JOAN OF PARIS (1942)

What R.K.O. exec approved the concept for this film’s opening credits?  A war story from  Occupied France, it was something of ‘downer’ for January 1942 when things looked pretty grim Stateside and rah-rah recruitment or comic-tinged adventure were being rushed into production.*  Obviously this was being filmed months before Pearl Harbor so maybe those credits were an attempt to lighten the mood using the blank label of a champagne bottle to run the title & names on, sequentially washing them off for the next listing by having the bottle spill over on itself, erupting again & again like a never-ending orgasm.  Yuck!  The film never quite recovers from this faux pas as a motley group of RAF flyers bail out in the French countryside then plan to reconnoiter in Paris to make connections and arrange a flight back to London.  Their leader ('Free French' so most at risk) synchs up with a priest (for resistence contacts) and a waitress (for l’amour tragique) as he attempts to outwit Nazi occupiers and get everyone safely back before a wounded RAF man succumbs.  Director Robert Stevenson & lenser Russell Metty prove adept handling backlot studio atmosphere, but the script keeps dropping the ball.  The love story all meet-cute all-the-time; the sewers of Paris underused as an escape route; a sauna steamroom giving unconvincing cover; a tiny tagalong Gestapo agent none too threatening.  Yet, the film something of a 'must see' because of its cast.  Top Nazi in Paris Headquarters hammed up by Laird Cregar in a rare outing away from home studio 20th/Fox.   He spends most of his time outrageously flirting with wanted French RAF flyer Paul Henreid making his Hollywood debut.  He’s the guy having the extended meet-cute with barmaid Michele Morgan in her Hollywood debut.  Morgan wouldn’t leave much of a local mark, but Henreid’s next two films of ‘42 were classics: NOW, VOYAGER and CASABLANCA.  Also of note, May Robson in her last film; Thomas Mitchell (an Irish French priest?) getting the best scene in the pic counseling John Abbott before his execution; and Alan Ladd seen here as that wounded fighter immediately before moving over from R.K.O. to Paramount and bigtime movie stardom with THIS GUN FOR HIRE/’42.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Stranded fighters behind enemy lines common fare in early WWII films from Brits & Hollywood.  From the U.K., try Powell & Pressburger’s ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING/’42; or out of Hollywood, Raoul Walsh/Errol Flynn with DESPERATE JOURNEY/‘42.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/11/one-of-our-aircraft-is-missing-1942.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/02/desperate-journey-1942.html

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Heartfelt & proudly eccentric*, Gus Van Sant’s stare-down at the ins & outs of NorthWest city-boy street hustlers is fabulist & intimate at the same time.  Centered on tousled blond beauty River Phoenix, apt any moment to fall off some trick’s cock in narcoleptic swoon; and Keanu Reeves’ raven-haired slacker, a rebellious Prince, scion to the mayor, reveling on the down-low edge.  (The way Sant paints these sainted sinners, so appealingly grunge-glam, we’d all be standing in line.)  Drifting around Portland, Seattle, Idaho, even Rome, hunting up customers as they search for Phoenix’s long-missing mom, the boys’ tender bromance leans toward love from Phoenix, wary acceptance from Reeves.  Withal, Sant gives half the film over to a replay of Shakespeare’s Falstaff & Prince Hal.  And not a travesty, but the real thing; robbing a certain Bard of dialogue credit.  (That’s cult director William Richert as the Falstaffian  ‘Fat Bob’, Reeves a Prince Hal who’ll eventually grow out of his sporting ways, and Phoenix as . . . never been sure who he’s supposed to be.  (Is James Dean in HENRY IV?)  Plus, a motley crew of hangers-on to laugh heartily at Elizabethan jokes they don’t quite understand.*  Shot in over-saturated hues to match the purple prose; it’s almost enough to hide the usual Gus Van Sant fault of announcing artistic intent & import rather than demonstrating it.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Almost wrote ‘profoundly’ eccentric.  If only it were!

DB/LINK:  *The only Sant (seen here) to avoid the fault is his debut feature, MALA NOCHE/’86.  At least I think it does.  Seen by happenstance decades ago on low-fi tv, and having missed the opening five minutes, the zero-budget film seemed something of an astonishment.  Now, I’d be afraid of a second look spoiling the memory.  (To see the difference, compare Sant with almost any film from fellow 'New Queer Cinema' auteur Todd Haynes.)  OR:  *Catch Shakespeare's original via Orson Welles in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT/’65.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/chimes-at-midnight-aka-falstaff-1965.html

NOWHERE TO GO (1958)

Winding down production, Ealing Studios’ penultimate film, best of the seven made after producer Michael Balcom moved the company to British M-G-M facilities, was ironically the most atypical Ealing film imaginable.  Purposefully so according to co-writer/debuting director Seth Holt.  Neither eccentric community comedy nor tidy kitchen-sink drama, but full-on Brit-noir, it might have starred Robert Mitchum @ RKO in the post-war ‘40s.  Holt gets right to it with a RIFIFI-influenced dialogue-free/docu-style jail break (outside POV), as Bernard Lee sets the stage for George Nader to bust free.  The first in a series of tense set pieces (Kenneth Tynan co-wrote) as Nader uses his considerable masculine charm (half John Hodiak/half David Farrar*) sidling up to a middle-aged widow with a fortune in coins to sell. (Why it’s silent & Early Talkie film star Bessie Love!)  He’ll be her agent, collect the cash, hide the loot, do time for the crime, then come out of prison after serving a relatively short sentence a very rich man.  Only things don’t go as smoothly as expected.  (Duh!)  Turns out the police aren’t quite as dumb as he hoped.  Co-conspirator Lee not exactly the honest crook he thought.  The local mob who promised to look the other way aren’t so willing when two people get killed.  And then there’s Maggie Smith.  Yep, Maggie Smith in her film debut (25 then; she’s shooting her latest, a one-woman stage play adaptation, 65 years later).  She bumps into Nader, or rather into the apartment he’s using, and a sort of rocky romance ensues.  (Truth be told, neither the off-screen murders nor the romantic angle fully worked out, but ain’t it always so in film noir?)  You’d never guess director Holt & lead Nader didn’t generate major careers out of this.  Smash stuff, deliciously dark under lenser Paul Beeson with a jangly jazz score from Dizzy Reece, the film a near classic awaiting rediscovery.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Never heard of George Nader?  You probably would have had he not been Universal stablemate with fellow closeted gay Rock Hudson.  Good friends, Nader took some of the heat off the Hudson rumor mill, but lost Stateside work because of it.

AIR (2023)

Maybe something in the air caused 2023 to look back in bemusement with an inadvertent,  serendipitous movie trilogy on the confluence of groundbreaking industry upstarts and a perfect alignment of game-changing technology, contracts & commerce three or four decades ago.  How else explain AIR (basketball shoes), TETRIS (computer gaming) and BLACKBERRY (cell phones) all being independently released within weeks of each other.  (The three even sharing the exact same IMDb score (7.4).  Each remarkably entertaining, too, though AIR, by far the starriest, biggest grossing (by a factor of 45!) and best received, also the least interesting/original.  Ben Affleck directs, charting the Ups & Downs of Nike’s pursuit (mostly by Matt Damon’s exec) of a young Michael Jordan.  Loaded with ‘80s detail, Affleck tries to go farther, making the film look like it might have been shot at the time (very Cannon Films/Golan-Globus).  Yet at its most ‘80s in Damon’s period-accurate gut and Affleck’s period-awful hair.  In general, the film not quite as clever as it thinks it is; more like an ESPN color-commentary/analyst offering commonplace ‘insights’ as if no one had ever thought of them before.  (See Jason Bateman going on about Bruce Springsteen for a prime example.)  Self-serving nudges, perhaps, but not disqualifying.   Just be sure to check out the other two in this accidental trilogy, especially TETRIS.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As nudged: BLACKBERRY and TETRIS.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/04/tetris-2023.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/07/blackberry-2023.html

MON GARÇON / MY SON (2017)

Having written & directed a fine Frenchified Hollywood-style genre pic in NE LE DIS À PERSONNE / TELL NO ONE/’06 (think THE FUGITIVE/’93 a la français), no surprise to find Guillaume Canet trying on a Liam Neeson Daddy revenge pic for size.  Hearing from his estranged wife that their son has been kidnapped from a winter camp program, Canet dashes home, only to be confronted by strange, suspicious behavior everywhere he turns: police, wife, her new boyfriend.  And trying to punch his way to the truth only gets him in trouble.  But where’s the urgency?  Where’s the search party & special police unit?  Where’s his son?  Writer/director Christian Carion seems to be trying for Kafka-esque Neeson, holding back info to lend an abstract dimension to well-worn tropes.  But it gives Canet, who should seem sensibly unhinged & off-putting in too righteous a manner, no room to emotionally maneuver.  Instead, we wonder about a second kidnapped child no one pays the slightest attention to.  Too bad Canet only acts (and purportedly improvises his dialogue) in the film, leaving Carion (who also did James McAvoy’s 2021 English-language redo; not seen here) to make so many bewilderingly tone-deaf choices.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  As mentioned, TELL NO ONE is the real deal.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/09/ne-le-dis-personne-tell-no-one-2006.html

MARE NOSTRUM (1926)

After FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE/’21 @ Metro, it was only to be expected that director Rex Ingram would get the next adaptation of a Vicente Blasco Ibáñez international bestseller.  But BLOOD AND SAND/’22 went to Paramount, retaining HORSEMEN scenarist June Mathis & star Rudolph Valentino while Ingram waited five years for a Ibáñez follow-up.  Newly fled from Hollywood for semi-independent production in Nice, France, releasing thru Metro-Goldwyn (note Louis B. Mayer left off the credits), it's another WWI story, a tragic Mata Hari spy whopper with older Latin Lover Antonio Moreno falling hard for Alice Terry’s Austrian temptress-spy, the two of them unknowingly killing his son when they help her gang’s U-boat reach its shooting destination at sea.  ‘But they promised no civilians would be injured!’  It’s a clever bit of far-fetched fabulism (Moreno a ship captain, estranged from his wife in Barcelona and unaware his boy has been searching all over Europe for him), but the situation simply hasn’t the propulsive quality of Ingram’s previous Ibáñez rouser. No matter how picturesque/picaresque he digs into real European locations, it tends to hang fire.  Or does until the stupendous last act (excluding some unhappy model ship work), especially a half-reel sequence covering Terry’s military execution (‘All these people here for me?!’).  So brilliantly conceived & shot (thank you cinematography giant John F. Seitz brought to Europe to continue their collaboration), Kevin Brownlow featured it to justify the entire silent film tradition in his groundbreaking documentary on the silent era, HOLLYWOOD/’80.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Movie nerds will want to know that future British directing great, Michael Powell, had his first movie job on this.  He adored Ingram and stuck around for three pics.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, more WWI female spies: M-G-M’s Garbo starrer, MATA HARI/’32, and an even more direct link thru a lesser von Sternberg/Dietrich film, DISHONORED/’32.  Von Sternberg might well have studied Ingram’s execution sequence.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/mata-hari-1932.html

OPPENHEIMER (2023)

In spite of an arsenal of filmmaking gifts, for writer/director Christopher Nolan ‘the gift to be simple’ has proven illusive.  Something much missed in this umpteenth telling of the life & times of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy, spookily good) and The Manhattan Project.  A natural at anything scientific thrown at him, academic maturity studying & teaching in the hothouse West Coast left-wing ‘30s culture, along with his taste for high strung women (Nolan seemingly flummoxed by them), set Oppenheimer up as both the natural guy to head research into beating the Axis Powers during WWII at unlocking the power of the atomic bomb, and a natural fall-guy in post-war 1950s Commie-Scare politics.  Not that there weren’t actual Commie villains hanging about for General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, excellent) to worry about.  (See Klaus Fuchs.)  Fascinating stuff any way you slice it, and Nolan brings his incredible visual chops to the party.  But with multiple, concurrently run storylines (personal relations; atomic rivalries; raising a town in the middle of nowhere; a rush to the finish line) set inside a flashback story structure that unfolds as Oppie defends himself from Washington Commie-hunters, Nolan drops the narrative ball, even with fistfuls of famous faces hanging around to help us keep track of people.  (You’ll still need a scorecard to parse personalities thru the film’s one-size-fits-all staccato dialogue.)  Oddly, Nolan largely misses the most interesting change in our attitude as the vast power of a nuclear device now too well understood to trigger the old terrors whereas merely looking at the artisan handcrafted ‘delivery’ system on display seems a thing of horror.  As mood piece, this is exceptional; as drama, less so.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Among the many documentaries & films orbiting Oppenheimer, and more specifically the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, a pair of competing projects from 1989 stand out: FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY (a big budget flop from Roland Joffé that wasted its potential; Dwight Schultz as Oppie & Paul Newman as General Groves) and a superior two-night t.v.’event,’ DAY ONE from tv-mini specialist Joseph Sargent; David Strathairn & Brian Dennehy as Oppie & Groves.

MONSIEUR N. 2003

Before trying the latest Ridley Scott ‘underwhelment’, this French-based NAPOLEON bio-pic is easy to find on-line.  Centered on the defeated Emperor’s last act, stuck in miserable comfort on the out-of-the-way Isle of Saint Helena, it’s well produced, well-cast & pretty fascinating stuff over the first couple of acts, before devolving needlessly in a third act that’s all shaggy dog story.  Whatever were director Antoine de Caunes and writers René Manzor & Pierre Kubel thinking?  (Can they possibly feel Napoleon's life starved for incident?)  The opening hooks you right from the start as Napoleon is exhumed from his Helena grave for reburial in Paris two decades after his death.  The biggest national event imaginable, and many of the parties who’d been around during his final years are being tracked down by a British officer with unanswered questions from his time there.  Was Napoleon poisoned?*  Who was behind a final rescue attempt?  Or was it a failed kidnapping?  Why else would Napoleon have refused his last chance?  Where did a favored British lady go to after she left St. Helena?  Why did an aide’s body disappear and who wound up with Napoleon’s considerable fortune?  Sounds like a clever mystery, non?  Well, no.  In fact, it’s all painfully stupid, as if in addition to being a great military strategist (a debatable point BTW with Waterloo & 1812 on your battle C.V.) the man could also give Agatha Christie lessons in designing and running twisty plots.  A shame, too, as everything untouched by these clever narrative ‘reveals’ is compelling & believable in a straightforward manner.  Serried ranks of guards (in spiffy red uniforms) and servants with little to do, no wonder jealousy & petty rivalries broke out among the staff.  As the new Brit in charge, Richard E. Grant is commandingly despicable.  And if Philippe Torreton’s Nappy is no more than adequate, Jay Rodan’s near-and-dear constant British watcher gives a starmaking turn that somehow didn’t pan out.  Worth a look for the first two-thirds, they even figure out a way for Napoleon to speak (aphorisms popping out of more conversational French) that sounds just right.  No small thing.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Ridley Scott agnostics only more confirmed in their opinion by his last three films.  Will NAPOLEON make it four?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The plot all based on possible poisoning and the Bonaparte family inclination toward stomach ulcers.  But didn’t Napoleon die of stomach cancer?  There’s no poison for that.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  It’s said there are more books on Shakespeare than anyone else but Jesus.  But in film, it’s Napoleon who’s second to Jesus.  Best Napoleon e’er seen comes in a rare screen appearance by famed film montage-master Slavko Vorkapitch who briefly shows up as the young Napoleon in Rex Ingram’s SCARAMOUCHE/’23.  A small but thrilling moment.  While Abel Gance’s insane and insanely brilliant NAPOLEON/’27 is an entire world unto itself.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/03/scaramouche-1923.html

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)

In David Lynch’s very Dickensian telling, the famously disfigured Freakshow of a man known as The Elephant Man was saved from sideshow exploitation (Monster to the ‘Penny-Dreadful’ crowd) only to be exploited more fashionably by society toffs, like an abused ‘shelter rescue’ still too scared to look under the tea-cozy for human contact & warmth.  Poetic, beautifully realized, etched in misted b&w backstreet settings (wondrously lit by cinematographer Freddie Francis), the film more a weepie than you may recall, with Lynch hitting emotional notes he wouldn’t try again till THE STRAIGHT STORY/’99.  As morally conflicted doctor and grateful ward, Anthony Hopkins (thoughtfully brusque) and John Hurt (opening up to this brave new world) pull off a double act for the ages, outstandingly supported by hospital ‘good guys’ John Gielgud and the always remarkable Wendy Hiller* (the two functioning much like Oliver Twist’s protectors, the film even imagining a third-act kidnapping) while Freddy Jones plays in the mold of Robert Newton’s Bill Sykes from David Lean’s OLIVER TWIST/’48.  Anne Bancroft, as actress Mrs Kendal (she got husband Mel Brooks involved as producer, he helped get her the part*) has a superior bit of business on first meeting when she goes into acting mode to keep from being revolted by the deformities, before succumbing to his innocence and simplicity of feeling.  (Hannah Gordon, as Hopkins’ wife, even better with a similar routine.)  Memorable stuff, and looking only stronger four+ decades on.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Is Wendy Hiller the only actress ever to bat 1000 on screen?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Make like the Greeks who’d find a related comedy to act as palette cleanser after that night’s tragedy with THE TALL GUY/’89 where an inspired Jeff Goldblum, stage stooge to horrible boss Rowan Atkinson, finds a new role starring in a stupendously funny musical adaptation of THE ELEPHANT MAN, titled ELEPHANT!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-tall-guy-1989.html

CONTEST:  David Lynch fought to use Samuel Barber’s mournful/moving ‘Adagio for Strings’ in the last section of this film. Probably the best film use of this oft-sampled music.  (Barber even made a choral piece out of it.  Gorgeous, yet again.)  Name at least three more prominent uses of the piece on film or tv to win a MAKSQUIBS WriteUp of the streamable film of your choice.  (No Googling, please.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *And kudos to Mel Brooks who gave Lynch the nod to direct the initial film at his new Paramount-based BrooksFilms outfit after seeing Lynch’s sole credit at the time, the deeply weird, deeply experimental ERASERHEAD/’77.

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN (1945)

Perhaps it was the war winding down, but something triggered a sudden urge at the time to look back at the nuclear family of the early 20th century in classic accounts across mediums (stage, print, film) and across the financial spectrum.  The rich ‘Days’ of LIFE WITH FATHER/’48 (the film fine, if not the phenomenon it was on stage); the upper middle-class 'Smiths' of MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS/’44; the lower middle-class 'Hansons' from I REMEMBER MAMA/’48, and most surprising of all, the tenement poor 'Nolans' in A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN.  The book an instant best-selling classic* (4 millions copies by 1950) given no top-tier stars in a cast of 20th/Fox contract leading players under stage director Elia Kazan helming his first feature.  And everyone does themselves proud with this tough-minded, emotionally overwhelming finely etched studio production.  Kazan knew he’d been given a gift with fading leading man James Dunn as an alcoholic ‘singing waiter’ father.*  Nothing before or after prepared anyone for his effectiveness, from his no more than adequate singing (perfect for the role) to the startling intimacy & blistering honesty of his scenes with eldest daughter Peggy Ann Garner.  As the two sisters (three in the novel), Dorothy McGuire as the prematurely hardened young mother & Joan Blondell’s life-affirming irresponsibility as Aunt Sissy live up to the roles of a lifetime.  Same for the studio tech work.  What a contrast to Kazan’s dismaying sophomore effort at M-G-M (THE SEA OF GRASS/’47).  The film, in style & story, something of an outlier in Kazan’s output.  In spite of his prominence, less than twenty films over four decades, and truly productive a mere fifteen years.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Somewhere along the line, Betty Smith’s near autobiographical novel got categorized (more like ghettoized) as a YA/girl-oriented novel.  And while that’s not entirely untrue, it seriously undersells the book and its impact.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *While Dunn is every bit as good as Kazan thought (a career rejuvenating Supporting Oscar®), his character a decade younger in the book, dying at 34.  Dunn 44 and showing every year and then some.  Why no one has picked this up for an extended remake (more than half the book goes missing, including Sissy’s hilarious ‘adoption’ and all sorts of Manhattan jobs for teenaged Francie) is a mystery. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  See just how right Kazan was about THE SEA OF GRASS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-sea-of-grass-1947.html   OR:  Use our Search Engine (upper left-hand corner on the Main Site/Web-page) for Write-Ups on most of the films mentioned in this post . . . and just about anything else!

RÒM (2019)

Tran Thanh Huy’s debut feature (apparently an expansion of his 16:30/’12), a tricky watch at 79 vibrant/hyperactive minutes, is an impressive, eye-opening peek at a Saigon subculture of young, mostly parentless ‘numbers’ runners on their dangerous daily rounds.  Even with a plethora of legal lotteries in modern Vietnam, the old numbers racket remains active as ever, but illegal & played under-the-radar.  On his own and living in a hovel (that’s a hovel in the middle of Saigon slums), Rom has a rep for picking ‘winners,’ but he’s long overdue to place his next win and desperate for the share he gets when a bet comes thru.  He’s also busy evading authorities and rival runners, particularly slightly older Phúc (pronounced exactly how you think); these two in a symbiotic relationship of mistrust, violence & double-crosses.  Huy brings the whole sordid neighborhood, its values, loyalties, mutual suspicions & interpersonal dynamics together while breathlessly following the boys on their mad daily dashes to bring results in, suss out lucky numbers, and get to the nearest betting shed before the day’s betting period wraps.  A minute longer and the film would exhaust you (and itself), but once you find the rhythm of the thing, it's upliftingly tragic, like Italian Neo-Realism on speed.  Reactions really split over this one, love it or hate it; it’s the real deal.  And who knows when (or if) Huy will get another chance?  So, give it 79 minutes.  Just be prepared to race-read those fast moving subtitles!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Hang on thru the closing credits for something of a wordless epilogue, elegantly told thru museum quality still shots.  A neat decompression after the film’s ADHD editing style, and showing impressive range from Tran Thanh Huy.

DOOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Mira Nair’s debut SALAAM BOMBAY!/’88 inspired lots of Kids-On-The-Street films,  many of them debuts.  This LINK brings up a few likely viewing options.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=salaam+bombay

UN MAUVAIS FILS / A BAD SON (1980)

Quietly awe-inspiring work from Claude Sautet, thoughtful, adult, involving, without the slightest note of worthiness or duty to spoil things.  Patrick Dewaere is utterly transparent (as if you could see emotions thru his skin*) as a still young man given a second chance after six years lost to a drug conviction.  Back in France, he’s looking for work and living with a resentful dad who holds him at fault for his wife’s death.  But it’s not that simple.  After a few manual labor gigs, his rehabilitation handlers set him up at a boutique book store where he’ll be working under another of their ’patients.’  A beautiful one, not quite ‘off the stuff.’   Very standoffish, she warms up quite suddenly.  But, again, it’s not that simple.  And so it goes with a series of new jobs, faces, apartments and experiences, eventually adding enough pressure to bring on a relapse as Dewaere still in a delicate condition, still in recovery.  Presented by Sautet with seemingly meticulous naturalism that’s also not that simple; dramatic construction very solid, unforced yet missing nothing.  Observant & revelatory results to recall what French New Wavers so loved in Jacques Becker’s best work.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Ironic that Dewaere lost that year’s Best Actor Cesar to oft partner Gérard Depardieu, caught up in that year’s sweep for Truffaut’s THE LAST METRO/’72.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/le-dernier-metro-last-metro-1980.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Hard to think of a current age-appropriate A-list Hollywood actor (other than Riz Ahmed) who wouldn’t muck this up with too much showy/soulful/James Dean-ish self-absorption.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For more Sautet, try UN CŒUR EN HIVER/’92, probably his best-known/most original/most accessible work.   Much Sautet still hard to come by over here.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/05/un-coeur-en-hiver-1992.html

SCARECROW (1973)

In the fussiest acting of their careers, Gene Hackman and Al Pacino over-commit to meager playwright Garry Michael White (10 credits in five decades) as he short-circuits MIDNIGHT COWBOY/’68 to OF MICE AND MEN/’39; ‘92 in this soggy, bromantic Road Movie.  Unlikely traveling tramps bumming West-to-East across America, Hackman the hotheaded jailbird, Pacino the errant husband/father, the boys lean toward MICE & MEN as model; then, unable to choose the better part, each of them decide to tackle George and Lennie.  The ever present goal no longer a farm, but a partnership in Hackman’s vision of a Car Wash in Pittsburgh.  Director Jerry Schatzberg lets you know what you’re in for right from the start, when a beautiful prairie landscape turns stormy on the hitchhikers and tumbleweeds blow in the wind.  Colorful characters pop up along the way: gals to burn dinner; a roll in the hay (not sex, an actual roll in the hay); okay, sex, too; diners with a jukebox that plays ‘The Stripper’ so Hackman can take off the eight shirts he always wears one on top of the other; a donnybrook that sends them to the clinker so Pacino can fight off a rapist; a ‘dead’ son in for MICE & MEN’s famous dead rabbit; etc.  Regrettably, people take this stuff seriously; even the Cannes Film Festival where it shared the Palme d’Or with Alan Bridges’ equally undeserving THE HIRELING/’73, a class conscious non-starter with ‘Lady’ Sarah Miles leaving the backseat for a tumble with Robert Shaw’s chauffeur.  Meanwhile the likes of Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS and Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT played out-of-competition.  Sheesh.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Fresh from being introduced to movie audiences thru Michael Corleone’s striking stillness in THE GODFATHER/’72, Pacino’s noisy, attention-grabbing was surprising, to say the least.  We’re now used to his extravagant nature (the good, the bad, the ugly), but watching him pull focus with odd moves, bits of dancing, goofy faces & voices, still something of a shock.  No wonder Hackman goes uncharacteristically OTT just to keep up.

THE FEARMAKERS (1958)

Only 54, Jacques Tourneur couldn’t have known he’d made his last good film (NIGHT OF THE DEMON/'57) the year before he helmed this inept political thriller. Both star Dana Andrews (also in Tourneur’s CANYON PASSAGE/’46 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/03/canyon-passage-1946.html), here as a psychologically damaged Korean War vet, a prisoner-of-war prone to migraines and psychotic episodes, but determined to return to his old D.C. polling firm.  Only where’s his old partner?  New owner Dick Foran now runs the place and has twisted it into a ‘push-polling’ propaganda mill working for . . . whom?  Pro or anti-commie?  The script very vague on specifics, but not on windy speeches passing as normal dialogue right from the start.  Andrews takes a pretty secretary into his confidence when he starts to suspect Foran of murdering his old partner; also trying on nerdy research man Mel Tormé to dig into office corruption.  (You read that right; Mel Tormé.)  From there, the wheels really come off the cart right thru a theater-of-the-absurd finale featuring fisticuffs between Foran & Andrews in front of rear projection/reverse angles of the Lincoln Memorial & the Washington Monument.  Lots more craziness, like a boarding house trap for Andrews run by a bickering couple out to fleece, recruit or incriminate him.  A pity as the subject matter of political persuasion via modern Public Relations & media leaks pretty advanced stuff for 1958, but you’ll be laughing (or wincing) too hard to notice.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Stick to last year’s NIGHT OF THE DEMON.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/night-of-demon-1957.html

HERE COMES MR. JORDAN (1941)

With much of the world at war (and its smell in the air over here), time was ripe for a light-hearted (or romantic) after-death fantasy; a genre that thrives on wartime loss.  So, this superior example of the form was just the ticket in ‘41.  Death: if you can’t beat it; fantasize about it.  (The world crisis adding something essential missing in Warren Beatty’s weightless 1978 remake, HEAVEN CAN WAIT.)  Put together at Columbia Pictures largely by Frank Capra’s old team after he’d left the studio; idea, production, script Sidney Buchman & Everett Riskin (brother of Robert), cinematography Joseph Walker, with Robert Montgomery on loan from M-G-M as a rising prize-fighter whisked prematurely to heaven after a plane crash.  Owed a second chance in a fresh body, his heavenly handlers, bumbling Edward Everett Horton and smooth, God-like Claude Rains, come up with a dead millionaire who’s just been drowned in the bathtub by his venal wife and secretary.  What a surprise when he walks into the room to meet them and fated match, Evelyn Keyes.  She’s there looking for justice for an innocent father framed by these guys.  James Gleason gets the role of a lifetime as the confused fight trainer, dramatically charged to help us track what’s going on with body swaps so we can follow action and laughs on a script that remarkably & unobtrusively balances ideas of Free Will vs. Predestination.  In the remake, Jack Warden gets the role, and also makes it the best thing in the pic, if perhaps not quite as unexpectedly touching.  Irresistible and almost weirdly satisfying in untangling all the metaphysics.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Obviously HEAVEN CAN WAIT/’78 is a natural, but so is Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46 and Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH/’46.  Meanwhile back at Columbia, Gleason & Horton repeated their roles in a silly, disappointing followup with Rita Hayworth, DOWN TO EARTH/’47.  OR:  SOUL/’20, a more recent near copy.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/soul-2020.html

GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS / PRÉPAREZ VOS MOUCHOIRS (1978)

In lockstep with Italy’s Lina Wertmüller, French filmmaker Bertrand Blier’s brief, intense vogue on American screens in the '70s took a resounding fall that left him out of fashion (and largely out of distribution)  by decade’s end.  Suddenly, what had looked humorously challenging became socially/politically toxic.  But where Wertmüller’s overstated/overeager films now seem all but irredeemable, Blier, can fall back on his classic French film technique, and HANDKERCHIEFS probably the best one to sample.  Gérard Depardieu (in youthful fighting trim at his most Brando-esque) is the worried husband of a disinterested Carole Laure.  Trying anything to revive her old joie de vivre*, he bets on likely pick-up Patrick Dewaere to supply the spark.  Alas, Laure would rather knit sweaters than make love.  (As the film goes on, all the men start wearing the same knit sweater pattern.  Nice touch!)  Nosy, annoyed neighbor Michel Serrault also joins the task force, but it’ll be an unhappy, mathematically inclined 13-yr-old camper who leads her to bliss.  Spinning delightfully when not spinning its wheels, Dewaere, in particular, so consistently funny, offbeat & winning, he takes the curse off much in here.*  (Depardieu tends to push too hard in comedy.)  At times you hardly notice that Laure, topless in half her shots, only exists as reflection for various male egos.  A personification of one of those extra receivers on the back of an old French telephone.  The film goes a little flat in the middle, but picks up as it turns more farcical & absurd, with a delightful side story for Serrault and the young boy’s mother that knows when to get the hell out of the way.  Something Blier never quite mastered elsewhere.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *When Dewaere’s Mozart-infatuated character speaks of the composer dying at 35, it can’t help but remind you of Dewaere’s early death when he was only 35.  See him at his peak in the great, savagely funny sports comedy COUP DE TÊTE/’79.  OR: Also from 1979, Blake Edwards putting Dudley Moore thru similar paces trying to make two women happy in the deliriously effective MICKI & MAUDE.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/03/coup-de-tete-hothead-1979.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/micki-maude-1984.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *For a childless couple, the concept of ‘making your wife laugh’ would normally be code for having a baby.  Blier, not a sub-textual kind of guy, makes the baby a literal idea.

THE BLUE KNIGHT (1973)

With pilot episodes for STAR TREK, MOONLIGHTING, REMINGTON STEELE, HILL STREET BLUES, even BATMAN, tv director Robert Butler, who died last week, should be as famous as sit-com guru JAMES BURROWS.  And this four-night ‘event’ television (full cut just over 3'; Euro-theatrical under 2) may have been his most influential work.  Taken from a typically downbeat best-selling cop novel by Joseph Wambaugh, it’s a granular/quotidian look at the last week on the job for aging ‘beat’ cop Bumper Morgan, played by recently revived movie star William Holden in his first tv drama.*  Last week on the beat?  We all know what that means.  (Actually, that’s the plot of Wambaugh’s just filmed THE NEW CENTURIONS/’72.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-centurions-1972.html)  Engaged to Lee Remick with less than zero in common, her social circle all cop-haters as seen in some of the worst scenes in the pic.  The first two episodes, with Holden’s vet patrolman handling one damn thing after another, come off best; with a random spontaneity and lack of direction that feels very believable.  The last half pulls the strings into a ball: revenge angle; tyke in trouble; imploding court case; closure on the kinky murder that opened the film; life goes on/downbeat ending.  With consistently good acting and mostly real L.A. locations, what really sets this apart is how Butler seems to look decades ahead inside future cop series.  (He’s got one foot firmly planted in KOJAK, a rival 1973 product, and the other stepping toward HILL STREET, NYPD BLUE, even toeing THE WIRE.)   What holds it back is a lack of action chops and his inability to vary the pace.  Something that might have been less obvious without a very ‘70s tv music score from Nelson Riddle that vamps when it needs to create a little suspense.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Holden’s waning career waxed to life with THE WILD BUNCH/’69 only to fall back from three consecutive flops.  This tv film got him an Emmy® and re-revived till his death eight years & twelve films later.  But a gem hides in those three flops, Blake Edwards’ WILD ROVERS/’71, recut & renamed to disastrous results on first release, it’s now restored.    OR:  Paul Newman was about the same age (if looking a decade younger than Holden) and in a similar career slump when he pulled the same aging ‘beat’ cop angle in FORT APACHE THE BRONX/’81.  Worked even better for him.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-wild-bunch-1969.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/wild-rovers.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/fort-apache-bronx-1981.html

FOR THE LOVE OF RUSTY (1947)

Starting in 1937, M-G-M’s series of Mickey Rooney/Andy Hardy programmers had the most consistently profitable cost-to-gross ratio of anything in Hollywood.  Naturally, other studios took note, or rather ‘notes,’ as this Columbia Pictures knock-off demonstrates.  Starting in 1945, with the Hardy Family in terminal decline, likable teen Ted Donaldson, moved from 20th/Fox A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN/’45 to Mid-America (on the Columbia lot) for a series of eight Boy & his Dog meets something like the Hardy Family pics.  But in entry #3, it’s Dad (Tom Powers) rather than the kid with a lesson to learn.  Rusty (handsome German Shepard ‘Flame’) hasn’t all that much to do; no heroics, no tricks, yet still saves the day just by getting injured.  Elsewise, dull, dull, dull, with one weird exception: Aubrey Mather as a creepy vagabond vet, the role modeled after Frank Morgan’s benign mountebank in THE WIZARD OF OZ, but oozing perverse interest.  There’s even a sleep-over!  Yikes!  Mostly this one’s worth a look as an early, unlikely credit for director John Sturges, years before BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK/’55 preceded THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN/’60 and THE GREAT ESCAPE/’63.  Note the first half-reel: clever camera moves, rhymed intro shots, all-in-one framing to cover character & narrative.  You can almost hear the producer yelling down the hall after viewing the ‘dailies.’  ‘Sturges, WTF.  It’s a RUSTY for crap’s sake.  We got 20 thou and a 12-day shoot.  Stop trying to be Orson Welles.’  (Welles indeed on the Columbia lot making LADY FROM SHANGHAI in ‘47.)   Sure enough, the rest of the film entirely without visual interest.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For overlooked John Surges, try THE SATAN BUG/’65.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-satan-bug-1965.html

DUNKIRK (1958)

Though dwarfed by Christopher Nolan’s mammoth 2017 production, this major effort from Ealing Studios, recently moved from their boutique compound to join M-G-M/U.K., works well on its own terms; even better as companion to Nolan’s impressive, if rather impersonal telling.  (Running a half-hour less, Nolan’s characters tend to get lost in the mix.)  The story structure is much the same: Nazis overrunning Europe in doubletime; abandoned British Units in France fighting their way to Dunkirk & a boat ride home; ill-prepared homefront, coddled by over-confident government & press; miraculous amateur flotilla of small commercial vessels & pleasure craft (some pressed into service, some spontaneously joining in) saving a remarkably high percentage of military surrounded by Germans at Dunkirk.  Assigned for some unremembered reason to journeyman helmer Leslie Norman (no doubt a stickler for holding to a budget; Ealing in its last gasps), it’s good, if standard WWII moviemaking of the period, only dropping the ball technically on big ships at sea.  Those cyclorama skies!  (Faking ships at sea always a sticking point at the time.*)  Luckily, the safe & solid cast, nearly all of them war vets, still able to pass or given age-appropriate roles (Richard Attenborough, John Mills, Bernard Lee top-billed), have their characters down pat and carry us thru any rough patches.  (All instantly recognizable even under a helmet which proves something of an advantage compared to Nolan’s film where scorecards would have come in handy.)  Only Malcolm Arnold’s warmed over score disappoints.  An obvious choice after BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI/’57, he coasts on that film’s music cells.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Michael Curtiz and the Warners special-effects department able to convince us back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, but maybe we were just caught up in the enthusiasm, the over-sized water tank built for THE SEA HAWK/’40; along with Errol Flynn’s dash and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s sweeping scores.

DOUBLE-BILL:  The obvious one, DUNKIRK/’17.

SPUTNIK (2020)

Moving with misplaced confidence between the obvious and the obscure, this one-trick-pony of a Sci-Fi thriller feels largely pointless (when you can make out what’s going on in the dank crepuscular atmosphere) before wrapping up with gory, unearned nihilism and, what else, shameless kiddie sentimentality.  Naturally, it was a big Ruskie hit.  It’s 1983 (the analogue technology the best idea in here since everything hands-on filmable) and two Cosmonauts are having a ‘Houston, We Have A Problem’ moment during reentry.  (What’s the Russian equivalent for ‘Houston?’)  Turns out, one of the men is bringing a little something back with him, an alien life form living inside his body.  Can he and the Alien be safely separated?  That’s the setup director Egor Abramenko washes/rinses/repeats at a faceless facility that serves as a secret space recovery gulag.  Run by that prolific prodigal second-generation mediocrity of Russian Cinema, Fedor (Sergey’s scion) Bondarchuk, here only acting.  (Count your blessings.)  Going outside the box (literally), he calls in brilliant nonconformist doctor Oksana Akinshina after traditional approaches fail to solve the issue.  Only problem, his idea of a solution may not be her idea of a solution.  The deliberate pacing gives you an awful lot of time to recall how many variations of this scenario you’ve seen (two or three times a season on STAR TREK, nyet?) which wouldn’t be a problem if there was a swing to the thing, or even a bit of self-awareness that we ain’t watching Andrei Tarkovsky . . . or John Carpenter.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Take a step back from this film’s curated 1983 setting to the circa 1982 alien terror of John Carpenter’s THE THING.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-thing-1982.html

A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959)

As Hollywood’s most benevolent B-pic producer, dozens of famous & forgotten directors in his debt for their start, Roger Corman tends to get something of a critical pass on his own directing efforts.  Sure, he was always up against low-budgets (casts, scripts & sets often dire), but what does it cost to put the camera in the right spot & control pace?  Happily, this modest riff on the old 2-strip TechniColor MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM/’33) is good dirty fun; small enough to work within his limited abilities.  Dick Miller, raised from supporting heel to lead, is a ‘mad’ busboy (with artistic leanings) at a Beatnik Coffeehouse.  He’s this film’s Lionel Atwill, the ‘Mad’ Sculptor turning dead bodies into accurate statuary.  Waxed figures in the first film; here, covered in clay by Miller.  (Actually, his dead animals & people look more like they’re been coated in fondant icing.  A much funnier idea than anything Corman comes up with.)  Not a scare in its 1'7", but harmless.  With one really good comedy bit from future Limeliters folksinger Alex Hassilev.  He’s the real deal and what a difference it makes!  (Too bad they didn't have the club crowd snap their fingers rather than applaud after each poem or song.)  Elsewise, generally stick with Producer rather than Director Corman.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM/'33.  OR:  For 3D fanciers, the inferior remake HOUSE OF WAX/’‘53.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/mystery-of-wax-museum-1933.html

THE LOVE PARADE (1929)

Coming off ETERNAL LOVE/’29, his largely unhappy final silent, Ernst Lubitsch didn’t merely make a smooth transition to the Talkies, but a revolutionary one with this sparkling musical.  Something that must have seemed impossible at the time.  A sort of reverse on THE MERRY WIDOW (filmed by Lubitsch in 1934*), this time, a randy Ruritanian officer is sent home from Paris in punishment for too many dalliances.  Working with so-so composers (no Franz Lehár equivalent on the Paramount lot!), Lubitsch can’t lean on the music, but he barely needs to, especially in the astonishingly fine & free opening two reels; the Paris-set prologue with Maurice Chevalier breaking the fourth wall to translate action (everyone speaking French) as he’s gotten himself in trouble by having one too many garters!  His mistress furious, her husband furious, the valet useless, a gun loaded with blanks, and a dog adding a Lubitsch Touch to save face.  Moviemaking audacity unprecedented at the time.  And while the rest of the film shows 1929 Early Talkie longueurs (as well as ‘live’ on set singing), it’s not far behind this miraculous opening.  Back in Sylvania, Queen Jeanette MacDonald can’t find a gentleman groom willing to emasculate himself in marriage and play consort for life.  But Chevalier has unexpectedly fallen in love and thinks he can work things out; he’ll play bad boy till the Queen comes down to his level.  Shot with perfectly judged alternations of scale (huge court settings vs. intimate personal spaces), and supported by councilors and a servant couple to mirror the romance (the amazing physical moves of stage star Lupino Lane still a wonder), the film far outpaces anything out at the time and, nearly a century later, still gives off its distinctive charm.  Technical improvements, and the first true Music Video sequence, would come in next year’s MONTE CARLO/’30 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/monte-carlo-1930.html) , though only this film offers a chorus of dogs barking in harmony.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Lubitsch wouldn’t get another budget to support this level of sheer spectacle until THE MERRY WIDOW over @ M-G-M, a final pairing for Chevalier & MacDonald.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-merry-widow-1934.html

FINGERNAILS (2023)

In only his second feature film, co-writer/director Christos Nikou is clearly headed deeper & deeper toward shallow waters on this futuristic fable, amusingly clad in 1970s apparel, technology & design, on the nature of Tru-Love: Now Scientifically Testable!  Or is for those willing to have a nail yanked out and micowaved (or some such gobbledygook science) alongside their partner’s plucked appendage topper.  (No doubt, they need the root end for the procedure.  But why use the premium index finger instead of the useless toe pinky?)  Though already a proven match with partner/fingernail skeptic Jeremy Allen White, Jessie Buckley senses something is missing in her relationship and secretly takes a job at Luke Wilson’s Love Testing Institute.  Guiding couples thru various bonding exercises before ripping a nail out for compatibility testing, Buckley finds her antenna rising to senior work associate Riz Ahmed.  And between all the mutual sexual tension, it’s but one surreptitious fingernail test before she conclusively confirms a level of attraction.  But isn’t her partner a perfect match?  Is it possible to love two people at once?  Is the test flawed?  And should results always dictate behavior?*  Played in hushed/halting tones as if thru a glass darkly, everyone hoping for spontaneity, but sounding more like they can’t remember the next line.  And who can blame them with barely enough material to fill a SNL comedy sketch.  (The ones that go on after WeekEnd UpDate.)  Trying for droll, Nikou misses badly, pivoting in hopes of earnest depth & real feeling, only managing fingernails on a chalkboard.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner covered this idea with impressive brevity intro’ing ‘On A Clear Day‘ with ‘And who would not be stunned to see you prove; There's more to us than surgeons can remove?’   The film’s hard to take, but the soundtrack does have Barbra Streisand at her absolute vocal peak.

MASQUERADE (1988)

This promising old-school thriller (9/10ths of the way) sees super-rich, 20-something Hamptons orphan Meg Tilley fall for pennyless charmer/pro-yachtsman Rob Lowe just as her venal step-dad is shot to death and her one-time townie High School boyfriend (Doug Savant, very good) shows up as the local cop on the case.  Dick Wolf, in an early pre-LAW & ORDER writer/producer credit, tries for a Patricia Highsmith vibe, but shies away from her knowing perversity, holding fast to old Hollywood ways that can make the film feel like a remake of some 1940s triple-cross film noir.  Rigged out with a John Barry score & David Watkin cinematography (the pair recently Oscar’d for OUT OF AFRICA/’86) who turn in stunning work too posh for the situation.  (It needs a bit of dirt under the fingernails.)  Greedy motivations, twisty plot ‘reveals’ & general moral morass keep it involving, but a better reason for watching is a chance to see Lowe trying out a path not taken, playing a morally (and possibly bi-sexually) compromised cad who never knew what hit him when he fell for his victim and tried to go straight.*  He’s very effective.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Though camouflaged by 1988 levels of nudity (so many tushes!), the film is very old Production Code in most ways, with needless sidesteps in character, plot & behavior to protect us from repressed gay angles; serving up sealed lip/old style movie kisses to signify chaste love; and virtue triumphant.  It all hints strongly at a far more dangerous first draft (by co-scenarist Larry Brody?) lost when someone (competent/faceless director Bob Swaim?) got cold feet.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL:  Lowe’s usual line about a lack of strong acting opportunities blames his own good looks; cursed as too pretty for serious roles.  Maybe.  But that ‘curse’ didn’t hurt Alain Delon, whom he often resembles here.  Delon even played a similar sexy cipher in PURPLE NOON/’60, an acclaimed real Patricia Highsmith adaptation you may know from its remake, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY/’99.  Neither film quite as good as its rep.  On the other hand, when Delon did give Hollywood a try, he got nothing but crap roles, just like Rob Lowe later got.

THE STONE / KAMEN (1992)

The unique cinema of Russian auteur Aleksandr Sokurov, more contemplative mood pieces than narrative, work (when they do work) by coming together subliminally inside your head.  But this particularly severe example is just too off-putting to connect.*  Hard to know what (if anything) is going on as the handsome young caretaker of the old Crimean home of doctor/playwright Anton Chekhov, discovers the long dead author dressed in underclothes and soaking in the tub.  For the rest of the film, these two will speak a few lines, share a meager repast, wander thru the home and eventually the grounds & nearby village, and ceaselessly stare (with unnatural interest?; with longing?; with deep empathy?) at each other.  Filmed in misty/mottled b&w and given a purposefully muffled soundtrack, the slightly distended image almost, but not quite anamorphic, meant to be left distorted in compressed Academy Ratio, with their physical closeness making it all that much more uncomfortable.  (When asked, Sokurov bristles at any ideas of homoeroticism.  But if not sexual, then surely sexualized?)  By the very last shot, as the men leave the dining room together after devouring each other in a nose-to-nose staring competition, they do seem headed for eternity not bed.  Chekhov famously said that if you show a gun on stage, you better use it.  Maybe that’s what’s missing . . . a gun.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: The film’s much debated look feels strongly influenced by the soft-focus photography Rudolph Maté cooked up for Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR/’32, itself a similarly unconventional vague mood piece of a film.  Though there the mood is horror, here it’s unknowability.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/vampyr-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Or is until the film’s striking penultimate shot.  A long take of a mountainside, shot like a profile, showing an incline that has the look of a cemetery (though it’s not) with a dense fog moving across the view.  More Swiss Arnold Böcklin than German Caspar David Friedrich.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Sokurov had a surprise Art House hit with his one-shot wonder RUSSIAN ARK/’02 (more views than all his other films combined), but his distinctive style is probably best served (and at its most communicative) in FATHER & SON/’03.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/father-son-2003.html

RAISING CAIN (1982)

After twenty years of dissatisfaction, Brian De Palma finally saw the film he thought he’d made in a ‘fan cut’ of CAIN put together by De Palma acolyte Peet Gelderblom.  Basing his continuity on De Palma’s original script, Gelderblom retained all the footage, just rearranged to help this confusing thriller finally hit its marks.  Frankly, still a debatable point, but De Palma happy enough to swap his original cut for Gelderblom’s as new ‘official’ Director’s Cut.  Lots of problems & confusion remain (purposeful & inadvertent), but you now at least can see what De Palma was going after, riffing on Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO/’60 (no shower scene, but split personality; cross-dressing; slow sinking car, embellished with passenger; disinterest in plausibility; etc.) and trauma-inducing Dad psychologically experimenting on his own kid, from Michael Powell’s PEEPING TOM/’60.*  John Lithgow, under the silliest hair of his career, is the mixed up husband of ditzy Lolita Davidovitch.  (An actresses who’s really only good under one director . . . and De Palma not the guy.)  She starts the screwball rolling by giving Lithgow a gift meant for ex-lover Steven Bauer (whom she still carries a flame for) and vice versa.  This merely a dodge for the main action (PSYCHO again), but the misdirection falls flat since Lithgow’s constant hallucinations mean everything plays as a non-threatening dream, while Bauer (I know, I know, he’s in the John Gavin role) distracts because he’s so good, so attractive we keep wondering why he didn’t have a major career.  (Maybe, like Gavin, he became Ambassador to Mexico!)  De Palma sets up a few of his signature all-in-one camera extravagances; amusing as ever, but adding little to our involvement . . . or his.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Powell’s career never really recovered from the controversy & DOA box-office results on TOM.  (It took decades to find champions.)  Ironically, you can equally make a case that Hitchcock’s career never really recovered from the controversy and blockbuster commercial success of PSYCHO.  Discuss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Frances Sternhagen is very good as the child psychologist taking on Lithgow, but who does De Palma think he’s fooling giving her a black (rather than grey) wig to set up Lithgow’s inevitable escape later in the pic?

DRAGONSLAYER (1981)

Producer/writer Hal Barwood & writer/director Matthew Robbins, present at creation as part of the Spielberg/Lucas/USC circle, left spotty records on their own after early success that probably peaked with this fantastic (in both senses of the word) Medieval fable.  A terrifying & enchanting  Sorcerer’s Apprentice tale, it was probably doomed commercially when Paramount publicists saw visions of STAR WARS dancing in their heads (note copycat poster & cast that visually matches Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher & Alec Guinness to Peter MacNicol*, Caitlin Clarke & Ralph Richardson).  In hindsight, that echo you hear is more LORD OF THE RINGS/GAME OF THRONES, and not in a bad way.  Odd this box-office disappointment never developed a cult following.  Richardson, who merely tops-and-tails the film, but seems present all the way, is the aging Sorcerer, called upon to slay the eponymous flying, fire-breathing beast.  But, judging himself too old to complete the journey, let alone the task, sends apprentice MacNicol, who channels his ‘late’ master as long as he controls the glowing amulet he inherited.  Along the way, virgins sacrificed yearly to appease the dragon; the young male courier entrusted with the commission revealed as a damsel in disguise (Clarke); a virgin Princess learns the King has exempted her from the sacrifice lottery and heads to the slaughter.  Meanwhile, our Dragon is raising a family.  Yikes!  With superb art direction, a nightmare-inducing practical marvel of a dragon and crystal clear narrative, only Robbins’ action chops  prove a bit shy.  He does better whenever something out of the ordinary or magical is called for.  Like whenever Richardson is on screen.  (10/31/23

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  MacNicol (in his film debut as is Clarke) is quite good, but facially, a disconcerting cross between STAR WAR’s Mark Hamill and sweaty exercise guru Richard Simmons.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Those GoT dragons never did much for me.  For a comparison with this dragon, check out the scary beauty who shows at the end of Disney’s SLEEPING BEAUTY/’59.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/12/sleeping-beauty-1959.html