in-name-only-1939.html   OR: Francis with William Powell in ONE WAY PASSAGE/’32, her best at Warners.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/02/one-way-passage-1932.html

WENDELL & WILD (2022)

Stop-motion animator Henry Selick (THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS/’93; JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH/’96), never a ‘less-is-more’ adherent, has rarely been as unnecessarily over-active as in this collaboration with Jordan Peele.  Off the big screen since CORALINE/’09 (technically still off since this is NetFlix), his visual stockpile may have gotten the better of him.  Or perhaps turning 70 led him to put it all up when he had the chance.  Not a bad thing, if story & characters profit by it.  But this traumatically dark tale of an orphan girl, blaming herself for her parents’ death (she's not half wrong), distresses when it wants to bring catharsis.  Sent to a Catholic Academy with other tossed-aside kids, ‘Kat’ sells her soul to a couple of wiseguy demons (Peele & Keegan–Michael Key) addicted to their master’s haircream, a product that also revives the dead.  At least, for a spell; long enough till our remarkably unlikable protagonist learns to accept . . .  (Now, you're ahead of me.)  On the plus side, James Hong, pushing 90, does a super job as Father Bests, also back from the dead; and a Hispanic sidekick named Raul (shouldn’t it be Raoul?), voiced by debuting Sam Selaya is great, the best developed character in here.  But too much feels either calculated (a push for racial diversity) or rushed (NetFlix holding to a Hallowe’en release deadline?).  The film is often fun to watch (worth it for technique & design alone), but a disappointment for Selick with only five features in 30 years.

DOUBLE-BILL:  In addition to the three well-known titles mentioned above, Selick’s live-action mix MONKEYBONE/’01 always goes missing.  Worth a look?  Write in and let us know.

NO SAD SONGS FOR ME (1950)

Back in 1939, Bette Davis died bravely of ‘Prognosis Negative’ in DARK VICTORY.  Now, a decade later, Margaret Sullavan, returning to the screen one last time after seven years off, was allowed to bravely say the forbidden word: ‘cancer.’  (Note self-congratulatory poster above.)  Though not naming anything more specific about what would carry her off in a few months, Doctor John McIntire also gets to mention the disease . . . once, and that’s it.  Progress!  In this relatively sobersided ‘Women’s Weepie,’ set in the sort of ‘50s suburban housing development you’d soon find on dozens of tv sit-coms, lackluster Wendell Corey is the busy husband, always off on a job while Sullavan wastes away.  Worse, he’s just hired attractive female assistant Viveca Lindfors.  A threatening triangulation turned opportunity/continuity for Sullavan who bypasses jealousy for matchmaking.  A perfect replacement for a soon-to-be grieving widower and a step-mom to daughter Natalie Wood.  (Excellent as always in her child star days.)  It all should make for a sticky piece of maudlin sentimentality, but director Rudolph Maté, just off D.O.A./’49, must have noticed the bizarrely similar story trajectories in two incompatible genres: Mortality calling in film noir and Women’s Weepie.  To their credit, both films honestly modest in their totally different ways.  And if Edmund O’Brien sweats his way thru the noir conventions of D.O.A., here Sullavan, looking decidedly worn since last seen, and done with the movies at only 41, yet finds under cinematographer Joseph Walker’s gentle care, a way to grow luminescent as the film goes on and she starts to lose the battle.  In her last scenes, reviving a sort of fragile beauty thru sheer will, acting and careful lighting.*

SCEWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Ingrid Bergman was the champ at growing more beautiful the sicker she got.  See GASLIGHT/’44, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY/’45 and NOTORIOUS/’44.

DOUBLE-BILL: Robert Donat , who had real health issues to work thru, brought unusual intelligence, acceptance & underplaying on a male iteration of ‘Women’s Weepie’ mortality tropes in LEASE OF LIFE/’54.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/lease-of-life-1954.html

THE DAMNED / LA CADUTA DEGLI DEL (1969)

Though few would now put this in the top half of Luchino Visconti’s output (tenth out of his thirteen features?), it was by some distance the most commercially successful on release.  Sex & Nazis, violence, nudity & perversion never a drag at the art-house box-office.*  And, famous titled Italian Communist that he was, it’s easy to see Visconti’s attraction to the subject matter in his own brief flirtation with Nazis in the mid-‘30s.  Less ideology than æsthetics, all those handsome Blonde Vikings in black & white uniforms with a blood-red accent.  (A look still drawing them in.)  Later, Visconti would come within a day of execution as part of the Italian Communist resistance.  If only similar character complication found its way in here.  Instead, it’s largely family dynasty drama, inspired by the real-life Krupps, as a couple of generations fight over who controls the metal foundries needed to weaponize the German Reich.  Interloper Dirk Bogarde is murdering his way up the ranks to a tune called by his lover, eldest family daughter Ingrid Thulin.  Visconti casts Helmut Berger (his exquisitely handsome partner at the time) as her perverse son, a charming psychopath who ‘reads’ gay, dresses a la Marlene Dietrich, but ravishes a young niece, a lower-class bottle blonde and eventually Mom herself.  Yikes!  The lad always around to pick up any family droppings as he morphs into an S.S. officer while various Nazi divisions begin taking over state & industry.   Meantime, Visconti takes subversive pleasure in the orgy/murder known as The Night of Long Knives where the ‘Brownshirts’ (portrayed here as a big gay orgy club) get mown down by leather-clad SS.  Handled in a manner unique in Visconti's films, with wildly roving cameras catching the action in hit & miss fashion.   The whole film inferring that the decadent elite brought about Hitler’s rise when it was really more the beer-stein mob rather than champagne flute sippers who voted them in.  And THE DAMNED winds up a sort of pastiche HAMLET: Berger’s Prince; Thulin’s Gertrude;  Bogarde’s Claudius; working thru a family dynamic Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes would recognize.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: One odd moment finds composer Maurice Jarre grabbing what sounds like a leftover music cue from his own DOCTOR ZHIVAGO when Berger ‘scores’ with Mom in bed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Homosexuality still officially (indeed legally) referred to in medical & psychological texts as a perversion in 1970. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Visconti’s other two with Berger are LUDWIG/’73 which is a crashing bore and the much maligned CONVERSATION PIECE/’74, a connoisseur’s piece but, in its own way, pretty special. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/ludwig-1972.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/gruppo-di-famiglia-in-un-interno.html

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)

The main takeaway from this film adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s stage musical isn’t the songs, plot or perfs, but the infamous washes of color that tint the screen in various hues whenever a song threatens.  Joshua Logan, director on B’way & film, spent pages of his auto-bio apologizing.  Initially filmed both with and without the effect, Logan was mistakenly led to believe the lab could easily remove it in post-production.  (Latterly, the film has appeared in video formats with various levels of reduced filtering.)  Seen now, distanced from the WWII story, the ‘49 stage show and the late ‘50s film, it’s less distracting, an attempt to heighten stylization not so different then the use of music itself.  The sad truth is, this off-putting technique is just about the least of the film’s problems.  Those begin with Logan’s ineptitude as filmmaker.  A ‘40s & ‘50s legend on B’way, he never developed a feel for film.  Continuing with construction and peaking with what amounts to a second-choice/road company cast.  As a naively provincial, slightly racist nurse from Little Rock, stationed in an erotically charged Pacific Isle, Mitzi Gaynor is her usual perky self; voice & personality missing essential overtones.  (Doris Day and Shirley MacLaine both unavailable?)  As the older French exile with a violent past, racially mixed-family and hopes of marriage, Rossano Brazzi is as Italian as Ezio Pinza was in the original stage production.  Pinza, a basso contante for the ages over three decades before ‘crossing’ to B’way, seemingly made an Italian-born Frenchman de rigeur as Emile de Becque.  Why not a French Frenchman?  Mais qui?  Charles Boyer fine, but a decade too old.  Yves Montand perfect (and with a voice), but too young.  Jean Marais?  As the young marine given a taste of island ecstacy before taking on a near suicidal mission, John Kerr looks the part, but sings with another’s voice.  And the love match basically has the virginal girl’s mother pimping her.  A bit icky.  (BTW, that’s Juanita Hall as Mom/Bloody Mary.  Dubbed in spite of doing the role on stage and singing again (stage & film) in R&H’s FLOWER DRUM SONG.  So many weird decisions.  The film still made a shitload of cash.  Hard to kill anything with that score.  On stage, they’re positively profligate with it, tossing out SOME ENCHANTED EVENING a mere ten minutes after the curtain rises.  Here, forty awkward minutes of beefcake tomfoolery and exposition on the beach before we get there.  To the film’s credit, a sequence of three character songs after the amateur Navy stage show (hometown blues for Gaynor & Kerr; anti-racist screed for Kerr, de Becque’s regretful solo ‘This Nearly Was Mine,’ painfully cut to half-length) show how this thing could have worked in spite of stiff megging.  (Check out an early office scene where Kerr meets his superiors to see just how bad Logan could be.  Or his use of matte paintings & cycloramas for long shots of forbidden island Bali Hai.  Sheesh!)  Logan’s next musical adaptation (FANNY/’61) dropped all the songs.  CAMELOT nearly bankrupted Warner Bros before PAINT YOUR WAGON/’69 tanked Stateside,  only to make pots of dough in Europe.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/06/fanny-1961.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/11/camelot-1967.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/paint-your-wagon-1969.html

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Best R&H film adaptations came first (OKLAHOMA!) and last (THE SOUND OF MUSIC).  Most in need of a redo: CAROUSEL.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/oklahoma-1955.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-sound-of-music-1965.html

UNFORGETTABLE (1996)

Instantly players in the ‘80s/’90s Neo-Noir Revival when THE LAST SEDUCTION/’94 came out, director John Dahl and sultry star Linda Fiorentino wound up being bit players after this second collaboration.  Dahl, at least, active to this day (mostly cable & streaming); Fiorentino, all but thru in six years.  Agent/manager negligence?  Difficult to work with?  On the ‘wrong’ side of forty?  Hard to guess from this meager paranormal thriller that sees Ray Liotta’s forensic doc, a long-grieving widower blamed for his wife’s death, taking unhealthy interest in Fiorentino’s mind-merging experiments.  Injecting himself with untested serum to get inside a witness's brain, he damages his health to seek the truth.  It gives Dahl an excuse for fast-edit psychotronic razzle-dazzle as Liotta shoots up to investigate with Fiorentino playing worrying sidekick/health coach for a guy she inevitably/unaccountably falls for.  A deep dive hardly needed when the real killer is so obvious a five-year-old movie novice could have spotted him in the first reel.  That said, it’s not a bad watch.  Dahl had a talent for these things* and Fiorentino grows on you in this silly role once you get past the horrible bangs that sparsely cover her forehead. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Though Dahl does have a manner of being slightly ‘off’ with his camera set-ups.  A bit too close, they sometimes ‘read’ as genre parody.

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned, THE LAST SEDUCTION really got people’s attention.   Not seen here since its theatrical release.  Send a COMMENT (see link below) and let us know how it's holding up.  OR:  Fiorentino’s striking debut, hard to the touch/quick to melt, against a very green, very likable Matthew Modine in VISION QUEST/’85.

THE LAST VERMEER (2019)

Dreadful.  Producer Dan Friedkin makes a sorry directing debut on this fact-inspired post-WWII tale of Vermeers, art forgery and Nazi collaborators in Holland.  Here, the accused wartime profiteer is art dealer/master forger Han Van Meegeren, a painter with a grudge against the art critics and authenticators who stopped his career back in the day.  He claims the Vermeer he sold to Hermann Göring for a fabulous sum was his own work, and who could object to a Dutchman pulling a fast one on the Nazi elite?  Profiteering as wartime sabotage.  Except . . . what if it IS a Vermeer masterpiece?  Patriot or Quisling?  Past Jewish resistance member Joseph Piller, now with the American Army, is trying to figure this all out, but the Dutch authorities want to handle it on their own, rush thru a trial, then execute the bastard.  Not a bad true story, but Friedkin’s film is a terrible mess.  The first half loaded with needless exposition, pointless personal backstory and chases thru the streets (nice period detail); the second, mostly courtroom drama and surprise 'reveals' barely worth a Perry Mason episode.  None of the actors have any rapport with anyone else on screen, Claes Bang seems too TALL to connect to anyone as the Army investigator, and in a regrettable first, Guy Pearce is an unwelcome presence on screen, overdoing John Malkovich tics & tricks to play the usual arrogant prick/genius who lives to brag about his unsung genius and annoy with a highly theatrical, uppity attitude.  (Malkovich can pull off these creepy characters; Pearce, hands aflutter, junior league at theatrical posturing.)  With a final twist so inconsequential, it may cause you to inverse gasp. ( A shrug?)  Turns out, some people in Occupied countries sucked up to the Nazi elite big time.  Quelle shock!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  With Alain Delon in peak form, Joseph Losey delivers a devastating look at a similar subject in M. KLEIN/’76.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/monsieur-klein-1976.html

IRON WILL (1994)

Thirty years after his last screen credit, John Michael Hayes (four classic Hitchcocks & top-grossers PEYTON PLACE and THE CARPETBAGGERS among his titles) returned to the big screen a final time with what is essentially a YA/coming-of-age Disney film.  I know . . . but a good YA/coming-of-age Disney film, especially for the ‘90s.  A fictionalized take on a real dog sled run (500 miles from Winnipeg to St. Paul), Mackenzie Astin channels his young James Stewart (check out the hair) as the farmer’s son who has to put dreams of college on ice when dad dies and mom's got to sell the farm.  But the $10,000 racing prize that tempted his late father looks just as good to this 17-year old American kid.  And, after a month’s training with dad’s old Indian partner as mentor, he’s off to take on hardened pros, all seasoned dog-sledding Goliaths.  Not a lot of surprises on how this all turns out, but the journey is sweet, cleanly shot (the bright look a pleasure after so many ‘antiqued’ filming techniques) and exciting enough to grab front page headlines from WWI.  And while tv actor/director Charles Haid (in his sole feature credit) proves no master of tone, he runs a clean story line and was given an unusually strong cast for a Disney pic.  Kevin Spacey as the cynical reporter; David Ogden Stiers as the race sponsor; Brian Cox as the bigshot betting against the kid.  The huskies a wonderful lot (earning more legit tears than the frostbit humans), and someone (Hayes?) had the grand idea of turning the main villain/competitor into Messala (Ben-Hur’s chariot opponent).  Even rousting up dogs with mostly black coats (like Messala’s chariot horse team) while giving Astin a pure white lead dog.  Too bad they didn’t go all in and reuse Miklós Rózsa’s score.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For a more realistic dog sled run, TOGO/’19.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/togo-2019.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *In BEN-HUR, there is no score under the big chariot race.  Here, it’s from Joel McNeely, a Disney regular who’s also made some of the best re-recordings of classic Hollywood scores.  Bernard Herrmann’s VERTIGO; a reconstruction of his all but complete unused score for TORN CURTAIN (when will someone dub in the whole Herrmann score on that misbegotten film?), plus an absolute knockout recording of Franz Waxman’s SUNSET BOULEVARD, including the alternate opening sequence set in a morgue.

DEVIL'S KNOT (2013)

The real mystery of this Tru-Crime story (three young boys bike into the woods and never come out) is how it became, as the Tie-In paperbacks used to say, ‘Now a Major Motion Picture!’,  and not a run-of-the-mill DATELINE or 48 HOURS tv investigation.  With A-list Oscar’d stars and everything, still one of those $15 mill pics that lose 40 mill.  Who ‘green-lights’ these things?  Reese Witherspoon is fine, I suppose, as one of the moms fearing the worst; and Colin Firth perhaps thought trying on a Southern accent would make a nice challenge.  (The accent also fine, I suppose.)  But director Atom Egoyan has little feel (or luck) finding humanity in one of those in-bred God-fearin’/Satan-obsessed Southern communities where Church sermons thunder against the morals of ‘youth culture’ and some quickly located teens and layabout 20-somethings call themselves Wiccans and confess to crimes . . . then recant.  Firth, an investigator helping a pair of lawyers working pro bono fights the good fight with scant motivation against a biased judge and a lynch-minded community.  Neither Firth nor film raising much of a sweat in this bright, shiny, antiseptic looking town.  Previously covered in books & documentaries (the events happened in 1993), it’s hard to see the purpose here.*  A sentiment seconded by film distributors who gave this an extremely limited release.  Then, right at the end, what ought to have been the film’s last two acts are inadequately laid out for us on title-cards (four or five paragraphs’ worth of them) filling in a race to justice and a long delayed Get-Out-of-Jail-Free twist (without exoneration/unable to sue the State of Arkansas) that might have made a more interesting film.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *IMDb lists four documentaries:  WEST OF MEMPHIS/’12, PARADISE LOST: THE CHILD MURDERS AT ROBIN HOOD HILLS/‘96, PARADISE LOST 2: REVELATIONS/‘00, and PARADISE LOST 3: PURGATORY/‘11.  (none seen here)

ROSITA (1923)

First of the major German directors brought to Hollywood, Ernst Lubitsch did a quick pivot from FAUST to much lighter fare when Mary Pickford’s mother discovered Goethe’s play was considerably darker than the Gounod opera.  (She murders her own child!)  Internationally famous at the time for epics that gave hormones to historical figures, here Lubitsch goosed Pickford’s career out of the doldrums.  It worked so well, commercially and critically, Mary later came to resent its success.*  Seen now, without that background, the first two acts, while excitingly staged on gorgeous sets (dynamic masses filling the streets of Old Seville), and knowingly played as Mary’s feral street-singer attracts the wandering eye of libidinous King Holbrook Blinn, it’s pretty lightweight stuff.  Or is until the stakes get raised in a third act largely stolen from TOSCA.  (Less the Puccini opera than LA TOSCA, the Sardou/Sarah Bernhardt play.)  Suddenly with something dramatic to play (King promises a 'mock execution' of a political prisoner to gain Mary’s sexual favors, then secretly reneges on the deal), it all comes spectacularly alive in unusual vertical compositions that place principals in the lower third of the frame to accentuate the massive sets.  (Cinematographer Charles Rosher seamlessly working in matte shots and various optical tricks.)  That’s Raoul Walsh’s kid brother George as the handsome prisoner and Irene Rich as a knowing Queen to put things right for a happy ending Sardou never thought of.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: And paid fast, as MoMA’s restored print (see LINK below) is available to museum members online for free only till Nov. 3rd.  Hopefully, a proper video release will follow.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: *Pickford turned against ROSITA in later years (perhaps having ceded artistic control  made it all too hard to swallow the critical & commercial success) and it became one of the few titles she didn’t bother to maintain properly.  The sole surviving print, from a Russian archive, has been miraculously resurrected and is introduced by MoMA film curator Dave Kehr on this link.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ2iZ9Sofl4

TOLKIEN (2019)

More accurately, YOUNG TOLKIEN.  This exceedingly handsome, cunningly parsed bio-pic on the LORD OF THE RINGS author, didn’t connect with the vast audience for his writings & adaptations.*  Their loss.  The story, laid out in three parts (with some flashbacks & inter-cutting), begins as BOY TOLKIEN, an orphan with a knack for literature & languages on full scholarship at a ritzy boarding school, is toughing it out with wealthier lads till he finds a fellowship of artistic leaning chums.  (All veddy, veddy British.)  Then UNIVERSITY TOLKIEN, finding a voice thru profs/mentors and a late switch in academic studies.  (Why it is always Oxford or Cambridge in these things?)  Lastly, SOLDIER TOLKIEN, learning the worst of life’s journey, and losing half of the fellowship in the trenches at the Battle of Somme.  Returning a wounded vet, now prepared to start a family & the great work.  The usual way of handling these things is to cherry pick incidents that match up with favorite moments, characters or themes found in the books.  Guilty as charged.  But Finnish director Dome Karukosi (his first English-language film?) & writers David Gleeson/Stephen Beresford glance rather than pounce on the eureka moments, while believable period art direction & an exceptional cast (young fellowship members & the well-matched mature replacements) make sure we’re not just looking ahead but involved in the here & now.  Nicholas Hoult, a gravely handsome Tolkien, and intellectual match, fellow orphan Lily Collins (looking like Jean Simmons in profile), supply warmth & charm.  But the standout perf comes from Tolkien’s poet pal, Geoffrey Smith, played with uncanny attention to detail by Anthony Boyle.  As much a stage as film actor, you need to go back to Stephen Rea in MICHAEL COLLINS/’96 or even Ralph Richardson in the 1939 version of THE FOUR FEATHERS to find its like.  Warm and touching without being overly sentimental; something of a bromantic classic that its target audience missed.

DOUBLE-BILL: It’s what DEAD POETS SOCIETY/’89 thinks it’s up to.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *A better poster might have helped.  This French one the best of an anodyne lot.

THE CAMERAMAN (1928)

Just as hardcore Marx Bros. fans don’t fully appreciate their initial success moving from Paramount to M-G-M for A NIGHT AT THE OPERA/’35, so too Buster Keaton cultists on his move from independent production to the M-G-M maw.  But while both were progressively tamed into shadows of themselves (Keaton in six years; the Marxes in seven), their wings had yet to be clipped in these first efforts, comic masters tweaked not flattened by the ‘good taste’ and lack of comic sensibility of studio production chief Irving Thalberg.  Particularly so in Keaton’s case where his eccentric comic stamp remains largely intact, if in a conventional boy/girl setting.*  (COLLEGE/’27, his most Harold Lloyd-like vehicle, holds to similar pattern.)   Here, Keaton’s street photographer falls hard for a secretary at M-G-M’s newsreel outlet, trades his tin-type equipment for a pawn-shop motion picture camera and spends the rest of the film following the girl (an excellent Marceline Day) and hunting up newsworthy subjects.  Each episode integrating narrative movement, thrills and laughs.  Exceptions include a break for Buster to play an inning of baseball at Yankee Stadium all by himself, and an improvised one-shot/one-take changing room bit as Buster and film Unit Manager Edward Brophy (spontaneously raised by Buster into a perfect comic foil) try changing into bathing suits in a single tiny cubical.  (Look fast to check out Buster’s amazing gymnastic physique.)  But everything in here is a standout: answering the phone an ingenious technical gag; a large public pool date with Day an entire comic universe for Buster to milk for laughs; a Chinatown Tong War where Buster at work turns a construction scaffolding into a natural camera crane and a ridiculously dangerous slapstick gag.  Helped by the amazing ‘Jocko,’ a capuchin monkey/assistant.*  Keaton makes impossible physical gags look so easy, you hardly realize the level of accomplishment involved.  Much like this intensely funny, sweet-natured, touching and endearing film.  (Look for the Criterion 2020 edition.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  *‘Jocko’ the Monkey fresh off his other classic film role, playing against (who else?) Harold Lloyd in THE KID BROTHER/’27, Lloyd’s most Keatonian (and best) film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *That slight ‘flattening’ makes THE CAMERAMAN a particularly good entry point into Keaton.  (Same for the Marx Bros. and NIGHT AT THE OPERA.)

PLEASANTVILLE (1998)

Undersold as merely clever on release, twenty-five years of ideological & social polarization have only added depth & emotional resonance to writer/director Gary Ross’s political parable about a pair of modern siblings (Tobey Maguire; Reese Witherspoon) sucked into the b&w world of a ‘50s/’60s family tv show.  Alternately amazed, amused & appalled at the happy conformity and absurd common-sense lacunae they find, the film celebrates disruption, knowledge & spontaneous unpredictability against this sterile, all-knowing Garden of Eden world (more trap than paradise), as unbidden longings (sex, maturity, artistic leanings, violence) trigger free-will/anti-Theist eruptions of healthy color, discontent, hormonal desire & complexity.  With an exceptionally well worked out plot structure by Ross that largely avoids a preachy tone.  (Though he does telegraph gags & morals; and it’s a bit unfair to have used LEAVE IT TO BEAVER as the main template since that show holds up so much better than others of its ilk; think OZZIE AND HARRIET, DONNA REED SHOW, FATHER KNOWS BEST, ROOM FOR ONE MORE, et al.)  Technically, the early digital effects all but faultless, seamlessly mixing and exponentially growing into colorful maturity as backlash from b&w conservatives threaten to stop the unstoppable.  With a real Frank Capra climax set in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD’s courtroom to close the narrative circle before everyone gets their just, if open-ended, reward.  Among the plus-perfect cast, Jeff Daniels, as a diner operator coming out of his shell to discover the artist inside, allows Ross to put on a magical mini-art history sequence as heartwarming as anything in here.  Plus Don Knotts as a magical TV Repairman!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Watch b&w cinematography raise good looks to myth as the young Paul Walker, all sharp angles and facial planes, is naturally abstracted past simple realism with color removed from the picture.  Enlarged thru reduction.  It’s why Orson Welles called b&w the actor’s best friend.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Composer Randy Newman grabs a hunk of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s BETWEEN TWO WORLDS/’44 for one of his main themes.  It works perfectly, but is uncredited.

THAT CLICK (2019)

Famed photo-journalist at LOOK and LIFE magazines, celebrated celebrity portrait photog Douglas Kirkland, who died recently at 88, gets a career bio as busy & surfacey as his work. Tall & dashing, he ingratiated his way into early opportunities with photographer Irving Penn and in emotionally open shoots with stars like Liz Taylor & (most famously) Marilyn Monroe, using the photographic equivalents of a reporter’s softball questions.  For Kirkland, exuding positivity from every pore on assignment, he’s Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment/ Celebrity Edition.  He’s tops at this stuff, but halfway thru, the film either runs out of things to say or (more likely) the subjects lack the mythic qualities of yore.  Instead of Marilyn, it’s Michelle Williams who played Marilyn.  Instead of Audrey Hepburn & Peter O’Toole in Paris with William Wyler on a trifle like HOW TO STEAL A MILLION, Nicole Kidman & Hugh Jackson make Baz Luhrmann’s soporific AUSTRALIA.  A nice technical touch has director Luca Severi using the entire frame on old home movie clips, so the left hand side of the image, usually cropped to remove sprocket holes, is shown, gaining about 20% extra image.  It’s a bit like those museum worthy prints that show the emulsion at the edge of the print.  Ironic in a film that mostly avoids interesting technical details on cameras, illumination strategies and lens choices which might have shed light on Kirkland’s forthright, unfussy work habits.  At the end, you wonder how much interest his work would hold if the subjects weren’t already famous.  Not unlike that other Canadian icon of portrait iconography, Yousuf Karsh.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: There should be more films on photographers.  Till then, see Fred Astaire play a Richard Avedon-inspired shutterbug with Audrey Hepburn as reluctant model in Stanley Donen’s Gershwin musical FUNNY FACE (with Avedon as technical consultant).

SLIGHTLY SCARLET (1956)

Lesser James M. Cain from budget-conscious producer Benedict Bogeaus & vet helmer Allan Dwan is a pretty mixed bag.  At its WideScreen TechniColored best giving some idea of what Douglas Sirk might have done with a Cain novel, but too often not at its best, just slightly ridiculous.  (Something Sirk crucially skirted in his finest socially aware melodramas.)  Secretary Rhonda Fleming and kleptomaniac sister Arlene Dahl play good redhead/bad redhead against John Payne, the ‘good’ badman they’re both interested in.  A mob guy with a conscience, he’s trying to play both sides of the fence running the gang while nasty conscienceless boss Ted de Corsia takes it ‘on the lam’ after roughing up a newspaper editor, killing the old guy.  Fleming, who works for the newly elected mayor, can’t see that Payne is using her to place mob-friendly pals in power positions; she’s too busy cleaning up Dahl’s latest mess and worrying over her deteriorating mental condition.  Eventually, de Corsia returns home to push Payne out of the picture and everything comes to a head.  It’s a neat construct, especially watching Payne, who’s sympathetic side curdles with easy access to power, but characterization & plotting are barely sketched in.  And what’s with secretary Fleming’s high-end lifestyle?  To say nothing of Dahl’s OTT crazy & crazier nympho act.  Sirk would have had a ball, but Dwan as so often, merely gets in & out as painlessly as possible.  A missed opportunity then.  But probably too outré to revisit today.  Still, who’d want to skip cinematographer John Alton doing his ‘Prince of Darkness’ film noir thing in TechniColor R.K.O. SuperScope.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Seeing redheads Dahl & Fleming together on screen is nearly as satisfying as having British character actors Reginald Gardiner, Reginald Denny & Reginald Owen all in the same pic.  Finally, able to get ‘em straight.

CONTEST: The DVD edition from VCI Entertainment comes with three John M. Cain movie trailers (THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY/’44 the other two).  A rare, if not unique example of one video company plugging a competitor’s product.  It’s a tactic found in the best known work of one of this film’s stars.  Name the star, the film where this helpful customer courtesy occurs and the specific new policy to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

WATCHER (2022)

Under-cooked and over-praised, this woman-in-jeopardy thriller has Roman Polanski on the brain (mostly ROSEMARY’S BABY/’68 and THE TENANT/’76), but can’t pull it off.  Here, the young bride’s foreboding new apartment is in Bucharest; her ambitious husband is always at work and thinks she has an over-active imagination; a new friend from down the hall goes missing; weird noises are coming thru the walls; a man directly across the street stares thru the window at her all night long (she stupidly waves at him); and the city is on the lookout for a serial killer.  But hey!, she’s probably just got new town/foreign adjustment jitters.  Writer/director Chloe Okuno, in her feature debut, treats our pretty victim as if she were Lana Turner in some 1940s movie, lounging around all day waiting for something bad to happen or hubby to come home.  Whichever comes first.  Supposedly an actress, maybe she’d sign up for language classes, an acting lab, audit a college course to help her Romanian, go to the movies to hear it spoken or keep the tv on to see if osmosis kicked in verbally. (When she does go out to a film, it’s in English: WAIT UNTIL DARK/’67 with Audrey Hepburn in jeopardy.  The one good joke in the pic.)   How ‘bout a cooking or culture class, and a stop at the fruit market on the way back.  (Even Lana might do that, just to surprise hubby when he got home.  Then he’d be late, supper burnt  and she’d be even more miserable.)  Perhaps if the acting were stronger or the pacing & rhythm as uncannily right as in a Polanski film we might tumble for the situation.  (Only the creepy villain really comes across.)  And with the cast given all the time in the world to pick up their cues, every story beat has plenty of time to fall apart . . . or fall flat.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  As you’ve likely seen ROSEMARY’S BABY, try THE TENANT/’76, still seriously overlooked Polanski.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-tenant-1976.html

MERRILL'S MARAUDERS (1962)

Decent, dutiful, just a little dull, adjectives rarely associated with irascible writer/director Sam Fuller, but apt for this standard-issue WWII mission pic about General Merrill’s American contingent of 3000 volunteer soldiers, part of a multi-national Allied operation to retake Burma from the Japanese.  Jeff Chandler, in his final role (dead at 42 from post-surgery complications when the film came out), is at war with his superiors, his ever-expanding assignment, and even the island’s physical properties, but never lets up in spite of casualties and his own deteriorating heart condition.  Fuller’s one-note script covers too much and not enough, the men’s personalities not registering even with nicknames like Bullseye, Chowhound & Kolowicz.  (Wait, that’s a real name, not that Claude Akins looks like a Kolowicz.)  Then skips the final assault.  Also missing: dense jungle, fetid swamps & the dreaded heat.  All these far better suggested by Raoul Walsh & Errol Flynn in their Burmese mission pic, OBJECTIVE, BURMA, made toward war’s end in ‘45 when darker, more realistic portrayals had become possible.  Here, you only get echt Fuller in some fairly lame comic business that seems to interest him more than the heroics.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, OBJECTIVE, BURMA/’45; its fine, Oscar nom’d Franz Waxman score generously sampled here sans credit.  OR: The more personal WWII pic Fuller thought he might be allowed to make right after this, THE BIG RED ONE.  Finally made in 1980, but heavily cut before a full-length restoration in 2004.  (You root for it to work, but it’s largely disappointing.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/big-red-one-1980.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: As Hollywood moved further away from the war years, the age of all those soldier boys also moved, from the teens & early 20-somethings who’d been drafted, toward 30 or even 40-somethings who had studio connections or been in the war a decade before.  The loss of fresh young faces sent to battle and possible death taking a dramatic toll on nearly all the many, many major studio WWII films made from the ‘50 to the ‘’70s.

BABY IT'S YOU (1983)

One of writer/director John Sayles’ best films, and (incidentally?) one of his least didactic.  It’s a classic high school first-love mismatch between Rosanna Arquette’s ‘nice’ middle-class Jewish girl & ‘dangerous’ lower-middle-class Italian smoothy Vincent Spano.  Set in a ‘60s that’s already Bruce Springsteen Jersey (some of his music anachronistically used between more appropriate ‘60s pop and Sinatra): HER - college-bound (specifically all-girls Sarah Lawrence); HIM - landing in Florida for nightclub opportunities between busboy duty . . . in other words, nowhere.  But when met as seniors, Spano dressed to emulate Sinatra in his Reprise Records ‘Ring-A-Ding’ days*, more Hall Monitor than student, a temptation and an embarrassment to Arquette.  And while Arquette is less judgmental than her friends, she still plays by the rules, won’t put out, and nabs the lead in the school play.  All of this finely observed by Sayles & cinematographer Michael Ballhaus.  But only in the second act, when it perfectly catches the college scene of the period, does the film surpass itself.  Sayles, who would have been in college just a few years later, captures the deep-felt fleeting moments about as well as anyone has: the quick, close friendships, awful blind dates with preppy boys from other elite schools that turn out to be not awful at all, the teacher who broke you down to rebuild . . . maybe for the worse, the new academic prejudices replacing old parochial prejudices, the inevitable breaking away from her past.  All with unblinking, uncanny accuracy.  The best forty minutes of filmmaking he ever did.  And what an eye for newcomers in cameos from then-unknowns like Fisher Stevens, Robert Downey Jr (hardly seen) and the sort of featured turn from a debuting Matthew Modine that presage a star-in-the-making.  (A position Modine frustratingly maintained without ever quite grabbing the ring.)  Sweet ending, too, with Sayles finding just the sort of visual element to tell the tale that was usually missing in his work.  Here, it’s seen when Spano, who looked five years older than Arquette back home, suddenly looks five years younger than she does when he meets her out of his element on campus.  A quietly devastating, insanely moving touch.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Something of a theme song here, Sinatra’s ‘Strangers In The Night’ was a rare 'old-line' success to make its way around British Invasion and MoTown hits to top the 45rpm ‘singles’ market.  Less known is that Sinatra thought the song was crap and hated having to sing it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The most Sinatra-like thing Spano does is get caught attempting to rob a tux-rental shop on prom night.  Sinatra did something similar (was it a drug store?) at about the same age, but his mom used her local political connections (and a bit of blackmail) to get the charges dropped.

DAMNATION ALLEY (1977)

Infamous as the pricey flop 20th/Fox figured would be the big Sci-Fi hit of 1977, studio execs dissing that cheap, goofy thing George Lucas had opening a few months earlier, you really didn’t need hindsight to spot this as a nothing burger.*  A post-nuclear holocaust road pic that’s almost shockingly incompetent.  (A small group of survivors from one of the last functioning military defense stations drive cross-country in a rough-and-ready tank to reach what’s left of civilization.)  A dud on every level: acting, story construction, special effects.  Naturally killing off their one Black principal, a sacred ‘70s film tradition.  More interesting than anything on screen is figuring out how anyone could have watched this and STAR WARS, their ‘other’ Sci-Fi release that year, than decide to push DAMNATION ALLEY, imagining the other film would quietly die.  Of course, the answer is: they didn’t see STAR WARS.  They probably didn’t bother to look at either film.  (These are important Hollywood execs!  You think they have time to watch movies?)   What they did see were box-office reports on hack journeyman director Jack Smight’s last two films before this, AIRPORT 75/’74 and MIDWAY/’75.  Typical commercial crap from Universal Studios under the Lew Wasserman regime.  Both made money.  That they were horrible films never entered into the equation . . . or showed on the money flow charts.  The former a sequel to a wildly popular film; the latter an all-star WWII actioner outfitted with Universal’s rumbling ‘Sensurround’ gimmick woofers.  (That they took notice of, shaking theater walls with Fox’s own Sound 360° . . . whatever that was.)  Amuse yourself imagining Dominique Sanda’s C.V. after this failed attempt at Hollywood stardom: Directors I’ve worked with include De Sica, Visconti, Bertolucci & Smight.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *They really could read box-office reports; quickly reviving old Double-Bill models to pair this with an honest to goodness B-pic made with one-tenth the budget.  See poster.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For a post-nuclear dystopian road pic, there’s MAD MAX and its various sequels.

AN CAILÍN CIÚIN / THE QUIET GIRL (2022)

Already a surprise hit in the U.K., this quiet, deliberately paced gem punches far above its weight.   Its idyllic rural Irish setting belied by a desperately unhappy, regressive young girl, a bed-wetting tween unpopular at school and at her home, a failing farm with older sisters who ignore her, an over-burdened pregnant mother without much time or inclination, and an unloving, disreputable father.  But a way out is presented when an older couple, childless cousins of the mother, offer to take the girl for the summer on their well-appointed dairy farm.  The two filling an ache from their own past.  The wife sympathetic from the start, the husband at first wary to the point of indifference.  (Like much that happens here, you’ll guess events & secrets before being told, a kind of gentle suspense built from withholding info till needed.)   Beautifully handled by writer/director Colm Bairéad, trusting the material and his audience, never rushing or pushing, working the intimacy for its own benefit in a thoughtful tone that thrives & concentrates using the old squarish Academy Ratio frame.  Cleverly set in the early ‘80s, this being rural Ireland (Gaelic and all), it might be taking place two or three decades earlier.  It lends a timeless quality and helps the film pack a hushed emotional wallop.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Ken Loach’s debut feature KES/’69 comes to mind.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/kes-1969.html

HINTERLAND (2021)

With a serial killer loose amid the general chaos & political upheaval of post-WWI Vienna, returning war vet/released P.O.W. Peter Perg (Murathan Muslu), a police detective before he enlisted, is unofficially assigned to find the man before he kills again.  A good setup for a dark thriller in this Austrian production that unfortunately bogs down from too many coincidences and improbabilities.  (The victims not random but conveniently linked to Perg’s wartime past.)  But within this plot, twists come honestly (especially the big reveal at the climax), and most of the tasty, well-chosen cast give off good period flavor.  Only female lead Liv Lisa Fries, division forensic doctor, is coddled with ‘relatable’ contemporary touches as a sop to modern tastes & sensibilities.  But the real excitement lies in a physical production that’s barely ‘physical’ at all.  Instead, most backgrounds & streets are layered into the composition via CGI realizations used not merely to augment reality, but to trade naturalism for German-style Expressionism.  As if the old UFA studio æsthetic of Fritz Lang & F.W. Murnau had suddenly acquired computer assisted art design.  A cityscape alive with instability and canted angles that might collapse at any moment.  Yet apparently unchanged by centuries of use.  A rivetingly suggestive look totally appropriate for the dissolving society norms threatening a republic that can’t find its footing.  It’s really something to see.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Erich Maria Remarque, of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT fame, wrote a near-sequel about post-war defeated German soldiers in THE ROAD BACK.  Something of a film maudit when James Whale made it in 1937, the 100" film was progressively butchered and refitted with broad humor (largely to get German Export approval) down to about 70".  Recently restored to something like Whale’s original cut, three problems remain: A first act that can neither find nor hold a tone; a lousy leading man in John ‘Dusty’ King (soon headed to cowboy fare); and hard to find decent copies (a complete cut on youtube looks awful).  Wait for better editions to show up as the film grows in interest & confidence as it plays, with powerful sequences on many of the same issues found in HINTERLAND.

BARABBAS (1961)

Not the typical overblown Early Christians Epic you expect from this period.  Instead, an episodic Biblical extrapolation (from Nobel Laureate Pär Lagerkvist’s novel) with everyone on their best behavior (well, everyone but a gloriously sadistic Jack Palance), working in a tone as subdued as lenser Aldo Tonti’s restricted color palette.  Director Richard Fleischer, a B-pic whiz rarely at his best on A-list projects, keeps the lid on uplift and emotion, even from lead Anthony Quinn (no small thing) as the man chosen over Jesus to be pardoned by a crowd at Pontius Pilate’s Jerusalem court.  Unable to fathom why he deserves this, or to process a trade-off that protects him from capital punishment in perpetuity, especially after witnessing the Crucifixion, Barabbas survives a series of encounters over the decades (and all over the Roman Empire) with believers and non-believers.  Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman (exceptionally good as his partner in the sulfur mines), Harry Andrews (reasonably effective in the impossible part of Peter), Ernest Borgnine, eventually coming up against Palance in gladiatorial conflict.  Lots of intelligent decisions made simply by backing off overstatement (screenwriter Christopher Fry having gotten a lot of that kind of thing out of his system on BEN-HUR/’59, itself tops in the overblown division).  Quinn was really batting it out of the park at the time.  But with GUNS OF NAVARONE just before, then LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and ZORBA THE GREEK coming right up, this downbeat Christ-crossed-my-path fable gets lost.  It shouldn’t.

DOUBLE-BILL: Quinn’s next big religioso, THE MESSAGE/’76, also got lost in the shuffle.  Possibly because it had to work around the traditionally camera-shy Prophet Muhammad.

JEW SÜSS / POWER (1934)

During his lifetime, this British movie was the major film credit for German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger*, one of the Weimar Intellectuals who spent the war years in Hollywood.  (Another of his novels, from 1933 on the rise of Nazism, THE OPPERMANNS, written when & where it was happening, just republished to considerable acclaim.*)  This one makes a fascinating, if not exactly easy watch.  (Accents, poor British sound recording & subfusc surviving picture element often make it a tough go.)  And director Lothar Mendes, one more alumni from Max Reinhardt’s theater, proves to be no Ernst Lubitsch, William Dieterle or Otto Preminger.  Yet the elaborate production, with a story like The Rothschilds, but seen thru a glass darkly . . . very darkly, is compelling stuff.  Conrad Veidt may be difficult to follow when he speaks, but feelings, motivation & tragic triumph come thru playing an 18th century financial whiz who leads a life outside the Wurtemburg ghetto by helping incoming Duke Karl Alexander with his considerable debts.  Before long, Josef Süss Oppenheimer is both minister and friend.  But at a price, as the Duke is as irresponsible in private as he is in public matters. It will cost Süss his daughter and his affair with a non-Jewish woman.  Yet in letting him become so powerful, the Duke will need a cabal of ‘gentlemen’ to take down this infidel servant, while remaining unaware of just how far Süss is willing to go for revenge.  Producer Michael Balcon lays it on for Mendes in production values & cast.  And if Frank Vosper, also in Hitchcock’s THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH this year, over-indulges as the grasping Duke, the Jewish contingent of Cedric Hardwicke as a psychic rabbi and ironic pal Paul Graetz make up for it.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK: *The NYTimes acclaimed Lion Feuchtwanger’s remarkably prescient 1933 novel two days in a row.  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/books/review/lion-feuchtwanger-oppermanns.html  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/opinion/the-oppermanns-feuchtwanger.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Not to be confused with the anti-Semitic 1940 Nazi-era German film of the same name.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Out the same year (and no doubt an inducement to get this made), THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD/’34.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-house-of-rothschild-1934.html

DOG (2022)

A surprise hit for co-directors Reid Carolin & Channing Tatum, making a cautious debut with that old standby The Road Pic.  The twist is that the two wounded war vets making this trip,  slowly warming to each other as long festering physical & psychological injuries rise to the surface and start to heal, are Man and Dog.  Specifically Army Ranger Tatum and Belgian Malinois ‘Lulu.’  With standard tropes for a (Grown) Boy and his Dog story, the tears begin with the opening credits, accompanied here by pages from the dog’s war service scrapbook, and pick up again on reaching destination, the funeral of a fellow vet, then right thru a coda that returns the dog to army base.  It’s everything in between that falls short.  Paint-by-numbers delays as Mr. Pooch dashes off-leash; mad pursuit; mischief & misunderstandings (by man and dog);  kindly stranger offers comfort & advice.  Eight or nine such turning points (that'd be about one per reel back when films came on reels).  All fine, all heartwarming (plus two for comic relief), but progressively uninvolving.  Still, by topping & tailing on the good moments, emotional buttons get pushed to send the customers out happy.  Sometimes, that’s all you need.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Don’t worry, one episode is there to show off the ‘Magic Mike’ bod.  (Tatum picks up a pair of free-spirited types.)  Physique buff as ever.  Even better, that moonpie face seems to be aging into something beyond bland handsomeness.  Previously unknown angles & planes now take the light adding interest & expressiveness.  Is it possible the guy can act?

FEUD: BETTE AND JOAN (2017)

Eight-part mini-series (mostly) from Ryan Murphy gets so much right seven-eights of the way, the collapse in the final chapter feels like self-sabotage.  Overdrawn & cartoonish at times, but these larger-than-life Hollywood personalities likely wouldn’t have had it any other way.  And not just Joan Crawford & Bette Davis as they vie for leverage filming WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE and HUSH, HUSH . . . SWEET CHARLOTTE, but director Robert Aldrich, mendacious studio head Jack Warner, bitchy gossip queen Hedda Hopper, et al.  Murphy uses phony documentary interviews with Joan Blondell & Olivia de Havilland as helpful scorecard to point the way for non-devotees.  Harmless, but is it needed?  (It’s there to serve as Murphy’s personal mouthpiece.)  But what a dead-on cast: Stanley Tucci particularly funny as awful Jack Warner; and someone had the wicked idea to make Crawford’s housekeeper/assistant Mamacita (a German who Joan at first mistook for a Mexican domestic she was expecting, hence the moniker), played by Jackie Hoffman, a lot like Agnes Moorehead’s housemaid in CHARLOTTE.  As expected, both leads easily hit their marks, but Susan Sarandon gets to have a lot more fun as Bette Davis than miserable Jessica Lange playing the dogged Crawford.  This imbalance the likely explanation of what goes so dismally wrong in the final episode where Murphy tries to even out our sympathies and their career arcs, but can only do so by seriously misrepresenting Davis’s career post-JANE/CHARLOTTE, bringing it to Crawford’s level of non-achievement while missing what real parallels exist.  (Joan made tv with a young Steven Spielberg/Bette with a young Ron Howard.  Later, Davis turns into Crawford on her last completed film project THE WINDS OF AUGUST against Lillian Gish.)  He even suggests that CHARLOTTE flopped.  (It actually did very nicely.)  Skipping over Crawford’s weird (not to say cruel) usurpation of her daughter’s soap opera role and ignoring Davis’s stunning Emmy-winning late work on STRANGERS.  If it doesn’t fit Murphy’s grand thesis, it’s out.  Leaving a bad taste in your mouth after so many bonbons and bon mots.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Often lost in the argument, HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE deserves a fresh look.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/hush-hush-sweet-charlotte-1964.html

TWO FOR THE SEESAW (1962)

Best remembered for his next play, THE MIRACLE WORKER, William Gibson actually had a longer B’way run with this intimate two-hander on an unlikely NYC affair between a MidWest lawyer headed for divorce and a much younger downtown artsy type, yin/yang lovers having mutual mid-life crises: his coming right on time/hers earlier than expected.  Henry Fonda & Anne Bancroft starred (later Dana Andrews & Lee Grant) before director Robert Wise, just off WEST SIDE STORY, got Isobel Lennart to ‘open up’ the play ever so slightly for Robert Mitchum & Shirley MacLaine.  Not particularly well received at the time, it now looks considerably better.  Mitchum something of a revelation playing a man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit type with unexpected tenderness.  Leaner than you recall, even his hair looks leaner, he’s a confused  stranger in a strange town hoping to restart his life & career.  MacLaine, on the other hand, has worn this characterization thrice too often.  After THE APARTMENT/’60, her spritely kook act always looked studied.  But she largely gets away with it here since faults and motivation merge when she’s looking over her shoulder at 30.  Cinematographer Ted McCord (in what he thought would be his last pic*) gets the sort of detailed b&w look then going out of style in Hollywood.  Presumably Wise had to fight the studio for every layer of chiaroscuro.  With all sorts of grownup touches in sleep-overs, sex and affairs signaling the fast decline of the Production Code.*  Unpushy and not too sentimental, it’s a modest thing, but neatly served.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Was this the first mainstream Hollywood film to use ‘queer’ for homosexual?  And in a surprisingly non-judgmental way for 1962.  (MacLaine briefly thinks Mitchum might not be interested in staying over and asks if he’s ‘queer.’  ALSO: Note that instead of using split screen to place Mitchum & MacLaine in a shared shot as they talk on the phone in separate apartments, Wise uses simple stage craft, ‘building’ the composition into the set.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  More grownup, ‘daring’ treatment of Manhattan-set sex next year in LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER/’63.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/love-with-proper-stranger-1963.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: *Showing quite the range, the next collaboration between Wise & McCord was THE SOUND OF MUSIC/’65.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-sound-of-music-1965.html

VANAMEHE FILM / THE OLD MAN: THE MOVIE (2019)

Stop-motion animation from Estonia, crude, rude & lewd in execution and content, loaded (or rather unloaded) with scatological barnyard humor, a specialty for writer/directors Oskar Lehemaa & Mikk Mägioff.  (The DVD comes with a few early two-minute ‘Old Man’ shorts even darker in tone.)  An elaborate prologue provides ‘historical’ context as a champion Milking Farmer loses his cow (and his complexion) when an untended udder explodes into a Nuclear Milk Bomb.  The gross fallout lactose rich & sticky.  Two generations later, his great-grandchildren are dropped off for a summer working the farm with grandpa.  Mucking out the barn chore Number One (the muck mostly Number Two), but once the three kids get the hang of teat patrol, the latest Milky-the-Cow takes off for the woods.  Catch her or another Lact-apocalypse is bound to happen.  Or will if the cow isn’t first beheaded by that gang of unemployed car-shop repairmen.  Only Ms. Cow is hiding in plain sight at a rock & roll music festival in the forest and can’t be reached without pleasuring a giant tree tunnel to orgasm.  Yikes!  (Or is it, Wha?)  Then there’s that giant bear swallowing everyone up.  No prob.  Just sing loudly and ride the wind as he farts you out . . . anally speaking.  Aghast & entertained all at once, it’s the film that put the little piggy’s ‘here sui’ in sui generis.  (Family Friendly?  Maybe for kids who eat their boogers.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For something in the same pig sty but less Punk Rock, there’s SHAUN THE SHEEP.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/shaun-sheep-movie-2015.html   OR the delightful sequel:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/a-shaun-sheep-movie-farmageddon-2019.html

SHOWMAN (1963)

Brother documentarians David & Albert Maysles (GIMME SHELTER/’70; GREY GARDENS/’75) got their start with this modest time-capsule peek at producer/presenter/publicist Joseph E. Levine just as he was pivoting from exploitation shlock (GODZILLA/’57; HERCULES /’58) to quality fare (THE GRADUATE/’67; LION IN WINTER/’68; A BRIDGE TOO FAR/’77).  Vittorio De Sica’s TWO WOMEN was the bridge  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/08/two-women-la-ciociara-1960.html), and here he goes on a ‘working’ victory tour carting Sophia Loren’s Best Actress Oscar® to Rome via L.A., NYC, and hometown Boston.  A squat bullfrog of a guy (think East Coast Sam Spiegel), always on the move as he schoomzes similarly built office ‘yes’ men (naturally, the sole rather handsome senior exec, he might have stepped out of MAD MEN, gets the heave-ho), debates issue-oriented producer David Susskind on Boston radio over the merits of A RAISIN IN THE SUN/’61 vs HERCULES, checks box-office receipts, attends a tribute dinner to himself, etc.  Impervious to jet lag (or does all the fat cover signs of fatigue?), he’s in and out of Rome overnight after delivering Mr. Oscar to a delighted Sophia.  Then . . . back to working the next project.  More than Levine, what the film really shows off is the radical improvement in versatility possible with ever smaller cameras and a revolution stemming from the new lightweight sound equipment.  A technical achievement that gave rise to cinéma vérité, here applied to documentaries.  It lasted about a generation before the rise of ugly video-tape systems.  Now, all digital and much improved.  Yet this somewhat primitive artifact of its era still feels fresh.

FINIAN'S RAINBOW (1968)

Another case of once socially progressive ideas/ideals turned hopelessly regressive by the time it got to the screen, this hard to revive B’way show with its immensely charming score proved something of a last call for a host of Hollywood vets (in front & behind the camera) and utterly incompatible with a whelp Francis Ford Coppola trying to make a film musical en plein-air, seasoned with a dash of New Wave tics.  Lyricist’s E.Y. Harburg’s head-scratching book brings Fred Astaire’s Finian from Ireland to America with a pot of stolen Leprechaun gold to bury near Fort Knox where it’s bound to multiply; a mint-flavored tobacco leaf that neither burns nor smokes; a racially mixed Southern commune to sing & dance behind the leads; a manly foreman to strum a guitar & fall for Finian’s daughter Petulia Clark; a racist Senator transformed into a Black man as a lesson in equality; a girl who dances rather than . . STOP!, go back to that Black transformation. God knows, this BlackFace element has stopped many attempts at revival.  (Actually easy to finesse; simply have everyone react as if there’d been a change in his makeup.)  Well, you get the idea.  Post-war ‘40 race issues, mixed with populist ‘30s ideas Harburg loyally stuck with.  But in this disaster, even the great songs feel off, arranged to ape ‘Pop’ 45s of the day, while the longer comic scenes flatline.  Stick it out to be rewarded with the one number that shows what Coppola must have been aiming at, a close harmony number for an all-Black quartet, ‘Necessity.’  Only, you’ve got to hold your nose since one of the quartet is a substitute, Keenan Wynn as that Senator in BlackFace.  Yikes!  And even that isn’t as hard to watch as Tommy Steele’s super-charged Leprechaun.  He makes Mickey Rooney look laid back.  (And yes, our poster is indeed a Paperback Tie-In.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Is this the shortest male cast in Hollywood history?  Fred Astaire, Tommy Steele, Don Francks, Al Freeman Jr., none over 5' 7".

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Make that LISTEN TO THIS.  From Hollywood’s ‘What-If’ file.  Independent animators John & Faith Hubley got as far as story-boarding FINIAN in the mid-‘50s to a finished soundtrack when the plug was pulled.  Frank Sinatra stars, with Ella Logan & David Wayne (from the original B’way cast), plus Louis Armstrong, Jim Backus, Barry Fitzgerald and Ella Fitzgerald.  It’s never appeared, but this LINK has about twenty minutes of often fascinating outtakes, mostly Sinatra.  But the best comes late when Ella Fitzgerald takes on “Necessity.’  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5uNOZdgiEw

DEAD FOR A DOLLAR (2022)

Legitimately dedicated to Budd Boetticher, late-‘50s master of concise/economical Westerns, this Walter Hill chamber Western gets a paradoxically large-scale look of infinite desert vistas that would have profited in a theatrical presentation.  Starring a nearly accent-free Christoph Waltz as a principled, if quick-to-draw, bounty hunter, he’s gone from playing villains to Clint Eastwood roles.  Hired to track down Rachel Brosnahan, Hamish Linklater’s abducted wife, she turns out to be no abductee, but in Mexico with a Black army deserter who’s less lover than temporary partner in her escape to freedom.  Hill, working from a story idea by Matt Harris, is given two wildcards: outlaw territorial boss Benjamin Bratt and just released cutthroat cardsharp William Dafoe, each nursing a separate grudge against Waltz.  Hill runs this poetically illogical story construction so well, you fall right in line with most of the story and action.  But he makes two serious missteps Boetticher would never have countenanced.  First, Dafoe really has no good reason to be in the story.  Good company, but peripheral to the narrative.  Boetticher cut his moral fables to the bone, and usually came in two reels shorter for the effort.  And second, he’d never have gone for the hazy, desaturated color used here.*  We might be watching one of those ‘sepia-toned’ prestige prints reserved for a few first-run theaters . . . er, theatres, while the rest of the country made do with plain ol’ b&w.  Hill also comes up shy on the logistics and action chops needed to get full potential out of his climax, leaving the final gun battle short on suspense & believability.  What he does build is enough goodwill to get away with a film that doesn’t quite add up.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Now 80, Hill has a brave, if uneven, output.  And few directors got off to a start as strong, as unheralded, as under-appreciated as he did in HARD TIMES/’75.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/hard-times-1975.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Favored cinematographer Lucien Ballard always gave Boetticher the bluest of skies to set off Randolph Scott's leathery neck.  (As did second-choice lenser Charles Lawton.)