FATE IS THE HUNTER (1964)

Director Ralph Nelson, a specialist in ‘thinking man’s pictures’ for people who don’t think, ought to have been just the man for pretentious ‘Pop’ novelist William K, Gann, master of pseudo-important corny melodrama (see THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY*).  But FATE gives off something of a bad odor as rising airline exec Glenn Ford tries to prove it wasn’t ‘pilot error’ by estranged war pal Rod Taylor that brought down a commercial jet with 54 on board.  Perhaps sole survivor stewardess Suzanne Pleshette can help the investigators by walking Ford thru all the fatal flight minutiae.  Better yet, Ford wants to recreate the exact flight step-by-step, just as it happened to clear Taylor’s name and find meaning in the tragedy.  That last the sticky bit in Gann’s shallow deep-think.  Sounding especially phony when served up with Ford’s hesitant delivery working overdrive.  He might be the ‘slow-thinker’ in a comedy act.  And poor, likable Rod Taylor, who ought to breeze thru his irresponsible scapegrace pilot routine, overloads on irrepressible life-force, asked over and over to belt out ‘Blue Moon’ to prove his fancy-free philosophy.  Even a simple meet-cute between Taylor and Nancy Kwan comes off as ludicrous.  (She steals the fish he just caught because she’s an ichthyologist.)  Plus supporting roles equally overdone across the board.  On the positive side, lenser Milton Krasner, working in yummy b&w ‘scope, gives off the appropriate glossy vibe, but can’t hide tinker-toy model plane F/X.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *As mentioned, THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY/’54.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/high-and-mighty-1954.html

WHITE SHADOW (2015)

And you thought you had it hard.  Imagine the life of a Black Albino in Africa.  Caught in a cultural trap between prejudice & superstition; in East Africa, not just ostracized but hunted, like an elephant for its tusks, by traders supplying body parts to Witch Doctors who claim it confers magical powers.  Well, you’ll still have to imagine it, since filmmaker Noaz Deshe is either unwilling or unable (I vote unable) to get much across in this first feature.  With pointlessly obscuring camerawork and disjunctive editing, you can barely make out the main characters before Albino Dad is savagely attacked by machete wielding murderers and his wife sends their Albino son off to live with her brother (?) in the big city to eke out a living searching land fills for metals & computer parts.  But even relative safety proves elusive as the boy’s uncle also lives under threat from violent gangs working for loan sharks out to collect what he owes on his truck.  As presented by Deshe, it's less story & character than narrative roadblock.  Too much lost thru over-active camera work and excessive editing of  already confusing raw footage.  The storytelling clears up for the finale after another Albino is killed: vigilante justice, lynching, a chance for personal revenge.  But hasn't the young man seen enough killing?  Ethnographically fascinating; cinematically obscured, the film, meant to be challenging, comes off as wasted opportunity.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  An award-winner for co-writer/director Deshe, ten years on and nothing new yet released.

DIVINE (1935)

Even when busy staying a step ahead of Nazis in the ‘30s (Germany to Italy to France, eventually  Hollywood), director Max Ophüls was unable to stop turning out the occasional masterpiece wherever he was.  His French debut, from Colette’s first original film script, if below that mark, still pretty special.  Ophüls somewhat held back by leading lady Simone Berriau (one good angle getting her thru a mere 14 films) on this standard story of the nice country girl nearly corrupted by the big bad city; worse, showbiz in the big bad city.  Set up as a replacement by a pal who’s going on tour, Simone’s got the looks to stand on stage in an oo-la-la revue and the figure to drop her drape and reveal almost all.  But good country gal that she is, she refuses to bare.  A rebellious act that causes a sensation!  (Don’t worry, you still see plenty that was banned outside France: bare breasts, lesbian tidings, drugs, opium seduction . . . saved in the nick of time by a police raid.  (Here, the one thing that needs to be smuggled past the backstage doorman is a breast-feeding baby.)  Meantime, Simone shuns showbiz temptation, she’d rather take a stroll with that good-natured milkman, George Rigaud in a breakthru perf.  But when circumstantial evidence on drug trafficking at the theater points in her direction, the wages of avoiding sin take their toll.  Ophüls seems completely comfortable right from the start.  And when the sets are too small for his favored long tracking shots (as in a cramped five-room apartment) he fakes a single-shot using an optical printing trick.  Once inside the theater, he can really stretch out and stage edit-free multi-plane action, roaming about while lenser Roger Hubert, nobly working to the limits of capacity, captures it all in one take.   The whole modest package basically irresistible.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Ophüls most famous backstager was his last film, the great LOLA MONTES/’55 which, alas, was also seriously damaged by an inadequate leading lady.

SLOW WEST (2015)

Well-received but largely overlooked, this chamber Western apparently started & stopped writer/director John Maclean’s promising career track.  (No credits in the last eight years, not an atypical real-world fallout after splashy success at Sundance.)  Neatly melding the sort of modest ornery Westerns Budd Boetticher & Randolph Scott were making in the ‘50s with the nihilistic Neo-Noir present-day ‘Westerns’ popping up in the ‘80s (and at a trim 83"), Maclean heads West in 1870's America as Kodi Smit-McPhee’s romantic young naïf pursues Rose, the girl of his dreams who left Scotland before him.  Joined none too soon by Michael Fassbender’s ‘protector’ at a particularly threatening moment as the film begins, he’s unaware the girl he loves (along with her father) has a $2000 reward on her head for murder or that Fassbender is actually a bounty hunter using him to guide him toward her.  Picaresque and picturesque, the film plays out as a series of lethal adventures, deliberately paced & low-key, yet leaving more dead bodies in its wake than the last act of HAMLET.  Mostly very accomplished, it could have filled in more of the girl’s backstory (she comes off as heartless), and Maclean no master of subjective POV, but fitted out with a fine sense of grandeur & absurdity that never feels condescending.  A common problem on those ‘80s noirs.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Never noticed it before, but here Mr. Fassbender is something of a ringer for the young Charlton Heston, if a far more fluid actor.  The face, form, even more the back of the neck.

SHOW BOAT (1936; 1951)

In the popular arts, ‘progressive’ is a relative term.  And so it’s proved to be in the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein 1927 musical breakthru, from Edna Ferber’s multi-generation tale of showbiz & heartache around a theatrical Mississippi riverboat.  You only need to look at how the opening verse of Flo Ziegfeld’s legendary show was altered over the years.  Meant to shock in ‘27, the first thing heard in the show was an all-Black chorus singing: ‘Niggers all work on the Mississippi; Niggers all work while the White folk play.’  (Yikes!  Ziegfeld productions always opened with a chorus line of pretty girls.)  But by the time this 1936 film came out, the verse had changed to: ‘Darkies all work . . . ‘  For the 1946 B’way revival it was ‘Colored folk work . . . ‘, and post mid-‘60s revisions got by with ‘Here we all work . . . ‘  American race attitudes in a nutshell.  And M-G-M in 1951?  They skip the verse entirely.  It’s changes like that in this ultra-lux iteration that turn a once purposefully tough show anodyne.  And while 1936 can be awkward and a little bumpy, it sees director James Whale working out of his fach, but often doing impressive things, generally sticking close to the original script, it's helped rather than hurt by rough moments, with real texture to the thing.  George Sidney in the remake very much in his lane, but unwilling to change gears and break out.  (In different ways, both versions make a mess of the end.)  Of course, 1936 has a dream cast of real SHOW BOAT stage vets: Helen Morgan’s Julie (with her wistful soprano) & Charles Winninger’s Capt. Andy (fighting himself to a draw on stage) from the original cast (so too Sammy White’s Frank & Francis X. Mahoney’s Rubber Face); Paul Robeson’s Joe from London; Irene Dunne who toured extensively as Magnolia.  (What a shame Edna May Oliver, the original Mother Parthy, had just left Universal for M-G-M.)   For 1951, gorgeous Ava Gardner*, Joe E. Brown, William Warfield’s impossibly smooth-voiced Joe in ‘Old Man River’, flutter-prone Kathryn Grayson, all completely outclassed.  Even solid Howard Keel’s riverboat gambler loses to Allan Jones whose voice & lightweight character are a much better fit for weak Gaylord Ravenal.  You get the idea of what’s consistently lost simply by comparing the full Oscar Hammerstein scena he turns out for the 1936 ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ sequence: lifelong bond between Magnolia & Julie; foreshadow of the miscegenation storyline, startling frank sexuality between Robeson & Hattie McDaniels' Queenie unheard of from a Black couple on screen at the time (with more to come in “I Still Suits Me’ a duet added for the film); Magnolia showing latent talent as a performer (Dunne, nearing 40, twerking!), and Parthy’s intolerance.  While the same song in 1951 delivers nothing but the girl bonding.*  Of course, not everything favors the older film, 1936 does give us Dunne as a ‘pickaninny’ (Four-star BlackFace ALERT!), but most of the missteps you find smoothed over in the 1951 remake are exactly what George Cukor knew to avoid when he made DAVID COPPERFIELD the year before, later saying, he ‘discovered my own rule in doing adaptations.  You must get the essence of the original which may involve accepting some of the weaknesses . . . I don’t believe in ‘correcting’ Dickens, ‘saving’ him and all that. I just had to go with the vitality of the thing.’  That’s what Hammerstein & Whale got so right in this remarkable 1936 document.

DOUBLE-BILL: This double-bill’s self-evident.  But watch the 1936 version first.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *And Ava really is unusually gorgeous lensed by Charles Rosher, though famously unhappy after her own vocals were eventually dubbed by Annette Warren for theaters.  Hers wound up only on the soundtrack album.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Or simply compare and contrast the comic pair of dancers on the show boat in the two films.  These two are meant to be nice second-raters.  Exactly how they are cast in 1936, while 1951 sees Marge & Gower Champions, the top swanky nightclub dance act in the country at the time, their steely perfection (and Gower’s glamor) useless to the story.

TERET / THE LOAD (2018)

Forget those OTT dystopian horror pics (Zombies, Undead, Roadie terrorists in barren scrub land), Yugoslavia 1999 was the real deal, no CGI necessary.  A no-way-out proposition of a country, torn in two by sectarian violence and NATO bombing.  It’s the slice-of-life drama targeted for his feature debut by writer/director Ognjen Glavonic in this deliberately paced, taciturn look at a few local misérables, given its P.O.V. by one bearish middle-aged truck driver transporting a high-priority mystery load he’d prefer not to know anything about.  Working his way from Kosovo to Belgrade around road blocks; stopping at a motel to phone home as an oddly threatening country wedding whirls about him; reluctantly accepting a teenage passenger trying to get out of the country (and forging an unlikely/temporary bond); spending the night at the routing office while his truck is ‘serviced.’  Then it’s back home before more of the same, hopefully a last run, and probably without his wife and rebellious teenage son to return to as they’re off to her father’s to find safety.   Grim and grimy, yet not without notes of grace between the stillness and general suspense, caught in what could be the calm before the storm.  It’s an unsettling place to be and an unsettling film, memorably so.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The way Ognjen Glavonic uses his cast, you might think they’re non-pros pulled off the streets of Belgrade, but all the larger parts taken by actors with lots of credits; the lead Leon Lucev with an impressive 76 titles on IMDb.

THE UNFAITHFUL (1947)

Third time ‘round for Somerset Maugham’s THE LETTER (an Early Talkie with gifted/doomed Jeanne Eagels in 1929 then haute Golden Age Hollywood from William Wyler for Bette Davis in 1940*) updates the property and moves from corrupt exotic Singapore to upperclass Wilshire Boulevard, L.A.  Now, Ann Sheridan’s the unfaithful wife who kills her attacker (or is it her lover?), Zachary Scott the blinkered husband and Lew Ayres the lawyer who’s also a family friend.  (Herbert Marshall played them both: lawyer in ‘29; cuckold in ‘40.)  It works, too, but there’s a structural problem since we’ve left Maugham’s unrepentant ways behind and need to thread a needle of love & redemption.  It means a whole extra act & epilogue (it feels less like a fourth act than like a second third act), and director Vincent Sherman, elsewise near his best, loses his footing in the last two reels.  Still awfully good.  Sheridan, Scott & Ayres habitually underrated actors, and substitutions for the other characters particularly clever (Steven Geray, Jerome Cowan, John Hoyt, Marta Mitrovich), plus Eve Arden cracking wise.  Look fast to spot the famous atrium & exposed elevators of the Bradbury Office Building in one of its first (of 100) screen appearances.  Too bad Warner's official release hasn’t a better print source.  It’s watchable, but does Ernest Haller’s lensing no favors.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Wyler/Davis rightly esteemed (it’s the one that opens as Davis shoots her lover six times on the porch), but Jeanne Eagels, cosseted with a nearly abstract visual approach (it’s easily located online in reasonable prints), is something else again.  Eagels some kind of acting genius, dead within the year from drug addiction.  She didn’t play the role on stage (Katharine Cornell did), but she’s unmatchable, one of the few addicts who seemed to use their addiction as a dramatic tool rather than try to hide behind it.  Like a great operatic diva using rather than obscuring vocal flaws for dramatic potential.

MY FATHER'S DRAGON (2022)

The trend isn’t good for Irish animator Nora Twomey.  After riding a wave of goodwill co-directing THE SECRET OF KELLS/’09 at Cartoon Saloon with Thomm Moore (who wouldn’t root for a small Irish animation outfit taking on Hollywood's giants?*), she went on her own with THE BREADWINNER/’17, both films worthy but underwhelming.  But neither prepares you for this sorrowful hodgepodge, a mess of a fantasy from Ruth Stiles Gannett’s popular mid-20th Century book about Elmer, a positive-thinking lad (presumably in Depression Era America*) who moves to the big impersonal city after Mom loses their small town grocery.  It’s tough going in the city, but luckily a stray cat starts speaking!  But only to Elmer.  And this leads to further adventures out at sea, landing on a wild island populated entirely by animals and run by apes in various sizes along with a magical dragon who needs a confidence boost that only Elmer is able to provide.  Some of the animation is fun to look at, the flat graphics of the prologue has a certain picturebook charm to it, but the fantasy elements don’t line up in a memorable way while the All-Star vocal cast proves surprisingly distracting.  NetFlix apparently kept this one strictly as a streamer so no idea if it caught on or not.  Maybe it just worked better on the page.  Gannett did write two sequels.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Of the Cartoon Saloon releases, Thomm Moore’s SONG OF THE SEA/’14 is the most satisfying.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/song-of-sea-2014.html    LINKs for Twomey’s other films:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/02/secret-of-kells-2009.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/th-breadwinner-2017.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The period is left vague, but still odd to notice over-the-shoulder seat belts when Mom & Son drive into town.

BLACKBERRY (2023)

Between BLACKBERRY smartphones, AIR’s footwear, and TETRIS computer games, late 20th century consumerism is getting quite the workout in 2023.  This one, a fact-based tale of Canadian hubris (is that an oxymoron?) plays as a satirical cautionary: All Capitalism Tends to Corrupt/Absolute Capitalism Corrupts Absolutely.  A pair of likeable tech nerds hope to land a deal to finance their putative smartphone, but only get up and running when a hard-charging, just fired master-of-the-universe wannabe businessman comes on board and totally shakes up their sleepy operation.  A series of compromises, moral & technical, do wonders for a few years, but over-extension, cutthroat deals, financial promises & lies, and character flaws magnified in the heat of competition bring it crashing down.  Director/co-writer Matt Johnson has a good time (maybe a better time than you’ll have, the film was an unexpected flop in Canada and a non-starter Stateside*) digitally shooting in a fashion made to resemble a 16mm cinema verité crew mistakenly hired for a mockumentary tv sit-com like THE OFFICE.  A perfect fit for both the film’s time frame and for the spirit of a little company growing too big for its britches.  Though with a Canadian film you never can be sure if it was done on purpose or was serendipitous.  In either case it’s the best observation in here, other than a superb character touch right at the end, when our nerd prince realizes he’s turned back into a frog as he opens the newly arrived Chinese manufactured model meant to save the company, then carefully repacks the substandard item neatly back in its box.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above, AIR (not seen here) and/or TETRIS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/04/tetris-2023.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Jay Baruchel, who plays the top tech nerd destroyed by success is like a new generation Rick Moranis.  Hopefully he won’t pull a disappearing act before turning 50.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Unusually, not a single mention of family or homelife for anyone in here.  Outside works interests reduced to Movie Night (at the office) and Hockey.  There are exactly three very modest female speaking roles and no relationship/romantic angle at all.  Does this in any way explain the financial drubbing?

MERRILY WE LIVE (1938)

TOPPER/’37, that popular ghostly tale of a just-dead free-spirited couple who haunt a dull fellow and teach him how to live, was a different sort of success for slapstick titan Hal Roach, a classy success.  Releasing at the time thru M-G-M (later TOPPER pics out via United Artists), a quick follow up with much the same talent was a no-brainer.  Literally a no-brainer for Roach, as he stole a good half of it from MY MAN GODFREY/’36.  Wealthy screwball family; newly hired tramp servant who’s really no tramp (Brian Aherne); a household in need of order; ditzy Matriarch Billie Burke; grouchy Pops Clarence Kolb; love match between classes; etc.  Not bad, actually, though director Norman Z. McLeod backloads too much of his best physical comedy bits.*  But where GODFREY is assured, and director Gregory La Cava makes Screwball look easy, even inevitable, and ties into social conditions for real dramatic/emotional ballast, MERRILY, like so many second-tier Screwballs, feels forced/unnecessary, and dies a bit every time a joke falls flat.  Somehow, the film got five Oscar noms (M-G-M party-line voting?), not for soigné leading lady Constance Bennett or overplaying Aherne (no Cary Grant, he), but in tech categories and for Billie Burke (next year’s Glinda the Good Witch), her only nomination.  She does gets the funniest line.  At the breakfast table (thoughtfully): ‘I’m so hungry.  I haven’t had a thing to eat since last night.’

DOUBLE-BILL: The original TOPPER is only slightly better (though you do get a look at Cary Grant becoming Cary Grant), whereas MY MAN GODFREY, works under the same rules, but plays a different game entirely.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *That’s solid Clarence Kolb as Dad showing off completely unexpected physical slapstick chops.  No stuntman, it’s really him doing those slips & falls.  Go Kolb!

OS VERDES ANOS / THE GREEN YEARS (1963)

From the late ‘50s thru the early ‘60s, various schools of New Wave Cinema sprung up all over Europe; differently named but impossible to miss in England, Germany, Italy, Poland and, of course, France.  Spain was in deep freeze as long as Generalissmo Franco held the reins (Spaghetti Westerns instead of Nueva Ola?), but Portugal’s small film community came a’knocking with this debut feature from 27-yr-old writer/director Paulo Rocha.  Technically very free, its story naturally focused on the new generation of post-war youth, here following a country lad who goes to work in the big city (Lisbon) and lives with his unattached uncle in a bad part of town.  (The middle-aged uncle is actually the more interesting character, a painter of artistic tiles for murals with a bohemian lifestyle.  But the times demanded youths.)  Slight, quiet, painfully shy, the thin-skinned boy more gangly Anthony Perkins than jangly James Dean, and, as an actor, frankly not quite registering in Rui Gomes’ blank portrayal.  Apprenticing with a shoemaker, he meets, courts, breaks up with and proposes to a pretty neighboring housemaid, their dates and unfolding relationship told thru velvety city walks and bad party scenes.  This is charmingly handled by Rocha, with graceful narrative ellipses rather than jump cuts feathered into the studio-free filming style, a revolutionary naturalism at the time.  But as the boy sinks in emotional quicksand (jealous of what he doesn’t understand/feeling patronized if anything is explained), Rocha pushes too hard for a No-Way-Out finish which Gomes, in his first significant role, can’t begin to pull off.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Ermanno Olmi shows what’s wrong here in his masterful IL POSTO/’61.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  An off-kilter scene with the uncle shows Gomes ‘acting out’ at a bar where his uncle takes him to meet friends and go girl watching.  And when a fight breaks out between them, an odd duck of an Englishman, closer in age to the uncle than to Gomes, steps in and winds up roaming the back streets of Lisbon with the boy.  Everything about this sequence shrieks homosexual pick up (see Fellini’s I VITTELONI/’53), but this ends with a pair of prostitutes for the two.  Would a gay pass have been censored at the time?

BULL (2019)

Writer/director Annie Silverstein’s award-winning feature debut is a lot like Clint Bentley’s award-winning feature debut of two years on, JOCKEY/’21, but centered on rodeo rather than race track.  Both feature aging leads, pushing 50 but prematurely weathered playing a young man’s game.  Here, it's bull wrangler Rob Morgan (superb) who’s injured on the job, brushing off doctor’s advice and risking permanent damage.  And where JOCKEY details a decline in getting those premium mounts, BULL has Morgan slip from mostly White First-Class arena gigs to mostly Black ‘minor league’ venues; even worse when this proud wrangler gets demoted to rodeo clown barrel work.  Silverstein determined to let the racial issues speak for themselves, both on the job and as seen in Morgan’s extended family.  The other parallel with JOCKEY comes in the second narrative line: there with a putative son, a raw up-and-coming rider getting mentored at the track.  Here: troubled teenage neighbor, a 14-yr-old girl Morgan winds up playing surrogate Dad to.  Her mom incarcerated; hanging with the wrong crowd at school; trashing Morgan’s home to show off and get attention; falling into easy money when her mom’s old boyfriend sets her up dealing OxyContin at the rodeo.  All just when she’s started to learn bull riding from Morgan and been welcomed by his extended family.  These story beats not the best thing in the film.  But for the most part, nicely paced, well-observed, even when her story echoes Jennifer Lawrence’s breakthru in WINTER’S BONE/’10, a similarity that does debuting Amber Havard no favors.  She’s fine, but the film is best for Morgan & in capturing a rarely seen side of small-town Black culture.  (NOTE: Labeled Family Friendly, but with some decidedly R-rated love-making for Morgan and an 'ex.')

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, WINTER’S BONE and JOCKEY.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/01/jockey-2021.html

LE NOUVEAU TESTAMENT / THE NEW TESTAMENT (1936)

Prolific Paris boulevard playwright/actor/manager Sacha Guitry was 51 but still new to film, especially to directing, when he shot ('transferred' overstates things) this typical stage vehicle for wit & wisdom Guitry-style.  Charting the romantic pas de six of two middle-aged couples, a 20-something son & 20-something daughter (or is she a mistress . . . or both . . . or neither?), it casts Guitry as a doctor who’s just caught his wife canoodling in a taxi with the son of a friend.  (A friend whose wife had once been his mistress.  Wait! - is the canoodling son his son?  He’s surely not the friend’s son.)  A complicated situation that pleases Guitry since it only strengthens his arms-length relation with his wife.  If she’s looking elsewhere, it opens the way for his lovely new office assistant.  Or would if she weren’t possibly his daughter.  Sacré bleu!  Perhaps Guitry should let his wife think she’s his mistress.  Got all that?  And if you think there isn’t an overbearing valet to confuse things further, you've never seen one of these things.  Everyone talks a mile-a-minute, Guitry double that rate.  (Positive outcome: with so many subtitles, you hardly notice the lack of film technique.)  Guitry does go out for a couple of brief set ups (including a putative rendezvous at the statue of Joan D’Arc . . . but which one?, there are four in Paris), but he’s yet to either come up with (or integrate) the distinctive off-hand visual style of his later work.  And he certainly hasn’t learned to modulate the delivery of his amusingly twisted loquacious logic.  But, if not the best intro to chacun à son goût a la Guitry, it may be as close as you can get to his unadulterated sui generis boulevard manner.*  If there ever was Pre-Code French cinema to match Pre-Code Hollywood, this'd be it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *DÉSIRÉ/’37 and POISON/’51 are two of the best entry points on Guitry; the first in Ernst Lubitsch mode, the second more Marcel Pagnol. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/12/desire-1937.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/04/la-poison-1951.html

HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL (1952)

Out of Universal Pictures, a low-rent/low-pressure MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS/’44 wannabe from (wait for it) Douglas Sirk!?  And something of an unexpected treat.  (The lower wattage not necessarily a bad thing.)  Charles Coburn’s the ailing, heirless gazillionaire with a fortune he wants to give to the family of the late beauty who stole his heart, but then said NO.  Initial disappointment leading to his great success in business.  But first, he must check out the family he never had/never knew, and see how they might handle unexpected good fortune.  Granted, the money-isn’t-everything ethos gets applied like impasto on a Van Gogh canvas, but the Hallmark Card ‘Roaring ‘Twenties’ flavor fits the moral, the playing is breezy rather than underlined, and Mom’s good old-fashioned beef stew proves a tonic to Coburn’s delicate stomach.  Lynn Bari & Larry Gates are over-parted as Mom & Dad, but everyone else is just dandy once Coburn shows up under an alias as a lodger.  Rock Hudson with an impossibly thick head of hair is the soda jerk of Piper Laurie’s dreams, working the counter at Dad’s pharmacy*, but Mom wants something better for her.  Fortunately, Gigi Perreau doesn’t have to pull our heartstrings as the kid sister and there’s the Easter Egg of Easter Eggs when James Dean shows up at the counter for a malted, still guileless and angst-free.  From MEET ME, there’s a song to pass around the house, snow for Christmas, a dancing finale, and an older brother with lessons to learn in a house far more modest than 5135 Kensington Avenue.  But then Mom goes ‘high hat’ and buys a mansion; Laurie accepts an engagement with the town’s wild rich boy; Dad loses big in the stock market; older brother buys a fancy car and gambles his way into serious debt.  Plenty of missteps for Coburn to fix before he tiptoes away.  The film not quite bothering to tie things up.  Fun!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Doing a Charleston, Hudson looks like he’s playing cat’s cradle with his long limbs.

DOUBLE-BiLL:  As mentioned, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, but not too soon whichever you watch first.

DESTINATION GOBI (1953)

Modest but enjoyable*, this Robert Wise fish-out-of-water WWII dramedy puts Navy man Richard Widmark in the Gobi Desert to oversee a weather station that’s sequentially threatened by nomadic Mongols, strafed & bombed by Japanese scouting planes, loses chief meteorologist & equipment, and is finally forced to cross the desert (Widmark & non-combatant staff) in hope of reaching the sea and ‘liberating’ a ship.  Plenty of unusual events & action (lots of TechniColored exploding ordnance), a growing relationship with that Mongol tribe they’ve gifted with 60 WWI horse saddles, why it’s even loosely based on a true incident.  Abetted by Charles Clarke’s handsome lensing (really good desert dune stuff/AZ & NV locations), a pleasingly recognizable ensemble cast (Darryl Hickman especially winning, Murvyn Vye not at all embarrassing as Mongol Chief), and actual laughs in Everett Freeman’s well structured script.*  Like William Wyler, Wise a stickler on construction, one of his secrets.  Another secret, the obvious good time everyone seems to be having on set.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The men dub one of the Mongols ‘Harpo’ for his slight resemblance.  Sure enough, Freeman gives him a signature Harpo charade routine where he mimes out his message.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Late in his career, Wise wanted to make Mid-List films this size, but found studios unwilling to Green Light anything but mega-budgets for him, even after a few mega-flops.

LE ROUGE EST MIS / SPEAKING OF MURDER (1957)

Commercially reestablished in post-war France playing a tough aging bad guy in Jacques Becker’s TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI/’54 and tough aging good guy for Jean Renoir in FRENCH CANCAN/’55, Jean Gabin was largely able to coast on his renewed reputation over the next two decades.  Stout, impassive, he found dramatic heft in his Buddha-like presence; authority thru seniority in roles on either side of the law.  In this typical example under journeyman director Gilles Grangier, Gabin leads daring daylight robberies with a gang he runs out of his legit garage business, staying above the fray of their petty squabbles to divide the loot between Lino Ventura’s trigger-happy thug, a scaredy-cat facilitator, and a centime counting enforcer upset that an equal share goes to the tip-off man.  Meanwhile, home-life is complicated by a brother with low taste in women (currently Annie Giradot’s ‘tart’) and a mother’s concern for her boy.  (Something of a stretch when you look as prematurely aged as the 53-yr-old Gabin did.)  Grangier’s work improves whenever he gets outside on real locations, but the third act climax, a robbery gone wrong when someone (the brother?) tips off the cops, lurches into blood-thirsty violence unprepared by the rest of the film.  It feels forced.  A reasonably suspenseful ride-to-the-rescue ending helps some, but the film is definitely sausage factory product.  (On the other hand, sausage very good in France.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned above, TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, the masterful template for this.

ATLANTIS (2019)

After a five-minute one-shot prologue (four soldiers finish off and bury a wounded enemy sniper), distanced by heat-capture surveillance imagery but still pretty grim stuff, Valentyn Vasyanovych’s award-winning Ukrainian film cuts to a barren landscape and this startling graphic: 2025 EASTERN UKRAINE one year after the war.  It sets up a quotidian look at how even wars won leave a terrible residue (physical/psychological) of aftereffects on land & participants (soldiers, volunteers, civilians).  Often played in static one-shot takes, though moving the camera when that’s called for, we begin by following two vets unable to adjust to post-war life.  One won’t make it.  The other joins an outfit working to deactivate military ordnance (especially mines) and to find, identify and properly bag, tag & bury corpses in various states of decomposition.  In the film’s most memorable scene, a static one-take wonder of a shot, the volunteer converts the ‘mouth’ of a damaged earth digger into an improvised bathtub.  It's followed by a disturbing return to an early scene of target practice, now reconfigured into a shadow play.  Hard as this sounds to watch, it’s also compelling and deeply humanistic.  There’s even a bit of personal hope for the volunteer with the woman who recruited him, though probably none for the contaminated land they are working.  The final shot, with a return to heat imagery, intensely moving.  It brings you back to that opening date:: 2025 EASTERN UKRAINE one year after the war.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Not a real match, but Miklós Jancsó’s nihilistic war film classic CSILLAGOSOK, KATONAK / THE RED AND THE WHITE/’68 lines up with this film.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/01/csillagosok-katonak-red-and-white-1968.html

THE GOOD DINOSAUR (2015)

You can ignore the troubled history behind this PIXAR animation (extended production, delayed release, replaced director, late changes in story & vocal cast) during its clever outer space opening where a formation of meteors jostle a giant one earthbound that just misses rather than hits the planet . . . DINOS SAVED!  (So where are they now?)  Followed by the film’s second good idea, a switcheroo on the expected Boy and his Dino story that flips into a Dino and his pet Boy!  It’s all the other decisions that pull things down, starting with the design of our anthropological dino family.  Mom, Dad, three kids (our hero is the just hatched runt).  No one seems to have figured out how they should move, what texture their skin should be, why they are farmers.  Farmers?!  But since it’s PIXAR, Dad’s soon sacrificed and the kid goes lost, searching for a way back home with help from his new pal, a little lost early-human (fearless & feral).  These two wandering thru a brave new world of primaeval terrors.  (The film on the violent side for the littlest tykes.)  Something of a visual triumph on backgrounds (landscape, weather, flora & fauna); it’s the foregrounds (action & characters) that underwhelm.  (Save the sadistically gleeful pterodactyl scavengers.)  Desperate for an exciting/heartwarming finish, the filmmakers borrow from the classics (a climax lifted from D.W. Griffith’s WAY DOWN EAST/’20; some sadder-but-wiser uplift out of Chaplin’s THE CIRCUS/’28).  And PIXAR knew what they had here, burying its release behind their prestige release of the year, INSIDE OUT.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  For good, dumb prehistoric Early Man/Dino fun, try the underappreciated silliness of CAVEMAN/81.

BON COP BAD COP (2006)

Hailed for toppling PORKY’S/’81 from its long held spot as Canada’s box-office champ, this policier recasts the Buddy/Buddy mismatched cop caper (think LETHAL WEAPON meets ‘70s French flics flick) with Colm Feore’s by-the-book English-speaking Toronto detective forced to partner with gonzo Québécois cop Patrick Huard; a high concept gimmick that shouldn’t miss, but does.  Erik Canuel’s all-thumbs directing has a consistently sour edge & staccato editing pulse that ill serves the charmless yin/yang personality clash used to power us thru a surprisingly unsavory tale of torture & revenge.  (Violent nutcase terrorist plots against an American businessman buying and transplanting Canadian hockey franchises to the States.)  Every larky outrage & body kick just begging to be cheered by an undiscriminating audience whenever the four (count ‘em, 4) females in the film aren’t throwing themselves at our two available he-man detectives . . . . or being tortured.  Less than twenty years old, COP might pass for one of those ‘70s French films in attitude if not in execution.  Heck, it makes PORKY’S look good.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Even the end credits are off, scrolling UP rather than DOWN in dizzying fashion.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  As mentioned, LETHAL WEAPON/’87, a prime example of the form, while over in France, still pumping them out regularly: DE L'AUTRE CÔTÉ DU PÉRIPH/’12 and a sequel LOIN DU PÉRIPH/’22 (neither seen here).  Plus, rumors of a BEVERLY HILLS COP streaming franchise where Eddie Murphy will mentor Buddy/Buddy cop duos.  Sheesh.

CRY DANGER (1951)

After a decade of sweet-voiced male ingenues in Depression Era Warner musicals, then nice guy/chumps around town, Dick Powell made a startlingly successful transition to film noir tough guy at RKO in MURDER, MY SWEET/’44 and CORNERED/’45.*  This third one, released by RKO but independently produced, is nearly as good yet barely remembered.  (Out of circulation before a recent UCLA restoration?)  This time, Powell’s on the wrong side of the law, but out of prison thanks to a belated/phony alibi.  He really is innocent, but detective Regis Toomey doesn’t believe it and follows him all over town hoping to find the missing 100-Gs he supposedly stole.  Powell’s helped by Rhonda Fleming, wife to his possibly guilty/still jailed partner, and his lying alibi, Richard Erdman, a fellow WWII vet with a wooden leg  and a bottomless thirst.  With plenty of tasty bad guys (and gals) all around town, Powell attempts to find who pinned the crime on him, who’s setting him up now, and where all that loot is, while getting bopped, shot at & lied to in traditional noir fashion.  Loaded with neat twists, unexpectedly believable L.A. trailer park æshetics and seriously chintzy interiors, a gaslighting bookie, and other tasty characters, only a final denouement disappoints.  (Too neat, too easy, too out-of-the-blue.)   NOTE: First directing gig for former actor, then editor Robert Parrish.  Powell rumored to have been at least partially in charge.  But whomever, good job!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *With the same director, scripter & star, CORNERED is the less acclaimed but looser, more relaxed, funnier, altogether preferable followup to MURDER, MY SWEET. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/cornered-1945.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  As the lying alcoholic pal, Richard Erdman steals all his scenes.  And in a nice bit, they have him pour the contents of a glass of milk back into the bottle before loading up on the whiskey without rinsing out the milky residue.  Yuck!  Almost makes up for a big boo-boo when they show him fall into bed without taking off his prosthetic leg.  Yikes!  Gonna hurt come morning.  ALSO: That’s legendary 007 title designer Maurice Binder getting his very first film credit as Assistant to producer.

ASSASSINATION (1967)

What with Jack Palance in career purgatory busy co-starring with Fernando Lama & Aldo Ray in KILL A DRAGON/’67, Henry Silva was the default go-to guy for this lower-half of a double-bill actioner.  Playing the look-alike brother of a recently executed man (if he is the brother), he’s just the fellow to take over a prearranged political assassination.  Could he actually be the same guy who got juiced in the electric chair?  That’s what the wife thinks after sleeping with ‘the brother.‘  Can’t be unfaithful when its your own spouse, right?  But all that comes much later, after various nonsensical Spy vs Spy moves designed to fill the time before a political assassination assignment calls on Silva to make a perfect shot thru the window of an airplane as it’s taking off down the runway.; a shot Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have made.  Emilio Miraglia (just upped from the second-unit and calling himself Hal Brady!) doesn’t worry about connecting the narrative leg bone to the narrative thigh bone, but bounces along with a script that never does connect the dots.  (Listen up for a great line of dialogue when Silva tells his spy boss to ‘Stop acting, you’re lousy at it.’)  And it’s a kick to see such poverty row art design on the interior sets.  Old Hollywood hid smallish budgets with drapes & shadows, now we get pastel painted flats.  Did they film in one of those bland suburban development model homes?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Lots of Italian ‘giallo’ in the ‘60s & ‘70s to show how stylish you could be without much of a budget.  Mario Bava probably best known Stateside.   An acquired taste, but in spite of its delayed release RABID DOGS/CANI ARRABBIATI/’74 makes a good entry point.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/rabid-dogs-cani-arrabbiati-1974.html

ALL MINE TO GIVE (1957)

Lots of good things in this Disney-like frontier family drama, thankfully not from Disney where homely production values, tear-jerking sentimentality and a bad case of ‘the cutes,’ swaddled in one of those cloying Paul J. Smith scores, would have over-egged the pudding.  (Out the same year, Disney’s OLD YELLER dodged many of these pitfalls, much helped by passing on house composer Smith.)  It’s a tru-ish story about young, married Scottish immigrants Glynis Johns & Cameron Mitchell who reach a small Wisconsin town only to find their relative has died, his home burned to the ground.  But thanks to a plucky town, our plucky couple are soon up & running with a quickly raised log-cabin (where they sleep in the same bed!), a logging job and enough kids to fill an orphanage.  That last one turns out to be the main plot when Dad goes down with diphtheria & Mom succumbs to typhoid, leaving eldest son Rex Thompson, 12 (he’s the son in THE KING AND I/’56), as man of the house, honor-bound to his mother’s dying wish that the six siblings not go to the State Orphanage.  They’ll have to be separated and placed, one each, at appropriate homes where they’ll be warmly embraced.  A childless couple; a family of boys wanting a girl; a family of girls wanting a boy; while stopping any wrong-headed adoptions.  Once he sets everyone up, he can leave school for that logging job.  Tough stuff here.  Sad as this all is, there’s a sense of uplift and accomplishment, too, tears held back as much as possible.  (Which only makes it that much more effective; get out your handkerchiefs.)  Director Allen Reisner moved to tv after this, and you’ll see why.  But he handles his cast very well, only to be stymied by soundstage exteriors that would have fit a more stylized genre piece or a musical (or in b&w instead of WideScreen TechniColor), but here push against verisimilitude.  You get used to it (William Skall’s lensing isn’t all bright & cheery), but it does keeps the film from reaching full potential.  Johns & Rex Thompson are particularly good.  And happy 100th birthday greetings to Ms. Johns, almost alarmingly pretty here.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The streamers are missing a trick on this one.  Not just remake possibilities, but to expand by following our six separated siblings, how they get along and come back together over the years.  RKO was in a death spiral when this film came out, but they seem to be active again and may have retained the rights.

MONTE CRISTO (1922)

Surviving by the skin of its emulsion (one compromised, but watchable print from the Czech Archives), this ten-reel film of the Alexandre Dumas perennial, from little-remembered director Emmet J. Flynn (washed out of the biz by 1929) and much-remembered silent star John Gilbert (washed out of the biz by 1934), is exceptional.  More of the story than you’ll find in many other versions, smartly structured with Part One covering the future Count’s unjust political arrest & escape; and Part Two his return in disguise to seek revenge on the three powerful Parisians who wronged him.  A big cast (Renée Adorée in the second of nine films with Gilbert, ‘stache-less here) & a production that’s continuously exciting & easy to follow (though you can almost feel Flynn straining to move his camera more than was being done at the time, compensating with fast edits & tight closeups).  Gilbert a compelling presence over four decades of melodrama taking him ship to shore; engagement party to dungeon; waterlogged escape to island treasure-chest; finally Paris politics, finance & society to a series of exposé shockers.  A big success in '22, Rex Ingram over at pre-M-G-M Metro obviously paying attention before next year’s SCARAMOUCHE.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/03/scaramouche-1923.html)  This superb 2008 restoration, a double Flicker Alley DVD with King Vidor’s BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT/’28*, with an excellent Neal Kurz piano accompaniment (listen at the Palace of Peers Court for Saint-Saëns’ 2nd piano concerto) could look even better with the latest digital techniques.  The film good enough to be worth the cost & effort.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *While BARDELYS is the A-side here, both films essential viewing. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/08/bardelys-magnificent-1928.html  OR: See a delightful, if painfully thin John Gilbert before his breakthru @ FOX in Mary Pickford’s HEART O’ THE HILLS/’19.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/heart-o-hills-1919.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  You can reduce ‘blasting’ on the surviving print by slightly cutting Brightness levels.

ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED (2023)

In 1992, Mark Rappaport made the edgy, influential, underground pop-documentary ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES using a Hudson avatar as self-interlocutor to talk us thru the closeted life & death (only seven years back) of the movie star.*  Make that movie victim since, after his very public death from AIDS, that’s the prism used to explain not only his life, but also his worth.  With cherry-picked film excerpts used to parallel ‘real’ life vs. ‘reel’ life (any dialogue containing ‘gay’ grabbed for use*), the film may have oversold Hudson’s discomfort.  So many gay actors in Hollywood, all to one extent or another making a devil’s bargain between work, fame & fortune, Hudson apparently quite comfortable in his shoes.  But what was arguably bold and radical (also cheap to make) in ‘92, now looks tame and old-hat from director Stephen Kijak.  Better production values and certainly better quality restored film clips (we do learn that Rock was a ‘Size Queen,’ and hear a pretty loathsome procurement phone call), but this hardly changes the specious nature of presenting his thinking & situation thru movie clips which don’t even do much to sell him as an actor.  Awfully good looking when he was young though.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Indie, artsy, underground bio-pics not unknown at the time.  Like SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY/’87, which used Barbie dolls to tell the pop singer’s tragic story.  Suppressed by her estate, it can be found if you search online.  Plus a Hudson connection since it’s an early work of Todd Haynes whose best known film is probably FAR FROM HEAVEN/’02, a close variant on the Douglas Sirk/Rock Hudson classic ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS/’55, putting a Black/White spin on the taboo romance and a gay angle to the cuckold husband, deceased in the original film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Back in 1934, movie execs insisted that the stage musical THE GAY DIVORCE was an unacceptable title, but THE GAY DIVORCEE was fine.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Why not just watch Hudson’s best film, Douglas Sirk’s masterful WRITTEN ON THE WIND/’56.  Yep, same year Rock got his sole Oscar nod for GIANT.

BØLGEN / THE WAVE (2015)

No one’s trying to reinvent the wheel in this well-made disaster pic from . . . wait for it, Norway.  No post-modern flips, no political allegory, not an ironic thought in its head, just a suspense-filled three-acts.  (Will the research team believe the statistics guy on his last day on the job?  Will the guy’s family survive the upcoming rock avalanche triggered fiord tsunami?  (A fiord tsunami!  Cool!)  Will the tourist bus aiming for higher ground be a lifesaver or a death trap?  You get the idea.  Cleanly handled by director Roar Uthaug whose #1 priority is to keep things from turning dumb (√); and whose second is to control the crumbling rock/rushing-waters CGI effects rather than have them control him.  (√)  The vibe less EARTHQUAKE!/’74 than POSEIDON ADVENTURE/’72 which means heroic lead Kristoffer Joner gets both the Gene Hackman and the Shelley Winters spots.  Plus, the first big cast film in ages where you wait fifteen minutes for someone to show up without piercing blue eyes.  Norway don’tcha know.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, EARTHQUAKE! and THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/10/earthquake-1974.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/poseidon-adventure-1972.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  That mountain fissure a real thing BTW, Norway’s equivalent to California’s San Andreas Fault.  But the writers miss a trick at the end by not having the family deciding that even after a double disaster they really can’t get the mountains out of their system and plan to stay and rebuild.  Cue swelling music . . . or maybe have everyone march up the mountain path singing SAN FRANCISCO.  You can check that finale out for yourself.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/san-francisco-1936.html

OKKO'S INN / WAKA OKAMI WA SHÔGAKUSEI! (2018)

Popular as a book and on tv, the theatrical version of Okko the young orphan innkeeper (that’s more or less the name of the tv series) is the first feature-length film from all-round animator (anime-tor?) Kitarô Kôsaka as director.  Technically, the film isn’t posh & polished as Ghibli or other top Anime, but as an example of East-is-East/West-is-West attitudes toward how kids in Japanese culture deal with grief, here after the loss of parents, it’s loaded with interest.  Little Okko, having lost her loving Mom & Dad in a traffic accident, is sent to live (and work!) at Grandma’s boutique Inn in a famous Japanese spa town.  The film is organized around customers as they come and go while Okko welcomes, serves and learns the biz, while also covering life as the new girl at school.  The best idea in here uses a pair of young ghosts (and a more corporeal demon) visible only to Okko because of her near-death experience and continuing emotional trauma.  A bond that fades as she begins to heal.  But it all plays out like Very Special Episode material with the worst saved for last as Okko draws close to one troubled family at the inn only to discover that the father was the driver responsible for the accident that killed her parents.  Yikes!  (Odd, as we’ve already seen an out of control semi-trailer truck causing the wreck.)  Just imagine the thousands of Motel 6 managers thrilled at the prospect of getting cheap labor while aiding little victims of family tragedies at minimum wage.  'I'm doing this for your own good, kid.'

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  While not without its own emotional & narrative lacunae, Ghibli’s orphan tale, WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE/’14, works on a much elevated visual plane.  Even better, if less of a match, the underseen WHISPER OF THE HEART/’95.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/omoide-no-mani-when-marnie-was-there.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/05/mimi-wo-sumaseba-whisper-of-heart-1995.html

SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME (1956)

Socko bio-pic of ‘40s boxer Rocky Graziano, a major influence for Martin Scorsese’s RAGING BULL/’80 which perhaps explains why it gets overlooked in the canon of classic pugilist pics.*  Unexpectedly tough & violent even by current standards (young Rocky was borderline sociopath), with ring action that aims not to dazzle in the Scorsese hyper-drive manner, but to convince in the fashion of BODY AND SOUL/’47 or THE SET-UP/49.   The latter also from director Robert Wise, but more classic noir than the naturalism seen here, abetted by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg dropping his signature gloss & glamor for grit.  As Rocky, Paul Newman found himself (and his audience) in his third at bat, getting the call after James Dean unexpectedly died.  Newman must have known it was his big chance and he grabs the role like a lifeline.  As method actors go, Newman indicates like mad, but he makes this thug’s progress count, backed by a fest of entertaining turns by red-meat actors.  Sal Mineo especially winning as a loser BFF; Pier Angeli adorable as the girl who sees something good in him; really everybody just right in a huge cast.  (Glance around to spot rising young actors in the backgrounds.)  Rarely thought of as a team, but scripter Ernest Lehman did three more with Wise: EXECUTIVE SUITE/’54, WEST SIDE STORY/’61; THE SOUND OF MUSIC/’65; that makes them four for four.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Even more overlooked, William Wyler’s boxing scam pic THE SHAKEDOWN/’29, largely because it was long unavailable.  Now easy to find, and a total charmer with some remarkable ring action, especially when you consider that as a silent pic, Wyler can’t lean on aural body blows from a soundtrack to cover faked punches.  Turn down the sound on any boxing pic to see just how much of the fighting is really ‘sold’ by the soundtrack.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-shakedown-1929.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Kudos to the film’s art designers & set decorators, that tenement flat Rocky grows up in is a dead ringer to the ones on display at the NYC Tenement Museum . . . only dirtier.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (1940)

Improbably reviving his career by kidding his way around a third-class farce on tour* (MY DEAR CHILDREN), a deathly ill John Barrymore was called back to Hollywood (ashamed they hadn’t pumped him dry?) for four films at four separate studios before he died in 1941.  More improbably, this second of the four, a Universal comic-horror programmer, not only best of the lot, but kind of fun.  (Admittedly, Universal’s bar set very low on these things.)  Virginia Bruce is the dress salon model willing to give invisibility a try.  John Howard the wealthy benefactor to Barrymore’s research scientist.  Charlie Ruggles an unfunny ‘comic’ valet, and the always alarming Oscar Homolka a gangster who wants to go invisible so he can sneak back into the country.  (Note he uses Hitler’s barber.)  None of this particularly funny even of its type, but damned if Barrymore isn’t up for the challenge, giving everything just the right touch.  He even looks relatively healthy: sprinting, falling to his knees, hiding his cue cards.  Maybe having A. Edward Sutherland as director helped.  No comedy technician behind the camera, but being W. C. Fields’ regular director obviously helped him know how to get the best out of hopeless drunks on their last legs.*  John Fulton got an Oscar nom. on the special effects, but telltale outlines remain all too visible.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Orson Welles was merely being a loyal pal when he observed that if he had a child he would send him to Chicago, chain him to a seat and make him watch every performance.  ‘Then I’d tell him he knew everything there was to know about acting.’   But it was NYTimes critic Brooks Atkinson, giving the show its sole decent notice, who laid it all out: ‘He is still the most gifted actor in this country.  During the seventeen years he has spent away from Broadway he has held his talents cheap, and the record is no pretty one in appearance.  He has aged more than seventeen years.  But whether he has wasted a great talent or not -- and that is his own business -- the fact remains that he has all the gifts an actor needs and can use them with extraordinary versatility.  In contrast with the Barrymore who dominated the theatre by memorable works twenty years ago, he is a ravaged figure now.  But the fact remains he can still act like a man whom the gods have generously endowed and like a man who knows the art and the business of stage expression.  The Barrymore breeding keeps him master of silly material, and the tricks he plays on it are the improvisations of a man of sharp and worldly intelligence.  No doubt it would be more exhilarating to see an eminent actor in a part of dramatic eminence.  Failing that, it is something to see him witty and gay.  Although he has recklessly played the fool for a number of years, he is nobody’s fool in MY DEAR CHILDREN but a superbly gifted actor on a tired holiday.’

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The film does let you see why Bette Davis thought Barrymore might still be able to co-star with her on THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER/’42.  Alas, he was failing too rapidly and she ended up with the play’s stage star Monty Woolley.

TARZAN (1999)

Critical consensus among animation-heads dates the Disney Renaissance in hand-drawn features going from 1989's THE LITTLE MERMAID thru TARZAN a decade later; four years after TOY STORY CGI changed the playing field.  But to be really precise, it started with the eruption of show-stopping applause that greeted ‘Under the Sea’ at MERMAID previews, and held only thru the first act of this film.  (Nine films; one outlier.)  Once civilization comes ashore starting the second act, the loss of magic & confidence is jarring.  Truth is, cracks show even in TARZAN’s first act with wisenheimer accents & worldly knowledge disrupting willful suspension of disbelief in this jungle menagerie.  But small flaws hardly matters next to the mastery of parallel prologues setting up how a shipwrecked baby Tarzan loses his parents just as Mother Gorilla loses her infant boy.  A wonder of narrative concision in eight wordless minutes.  And the positive vibe continues as Tarzan’s heroism finally gets him accepted into the gorilla clan.  But those brief wobbles in tone go completely off axis once father & daughter explorers land with a Great White Hunter guide.  Design elements refuse to coalesce: Dad pure ‘70s Disney house style, hunter a ‘50s cliché, daughter Minnie Driver.  What went wrong?  Phil Collins’ generic tunes?*  How the stylization can’t bridge the gap between naturalism in layouts & cartoony character design up front?  Or is it just missing story development and a too convenient ending?  But to see the curtain come down on an era, you'll need to watch the first act.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Collins even tries to match the Sherman Brothers ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ from Disney’s THE JUNGLE BOOK/’67.  No go.  And look fast to see Tarzan place his hand on the RIGHT side of his chest when he feels for his heartbeat . . . twice.

SCREWY THIOUGHT OF THE DAY: Did someone on team Disney purposefully ‘ape’ John Barrymore’s legendary 1922 B’way HAMLET for Tarzan’s character design?  The posture, the aquiline nose, the compact energy even in repose.  The similarities are striking.

LA PEAU DOUCE / THE SOFT SKIN (1964)

George Bernard Shaw split his plays for publication as Plays Pleasant and Plays Unpleasant.  An organizing principle François Truffaut might have found useful: Films Pleasant and Films Unpleasant.  Simplistic, but helpful.  Had he tried it, this fine if unlikeable work might well have topped the Unpleasant list.  Something of reverse image to JULES ET JIM/’62: illicit love affair rather than love triangle; present rather than period; drab man/two unacquainted women rather than BFF males/single life-force woman; rich rather than poor; and not a lovable character in sight rather than a trio of charmers.  Also, at a technical if not thematic level, his most Hitchcockian work.  (Truffaut heavily engaged at the time on his famous interview book.)  But it’s all those negative differences with J&J, his most recently released feature, that hold down this film’s reputation then & now.  A shame as the film is a triumph of execution as well as being unusually personal/revealing.  And that’s saying something when your career-making international debut is the near autobiographical 400 BLOWS/’59.  (It's Truffaut’s own apartment filling in as the home of Jean Desailly’s unfaithful husband.; and, naturally, during the shoot, Truffaut, separated but still married with two girls, was having an affair with Françoise Dorléac who plays the mistress in the film.)  The lurch into melodrama at the end may not quite convince (Truffaut fantasizing about punishment for his wayward ways?), but the film is so damn precise in capturing every move and moment, you go with it.  Unpleasant, but extraordinary.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned, JULES ET JIM.

NIMONA (2023)

Winning, original animation (CGI, but with a hand-drawn feel), from the ND Stevenson graphic novel, a project that mutated thru a succession of studios (Blue Sky/Fox to Disney to Annapurna/NetFlix) rather like the suggestions of Gender Fluidity in its eponymous lead are transposed into what might be called Species Fluidity.  Opening on epic, ancient prologue, the story jumps ahead to ‘modern times’ where Brave Knights continue to defend the world against evil forces.  But the latest Knight’s Dubbing Ceremony goes horribly wrong when the first ever Commoner Knight is set up with a loaded sword that backfires on the Queen and ignites destruction of the entire world order.  And, as an added character bonus, this world destroying knight not only a commoner, he’s also gay, partnered with a Golden Boy Knight also coming into his maturity.  (Riz Ahmed exceptional as the commoner-knight.)  A dystopian world greets this knight when he awakes in jail with a life sentence and artificial arm.  Enter Nimona, a wild sprite with a gift for shape-shifting, anarchistic tendencies and superpowers.  She’ll save the day and reveal the truth . . . if anyone’s left to hear it.  Lots of fun to this wild ride, with Nimona, looking like a fetching gender-swapped Peter Pan (devilish grin/forward tack*), regularly transforming herself into whatever beast, monster or supernatural being is needed to fight off disbelievers.  Including our knight’s ‘Ex.’  It can make her something of an ADHD pain in the neck, which may be why the opening double prologue is the best part of the film.  Certainly the best designed.  The rest, if a bit over-cooked, still better than recent Disney animation projects they didn’t drop.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Easy to imagine Nimona taking on the lead in Disney’s underappreciated 1953 PETER PAN.  A version of the James M. Barrie classic that does less dancing around the motivating sex/puberty issue than you might imagine.