STILLWATER (2021)

Hard not to root for this Father-Love story to work.*  Just the sort of mid-list feature once common, now all but impossible to get funded.  It’s no big tent pole pic, micro-budgeted cult item or the latest in some expanding franchise, so a real pleasure to watch this one take off so nicely, only to wince as it crashes & burns on its third act reentry.  (Difficult to know how it performed what with COVID still in the air & streaming data the usual mystery.)  The film tees up on (but largely stays clear of) the tragic Italian murder trial of American Amanda Knox*, but is set in Marseilles.  Matt Damon (excellent) is Dad, the Oklahoma construction worker who goes to France to visit his daughter, incarcerated for a murder she didn’t commit.  Finding no help from her attorney, he starts investigating on his own.  And the pleasure of the opening two acts largely stems from how co-writer/director Tom McCarthy and Damon (a very hands-on star) work to avoid all the usual prickly French/Ugly American tropes using a Based-on-a-True-Story template for this pure fiction.  Structurally, the investigation hits a wall and the second act is all personal relations: Dad & wary daughter (Abigail Breslin) and between Damon and Camille Cottin’s single mom with a little girl (Lilou Siauvand).  For Damon, this is like a double helping of second chances: reconnecting with his own daughter, plus having a shot at the family he missed out on back in the States.  It's the best thing in the film, but throws McCarthy completely off his game so when he attempts to restart the investigation he's painted himself into a dramatic corner.  Far-fetched coincidence now runs the plot; Damon’s actions are out of character; and a final twist, an unconvincing ‘got’cha’ moment, plays out like Hollywood film conventions from an earlier decade.  You can almost hear James Stewart telling Kim Novak, ‘You shouldn’t have been so sentimental, you shouldn't have been so sentimental.'  (That from a great, but entirely different kind of movie.)  Pity.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Hollywood Mother Love dramas a dime a dozen going back to the 1920s.  (It’s how Louis B. Mayer got his start in Hollywood.)  Father Love far less prevalent.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *HULU about to go into production on a limited series about the case, AMANDA.

DISORDER / MARYLAND (2015)

Daringly lean thriller from co-writer/director Alice Winocour may not be up to much, but gets what it’s going after without insulting our intelligence or patience.  Matthias Schoenaerts is the main event in the film, an Afghanistan-tested Special Units soldier (think Navy Seals level, but French) itching to get back in, but currently on a medical PTSD break.  Filling in with other war-hardened vets on a temp job, he’s part of a Home Security detail working a big social event at the massive French estate of a Middle-East wheeler-dealer type making pacts & fortunes in the illegal gun trade as various shady characters take meetings during a lux all-day affair.  He seems to have it all, including gorgeous international jet-setting wife Diane Kruger & requisite cute kid.  But something’s ‘off’ about the whole package and Schoenaerts feels it in his bones . . . or is he simply mismanaging the regime of drugs he takes to control his symptoms?  And when an unexpected trip out of the country leaves the wife & son in need of a bodyguard, the babysitting gig is too easy and well-paid to turn down.  What no one knows is that a power-play is already in motion, the arms dealer being played, the wife & son left behind, possible collateral damage.  Winocour has an uncanny ability to keep us informed and off-balance at one and the same time, she’s also a whiz at clear logistics in the big mansion, on the road (are we being followed?) and at a possible assassination setup at the beach.  Mostly, it’s the wary intelligence, instinctual problem solving, muscular moves & scent of easy sexuality from Schoenaerts (boasting a very potent Steve McQueen vibe* if his PTSD doesn’t take him down first) that make this one work so well.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *As plot-heavy as this is plot-light (the end here extremely cryptic), the Steve McQueen of Robert Wise’s THE SAND PEBBLES/’66 is the guy Schoenaerts mostly channels.

THE FIRST OMEN (2024)

In 1976, top-tier production values and recognizable A-list talent (on both sides of the camera) made THE OMEN something of a game changer: gory R-rated horror fit for the mainstream.  (Take the grandparents!)  Unlike truly distinctive films lifting the genre (think ROSEMARY’S BABY/’68; THE EXORCIST/’73), OMEN thrived under director Robert Donner’s faceless professional competence, the sole unarguably great element Jerry Goldsmith’s slip-siding score.  So why a reboot?  (Other than hoping to restart a money-churning franchise.)  It’s adopted Devil Child plot surely played out, no?  But with artsy debuting director Arkasha Stevenson and a crepuscular haze o’er all of Rome (plot finesses to set action at a Catholic all-girls orphanage in 1971 Red Brigade Rome, and the percentage of English speakers hard to swallow), the smartest move flips narrative template from OMEN to ROSEMARY’S BABY.  More specifically, turning the plot into SISTER ROSEMARY’S BABY, impregnated for a fresh Demon Child who’ll scare the fading faithful back to church.*  And, in spite of too many someone’s-behind-your-back shocks and loads of Red Herrings (easy enough when all those Nuns look alike), the film largely hits its target.  Or will have if so-so grosses don’t stop a tipped sequel in its tracks.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *They hold off bringing in the expected Jerry Goldsmith music cues till very near the end.  (And it still blows away anything else in here.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/omen-1976.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Accuracy would demand NOVITIATE ROSEMARY’S BABY.  But that’s not very catchy.

INSIDE THE MIND OF A CAT (2022) INSIDE THE MIND OF A DOG (2024)

From Nature Documentarian Andy Mitchell, two self-recommending dives (less deep than advertised) into old news about dogs (they’re basically socialized wolves) and cats (newer to mankind, entering as rodent hunters with the rise of crop cultivation*), along with a few dollops of recent research on how our favorite house guests figure things out within instinctual reactions.  But what really makes this pair of films such adorable fun comes in how their filmic personality mirrors the species they’re exploring.  So, MIND OF A DOG is goal-oriented, cresting with teary epiphanies (who makes the cut to be a service animal*) while the cat profiles remain intensely unknowable . . . and unaccountably hilarious.  Dogs thrilled to be let into your life; cats pleasantly surprised to find you’re occasionally useful.  Each a little over an hour; each pleasant company.  But unlike even the most ordinary cat, not a living work of art.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The weirdest ‘new’ discovery about cats comes from Japan where a professional cat lady (to use the new J.D. Vance scientific terminology) has discovered feline nationalistic variances. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The adoption 'graduation' ceremonies between successfully trained service dogs and their new human matches is emotionally topped by the brief farewells for the dogs and their foster family.  (Bring your handkerchiefs.)

(Self-evident) DOUBLE-BILL:  See Title!

JUSQU'À LA GARDE / CUSTODY (2017)

The relative informality of child custody court and its unproportionally large consequences are the subject of writer/director Xavier Legrand’s granular study of the aftereffects of an unamicable divorce between superstore clerk Léa Drucker and hospital security agent Denis Ménochet.  Two kids are also involved, the 18-yr-old daughter, not much affected by the outcome, while a younger son, about 14, terrified of being alone with dad.  But is he really such an ogre?  Or has a resentful wife been systematically turning the kids against him.  Legrand lets us know the score quickly as Ménochet’s temper blows on a very short fuse and needs the smallest of slights to be activated.*  So the film lives or dies on observation, accurate details, bad timing and our belief in how domestic violence is the controlling factor; all of which Legrand develops to great effect and the sort of real life terror barely touched upon in genre horror films meant to do nothing but give you a quick scare.  Debuting non-pro Thomas Gioria as the boy (a shuttlecock between the parents) is especially terrific.  Haunting stuff here, top César award winner.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Originally planned as three short films, director Legrand expanded the last two parts into a single feature after making the first section in 2013 as AVANT QUE DE TOUT PERDRE; included on the KINO-Lorber DVD.  Legrand prefers you watch the prequel after the feature.  (Note the young son is played by a different actor in 2013.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *As the bull-like dad, Denis Ménochet could give Robert De Niro lessons calibrating degrees of threat.  (Compare with THIS BOY’S LIFE/’93.)  Yet he’s even better, subtler, in the earlier film, shot when Ménochet was three years younger/twenty pounds lighter.  In the feature, his bulk tends to give the game away before he’s shown his hand.

TONI ERDMANN (2016)

Exceptionally well-received German dramedy (widowed Dad resorts to wacky subterfuge to reconnect with distanced business-oriented single daughter) seemingly had it all.  Big grosses, stellar reviews, a cache of awards (including an Oscar® nom.), Hollywood remake pickup with Kristen Wiig & the retired Jack Nicholson attached.  Yet, whatever was seen at the time, the film has gone ‘off’ faster than a gutted fish in the summer heat.  Prolific German producer Maren Ade, occasionally writes & directs, as here, apparently trying for an AUNTIE MAME meets MORGAN vibe*, but can’t find a tone to let Peter Simonischek’s shaggy life-force Dad barge into his uptight daughter’s life (she’s a business liaison exec working in Bucharest) without coming off as a stalker, an embarrassing pest who can’t stop himself from inflicting unfunny practical jokes on a humorless daughter.  This time, his bag of tricks has him in disguise as a bewigged character named Toni Erdmann, supposed life coach to masters-of-the-universe corporate titans.  Structured as a series of unfortunate events, he tags along on her meetings (looking like he hasn’t bathed in a month) while she acts as if he’s not physically there.  (And good luck with that!)  Eventually, she’ll crack, which is what he was hoping for; anything to jog her out of her workplace rut.  Career competition passing for sex and companionship.  And while Dad was triggered to spontaneously reenter her life after his old dog died, daughter Sandra Hüller will succumb at a birthday party where she sheds her clothes in lieu of shedding her skin.  You too may wish to molt after seeing this.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  A unified acting style for the cast or an hour less running time (it’s over two and a half hours!) might have given a more stylish director enough wiggle room to put this over.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *No doubt you know AUNTIE MAME/’58, but MORGAN/’66 can be summarized as a sanity-challenged ‘Mod’ era London romance.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/auntie-mame-1958.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/05/morgan-suitable-case-for-treatment-1966.html

HELL TOWN / BORN TO THE WEST (1937)

A surprise from John Wayne’s decade in Poverty Row purgatory, pumping out scores of Western programmers all thru the ‘30s, between a flop star debut in Raoul Walsh’s THE BIG TRAIL/’30 and his A-list career resurrection in John Ford’s STAGECOACH/’39.  The surprise?  It’s a good movie.  Low budget, and just under an hour, but this Western, from a Zane Grey story, has a lot going for it.  (Unfortunately, that doesn’t include it’s current physical condition.  Original elements lost?)  Wayne and comic sidekick Syd Saylor (occasionally managing to be funny) are headed West when they stumble into a cattle raid.  Joining the fight, they belatedly realize they’re working with the bad guys.  Yikes!  Getting the heck out of there, they soon find legit work with Wayne’s old pal Johnny Mack Brown.  (Wayne behind an apron as wagon cook.)  He’s mainly hanging around to woo Brown’s pretty, stylish fiancée Marsha Hunt.  Aware of this dangerous new rival (Wayne long, lean & devilishly handsome at 30), Brown ups Wayne to foreman, giving him a big test he secretly hopes he’ll fail: take the herd to town and cash out.  Sure enough, a tempting poker game and the bad guys he’d almost gone in with, take him down.  It’s a chunk of change Brown would gladly forfeit to reveal Wayne’s true colors and win back the lovely Ms. Hunt.  Heck, this isn’t formula stuff at all.  Well-directed too by all ‘rounder Charles Barton.  Excellent with horses & stunts (check out a dandy chase triggered by a rattlesnake that spooks Hunt’s horse), Barton did quite a lot of comedy and it shows.  (Last feature credit?  Disney’s THE SHAGGY DOG/’59.)  In fact, everything in here could have worked with a big budget.  Even more surprising, just about everyone ups their game to make it work here.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  A quick look at Wayne’s credits starting around 1936 reveal just how many non-Westerns he was making before STAGECOACH (of all things an A-list Western) bumped him up for good.

AMBP:  Alan Ladd listed on the poster, but he's not in the film.

GREEN ROOM (2015)

Indie writer/director Jeremy Saulnier got buzz-worthy traction (if small return: 5 mill budget/4 mill gross) off this violent nihilistic actioner.  Heavy on gross-out stylistics (a Gaspar Noé acolyte?), there’s solid structure behind its story of a struggling punk rock band (3 guys/one gal) living out of an equipment van, forced to siphon gas from parked vehicles to make the next gig.  This time they’re heading to a faceless warehouse space to play for a mess of skinheads, Far Right/leather-fetish Nazi sympathizers already waiting for them to show.  Nazis?  Hey, a date’s a date . . . plus 350 in cash and possible gate bonus.  But when a band member collects a smartphone from backstage and runs into a fresh murder victim (stabbed in the head!), the band is quickly shunted into the green room, supposedly to wait for the police.  Are they going to give statements or being held like lambs to the slaughter for what they saw.  Or worse, being set up to take the fall.  Oddly enough, that’s exactly what club owner Patrick Stewart is trying to figure out.  Meanwhile, the band is stuck in green room hell with a vicious enforcer and a wild card girlfriend whose allegiance is a mystery.  Should they believe what they’re being told or plan to fight for their lives?  First problem; no alternate doorway out.  Second problem; director Saulnier can't keep track of his characters and spaces.  With only seven or eight people that count and merely two main acting spaces, it shouldn't prove too much even for a logistic-impaired director who can’t parse his ‘plastic elements’ so we can properly follow the Who, What, Where, Why or When.  Are Saulnier’s other films similarly mismanaged?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The film has the feel of being a disappointing remake of a better realized Korean or Japanese film you can’t get your friends to watch.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One of the band members is the ill-fated star-in-the-making Anton Yelchin.  He’s really good, a major loss.

OUTPOST IN MALAYA / THE PLANTER’S WIFE (1952)

Pushing 50, Claudette Colbert had cut way back on her workload by the time she made this British mid-lister, the latest waning Hollywood star hired to add commercial luster to a British production.  Set on a rubber tree plantation in Malaya (hadn’t this industry gone all synthetic post-WWII?), she’s going thru a bad patch with husband Jack Hawkins just as the country’s going thru an even larger bad patch with marauding Commie rebels.  These natives not only restless, but leftist, a threat to the posh lifestyle of the British colony.  For Claudette, it’s so long cocktail dresses & tony clubs; hello slacks & Tommy guns.  Yikes!*  With lots of location shooting, just not for the lead actors who stick to process shots and sets at PInewood Studios, handled better than usual by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth via trick effects & well-matched angles and film stock.  Journeyman director Ken Annakin had yet to lose all personality on big-budget anodyne family fare (MAGNIFICENT MEN AND THEIR FLYING MACHINES; CHITTY-CHITTY BANG-BANG) and brings off what people once thought of as Colonial slice-of-life atmosphere.  Servant/master relationships; the lifestyle & strict dress code of the gin & tonic set; the care & bleeding of those damn rubber trees; the ironic away-from-home ultra-patriotism of the locally born & bred Brits; the young scion with his native BFF.  Oops, a step too far on that last one since the local ‘pal’ is played by a White kid in dark body make up.  (Boo!)  All other Malaysians, more or less Malaysian.  By the third act the whole thing turns into something of a Far East American Western.  Smartly staged though, and pretty suspenseful as the underdefended estate comes under enemy attack and we wait for the Cavalry . . . er, British military relief. followed by marital resuscitation and a pledge to see it out while the boy heads home to England for safety & school.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *In John Ford's DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK/'39, Colbert sides with the Revolutionaries to battle American Indians fighting with the Brits in the American Revolution.

HÆVNEN / IN A BETTER WORLD (2010)

Danish director Susanne Bier’s Oscar® winner (Best Foreign Language), less breakout than consolidation/recognition of her run of five preceding well-received titles in under a decade.  (Bier likely best known here for the multi-part tv adaptation of John Le Carré’s THE NIGHT MANAGER/’17: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-night-manager-2016.html.)  Superbly structured and economically handled, this many-sided two-family drama begins away from home, in Africa where a Doctors-Without-Borders type is patiently speeding his way thru scores of cases in a camp near some unspecified war zone.  Admirable work, but it’s taken a toll back home in Denmark where he’s separating from his wife (an affair he’s written off but she hasn’t), but not their two boys, the eldest, about 12, an obviously great kid with a crooked smile, being horribly bullied (as a rat-faced Swede) in middle school.  At the same time, a second family (disengaged father/resentful son) are dealing poorly with the death of the mother.  And when this 12-yr-old son starts at the same school, he quickly bonds, even protects, the bullied kid.  Only his ‘protection’ takes a violent course, bringing out untreated fissures in everyone’s personality that threaten all relationships.  It’s a blister that won’t break without dangerous consequences.  Even the level-headed doctor finds his limit for tolerance crossed back in Africa.  Insightful, thought-provoking & heartbreaking (though Bier pulls back from the abyss); sentiment earned rather than taken.  (NOTE:  Family Friendly label on this one, but no younger than our 12-yr-old protagonists.)  

LE PROCÈS GOLDMAN / THE GOLDMAN CASE (2023)

The other French courtroom drama of 2023; the one that’s not ANATOMY OF A FALL (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/07/anatomy-of-fall-anatomie-dune-chute-2023.html).  That got all the attention (grosses, export, awards), GOLDMAN settled for sweeping France’s Best Actor trophies for Arieh Worthalter’s furious perf as Pierre Goldman, The Last Angry Man of the French Radical Left.  Following revolutions around the world in the late ‘60s, this French/Polish Jew lives a hand-to-mouth existence, mostly thru robbery, which he freely admits, with two murders and one shooting as collateral damage, charges he vehemently denies.  After some preliminary scene setting (the accused; lawyers; judges; crimes), we hit the courtroom and never leave.  Leading director Cédric Kahn’s to use Academy Ratio for tight framing on a film that’s almost entirely composed in medium close-up/ head-to-waist shots.  Goldman, alone, all but bursting out of his frame-lines whenever his lawyers try to ‘explain’ his actions thru context or bring in sympathetic character witnesses.  He’ll only accept hard facts as defense; he needs nothing else.  But what conflicting testimony comes in!  French evidentiary rules must have been incredibly loose in the mid-‘70s along with the court’s outrageously theatrical atmosphere.  And if Goldman isn’t the only one in court to go into tirades when crossed by facts or tactics, he’s still a unique pain.  But an innocent one?  Fascinating stuff here, with the film shedding its awkward nature of presentation as it goes along; as rigorously shot as it is argued.

TURN BACK THE CLOCK (1933)

Lee Tracy, born to play wised-up reporters flashing a press pass, was always something of a lowlife outlier at M-G-M, a mutt among the pedigree.  With supporting roles in A-list pics and leads in programmers, this final M-G-M role finds him top-billed as a disappointed everyman, a Manhattan pharmacist living above the shop with his little grey wren of a wife.  But when he bumps into an old pal who made good (Otto Kruger) and the guy offers to invest his small nest egg for him, he sees a second chance at the road not taken when he married for love instead of money.  Not so fast, says the missus.  Storming out, a traffic accident knocks him out cold and he imagines the successful life he missed out on.  It’s the old (even then old) alternate life scenario.  (IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46 still the best known example.)  Always with the same moral: the grass ain’t greener on the other side of the fence, be thankful for what you’ve got . . . even in the Depression.  Co-written with Ben Hecht, director Edgar Selwyn (a major B’way producer who dabbled in Hollywood*) does have the time frame to give this iteration interest (WWI thru early Depression days), but Selwyn never quite got the hang of film technique.  And tossing in the occasional montage to make things ‘filmic’ hardly helps.  (The same could be said of Ben Hecht’s attempts at directing.)  Yet the film just odd enough to be worth a look.  (Plus fun actor spotting.  Look!  Auntie Em and Uncle Henry from THE WIZARD OF OZ!)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Edgar Selwyn’s real Hollywood achievement came from ‘lending’ half his name to a certain Samuel Goldfish.  Once producing partners back in New York, the Goldwyn Company took the GOLD from Goldfish and the WYN from Selwyn for its official name.  And the men had a verbal agreement not to use the company name as their own.  Guess who didn’t hold to the bargain?  As Goldwyn famously said: ‘A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.’  No wonder B’way wags said Goldwyn took the wrong halves of the two names.  He should have called himself Samuel Selfish.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For Lee Tracy in an A-list pic, DINNER AT EIGHT/’33.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/11/dinner-at-eight-1933.html

THE ADMIRAL: ROARING CURRENTS / MYEONG-RYANG (2014)

Korean foundation story, from 1597: Naval Division; a huge success locally, probably too obscure for foreign markets.  One of those Nation building fact-based myths of heroic forefathers overcoming impossible odds to stay independent.  (Not seen here, but a different angle on the same legendary battle recently out: NORYANG: DEADLY SEA/’23.)  Here with twelve barge-like warships* (a larger battleship, a ‘Turtle boat,’ lost to fire) taking on a Japanese fleet of 300 attack vessels.  Underdog country holds firm against a greater international power!  It’s not unlike Britain taking on the Spanish Armada; a nearly contemporaneous event, 1588.  That European battle largely won by England’s smaller, more maneuverable vessels running rings around larger/slower Spanish galleons.  Here, in a move that has Asian Martial Arts as model, a stronger attacking power (Japan) finds its great weight flipped back at them.  So too with bad sea conditions when a tidal whirlpool turns from Korean obstacle to potent offensive advantage.  The character of crusty, aging Admiral Yi will also be familiar to Western audiences as he’s a lot like Field Marshal Kutuzov who led Russia against the French in 1812 (see Tolstoy WAR AND PEACE), called back from obsolescence, then fighting with scorched Earth policies and tactical retreat.  Such similarities help to give easy narrative access, yet the film misses emotional involvement and lacks character development after its many introductions.  We’re left with a well-produced film that plays like a State-Approved pageant fit for international trade shows, right down to its incongruous Western-style musical soundtrack.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: John Woo brings fantasy & ‘swing’ to his fabulist sea battles and the power of weather forecasting (!) in RED CLIFF.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/chi-bi-red-cliff-2008.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/chi-bi-xia-jue-zhan-tian-xia-red-cliff.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Those barge-like warships powered by oar, the rowers using a circular technique that’s hard to figure out, impossible to imagine supplying the speed shown.

CARNIVAL STORY (1954)

Failing American circus goes to post-WWII Germany for a reboot in this mid-weight indie pic from budget conscious producers King Brothers, gleaning off C.B. DeMille’s bg-ticket Oscar-winner THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH/’52.  Directed by Kurt Neumann (times 2; there’s also a Euro-cast version, CIRCUS OF LOVE), the intriguing idea of how the two cultures differ (national culture and circus culture) is largely dropped, replaced by a less original romantic quadrangle when talent manager Steve Cochran spots Anne Baxter stealing his wallet to get food in the midway and gets her kitchen work in exchange for a little action.  The film unusually frank on their relationship and on Cochran’s physical & mental domination.  Next, daredevil diver Lyle Bettger (the main villain in GREATEST SHOW) takes her on as apprentice diver and for a while she splits her time between bed with Cochran and a water tank with Bettger, Baxter a natural from a six-storey high ladder.  Yikes!  Next guy up is Bettger’s WWII photographer pal George Nader, always on the hunt for a magazine article, especially a pretty one.  That makes two nice guys and one heel (Cochran), on the make, while Baxter, drawn to abuse after post-war life on the streets, can't shake Cochran.  A couple of marriage proposals, a sabotaged act, a missed trick, a jealous gal in tights, the usual circus tropes, but with a masochistic Euro-slant.  Too bad director Neumann is no UFA stylist.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The sharp-edged TechniColor seen in DeMille’s GREATEST SHOW quite a contrast to what we can currently see here in Ernst Haller’s unrestored AgfaColor lensing.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-greatest-show-on-earth-1952.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  A bit of slumming for Baxter?  This film surrounded by roles for Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and DeMille.  (Lang would have been just the guy for this one.)

PASSAGE TO INDIA (1984)

Forty years after coming out, David Lean’s final film has, if anything, ripened; most of the reservations found on its release now hardly noticeable.*   Unprecedented three-in-a-row epic successes (BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI/’57, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA/’62, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO/’65) had left Lean unprepared for really bad notices on RYAN’S DAUGHTER/’70.  And though profitable, Lean basically licked his wounds for 14 years before PASSAGE brought him out of professional exile.  Now 75, the film has an I’ll-show-you energy & pace that’s rather thrilling.  It also looks like it cost three times its 16 mill. budget.  Thru sheer craft and a master’s confidence, it's not merely deeply satisfying but somehow, on a technical level,  emotionally moving.  And what a daring choice for a literalist like Lean, E.M.Forster’s critical look at the ruling Brits in India, with Lean's signature large-scale East/West clashes set beside personal stories defined by half tones, unknowable truths & emotional deflection following a nearly affianced young woman (an unsettling Judy Davis) when she visits her intended (Nigel Havers) on a trip with his aging mother (Peggy Asncroft, nonpareil) to his posting.  Hoping for real contact with a different culture , the two visitors feel stuck in the English colonial lifestyle, but break out thru a chance encounter the mother has with local doctor Victor Banerjee (Satyajit Ray's frequent lead).  Their nighttime meeting in an elsewise deserted mosque mysteriously throbbing with emotion.  But the path of good intentions . . . you know, East is East and all that, lead to an outing gone wrong at some foreboding caves, a criminal case, a confession to . . . well, to what, exactly?  Not really Lean territory at all.  Yet what an involving piece he makes of it.  So consistently interesting, thoughtful and well paced, it’s one of those 3-hr films that feels untethered to its actual running time.  Lean died before starting on Joseph Conrad’s NOSTROMO (still unproduced), but could he have chosen a better farewell?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Three can still rankle: Maurice Jarre’s catchy score which naturally was Oscar’d; Lean reversing the novel’s last sentiments; and (the elephant in the room) Alec Guinness in ethnic drag as Professor Godbole.  And while he’s both charming & quite funny as the eccentric teacher/philosopher, the practice of Whites playing people of Color, at least in serious films, had already passed.  This casting entirely at Lean’s insistence, probably as insurance since Guinness, in spite of their long, bickering relationship, had been in all the late epics except the poorly received RYAN’S DAUGHTER/’70.

CONTEST:  Of late Lean epics, the only one shot flat (1.85: 1) instead of in a WideScreen format.  Explain why to win a MAKSQUIBS WriteUp of your choice.

THERE AIN'T NO JUSTICE (1939)

With a career’s-worth of credits at various studios already behind him, British producer Michael Balcon, putting a new team together for next year’s Ealing Studios startup, elevated assistant-director Pen Tennyson to helm this sharp little boxing programmer.  And Tennyson really came thru, starting with the cast.  Jimmy Hanley, personable, if darn skinny for a boxer, is reasonably athletic as the young car mechanic who chucks his old job to take up boxing (after accidentally getting in a row with a top pro boxer) unaware he’s signed on with a crooked manager.  It’s also how he’ll pivot from his nice, new girlfriend to the manager’s moll, pawing the lad to see if he’ll throw a fight for a quick payout.  He just might, too, as his sister needs some quick cash after shady fiancé Michael Wilding (the cad!) takes off with the 60 quid she had in the till.  Yikes!  Worked up with unusually satisfying twists from writer James Curtis (and a doozy of a climax when the bad guys try to stop the big fight by causing a riot in the stands), the film lets Tennyson display some atypical awareness for the time of workingclass life & sensibility in a lightweight drama (note the opening neighborhood establishing shots), the close family routine (Mom, Dad, son, daughter & 2-yr-old) in a flat two sizes too small, along with some terrific technical flair as needed.  Not only in above average fights in the ring, but in a quick-cut/montage suicide attempt.  Excellent stuff!  But Tennyson (and yes, he is related to the poet) only made two more films before dying in the war at  just 28 in 1940.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *One of the two, his last release, CONVOY/’40.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/04/convoy-1940.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Once available only in subfusc VHS editions, this is now available (via Canal+) in near mint condition.  An unexpected treat on these low-budget films.

TOMORROW'S GAME (2022)

There must be a wave of nostalgia for ‘90s Nickelodeon Live-Action comedy.  How else to explain the high IMDb rating and awards (from sports, kids & Latino niche film fests) for this condescending kiddie film about the clueless nephew of a baseball legend (the first Dominican in the Majors), who time-travels from 2002 to 1957, to witness his Uncle’s debut game.  Suddenly stuck in the past thru a fluke in antique technology (a reel-to-reel tape recorder that holds the old radio broadcast), he’ll need to recreate the exact setup & circumstances to get back to his 2002 ‘present.’  Sounds cute, if awfully derivative, but with good opportunities to spotlight progress in social/racial attitudes, technology & pro ball; all largely missed.  Those not missed, dumbed-down for 7-yr olds . . . back-of-the-class 7-yr olds.  At least we don’t have to put up with that Nickelodeon laughtrack mechanically chortling when the nephew proves so baseball-ignorant he thinks players wear tights and kick the ball.  On the other hand, we do have to put up with Nickelodeon’s negligible production values & amateur indicative acting.  (The techno-savvy girl he meets in the past a particular horror.)  Making their feature debut, co-directors Jonathan Coria & Trevor Wilson couldn’t have imagined film school studies would lead to making a modern equivalent of a 1960s charm-free/force-fed Disney-style family-friendly write-off.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  While parallels to BACK TO THE FUTURE/’85 are obvious, a better model would have been PLEASANTVILLE/’98.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/10/pleasantville-1998.html