INSIDE MAN (2006)

Spike Lee dropped issue-oriented auteur aspiration for hired-hand director in producer Brian Grazer’s tricked out bank robbery caper.*  (Did Grazer partner Ron Howard pass?)  No big themes in this one, just big movie stars jostling for attention (Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor) in Russell Gewirtz’s original screenplay.  Heist leader Owen clues us in via soliloquy right from the start, as does Lee who slips in one of those Zoom-In/Track-Out shots* famous from Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and Spielberg’s JAWS, a technique he’ll return to two or three times later when he’s not dancing his camera around the action.  Look for a real humdinger of a shot when chief hostage negotiator Washington glides toward us on some sort of tightly framed 'dolly' wagon while everyone else is running on foot.  Just how bored was Spike?  These technically showy things can be fun in the right situations, but here they’re just camouflage for a robbery/hostage drama that turns out to be a Shaggy Dog story.  Even treading water, all those stars were enough to make this a modest hit, but, for once, Hollywood didn’t fall for good grosses, and Gewirtz has had little to show over the next twenty years after this debut feature.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Best guess, Lee thought he could make a sort of TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE/DOG DAY AFTERNOON combo out of this.  Ironically, Denzel Washington remade PELHAM three years later.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Or is it Zoom-Out/Track-In?

NO NAME ON THE BULLET (1959)

Still short, but no longer young enough to play ‘The Kid,’ war-hero turned actor Audie Murphy caught a break playing a Bad Guy under Jack Arnold’s laconic direction* on this unusual chamber Western.  Not much in the way of action, romance, horsemanship or vistas, but branching off the ‘50s trend toward psychological Oaters toward, of all things, philosophy and semantics.  (Philosophy & semantics 101, but still . . . )  Structurally, a traditional Stranger-Comes-To-Town piece, Murphy’s a traveling hitman, a hired gun who stays technically not-quite-guilty by goading his assigned target into drawing first.  Feared and so well known, his name enough to trigger panic for half the men in town, causing unprovoked suicide, stress severed partnerships, fire sales.  Yet no one as yet even knows whom he’s come to kill.  Waiting till that effect fully settles in, Murphy strikes up an unlikely friendship with town Doc Charles Drake (excellent).  Playing chess and discussing which of the two helps humanity more; the professional killer who removes evil men standing beyond the law; or the principled physician who heals indiscriminately?  The dialogue ain’t G.B. Shaw, but it’s not bad.  With Arnold knowing just how much we can handle before the next threat, including a disrupted attempt at ‘premature justice’ from the town’s fair citizens against Murphy’s Angel of Death, our vastly outnumbered/out-gunned seasoned assassin.  The film even pulls off an unexpected victim to reveal at the climax, along with a clever way out of this philosophical pickle that avoids being a cop-out by inches.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Before Murphy went with Universal and (mostly) Westerns, he showed another kind of range in an early role working under John Huston on Stephen Crane’s THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE/’51.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/05/red-badge-of-courage-1951.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jack Arnold best known for iconic ‘50s Sci-Fi: CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON/’53; IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE/’53; THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN/’57.

LOVE AFFAIR (1939)

Starting as shipboard rom-com between solo passengers on their way to NYC, Charles Boyer (Continental Rake) and Irene Dunne (ex-club singer/current publishing secretary), the two  engaged, just not to each other.  (And both peerless.)  Shifting to dramatic romance and a decisive meet-up six months later at the Empire State Building, Leo McCarey’s genre mash-up looks better than it has in seven decades when R.K.O.’s original film elements were lost in transit to 20th/Fox where McCarey was remaking it for Cary Grant & Deborah Kerr as AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER/'57, a notably inferior effort.  It got a lot of attention when some of the plot and a bit of the film showed in Nora Ephron’s typically anodyne SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE/’93.*  Now, with the 1939 original restored by Lobster Films & MoMA from McCarey’s donated 35mm nitrate print (check out the before & after on Criterion) you can at long last really see it.  McCarey, in the sweet spot of his career, between THE AWFUL TRUTH/’37 and GOING MY WAY/’44, seems unable to put a foot wrong.  His loose, improvisatorial style, built in his early silent comedy days, entirely intuitive, finessing pivotal moments like the lovers’ visit with Boyer’s failing grandmother, to unexpected emotional levels.  McCarey’s pay-to-play Catholicism held from treacle by his Personal Trinity: Faith, Sex and Comedy.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Enough attention to generate an unhappy third version: 1994's LOVE AFFAIR with Warren Beatty & Annette Bening.

CONTEST:  How does Elvis Presley figure into this?  A correct answer earns your choice of movie for a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2024)

After the Osage Tribe find oil reserves under their land and grow rich in the early 1920s, the local white men who’d long run their affairs in Oklahoma, scheme to take profits and rights away from them.  No surprise in that story; a true and important one, for sure, but not exactly filled with surprise.  Equally unsurprising, the kid glove treatment from critics & the award circuit for Martin Scorsese’s latest self-indulgence; packing two-reels of story into a three-and-a-half hour running time,*  (His last, THE IRISHMAN/’19, an equally long marathon.)  A sub-story embedded here on the birth of the FBI thru their belated investigation of the swindle offers major possibilities, fresh angles on an old theme, plus the film’s best perf in Jesse Plemons’ G-Man.  But it doesn’t show up till the film’s half over, and never claims focus.*  Instead, Leonardo DiCaprio returns from WWI, aimless but hoping to work for his politically powerful Uncle Robert De Niro, a sort of Oklahoma version of one of those ‘benevolent’ White capitalist bullies Edward Arnold used to play in Frank Capra movies.  Bob’s really out to murder his way into an oil fortune with help from his naïf nephew who’s married into the clan.  But as DiCaprio is 50+ when his character needs to be 25 to make sense, he comes off as a bigger villain & a bigger dope than we can invest our emotions in.  While a nefarious De Niro, unable to just rely on his intimidating stare, the fallback gesture he over-relies on in mid-list fare, a habit that likely kept Scorsese looking elsewhere for an alter-ego for nearly three decades (1985 -  2019), brings out a truly odd solution: channeling Robert Duvall as an acting model all thru this film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Marty knows it, too, fashioning a five-minute radio show recap of the whole plot for a burlesque coda; even taking a cameo role in it.  A gag or an insult?  Tone deaf or Brechtian?  Discuss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Besides Plemons, the other worthy element in here is Jack Fisk’s production design.  Even if Scorsese tries to sabotage it with ill-considered camera moves (interiors and exteriors) aping his famous nightclub back-entrance intro shot in GOODFELLAS/90.

JOINT SECURITY AREA / GONGDONG GYEONGBI GUYEOK JSA (2000)

Well-received, but disappointing.  Award-bait (cinematic & humanitarian) from iconic Korean writer/director Park Chan-wook plays like an allegory on the futility-of-war.  Odd, as it takes place in the on-going Cold War between North and South Korea.  In a peacefully maintained border area campus, where territorial lines are laid out in tasteful sidewalk pavement styles, a neutral foreign official, with a Korean background, has come to investigate what happened when patrolling soldiers of the South crossed into the wrong DMZ area, nearly triggered a landmine, found themselves in North territory and, after explanations, slowly started to bond with their enemy.  Brothers under the uniform?  Or just under the skin?  The breach in territorial protocol an honest mistake/misstep or a testing provocation?  Things seem to be calming down as the soldiers work things out on their own (and share chocolate), but when a superior true-believer officer hits the outpost, suspicions flare up and a gun-happy Mexican Stand-Off erupts.  Like a 1960s parable (specifically 1964: more earnest FAIL-SAFE then hip DR. STRANGELOVE), and a big hit in South Korea, it was a career breakthru for Lee Byung-hun as the handsome South Korean soldier.  But in trying for timeless verities, Park ends up dated.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Head Juror at this year’s Cannes Fest, Park Chan-wook remains best known for his gross-out thriller OLDBOY/’04.  There’s lots more to him, but it’s a good place to start.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/oldboy-2004.html

LOVE (1927)

Greta Garbo’s silent version of ANNA KARENINA always considered something of a travesty, starting with that title.  Plus, no cheering section for Anna without Dolly, Kitty or Levin; no pregnancy; no drug addiction or suicide attempt; no insufferable forgiveness from cuckold husband; no train!  No wonder Garbo tried again, now with sound, in 1935.  So, why is this infamous iteration, taken on its own terms, so satisfying?  That notorious happy ending?  Seems just right in Edmund Goulding's well-directed production.  Perhaps because even at its most M-G-M idiotic, the film all of a piece.  Very well cast, too, with top-billed John Gilbert as love-struck Vronsky.  (The orchestral soundtrack on the official DVD release from Warners recorded live, so you hear the audience gasp & laugh at his initial reaction to Garbo.)  The real hero here (along with regular Garbo lenser William Daniels) may be Hollywood’s highest paid scripter Frances Marion, here credited only for ‘continuity,’ who chose to make the film as a series of ‘set pieces.’  Snowy meet-cute, ballroom gossip, race track disaster, mother-love reunion, renunciation², etc; and who put them in order.  Simplified into an awkward love triangle for Garbo not between Gilbert’s military officer and VIP husband Karenin (a one-note Brandon Hurst), but between Anna’s love for Vronsky vs. her love for her little boy.*  Her fourth Hollywood film, but first to take her beyond temptress mode.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Advantage 1935 in both these roles with Basil Rathbone’s chilly husband a far more dangerously attractive/formidable obstacle; and, fresh off DAVID COPPERFIELD, the wistful charm of Master Freddie Bartholomew, the other love of Anna's life.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/anna-karenina-1935.html

ZOOTOPIA 2 (2025)

With near identical budgets (150 mill) and near identical creatives (from directors Jared Bush/ Byron Howard down thru cast & crew), this animated sequel nearly doubled the billion dollar gross of the 2016 original.  And if hardly twice as good (indeed a modest fall off), it’s good enough to justify blockbuster numbers.  This time out, Judy Rabbit and Nick Fox are no longer adversaries, but junior cop partners on the hunt for the long suppressed truth behind Zootopia’s origin story.  Is it possible those forked-tongued snakes got a raw deal in the legend of Zootopia’s beginnings?  They’ll go to the ends of the ‘safe’ territory behind the transformative wall of intra-species cooperation to find the truth.  Less straightforward than the earlier film’s police procedural format, which may explain why the film is over-produced, trying too hard to top themselves with (very impressive) spectacle.  But this soon drops away as their main mission clicks into place; along with expected character turns from various animals new and returned.  Less understandable are a pair of self-revelatory/self-justifying soliloquies for Nick & Judy.  Talk in place of clarifying action . . . in an animated film?!  The film quickly recovers movement and momentum, but an odd glitch from these guys.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  No doubt, you’ve seen the original, yes?   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/10/zootopia-2016.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Stick with the end credits not just for the tag surprise, but also to note the international line-up of names & nationalities.  A veritable cornucopia of D.E.I. in the film’s D.N.A.

WEAPONS (2025)

This critically & commercially well-received, darkly-comic Body Horror from writer/director Zach Creggar even earned a rare acting Oscar® for the genre.  Good scary fun, if ultimately less than meets the gashed eyeball.  It opens poorly, with needless narration from a wise-for-her-years child giving us too much info, and Creggar defensively covering with a plethora of ‘shock cuts.  But things rapidly improve once Grade School Teacher Julia Garner finds all but one of her kids, Alex, absent.  Make that missing.  As if the Pied Piper had tootled them away in the night.  Angry suspicions fall on the teacher, but no evidence.  No matter, she’s dubbed a witch by locals.  (Another error, make that a cheat, from Creggar removes any serious investigation of the house & parents of Alex, the boy who stayed in town when they ought to be swarming the joint.)  Still, this prologue enough like a classic TWILIGHT ZONE opening to get you interested.  (Actually, it’s more like a ONE STEP BEYOND episode, but who remembers that paranormal knock-off.)  And this is where you wonder how one of those half-hour shows can possibly support a two+ hour film.  (Spoiler Alert!)  Answer, it doesn’t.  Instead, Creggar switches to HANSEL & GRETEL, but without Gretel.  (Hansel & Hansel?)  With spooky Great Aunt (that’s award-winner Amy Madigan in fright wig & makeup) as the witch who’s capturing little boys and girls to fatten up before getting the life’s essence out of them.  (Sustained only by cans & cans of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.)  A few gory visual effects; hop/skip & jump character continuity for some non-linear surprise explanations; and a nifty semi-heroic turn from grieving parent Josh Brolin (head squarer than ever) also helps.  Just be aware: some gory effects nearly as ‘grimm’ as those famous Brothers.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  One unhappy comic-horror throwback sees the return of a trope from the 1970s that saw either the FIRST or the WORST/most realistic gory violence hit the one significant Black in the movie.  Now, this spot goes to the film’s main gay character (and his husband).

THE CHORAL (2025)

A can’t-miss idea that self-sabotages by striving for originality when the old tropes are just what’s needed.  It’s 1916, with more than a year of war on the continent as seen from a Yorkshire Mill Town where even their prestigious/well-funded local choral society feels the pinch of conscription decimating the ranks of tenors & baritones.  Now the music director is enlisting.  With few options, mill-owner/fading lead tenor Roger Allam (beyond praise) has little choice but to hire musically qualified, but ostracized Germanophile Ralph Fiennes for the position.  (He’s also a single man of ‘peculiar tendencies,’ as it was put at the time.)  Fiennes immediately starts recruiting any & all classes all over town, from bakery boy to disabled/still convalescing vets to sing, as well as settling on Sir Edward Elgar’s then little known oratorio THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS in lieu of the usual Bach, Beethoven or Brahms; all uncomfortably German.*  The film all but running itself in these early scenes, written & played with unexpected tartness, LOL personal putdowns, and gossipy chorister queens kibbitzing from the sidelines.  With a fierce, almost proud, local rudeness staunching sentimentality, even the telegraph messenger boy delivers his death notices with dispatch before riding to the next choral rehearsal; sacred and profane juxtaposition in the form of cheeky gallows humor and hopes of shagging a young, newly widowed soprano after practise.  Scripter Alan Bennett, now in his nineties, at his best here, and as the tone shifts when a one-armed/disabled vet* comes home to a wife’s disappointment and an offer to use his fresh tenor voice to  oust Allam from his usual lead spot.  After this, something goes seriously wrong with Bennett’s ideas.  Revising/downsizing the oratorio to fit resources; repurposing the poem as dramatic tableaux that comments on the war in ways more 1960s than 1916; bringing in Elgar not for a nervous opening night, but for suspense (will he let the show go on in this radical form?).  Everything stops ringing true to the times.  A nice coda returns to form as more young men leave for the war, and the film has an impressive offhand period look.  But Elgar, who wore his musical sentiment on his sleeve, would have mourned how Bennett's script and Nicholas Hytner's direction turn chilly in the third act.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *At the time, GERONTIUS had yet to achieve its current standing.  Four major recordings released in the last two years, the most recent featuring just the sort of amateur choir, The Huddersfield Choral Society, this film’s group emulates.  Founded in 1836, Huddersfield also recorded the first complete GERONTIUS in 1945.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jacob Dudman, the returning one-armed vet who sings Gerontius, appears to be doing his own vocals.  It’s a killer part so congrats . . . if he is.

NEXT TIME WE LOVE (1936)

Note that James Stewart, in his first leading role, is missing from our poster.  Under contract at M-G-M, who couldn’t figure out what to do with this tall, gangly (make that alarmingly thin), unconventionally attractive fellow; loaned out to Universal who had just the thing for him  On the other hand, they failed at make-up 101.  Check out the lip-rouge on his enormous lower lip.  Yikes!  Had Stewart been roughhousing with roommate Henry Fonda?  A lucky punch, too, since co-star Margaret Sullavan (that’s her on the poster) had just amicably divorced Fonda, and specifically asked for his roommate in the part.  Perfect together, they’d pair up for three more films.*  Here, with director Edward H. Griffith (best known for stage reliant transfers on Philip Barry’s HOLIDAY/’30 and THE ANIMAL KINGDOM/’32) along with gifted lenser Joseph A. Valentine faking unusually atmospheric NYC & Europe locales on studio sets (plus an uncredited Preston Sturges taking a pass on the script), they play out a difficult two-career/sperate lives marriage that’s unusually intelligent & modern for 1936.  Each following their bliss to success as Foreign Correspondent (him) and stage star (her).  While waiting in the wings, respectful third-wheel Ray Milland.  (Looking ridiculously handsome, it was, along with next year’s EASY LIVING/’37, his breakthru role after seven years.)  The film goes soft and sentimental in the last reel (which is fine for this sort of thing), but also narratively convenient to tidy up all the moving parts (which ain't).  But so much better than you expect, it’s something of a find.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Second pairing, THE SHOPWORN ANGEL/’38, now looking a bit shopworn itself, but 3 & 4 are contrasting masterpieces: Borzage’s THE MORTAL STORM/’40; Lubitsch’s THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER/’40.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-mortal-storm-1940.html

NOTES ON A SCANDAL (2006)

Writer Patrick Marber made his name when Mike Nichols filmed his play CLOSER/’04 as an expanded four-hander.  Like many a Nichols’ project, second-tier material sold as designer goods (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/closer-2005.html).  Here, Marber adapts a novel by Zoë Heller about a high school scandal, essentially a three-hander involving a controlling, but repressed, soon-to-retire lesbian-leaning teacher; a younger/married art teacher she’s set her eyes on; and the 15-yr-old student whose dick gets in the way of everyone’s plans.  Written as a mash-up of Terrence Rattigan  (career disappointment; ducked personal opportunities) and Tennessee Williams (curdled passion between the fatally mismatched), it’s a well-plotted l’amour fou³ that crashes in the light.  It might have worked if Marber had only told the team he’d written a pitch-black comedy of bad manners.  Over-produced, in a manner typical of Scott Rudin in his pre-exile Hollywood heyday; mistaking borrowed prestige for taste.*   With top-flight stage director Richard Eyre showing yet again his strange disinclination for movie rhythms; Judi Dench working too hard in a part her pal Maggie Smith was born to play*; and Cate Blanchette failing to convince herself (or us) that she doesn't see thru Dench’s entrapment scheme or that she’d fuck her student conquest rather than older husband Bill Nighy.  Not bloody likely.  Maybe this would all play more convincingly as a period piece.  1950s?  And with the coded dialogue of those censored days.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *It’s why Scooter has classical composer Philip Glass on the score.  His glacially slow cyclical cell adjustments not doing much for the film, but cowing the Academy to pony up with an Oscar® nom.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Maggie Smith devotees can get a taste of what she might have done here by watching a Double-Bill of one of her Best, and one of her Least known films: THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE/’67 and THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARN/’87.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-prime-of-miss-jean-brodie-1969.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-lonely-passion-of-judith-hearne-1987.html

SYNONYMES / SYNONYMS (2019)

Forty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born writer/director Nadav Lapid on twenty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born lost soul Yoav; auto-biographical elements inevitable.  (The film also something of a family affair with a brother co-scripting and Mom co-editing.)  Here’s how Lapid tells it: With little more than a stolen French/Israeli dictionary as guide to his new country, Yoav is going for rebirth as a Frenchman.  (Perhaps why debuting Tom Mercier so often buck-naked.)  Squatting overnight in a rich family’s townhouse, he can’t find the clothes he took off to bathe.  Now he’s really in rebirth mode . . . if he doesn’t freeze to death.  Saved by two unexpected housemates, the home’s billionaire’s son and his girlfriend (the only other people in the place), his adventures in assimilation are kick-started with clothes & funds from these fairy faux siblings.  Nifty work from Lapid, with Yoav not so much meeting his future as flirting with it.  Especially the scion who’s already breaking personal space with his ‘guest.’  Adventures in the outside world work best with another Israeli, a political agitator who loudly hums ‘Hatikvah’ on Le Metro, hoping to provoke an incident.  Yoav, who’s sworn off Hebrew, watches in horror & delight.  And there’s citizenship school, too.  But Lapid pushes too hard with a soft-porn photo-shoot (Yoav raising funds); a move to enter the Foreign Legion (?), and reverse-snobbery at the chamber orchestra concert of the girlfriend who’s been bequeathed to him.  Has Yoav gone a bit mad or are his true (terribly confused) colors simply coming out.  A surprise meeting with Dad suggests a way out, but damn if anyone will take it.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Lapid's alter-ego’s personal journey thru Statehood, Politics & aversion to his past is less interesting and less well-handled than the menage-a-trois set-up suggested here.  You’ll find that story developed in the most sophisticated manner imaginable in Bernardo Bertolucci’s underrated THE DREAMERS/’03.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/dreamers-2003.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Perhaps Lapid is yet another auteur, loaded with talent in handling cast, crew & camera, whose work might benefit with an outside pair of eyes holding the purse strings and sometimes saying, ‘No.’

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (2018)

Still untold.  A glitzy, wasted opportunity from Pamela B. Green (her sole feature credit as director) pays tribute to forgotten female film pioneer Alice Guy, but misses her importance.  The facts get on screen, in distractingly imaginative graphics, but we never get into what made her click as a filmmaker.  No comparisons with other early filmmakers.  No decent length clips to help judge her.  Her achievements taken on faith.  Mme. Guy had yet to turn twenty when she started working for Leon Gaumont in 1895.  Yep, same family as today’s distribution giant.  M. Leon brought her to a preview of Lumière’s legendary/first-ever projected film showing.  By the next year, Guy was directing some of the earliest film shorts.  And continued doing so over the next twenty-five peripatetic years; till the film industry became big business post-WWI and women, other than actresses, writers & editors, largely disappeared from most positions.  Famous for the early studio she and husband Herbert Blaché built in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he wound up directing in Hollywood* while she looked for work.  It’s a fascinating story, she lived till 1968 and there are filmed interviews of her, mostly from 1964, but we never find out what we really want to know.  The clips are tiny, yet collections of her work are available, but we don’t get enough to form even a preliminary opinion, or see how she was different (better?) than others at the time.  Worth a look, but meaningless without better support from the films.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  A couple of years before this came out, Thierry Frémaux’s LUMIÈRE!/’16 used Auguste Lumière's eternally fresh 19th century actualités to tell his story and the story of the start of The Movies.  Getting everything right this one flubs.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Husband Herbert Blaché, a far less important figure in film history (and a real shit), yet now far more seen than his wife as he directed Buster Keaton’s first feature, THE SAPHEAD/’20.  Not really part of the Keaton canon, Buster only a hired actor here just as he was beginning his own post-WWI shorts and features.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-saphead-1920.html

PRETTY BABY (1950)

While the game looks lost before the credits finish, hard-hitting Warners hardly the studio for farcical workplace rom-com, a bit of patience and an open mind helps get this one over the finish line with honors.  Bronze, not gold; nothing to sneer at.  Key man undoubtedly writer/producer/Hollywood wag Harry Kurnitz, here with Jules Furthman co-scripting on a good idea about a mid-size NYC ad-agency run by Dennis Morgan & Zachary Scott (in a swell double act) trying to hold onto tyrannical major client Edmund Gwenn’s baby food company.  Enter Betsy Drake as emergency temp secretary, overloaded & under-prepared as new boss Morgan goes at his usual warp-speed.  She’s soon demoted to mimeograph machine operator.  Depressed, she steals a seat on the subway home using a realistic plasticine doll baby when happenstance, and the necessities of farce, place her next to Gwenn.  Unaware of who he is, she mentions the baby is named after him!  After all, in spite of his bad rep, he is paying the bills at her company . . . that is if she’s still got a job there.  At this point, almost all the forced setups are in place, and the film can get down to being unexpectedly bright & funny.  Gaining big laughs at a more than acceptable pace, and not only from Kurnitz.  B’way director Bretaigne Windust, who staged the two top comedies of the ‘40s (ARSENIC AND OLD LACE; LIFE WITH FATHER), but never quite figured out the movies, does his best work on film with flowing tempos rather than hysteria.  (Note absence of 'comic' underscoring.)  Alas, while the three male leads consistently find (and share) the fun with us, Drake (whose short career seemed to be organized by husband Cary Grant*) simply hasn’t the goods to pull this off.  You keep wondering why Warners didn’t reunite Morgan with his co-star from last year’s IT’S A GREAT FEELING, Doris Day.  Perfect for the part.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *With one exception, Drake’s film career ran eight features (1948 - 1958), including two duds with husband Grant (EVERY GIRL SHOULD BE MARRIED/’48; ROOM FOR ONE MORE/’52.  Wife #3 (of 5) to Grant 1949 to 1962, her best film was, of all things, Frank Tashlin’s WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER/’57, against Tony Randall.

THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971)

Best known for directing the original mini-series of PENNIES FROM HEAVEN/’78, Piers Haggard’s early folk-horror feature is both seriously creepy and unexpectedly serious.  A telling of a witches cult, with real supernatural elements, at a time when England’s upperclass has written off witchcraft as superstition, but still feverishly believed by devout country folk.  And damned if they aren’t onto something wicked this way comes.  No doubt the film’s release in the ‘Mod’ era, with advertising fit for the film-savvy ‘70s, made this come off as Hammer Films fodder.  But Haggar seems to have had something more like Carl Theodor Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH/’43 in mind.*  And if he doesn’t get all the way there (who has?), it’s an honorable attempt.  A country farm lad (with a mop-top hidden under his wool cap, is ploughing his field when he turns over monstrous remains.  His master makes light of it, but is convinced to go to London for answers when an ancient scientific tome cites similar finds.  While he’s away, half the town starts to succumb, becoming possessed by a witch who seduces men (with full frontal nudity, no less) to either their doom or into joining her cult.  Even a female acolyte, saved by a local farm boy, is unable to resist the call of this devil cult.  And that’s after an unqualified surgeon has painfully removed a patch of ‘Devil’s Skin’ from her thigh.  Yikes!  Returned from London, the Magistrate is now convinced, and a fight between The True Church and The Devil’s servants is inevitable. Very effectively done, and well shot largely in bright sunshine instead of the typical gloom & doom. And while Haggard has neither the funds nor the chops to make his ambitious final showdown work, the film is good enough so you take it ‘on account,’

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Recently, Robert Eggers got his horror-driven career off the ground with THE WITCH/’15.  But nothing has ever matched the stake-burning conviction of Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH.  A film to make you think of tossing the reel tins in the lake to find out if they’ll innocently sink or guiltily float.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/day-of-wrath-1943.html

L’AGE D’OR (1930)

By now, the main shock in Luis Buñuel’s early surrealist film is how unshocking it is.  Or rather, that its shocks need explanation.  Like a joke that needs to be explained; not a good sign.  (If you can watch with a commentary track, I’d give it a shot.)  Coming on the heels of UN CHIEN ANDALOU/’29, which does still shock, Salvador Dalí again collaborates, though apparently with less input.  Working a line-up of near random topics, chosen to rile the easily offended (Politics, Religion, Social Mores, War and the Bombing of Innocents; something for everyone!), the thru-line for an hour’s running time (three times the length of CHIEN) settles on frustration, a Buñuel idée fixe, here unconsummated love.  Custom & propriety interrupting one couple as they dry hump to Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde, ‘make love’ in a tree garden, and, as a footman announces a visit by the interior minister with the man, leave the woman to suck on the marble nipples of a classical statue.  Perverse acts of frustration pointing directly ahead to those guests in THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL/’61 unable to leave a drawing room, or the meal no one can get to in the masterful DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE/’72, both looking as vital & essential as L'AGE now looks merely historic.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above EXTERMINATING ANGEL and/or DISCREET CHARM.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/exterminating-angel-1961.html

LEFT-HANDED GIRL / ZUOPIEZI NUHAI (2025)

First solo-directing gig for the left-hand girl of ANORA/’24, one half of filmmaking partners Shih-Ching Tsou & Sean Baker.  Here they share script credit on a character driven story about a single mom who moves to Taipei (where most of her family lives) with her two daughters (20-something/8-yr-old) to open a noodle shop.  Talked into a location toward the back of a busy mall, they also move into a small apartment on the same day.  Counting on her kid’s help, Mom’s soon confronted by their indifference to her situation, adjusting to impersonal big city life, and her older daughter’s resentment of . . . well, just about everything.  She’s a pain; going thru an age where you’re not sure if you’ll be seated with the grown-ups (Table A) or the tykes (Table B).  The 8-yr-old also having trouble as old-fashioned Grandpa insists on ‘curing’ her left-handed ways.  But if she’s got ‘the devil’s hand,’ then why not say ‘the devil made me do it’ to cover her shop-lifting habit.  Life at the mall has it’s advantages!  And just when Mom’s found a nice guy at the discount store down the hall at the mall.  All this coming to a head at a big family gathering to celebrate Grandma’s 60th.*  Scores will be settled.  Truths will be told. Guilt will be spread.  Fault lines and implosions with the cake.  It’s all a bit of a cliché, like blaming the parents for the kids’ issues in a 1950s movie.  A shame as much of the observations, detail and mysteries of the characters are more compelling when left unresolved and unexplained.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *In the States, these family blow outs often as not occur at Thanksgiving reunions.  But since that holiday doesn’t exist anywhere else but Canada, Christmas, Anniversaries and Big Birthdays take its place for international family meltdowns.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Tsou shared her first directing credit (on TAKE-OUT/’04) with Baker.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/11/take-out-2004.html

NIGHTMARE CASTLE / AMANTI D'OLTRETOMBA (1965)

Genre hopping Italian director Mario Caiano, busy with low-ball Sword & Sandal epics and early Spaghetti Westerns in his first films, branched out to Gothic Horror on this sub-Edgar Allan Poe creep-out, more Hammer Films than Roger Corman/AIP adaptation or proto-Italian giallo.  But even more, yet another variation of GASLIGHT.  The classic stage melodrama where a fortune hunting husband (here - also a mad scientist) tries to break down his fragile bride in an attempt to steal her fortune while taking advantage of her all too willing personal maid before a heroic  outsider comes to her rescue.  (In George Cukor’s 1944 classic, it's Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, debuting Angela Lansbury, and Joseph Cotten.*)  Nothing like that cast here, but Barbara Steele does get to split the deluded Bergman role in half as sisters, one sacrificed in a hellish prologue, the other led to believe she’s taken on the other’s personality.  Monstrous supernatural things added on to bring back the dead in gruesome body horror appearances that don’t really add much.  Still, quite watchable, with Ennio Morricone’s organ-heavy score and amusingly baroque interior decoration.  Check out the ‘hugging’ restraining chair.  If only Caiano (here listed as Alan Grunewald) knew how to alter pace & rhythm, the film is one long dirge when it might have worked in a manner to give Mario Bava or Dario Argento competition.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The Stateside release clipped about 15 minutes off the running time.  A full cut in English dub titled NIGHT OF THE DOOMED runs 104".

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, sans body horror, GASLIGHT.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html

ATTILA MARCEL (2013)

Sui generis French animator Sylvain Chomet (THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE/’03; THE ILLUSIONIST/’10) has just released his first animated feature in 15 years, A MAGNIFICENT LIFE, a bio-pic on French writer/filmmaker Marcel Pagnol  (not seen here).  Which begs the question; what’s he been up to between his hand-drawn projects?  Here’s part of the answer, this wondrous live-action fable that to a remarkable degree carries the same sensibility as his animated fare, giving off the sort of personalized charm, delight, darkness & touching whimsy you can’t fake without seeming coy & saccharine.  (It’s what Tim Burton and Wes Anderson so often miss achieving.)  Chomet also unafraid of bold color, bad taste & sentiment when that's what's called for.  Guillaume Gouix is the wide-eyed Paul Marcel, orphaned son of Attila & Anita, ‘Apache’ dancers who died in front of the toddler.  Since then, he’s not spoken, and been raised by his two spinster aunts, dance teachers whose classes he accompanies.  But his piano skills go to virtuoso level.  If only he could breakthru before hitting the competition cut off age of 33.  He’s got a wide local rooting section, but is most indebted to his secret sessions with Mme Proust, a neighbor who serves madeleines and hallucinatory tea so he can dream back to toddler POV memories of his parents.  The best ones appearing in his mind as full blown musical ‘Numbos’ with catchy tunes and gorgeous looks (settings & performers).  Special stuff here.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Make your own olde time movie show by starting with an early Chomet animated short, THE OLD LADY AND THE PIGEONS/’97.   Looking a bit like George Booth New Yorker drawings, this free link has French subtitles for the opening (and closing) ‘Ugly’ American tourists.  Elsewise it’s all but dialogue free and best experienced without explanation.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0PioYGdLI4

OPERAZIONE SAN GENNARO / THE TREASURE OF SAN GENNARO (1966)

When on form, Italian director Dino Risi and Hollywood’s Blake Edwards show remarkably similar filmmaking gifts & styles.  (When bad, they're bad in their own way.)  Here, with Risi pulling off a Napoli-set comic crime caper, just two years after Edwards’ THE PINK PANTHER*, they’re at their most alike; Romulus & Remus sharing a wolf teat in a perfectly composed shot.  American gangster Harry Guardino, with deadly moll Senta Berger (excellent!), has a plan to rob the Jewels of San Gennaro, but needs local help and approval from various mob fiefdoms.  The area in question run by Nino Manfredi, but he needs various approvals, too, including one from elderly, just released Totò (hilarious).  Naturally, lots of Neapolitan flavor (real locations/'looped' dialogue; mid-‘60s Italian production standards).  Most of the character support dead accurate, often very funny.  Watch for Manfredi’s bull-like assistant.  With a devious plot of close calls, suspenseful delays you can follow, a religious code-of-honor to find loopholes in, and a wedding feast interrupting the heist with ‘off’ shellfish.  Plenty to keep you involved before Risi pulls out his slapstick directing chops in a brilliantly staged and perfectly paced race to the airport finale far more deadly than anything Edwards could get away with in Hollywood at the time.  Now, with the film scheduled for an English-language remake, we’ll see how far they’ll go.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The explosion in gritty crime capers with meticulously detailed heists that blew into international cinema on the back-draft of Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI/’55 was shortly followed by burlesques like BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET/’58.  Peaking in 1964, with PANTHER and when Dassin got in on the joke with TOPKAPI.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/topkapi-1964.html

F1: THE MOVIE (2025)

Gotta give producer Jerry Bruckheimer (or one of this film’s thirty-three producers!) credit for truth in advertising with that title.  Not for the Formula One car; for the Formula One script.  It’s as formulaic as it gets.  Hokey, too, with Brad Pitt’s aging gadfly race car driver (with a past) signing on to help Javier Bardem’s struggling F1 team by playing rival, mentor & Zen Master to cocky star on the rise kid.  Kudos for the clean soundtrack (for once you can understand dialogue during the vroom-vroomy race sequences), everything else hash.  And must it feel so generic?  Even Brad Pitt looks generic handsome.  Brad Pitt!  Like others who might have played the part at some appropriate age.  Val Kilmer; the Bridges Brothers in their FABULOUS BAKER’S BOYS/’89 days.  Paul Newman at any time.  (Great messed-up short-shag hair, though.)  Plus, at 2.5 hours, sure feels like they’re stretching this one out to get in another day at the track.  Worst of all, they’ve wasted a favorite plotline; the one about an also-ran finally getting his shot at the big time, unaware he’s been hired not because someone thinks he can win, but because they’re sure he’ll lose; only to then turn the tables to show he’s had the right stuff all along.  (Think Jason Sudeikis in TED LASSO; Paul Newman in THE VERDICT.)  Here, it’s Pitt getting resurrected.  Or is it?  What with director Joseph Kosinski from TOP GUN: MAVERICK/’22 calling the shots (too many shots BTW), more likely the object of resurrection is the late Tony Scott, or at least his overly fussy directing style.  A tip of the hat toward the director of the original TOP GUN/’89.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Pitt gets a showy soliloquy, the one studio development types refer to as the Oscar® moment, with a needlessly long/over-articulate speech on being in ‘the zone,’ unnaturally calm in the middle of track chaos.  Yet, has any car racing film tried to put that meditative/slo-mo feel in the midst of a race on screen?  Common in other sports pics (sprinters, jockeys, batters, pitchers, goalies, oarsmen, even boxers), but car drivers?  Let us know of any examples in the COMMENT box.

THE MIRACLE RIDER (1935)

In the last decade of the silents, Tom Mix was, by some distance, the biggest of all cowboy stars.  Hardly remembered now, Talkies (and age) slowed him down, though still releasing multiple features each year before taking a two year break, returning in 1935, now 55, for one last roundup, this seriously successful/seriously fun serial from little Mascot Pictures.  At 15 ‘chapters’ (the first is double-length), the whole shebang runs just over five hours.  And worth every minute.  (Okay, every other minute.)  Well produced as these things go, co-directed by B. Reeves Eason and Armand Schaefer.  If Eason’s name rings a bell, he was largely responsible for the 1925 chariot race in BEN-HUR.  (Plus B-pic whiz Joseph H. Lewis (see GUN CRAZY/’50) as supervising editor.)  Mix and his amazing horse Tony Jr., still do all the stunts and those leaping mounts look painful, as do a few mountain tumbles for man & beast.  The horse wouldn’t be allowed to do them today.  The story ain’t bad, either.  Ranger Mix, protector of the local Indian tribe against a pair of White capitalist villains.  One running the general store wants to chase the Indians off their land and have the government buy his spare property for resettlement.  The other runs an oil distributor as cover, but wants the Natives off the reservation so he has exclusive access to a powerful explosive he hopes to mine.  Typically, the best episodes come early, look out for the mechanical radio controlled Firebird!  And Mix outnumbered by the villains, minions and a (coatless) turncoat Indian.  Chapters ending with the traditional cliffhanger (Is Tom Dead?) before doubling back Next Week to show how Mix jumped off the exploding bomb/derailed train/pilotless glider just in the nick of time.  The later episodes are in better physical shape.  Not exactly great, even as serial trash, but addictive.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The film yet another example of how often Indians weren’t treated just as marauding savages, but often shown with sympathy.  Patronized & infantilized by their Great White Hollywood Fathers.  Which portrayal is worse?  Discuss.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  During his peak years, Mix took a swing at expanding his range with something more serious, an excellent, if not well received 1925 adaptation of Zane Grey’s RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE/1925.  It makes a fine introduction for modern audiences to get to know Mix.  But hard-wired Mixologists find it a bit ‘high hat,’ and Mix-Nixers won’t give it a try. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  SUNSET/’88.  Blake Edwards’ Hollywood-set modern Western has Bruce Willis as Tom Mix and James Garners’ Wyatt Earp join forces to solve a showbiz murder.  Sounds promising, but it's all downhill (period inaccurate, pointlessly coarse and lazy plotting in Edwards’ late manner) after its neat action set-piece opening.

LUXURY LINER (1948)

Coasting thru the war years when just about anything made money, Hollywood peaked commercially in the afterglow year of 1946, then watched helplessly as the old studio system started to collapse.  A slow drip contraction of some twenty-years.  And while M-G-M didn’t fare much worse than other ‘majors,’ they had farther to fall.  (Note this handwriting on the wall a year before the Supreme Court vertical-integration ruling against the studios and even longer before television was having a serious financial effect.  What you do see are the old formulas curdling before your eyes, as in this idiotic showcase film, a typical Joe Pasternak family-friendly production, for Jane Powell.  More irritating brat than adorable baby coloratura, she’s a stowaway on Captain Daddy’s ocean liner so she can finally get some quality time with her single dad George Brent (looking quite stout in uniform) and play mismatching matchmaker to half the passengers onboard.  Lots of second-tier musical interludes (legendary, if aging Wagnerian heldentenor Lauritz Melchoir never did get film-friendly) though Xavier Cugat (plus band and chihuahua) show how to do this kind of silliness.   But Pasternak, here with kid actor turned mediocre director Richard Whorf, seems to have forgotten the rules for the distribution of laughs, tears and reconciliations, he once could pull off in his sleep.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  As we’ve mentioned before, 100 MEN AND A GIRL/’37, Pasternak’s best, also uses baby coloratura and single-father/daughter strained relationship as narrative engine.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/100-men-and-girl-1937.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  M-G-M’s tech crew gave the big ship some unusually clever process/model combo shots.  Very cool looking.  With a repeated shot from the side where the visual integration and grain match is stunning.

LYING LIPS (1939)

Oscar Micheaux, the go-to guy for film text-books needing an example on early independent Black cinema: the first Black to produce a silent feature; first to produce a Talkie; first to tackle race issues.  (He also takes it on the chin for using light-skinned Blacks as romantic leads and darker ones for laborers and villains.*)  Lots of cultural/political/social issues tied to this one-stop source.  Less discussed is whether Micheaux was any good as a filmmaker.  Of course, between lost titles and subfusc surviving film elements, it can be hard to tell.  But even a tight budget needn’t mean stiff, formal dialogue.  Letting characters come to dumb conclusions.  Or choosing bad camera placements.  Often, the best things on film are free.  Edna Mae Harris stars as a nightclub singer who refuses to play after-hours good-time-gal to fat-cat friends of the owners, instead going home to find her Aunt  murdered and herself set up for arrest.  Yikes!  It’s really an insurance scam and Edna, in spite of her protective lawyer/fiancé and top inner-city detective Robert Earl Jones (best thing in the film/father to you know who) stick to her side and eventually clear up the mystery.  Odd how the after-hours plot disappears.  But structure not Micheaux’s long suit.  Instead, piece by piece, the story lands and you can just make out what gave Micheaux a long career and made him, at least historically, important.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *It’s supposedly what got restauranteur Paula Dean in trouble with The Food Network execs: Light-skinned Blacks assigned to work ‘front of the house’; darker-skinned assigned to kitchen duty.

INFERNO (1953)

Weeks before 20th/Fox introduced CinemaScope (‘the miracle you see without glasses!’) to the public with THE ROBE, helping to speed an end to the brief early ‘50s 3-D craze, they released one of the better films made in the process.  Doubly ironic, since, like so many 3-D pics at the time, INFERNO largely distributed ‘flat,’ in 2-D.  Another POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE infidelity/murder story (though with different outcomes), the film’s mostly a three-hander, and good even in 2-D, with the guilty pleasure bonus of watching the action-packed last reel (actually two separate reels running in synch) hoarding most of the objects thrown directly at the camera.  Fun spotting even in 2-D.  (Make it a drinking game!). Journeyman director Roy Ward Baker runs a cool, clean narrative as lethal lovers Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan try to get away with the murder of Robert Ryan, Fleming’s rich, older, selfish husband, abandoning him in the desert with a broken leg before carefully setting the scene to make it look like his own doing.  Only wily Ryan proves too stubborn, too ornery, and too self-reliant to die.  And the longer he can keep going, the more chance he’ll be rescued.  There’s a good cast in support (Carl Betz, Henry Hull, Larry Keating), with cleverly worked out falling objects for those 3-D effect shots, and the great Lucien Ballard to shoot them.  Along with LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN/’45, one of the rare TechniColor & sunshine noirs, even rarer with 3-D.

CONTEST:  Explain why these early ‘50s 3-D films always ran about 80 minutes (with half-point intermissions) to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streaming film of your choice.  (NOTE: Professional film projectionists ineligible.)

FIRE WILL COME / O QUE ARDE (2019)

Paris-born, but with a Spanish heritage, director Oliver Laxe currently breaking beyond the film fest circuit and gaining attention on SIRAT/’25, his fourth film (not seen here).  It follows a father & son thru North African ‘rave’ sites as they search for the man’s missing daughter.  This, his previous effort, follows a paroled arsonist (he started a mountain forest fire that threatened his own Northern Spain village) as he tries to restart a life after two years in prison.  Unsurprisingly, no one wants much to do with him.  But, as Robert Frost put it, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’  So, holed up with his aging mother, he halfheartedly looks for work, but seems reluctant to try to connect with anyone, even new people in town.  Guilt/innocence/actions never discussed, all settled by small town gossip  & misery.  Even the incessant rain working against hope or redemption. Inevitably, another blaze will look like his doing.  And here, Laxe’s treatment breaks down, unwilling to speculate on the situation other than one physical altercation with a suspicious neighbor.  Laxe entirely focused on fate, a traumatic tone and the physical atmosphere.  But perhaps avoiding the elephant in the room, adds to the mesmerizng atmosphere.  Filming and the non-pro cast (particularly Benedicta Sánchez as the mother) impeccable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Obviously, SIRAT, which sounds fascinating.

SISU (2022)

The Finnish title may be untranslatable (think ‘Back-against-the-wall indomitable courage’), but the action, ultra-violence and gore easily cross international borders since director Jalmari Helander makes this WWII chase-and-shoot thriller neatly balanced between mirth, mayhem & absurdity.  The look seemingly realistic and stylized; not so much the expected Asian Martial Arts, more like a Chuck Jones Road Runner cartoon.  Finland tundra in for South West canyons.  Plus a twist: Wile E. Coyote is our heroic alter-ego.  With apologies to Ernest Hemingway, it’s THE OLD MAN AND THE NAZIS.  Finnish sniper Jorma Tommila (a one-man killing unit) had been taking out hundreds of Russians like a scythe running thru a wheat field early in the war before walking away from battle to mine for gold.  But the changing landscape of war in 1944 sees retreating Nazi forces after him and his stash.  So now it’s the Nazis’ turn to die in the hunt.  A crash landing, a hanging, a drowning, nothing seems able to stop this guy.  More than tough, he’s downright immortal.  Held to a brisk 91" (any longer and it would collapse from CGI fatigue which it almost does in a flying sequence), but taken on its own terms, it’s effective and weirdly fun.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A Finnish production, but made in English.

RED WING (2013)

A Hallmark cable movie from deep-think autuer Terrence Malick?  This landscape besotted adaptation of an 1840s George Sand novel (FRANÇOIS LE CHAMPI/FRANK THE FOUNDLING) feels like it might be.  Actually, Malick only exec produced, Will Wallace takes credit (if that’s the word) for directing.  With a Book of Saints æsthetic to exploit the visual harmony of man, nature and Texas in the 1970s, young Glen Powell (25 at the time) plays a naïve & sentimental foundling (a regular Billy Budd), honest, handsome, hardworking, friend to man & beast, earning his keep in the field thru his adolescence (and beyond) on a small farm where surrogate Mom (Breann Johnson) watches over him and mean, lazy surrogate Dad (Luke Perry) takes umbrage with a beer chaser.  Shying off the town ladies who hit on him, he starts rumors by not screwing indiscriminately.  No surprise, jealousy gets him kicked out of the house.  But a few days on the road finds a new farm and a chance to begin making the same personal choices & mistakes.  For some reason, the women in the film are terrible actors (laughably transparent), the men somewhat better.  Bill Paxton fine as farm owner #2, and there’s instant actor/audience rapport from kid ‘brother’ Lucas Adams.   But Wallace’s presentation so hackneyed, they might have done better setting this in the 1870s rather than the 1970s.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *To judge by the movie marque in town (they seem to be showing Robert Altman’s THE WEDDING) it’s 1978, the same year Terence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN came out.  Nice try guys.  But this little Texas bijou would never have booked that Altman flop.  Though it’s  a sure bet anything they would have shown would have had just as many embarrassingly crappy music videos in it.

TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE (1945)

Comic films noir, a sub-genre generally best avoided, tend to have less laughs than straight noir; and no discernable suspense.  But here’s a happy exception from early in noir master director Anthony Mann’s career.  Not much known for comedy, perhaps that’s his secret.  Rather than going for laughs, he plays the game straight; making sure his plot holds water.  Pleasingly cockeyed rather than dumb.  It also has the striking advantage of debuting noir icon Jane Greer, already showing cool heat in support.  Elsewise, lead couple, top cop, crime reporter, all pull together on a script that rarely sinks for a laugh.  (From a Gelett Burgess novel previously filmed as TWO IN THE DARK/’36 - not seen here.)  Tom Conway (the non-caddish kid brother of George Sanders) is nearly hit by cute cabbie Ann Rutherford.  Already conked on the head, he’s got temporary amnesia and a likely murder rap chasing him.  Who is he?  Figure that out to find the real murderer among a bunch of B’way writers, producers & actors before the cops move in for an arrest.  Less innocent man on the run than innocent man running in society and theatrical circles.  Neatly played and written, with quick answers and solutions, the film doesn’t overplay for easy laughs, but leads us toward believable motives and solutions.  But all bets are off when Greer shows up as a B’way sharpie who knows what’s going on.  Poor Ann Rutherford, pleasant enough as a sympathetic cabbie sidekick to Conway’s confused suspect, hasn’t a chance once this Always-Gets-What-She-Wants femme fatale shows up.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Jane Greer’s main claim to noir immortality stems from OUT OF THE PAST/’47, but for lighthearted noir stylings, try THE BIG STEAL/’49.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/07/big-steal-1949.html

JUVENILE COURT (1973)

From late/great documentarian Frederick Wiseman (dead last month at 96, his most recent film out in 2023), this early masterpiece in his favored fly-on-the-wall manner remains one of his best; certainly one of his most influential, inspiring thousands of syndicated hours of copycat courtroom tv drama.  Most of them spoiled by textbook melodrama; literally so thru underscored speech & action.  These offshoots quite a contrast to Wiseman’s slow-burn purity & effectiveness in his approach on a handful of cases, gray areas left intact.  Everyone given as much sympathy as Wiseman is able to generate.  With far more comfort & care, and a lack of jaded behavior from this Memphis, TN courthouse staff, than you’d expect.  More staff Blacks than you expect, too.   How different this might have looked ten years earlier.  Wiseman holds back the most complex case for the end (the film running about two and a half hours without a wasted minute).  Deeply empathetic with a thoughtful even-handed judge and an uncomprehending sacrifice to the system bringing the most emotional moments in the film.  But you’ll find your own case of special interest.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Some of the cases don’t finish, but are sent to continue in another court giving no closure after we’ve invested ourselves in some kind of outcome.  A commission from the Wiseman Estate on a Project Update to run as a coda to the film would be just the thing.

PENELOPE (1966)

Not yet 30, but with her career slipping (only one film of consequence ahead of her*), Natalie Wood couldn’t have been happy with the scripts on offer at the time.  Nor this cast & crew other than D.P. Harry Stradling, too many near novices on a major studio production.  But with Hollywood facing collapse and, as yet, no rebirth on the horizon, she grabbed this meager comedy that sees her playing a goofy, but glamorous kleptomaniac who’s trying to rejigger interest from workaholic bank executive husband Ian Bannen.  (His first & last conventional Hollywood lead.)  Maybe she’ll get his attention by robbing his new flagship bank?  That’s about it for plot, the rest is comic fashion show (did Howard Fast really co-write this?), complications coming via love-addled shrink Dick Shawn (fey & reasonably funny) and love-addled police investigator Peter Falk (in something of a trial run for Columbo two years off).  But don’t give up, what catches the eye is more than usual NYC location work (the city looking great in 1966, late ‘60s decline yet to appear; one long scene played in the MoMA Sculpture Garden a treat), plus the chemistry between Falk & Wood so obvious, you wonder why no one did anything with it.  But the oddest part of the film is that everyone involved, including faceless director Arthur Hiller, seems to think they’ve got another BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S/’61 in here.  With borrowed style, borrowed party scenes, borrowed kooks, even a Givenchy outfit as a major clue to the crime.  Maybe they borrowed it from #1 Givenchy client Audrey Hepburn?  And maybe that’s why they got ‘Johnny’ Williams to write a song for Natalie to sing.  ‘Moon River’ it ain’t.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *That would be BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE/’69.

HAMNET (2025)

Overpraised for an award-winning NOMADLAND/’20; then under-performing in her MARVEL misstep/’21, here Chloé Zhao fulfills the promise of THE RIDER/’17, her docu-flavored feature, with this Shakespeare & family re-imagining.  Collaborating on the script with original novelist Maggie O’Farrell, it’s a daring rethink of the young Latin tutor William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and older Anne (Agnes) Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), a forest-wise Earth Mother type); their courtship & marriage before a quick succession of children (two girls/one boy) and long separations as Will pursues theatrical opportunities in London.  Finding believable physical & mental spaces for this to play in (note the static one-shots during intense moments), Zhao carefully builds in period detail and still-modern emotion, refusing to overplay or nail everything in place for us.  Late 16th/early 17th century Stratford & London coming fully to life before Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), their enchanting young son, suddenly falls ill while Shakespeare is away (as he always seems to be) in London.  The feeling of desertion particularly acute for Agnes.  All of this superbly handled across the board, and all of it heartbreaking.  But the miracle of the film comes in what technically amounts to a long coda (it runs its own entire three act structure in about twenty minutes) when Agnes and her brother go to London to see their first play, the premiere of HAMLET at the Globe Theatre.  (That’s Jacobi’s real-life big brother Noah Jupe playing a college-age Hamlet.)  Scenes of rehearsal and then the opening* before a rapt crowd, knowing what we now know of the personal life . . . has HAMLET ever played in quite this raw a fashion?  Zhao showing nothing less than the purpose of art at its highest level, with tear-worthy emotional depth you rarely find in something you know so well.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned above: THE RIDER/’17, still too little seen.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-rider-2017.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The modern/thoughtful pace of stage acting we see used in the production of HAMLET works within the film.  But at this tempo, could HAMLET get to the finish line in the two-and-a-half hours of natural light available at The Globe?

THE ICEBREAKER / LEDOKOL (2016)

And you thinking Russia not know how to make CGI-loaded Bolshoi Blockbuster?  (Bolshoi Icebuster!)  Phooey!  We show.  Big ship taking on frozen Arctic Sea as well as frozen expeditionary science unit with dog.  But with ship Captain Pyotr Fyodorov, handsome, strong, stubble beard, 70 men safe on board.  (Two time winner of Russian Hero of the Year acting award!  Real thing.  Look up!)  But stopping boat when science man & dog go overboard in frigid waters bolshoi mistake.  Save doggie; lose man.  Puts rescue attempt ahead of mission.  Soon helicopter comes.  Replace fine Captain with no nonsense Captain.  Less handsome; no caring.  Crusty exterior hiding crusty interior.  Smashes sailor’s guitar to bits if deck not swabbed with anti-freeze.  Relieved Captain & new Captain like Burt Lancaster & Clark Gable in RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP/’58; Liam Neeson & Harrison Ford in K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER/’02.  Dozens others to choose from.  Yet, mean Captain wife back home having baby #1 at home.  Maybe he's not so bad.  But now, ship stuck in ice, with huge iceberg following.  Yikes!  Cracks below deck no one in Moscow takes responsibility for.  Now storage flooded, nothing to eat but cabbage soup.   (Inside info: is same cabbage soup as before flood.  Ironic, da?)  Almost forget; for film, no expense spared, English dub made by same team who did WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY?/’66 for Woody Allen.  And since date of events is 1985, everyone calls everyone ‘dude.’   Plus takeaway motto: Shit Floats.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Look for some great sunshiny weather as a water truck spews out heavy rain showers on a Moscow sidewalk.  While on the English dub track, a clueless actor pronounces LeninGRAD as LeninGARD.  Even under perestroika , you could get shot for that.