THE WRECKING CREW! (2008)

Not the 2026 Dave Bautista/Jason Momoa action-comedy, not the 1968 spy spoof for Dean Martin’s Matt Helm; not even the 2000 Black Actioner with Ice-T & Ernie Hudson Jr.  This WRECKING CREW! (note exclamation point), is a homey documentary charting the ‘60s heyday of a tight group of about 20 or so West Coast studio session musicians whose careers peaked just as the center of Pop music influence shifted from New York to L.A., from the Brill Building to that stack of 45s known as the Capitol Building.  Sinatra & Co. to the Beach Boys; and everything in-between.  The ‘crew’ played for/with everyone.  (Boomers should stick around for the end credits to hear clips from fifty to sixty hits they’ll recall not included in the main film.)  There’s a bias in the film since it was put together by Denny Tedesco, son of main guitar player Tommy Tedesco (there’s a better film somewhere inside the clips & fresh interviews), but these nostalgic touchstones offer a lot.  Especially if you don’t mind a bit too much of interviewee Dick Clark’s idea of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  You might even be surprised to find out the Wrecking Crew played all the music not only for The Monkees, but also for The Byrds, The Association, even a lot of Beach Boys stuff under Brain Wilson.  Good vibrations, indeed.  On the other hand, imagine the thousand of schlock ‘pop’ they were paid to polish.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Gary Lewis without ‘the Playboys’ a typical interview, speaking on how his band was swapped out for Wrecking Crew musicians at recording sessions.  The Playboys’ names on the album, but not a note.  BTW Gary’s dad, Jerry Lewis set the bar for passive/aggressive behavior naming his first-born not Jerry Jr., but the near sound-alike Gary.  (Later raising the bar by disinheriting him.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Their slow ‘70s decline came two ways.  From new bands who wrote & played their own stuff; and (as told by Plas Johnson, the crew’s saxophonist famous for laying down The Pink Panther solo in two takes) thru the rise of twenty-four track technology which had them record in sections rather than together with the singer as a band.

DOUBLE-BILL:  20 FEET FROM STARDOM/’13, has a somewhat similar take on the great girl backup singers for some of the best known Black Pop vocalists of roughly the same period.

MINAMATA (2020)

With a new version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL in the can (EBENEZER/’26), much press on how Johnny Depp has beaten ‘Cancel Culture’ after nearly a decade without a mainstream Hollywood release.  (A domestic ‘He said/She said’ dispute Depp legally, if not in all hearts, won.)  But being ‘cancelled’ not the only crisis Depp has faced, already in career decline from being ‘enabled’ to death, done in by success.  Specifically the one-two commercial punch of the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN series and ALICE IN WONDERLAND.  Depp taking all the wrong lessons from these mega-hits, doubling down on OTT eccentricity to steadily diminishing results, less interested in character development than in seeing how much he could get away with before someone called his bluff.  Enablers never do.  (Depp hadn’t co-starred with late-stage Marlon Brando for nothing.)  But then a can’t-miss’ ALICE sequel missed, THE LONE RANGER failed and he was axed from FANTASTIC BEASTS.  (The last something of a blessing in disguise.)  Could Depp still play a normal human-scaled character?  This true story (and it’s truer than most) involving a difficult character in a tragic situation ought to be right up Depp’s alley.  An American  photo-journalist approached by a group of Japanese admirers with a terrifying job, W. Eugene Smith (Depp), an on-and-off LIFE magazine regular, pitches their project to expose mercury poisoning by the Japanese factory that controls the town of Minamata.  But he’ll not only have to break thru all sorts of local protocol, a local police force working for the owners, bribes from the factory to lay off, refusals from families unwilling to allow victims to be photographed (the heart of any LIFE Magazine article), Smith must also confront personal demons that have kept him off the camera and on the bottle for too long.  (We're not so far from Depp’s own situation.)  Excellent characterizations on all sides (in Japan and back in NYC), and truly lovely interactions between Depp and a young victim learning to take photos.  Yet, the film barely makes its mark.  Some of the problem stems from Depp’s old-age makeup (was he going for elderly Groucho Marx or Billy Crystal?), but more from the inexperience of co-writer/director Andrew Levitas on just his second film.  He misses a lot and explains less, with flat staging even in a riot.  Then, when he does try for action, it’s overdone.  Still, except for an awkwardly handled romance with his interpreter, Depp is able to show what he can do given the chance.  If only his comeback project didn’t call for a return to OTT eccentricity in a story that’s been done to death.  (As well as to a T.*)

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Lots of CHRISTMAS CAROL coverage on this site.  Type Scrooge or Christmas Carol in the Search Box (Upper Left corner on the Main Site - Link below if needed) to find heaps of previous Ebenezers.

THE STALKING MOON (1968)

After seven films from 1957 to ‘68 (including TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and FEAR STRIKES OUT), producer Alan J. Pakula and director Robert Mulligan* went out with a bang.  But only because their final project was a violent Chamber Western with lots of shooting.  Elsewise, it’s something of a whimper.  Gregory Peck (only 52, but looking at the downside of his career) is a retiring Cavalry man who gets stuck escorting Eva Marie Saint’s abducted White woman, and her unwilling half-Indian eight-yr-old son, East after a decade of life on the range with her Tribe.  Two problems: ONE - she hasn’t got a home to go to (or any place for that matter); TWO - the boy’s father, a full-blooded Native American warrior, our Stalking Moon, is already on the Trail, killing anyone who comes between him and the boy.  It’s not bad, though the film takes its time getting a move on thru all the desert dust, but it sure could use a bit of surprise.  Something easier to get from an unpretentious B-list Western without so many big names in front & behind the camera on what is a pretty straightforward Avenging Father/Isolated Cabin Under Siege story.  Note that A-list scribes Alvin Sargent & Wendell Mayes let third-wheel ‘good’ Indian Robert Forster break thru the troubled Indian boy’s defenses rather than giving Peck a warm fatherly moment.  Kudos to Peck, not that many big-time movie stars would let that scene go to someone else.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *After this, Mulligan continued directing with various producers to reasonable effect, but Pakula’s switch to producer/director went into award-winning overdrive.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Pakula post Mulligan doesn’t need a push, but Mulligan post Pakula less celebrated.  Try clever/creepy THE OTHER/’72.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/02/other-1972.html

MILLE MILLIARDS DE DOLLARS / A THOUSAND BILLION DOLLARS (1982)

Patrick Dewaere’s penultimate film; sadly unworthy of his great talent.*  It sounds okay, a French take on ‘70s conspiracy thrillers, not political/military conflict & subterfuge, but focusing on International Business practices and near-sighted Investigative Journalism.  Dewaere’s steady/determined reporter unaware his latest exposé of a major figure in French business, culture & politics used him (and his publication) as part of a plan to make the man's murder look like suicide.  But once Dewaere starts investigating the suicide, he puts himself and his family in jeopardy.  If only we weren’t under the dependably mediocre hand of writer/director Henri Verneuil, here surpassing himself with some of the dullest exposition of his career.  And the film’s all exposition, the dramatic underpinnings facile/suspense-free.  Talk,, Talk,Talk: all in medium shot.  Four short, carelessly staged bits of action in a two hour film while Mel Ferrer’s conglomerate mogul squeezes competitive companies into his orbit and secretly sends out agents to keep Dewaere from finding a folder of evidence proving his story before attempting to kill him.  There's even a trick populist ending that's pure Frank Capracorn.  Jeanne Moreau shows up briefly as the suicide's widow to claim she got married in 1941 (she’d have been 13), while Verneuil calls in other big names for near cameos to bulk up his cast and make the film seem important.  And Philippe Sarde's four piano score?  A Verneuil stunt.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  What was lost in Dewaere’s early death at 35 can be well judged by watching the raucous soccer comedy of COUP DE TÊTE/’79 and the family drama UN MAUVAIS FILS/’80.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/03/coup-de-tete-hothead-1979.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/11/un-mauvais-fils-bad-son-1980.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Stateside, Dewaere still best known by two early films teaming him with Gérard Depardieu, acclaimed in their day, they’ve aged as poorly as M. Depardieu.

SYMPHONY OF SIX MILLION (1932)

David O. Selznick, for better or worse the epitome of a Golden Age Hollywood producer, only made two films that deeply resonated with his personal life.  The WWII homefront drama SINCE YOU WENT AWAY/’44 (like a tribute to wife Irene Mayer Selznick whom he’d soon leave for that film’s Jennifer Jones - as we said, for better or worse), and this, his first at R.K.O. as Executive Producer after leaving Paramount, showing striking elements from his own family: NYC setting with Yiddisher Mama; overworked/cash-strapped Papa (Selznick’s ill father dying soon after this film's release); materialistic older brother; et al.  Adapted from a Fannie Hurst short story, we’re considerably below the real Selznick’s finances, specifically Lower East Side Jewish Ghetto (‘ghetto’ the term used thru-out the film), it might be a trial run for a previous Hurst movie, Frank Capra’s far better realized Part-Talkie THE YOUNGER GENERATION/’29.*  Both films featuring Ricardo Cortez as a gifted doctor to the needy who moves uptown (first 89th/West End; then Park Ave.) and regrets it, losing his soul to become a rich society doctor.*  In the earlier film, Cortez even pretends not to recognize his unrefined tenement parents, while here losing confidence in his ‘miracle’ surgical hands when he can’t save his father on the operating table.  It’s the film’s best scene, with striking direction, lighting and daring agogic editing from Gregory La Cava, Leo Tover & Archie Marshek.  It also points up Max Steiner’s pioneering underscoring, ironically by having it suddenly drop off the soundtrack.  Generally, the cast plays broadly as possible, Papa Gregory Ratoff in his film debut straight from Second Avenue Yiddish theater.  Only Irene Dunne, as Cortez’s limping childhood pal, now teaching blind students near his old free medical clinic, holding down the emoting to Episcopalian levels.  It’s all a bit much, but also just right.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Ricardo Cortez, né Jacob Krantz, got his movie name during the Valentino craze.  Brother Samuel Krantz, great cinematographer of MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, followed suit, becoming Stanley Cortez.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, superior Hurst in Capra’s THE YOUNGER GENERATION, as well as hands-on producer Selznick’s sole original screenplay credit in SINCE YOU WENT AWAY.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-younger-generation-1929.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/since-you-went-away-1944.html

FAST CHARLIE (2023)

Director Philip Noyce and actor Pierce Brosnan were at their professional peaks about thirty years ago.  Safe, dependable bets to handle medium to big projects and keep anxious studio heads calm, but missing anything distinctive in their work.  Occasionally, Noyce went out on a limb (see RABBIT-PROOF FENCE/’02), but by-the-numbers Tom Clancy adaptations and dud sex thrillers more common.  And Brosnan?  Think of his career this way: while certainly not the worst James Bond, he certainly was the least memorable.  Their past likely making this diminutive revenge actioner (from Victor Gischler’s novel, an Elmore Leonard manqué of a book) seem more satisfying than it might otherwise be.  Still crud, but likeable crud.  Brosnan (sporing a come-and-go North Florida accent), is hitman & fixer to physically & mentally failing mob boss James Caan (his final role).  Caught in the middle of a gang war after a new partner blows a rubout; the partner’s ex (sadder-but-wiser Morena Baccarin, super!) wants the $50 thou he owed her; one of Caan’s deputies about to take over Caan’s territory; and bodies dropping like flies shot thru the head.  The film surprisingly gory.  Just the moment for Cupid to show up for 70-something Brosnan and 40-something Baccarin.  Noyce gets a lot out of basics (car chases, coastal roads & glaring sunlight; action meeting immovable object; logistical complications; Brosnan’s tarnished looks.  All told, I’d pick this over  peak Noyce or Brosnan for something with some distinctive, if borrowed, flavor.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Noyce’s lack of distinctness landing only one other write-up on this site, THE QUIET AMERICAN/’02.  And that post largely leaning toward another version of the story.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-quiet-american-1958-2002.html    

THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941)

Just before starting as contract player at Warners (and all his best remembered Hollywood films), Peter Lorre was ‘jobbing’ at various studios, M-G-M, Republic, and here Columbia on this modest Horror programmer.  As an enthusiastic naïf, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, his plans are literally burned to hell when a fire at his residential hotel leaves him with a face so ghastly no one will employ him in spite of his abilities with anything mechanical.  Stopped from suicide by passing bum George E. Stone (excellent*), he finds a use for his talents in robbery, stealthily moving in & out of shops, vaults, warehouses, anything.  Lorre’s once strict moral code crumbling in the face of rejection by decent society, only the underworld having any use for him.  One exception: Evelyn Keyes, a blind costume jewelry maker who can’t see the hideous face or how Lorre gets around unnoticed by hiding himself (and his tortured soul) under a latex mask.  But then the possibility of recovery with new plastic surgery techniques raise hopes and he tries to go ‘straight’ with disastrous results.  The rest surprisingly bleak.  Director Robert Florey must have talked a good game, his films never quite matching his ambitions after making his name on the experimental LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413, A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA/’28.  His films don’t ‘swing.*  But he holds this to just over an hour and gets a boost from cinematographer Franz Planer, still fairly new in town, but soon a regular for greats like Wyler, Zinnemann and Ophüls.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *More horror for Florey & Lorre over at Warners in THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS/’46.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-beast-with-five-fingers-1946.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Stone very much part of the criminal gang, yet not only does he receive no punishment, he’s rewarded!  The Hollywood Production Code ‘raped in its sleep,’ as James Agee would soon put it (though for a different film).

THE BALLAD of GREGORIO CORTEZ (1982)

Actor/producer Edward James Olmos was the driving force behind this groundbreaking ‘Chicano’ Western, based (pretty accurately) on a simple verbal misunderstanding during an arrest-gone-wrong that snowballs into a manhunt and scores of innocent dead.  A real life ‘failure to communicate’ tragedy from 1901 Texas.  Olmos is Gregorio Cortez, a man on the run after killing that local arresting officer, a sheriff who drew a gun on Cortez, murdered his brother and put Cortez on the run, but doomed to be caught.  The non-linear presentation, along with actions repeated from alternate POVs, lifting this beyond simple suspense.  All while a unit of Texas Rangers blunder into indiscriminate murder of uncomprehending local Mexicans they take for Cortez confederates.  The purposeless killings only stopping when a legit sheriff takes charge, informing the Rangers there’s no gang involved, it’s been a one man job . . . and possibly self-defense.  Once arrested, Cortez is soon being mythologized by the Mexican community in Texas (as he is to this day) though the situation remains complicated.  Something Olmos doesn’t shy away from, hiring Robert M. Young, a superb technician too often pigeon-holed as a one-trick socially-conscious director, who rewrote an overly hagiographic script to admit nuance without softening the basic injustice.  Even more important, making a one million dollar ‘Super 16' budget look fully realized.  (Superb natural-light lensing from Reynaldo Villalobos.)  Only a few bad actors and a synthesizer score giving away the cost factor here and there.  The film doubly important for offering a rare Mex/Tex tilt historically (1901) and currently (1982) in presentation & attitude.  (It plays in English and Spanish without subtitles to emphasize language barriers.)  The film briefly heralding a road across a cultural  border still not taken.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Instead of another film with Chicano orientation, watch the excellent Extras on the Criterion edition, especially Olmos’s talk on how it all came about and, especially, how its distribution was purposefully fucked up by the head of Embassy Pictures.

STALLION ROAD (1947)

This modest feature is mainly interesting for figuring out why its three stars teetered just below the A-list*, and for an unusual lack of dramatic incident in its first half.  It’s like everyone’s on holiday in SoCal horse country.  Rather pleasant.  It’s midway in before life & death melodrama, along with romantic tangles kick in.  Pity journeyman director James V. Kern, out of his depth in both halves.  But for as long as nothing much is happening (other than a scare for Alexis Smith’s kid sister at the beach), horse rancher/veterinarian Ronald Reagan, visiting novelist pal Zachary Scott and pants-wearing/horse breeder neighbor Alexis Smith play a friendly game of catch and release visits to figure out which two parties make the natural couple.  Stephen Longstreet, scripting from his own novel, happy just to observe.  Then anthrax comes to cattle country, and melodrama breaks out.  Stupidity, too; one of those plots where you’re not allowed to make a simple explanation if you want to keep the plot going.  So Doc Reagan may be saving the entire livestock population of the area and working on an experimental serum, but Smith isn’t told of his heroics.  All she knows is he didn’t show up for her sick show horse.  It gives Scott an opportunity to move in, leaving Reagan with a clinging married gal he once dabbled with.  It’ll take a (near) fatal diagnosis to sort this one out.  A shame, that directionless first half was something singular for ‘40s Warner Brothers.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Watch how the film gets around the Hollywood Production Code during an unethical medical procedure.  People say editing can save a film, it also can save a hero’s life.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Why didn’t these three hit the A-list?  Best guess: Reagan only able to play one note at a time.  Smith too tall for three-quarters of Hollywood’s leading men.  Scott . . . well, that’s a tough one.  Too good for his own good?  See what he does under Jean Renoir in THE SOUTHERNER    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-southerner-1945.html

DISCLOSURE DAY (2026)

Steven Spielberg had a ‘New Coke’ moment in 1980, re-releasing his 1977 blockbuster CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND in a Special Edition that slightly trimmed the original cut, then added a final sequence taking us along with Richard Dreyfuss inside the Alien Mothership.  Pretty much everyone hated it.  At best a mistake in intention; at worst something leftover from a  World’s Fair exhibit.commissioned from Disney.  Spielberg took the hint and axed the sequence from subsequent editions.  But he’s a stubborn guy, and, 46 years later, he’s still trying to get it right, now as the climax of this new Aliens Are Real/Aliens Are Here thriller.*  The film and the man treated with kid gloves by critics as something of a last hurrah (print puff pieces downright painful), not that he doesn’t deserve the attention, and not that the film is a dud, but something’s definitely off.  The basic story, and raise your hand when you recognize the idea, is that documented evidence of alien visitors long suppressed by a special military unit led by Colin Firth is heading toward international exposure by a break-off group led by Colman Domingo.  Platonic couple Josh O’Connor (math whiz) and Emily Blunt (inexplicably speaking in Alien tongue) are earthly messengers on the run.  Naturally, the film is well accomplished, perfectly judged pacing and plenty of close calls staged to a technical fare-thee-well.  But about two reels in, it’s hard to miss that everybody involved thinks they’re making a suspense comedy . . . except Spielberg.  Most noticeable when miscast Blunt goes into her speaking-in-alien-tongue routine.  (She does international languages, too.)  You keep expecting to hear a giggle of self-surprise burble out of her at her own unexplained ability after these exchanges.  And not just any giggle.  But the rumbling joyful snort and laugh that were a Goldie Hawn specialty.  (Spielberg’s first leading film lady in THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS/’74 when she would have been just the right age for this.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-sugarland-express-1956.html)  And it wouldn’t have altered the general tone of legit suspense, either.  Think of all the big laughs Spielberg put over as part of the mix in JAWS, RAIDERS, JURASSIC, etc.  Spielberg, always something of a square; it's a large part of his charm.  Now pushing 80, has he become too square to get the joke that over half a century of Alien footage showing hundreds of witnesses hasn’t leaked from any lips in seven decades?  (At 94, composer John Williams seems in on the joke when needed.)  Perhaps Spielberg simply can’t go home again; or can’t without Goldie Hawn’s giggle.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *How stubborn?  Counting GOONIES as a junior-league Indy pic and TINTIN as Indy français, Spielberg went to the Indy well seven times, only bringing up water twice.  Then watched from the sidelines as the recent PADDINGTON BEAR in Peru pic filled the bucket.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note Spielberg pointlessly circling his subject like some kid just out of Film School.  Then turning uselessly old-school Hollywood with fussy matching edits.  Trying too hard?

DOUBLE-BILL:  DISCLOSURE ends with a tease, a message to the world from an interplanetary friend that’s  cut off before we get the translation.  Odds are it’s the same speech Michael Rennie’s Alien gives at the end of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL/’51.

THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER (1975)

After a Zeitgeist-grabbing two-fer for Paul Newman & Robert Redford (BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID/’69; THE STING/’73), director George Roy Hill soloed with each: this for Redford; SLAP SHOT/’77 with Newman.*  All four hits, the budget-conscious Hill bringing each in for about 5 or 6 mill, but only the first two smashes, earning five times the gross of the last two.  Nowadays, SLAP SHOT holds first critical position (rightfully so - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/slap-shot-1977.html), and it’d be a stretch to say BUTCH or STING has grown in esteem, but odd-man-out WALDO looks considerably better than once thought.  Some of this has to do with a lighthearted ad campaign misrepresenting the film in hopes of STING-like grosses.  Or perhaps the film just looks more interesting than it did in ‘75.  (Original story by Hill/script by BUTCH’s William Goldman.)  Redford, perfectly cast, is an intensely likeable scapegrace, a narcissist who always came on the scene a bit too late to live up to his potential.  A pilot in early aviation days, he missed action in  WWI then ran out the clock on barnstorming and big-time Air Circus shows.  Perpetually in trouble with cash, he’s soon skirting the new laws taming old-school flyboys as aviation matures from daredevil freak-show to big business.  Hill manages to segue from fun adventure to doomed lives in an instant (you can’t miss it), charting a diminishing trajectory from midpoint down, all the way to Hollywood stunt flyer, old scores to settle and no turning away from implications.  Certainly not from Redford who locks onto that now empty heroic grin; and Hill never showing his hand.  No wonder the film sputtered in comparison.  Technically superb, lenser Robert Surtees ditching THE STING’s glossy look of the same time period.  Loaded with real planes, real flying, real pilots offering plenty of pre-CGI thrills.

DOUBLE-BILL:  More daredevil pilots in Douglas Sirk’s too little known THE TARNISHED ANGELS/’57, from William Faulkner’s PYLON, with Rock Hudson, Robert Stack & Dorothy Malone.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Technically, it’s another Redford/Newman pic, not Paul, but with ill-fated son Scott Newman in a small role.

OUR TOWN (1940)

Hitting the screen only two years after its B’way opening in 1938, this film adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic was initially well received.  Later, objections to the revised ending and floods of subfusc home editions (plus maybe a few too many High School  productions) knocked the film’s rep down a peg or two.  Nothing can be done about that :happy' ending (less than a minute long, it’s easy to mentally block), and now, much that might have been done to improve picture quality has, at long last, been done, thanks mostly to The Library of Congress.  (Look for their 2023 restoration.)  And the film’s come up a treat.  Cleverly retrofitted for film by Wilder and actor Frank Craven, who repeats his ‘Stage Manager’ role from B’way, the revolutionary bare/prop-free stage production gets a rethink from legendary Hollywood Art Director William Cameron Menzies, given his head by director Sam Wood to use a stylized realism that heightens every scene.*  The quasi-simplicity of Wilder’s turn-of-the-last-century portrait of a ‘good’ small New England town leaps off the soundstage: daily routine, pleasures & tragedies of home-life: births, young love, weddings, death; laid out by Wilder like a prose poem of details & duties.  Craven is still a welcome surprise as tour guide, brisk, sec, blunt, without nonsense or sentimentality.  The other major holdover from the original production, Martha Scott as young Emily, who marries the boy next door, less successful.  Twenty-eight at the time, a lack of freshness less from being a decade too old than from having already figured out her line readings.*  And playing against a 22-yr-old William Holden only points out the difference.  Holden holds the screen effortlessly, breaking your heart with minimal effort.  A scene where Father Thomas Mitchell takes him to task almost unbearably moving.  With all the Hollywood supporting players at the very top of their game.  So too lenser Bert Glennon, just off John Ford’s STAGE COACH/’39; deftly jumping from Monument Valley to Menzies' carefully worked out stage set perspectives.  All of them memorably cosseted  by Aaron Copland’s perfectly judged score.  (Long a concert piece that’s never gone out of favor.)  The restored film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58O76SinOrQ&t=1027s) now easily besting the many tv versions hanging out online.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Another Wood/Menzies collaboration, KINGS ROW/’42, something of an anti-OUR TOWN.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/kings-row-1940.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Martha Scott’s B’way understudy, Teresa Wright, would have been perfect.

HOPPERS (2026)

The sound you heard coming from PIXAR hometown Emeryville, CA last March was likely a collective sigh of relief.  They’d just released their first original (non-franchise) hit in some time.  (Since the pandemic?*)  No mega-smash, but a solid stand-up double.  In many ways it’s an odd film (a good thing after so much formula PIXAR), HOPPERS' story a variation on the old ‘pave paradise/put up a parking lot’ trope, with nods toward Cinderella’s time-limited transformation, as unlikeable characters & unattractive design choices seem to hint at self-criticism & acknowledged course correction.  This being PIXAR, reset comes with a $150 mill price tag.  (But who stuck those scary sharp teeth in a duck’s bill?  Yikes!)  Our nominal heroine, a self-righteous pain, is 19-yr-old squeaky-wheel Mabel, determined to save her spoiled childhood pond (and the critters who once lived there) in the face of highway development.  Her antagonist a self-infatuated mayor (Jon Hamm, very good) who can’t compromise without losing face.  The gimmick a science project that ‘hops’ personalities from one species to another.  Mabel zapped into a beaver bod.  The script, trying too hard to be fair to all sides, winds up celebrating false equivalency as if it were compromise.  Not quite the same thing.  But that’s politics; we’re here for art, yes?  Good to see PIXAR questioning so much about itself.  Even if it’s yet to find answers.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Dear PIXAR character animation team.  The ‘cartooniness’ of the character animation design is worth pursuing, but this in-between stage is uncomfortable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  They miss an opportunity when the various animals play call-and-response with their distinctive vocalizations.  It plays like a song cue (‘I Bought Me A Cow’ from Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs?), but nothing comes of it.  Pity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *A sure theatrical hit lost to PIXAR when LUCA/’21 turned streamer in early pandemic days.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html

IL CAMMINO DELLA SPERANZA / THE PATH OF HOPE (1950)

A decade before DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE/’61, the most iconic of all commedia all'italiana titles*, writer/director Pietro Germi, like so many others, was still turning to Italian Neo-Realism for guidance.  So even with Federico Fellini co-scripting, this immigration melodrama gets its start firmly planted in the naturalism of Sicily's rocky soil.  Its story remarkably close to what you’d encounter today with the major difference that the borders being illegally crossed all within Italy.  Or are till the very end.  In a small Sicilian town, the closing of the local sulfur mine leaves most of the locals unemployed, willing to give their small savings to a smuggler promising passage and jobs in France.  Naturally, the guy’s a swindler, their money already mailed to an accomplice when a mixup at Rome’s train terminal puts everyone on the run; government agents in pursuit; couples split/lost in the city, the lucky ones reunited in police stations before being ordered back to Sicily . . . or else.  Cutting loose, some grab temp farm labor, unaware they’re scabbing against a labor union, the few now left, clamoring into unmarked trucks, clawing their way to a dangerous mountain-pass border crossing.  Germi pushes the melodrama till things start looking like a ‘well-made’ play.  But the cast (headed by Raf Vallone; with pros in most of the leads) is empathetic as hell (those big-eyed bambini!).  There’s even an operatic climax straight out of CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA.  Effective?  Si.  Neo-realistic?  Non così tanto.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The ironic distancing and dark comic tone that fed commedia all'italiana not yet possible, not before the economic miracle later in the decade, nicknamed ‘Il Boom.’

ACROSS TO SINGAPORE (1928)

Second of three films taken from Ben Ames Williams’ novel ALL THE BROTHERS WERE VALIANT (also 1923, now lost, and 1953 - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/all-brothers-were-valiant-1953.html).  Oddly, only one of its four seafaring brothers turns out to be valiant, the others either lost at sea, lost in the plot or lost in the Mysterious East (from unrequited love or a fortune in stolen pearls).  Only the youngest valiant.  With plot tweaks to match different casts, this one has Ramon Navarro (29, but looking a decade younger) perfectly cast as the teenage kid who’s grown into a young man (delicate, but sturdy) while his older brothers were at sea.  Eager for a first voyage, he’ll miss his girl (22-yr-old Joan Crawford), only to be emotionally waylaid when alpha-male brother Ernest Torrence (50 and looking it) forces an engagement on the terrified girl.  As if that’s not enough, the voyage under stress from storms and a First-Mate who takes advantage of Torrence’s monumental bender, leaving the lovesick man for dead in Singapore (actually he’s leaving him with Anna May Wong!), and commandeering the ship.  Once home, Navarro takes the rap before stealing off with Crawford to find his big brother and clear his name.  Nicely directed by William Nigh (a prestige silent helmer who steadily lost ground when sound came in), though the first two reels of forced roughhousing between the boys before they ship out are a pain.  Thankfully, it’s shot by the great John F. Seitz, a transformative lenser for Rex Ingram, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder.  Serious print deterioration means you’ve got to squint thru a lot, but much remains in pretty good shape.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Torrence’s claim to film immortality came earlier in 1928, playing enormous, disappointed Dad to Buster Keaton in STEAMBOAT BILL, JR./’28.  Then, later in ‘28, repeating the characterization note for note against another son, John Gilbert in THE COSSACKS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/steamboat-bill-jr-1928.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-cossacks-1928.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  1928 was such a phenomenal year for silent cinema.  And Early Talkies generally so stiff.  (In round numbers: 1928 80% siient/20% Talkie; 1929 20% silent/80% Talkie.)  It’s easy to see what was being mourned/what was being lost.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (2014)

You’ve heard of the so-called ‘Cilantro Gene,’ a condition causing 23% of the population to taste rubber tires when eating the popular herb?  Less known/equally powerful, the MARVEL Comics Movie Mutation, a genetic response presenting as doziness, hives, nausea, rejection to endless cross-plugging of the MARVEL Universe, characters & franchises within a single film; all exacerbated by CGI abuse; battle-palooza fatigue; ‘fatal’ blows of zero consequence; and no built-in bathroom breaks for three hour running times.  A MARVEL-phobic effect, once rare, now showing alarming spikes of growth in casual viewers & loyal fanboys.  It's one reason the first Chris Evans led CAPTAIN AMERICA film (THE FIRST AVENGER/’11) was such a pleasant surprise to gene carriers.  Perhaps because its origin story held to a single hero; perhaps because period elements gave an analogue feel to practical and non-practical (CGI) effects; perhaps because old-school director Joe Johnston brought mid-century æsthetics from his THE ROCKETEER/’91 with him as well as action chops that bothered to connect the thigh bone to the leg bone.  Alas, as noted at the time*, it couldn’t last; and this sequel, generally considered the high point in MARVEL’s film renaissance, figuratively put the cilantro back in the recipe.  Here, directors Joe & Anthony Russo* packing back in all the allergy inducing elements on a story about a splinter group sabotaging the Super-Hero good guys of S.H.I.E.L.D. from within.  A story built for cross-plugging at every exposition stop and story beat.  Sure tastes like rubber tires to me.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Bearing in mind that you should never take advice from anyone who says, ‘I don’t usually like (fill-in-the-blank) genre movies, but this one is worth seeing.’  But that first Evans CAPTAIN AMERICA film is darn entertaining.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/04/captain-america-2011.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Remarkably poor editing (especially in hand-to-hand action stuff) for a film costing near 200 mill.

THE GREAT ESCAPER (2023)

Last call for Michael Caine & Glenda Jackson (and with them, a British film generation), who go out not with a bang, but with an anecdote, fact-based/well chosen.  It’s 70 years after D-Day and Normandy Landing vet Caine, now living comfortably with frail wife Jackson in an assisted care facility, realizes he’s too late to join a group for the commemoration in France.  But it’s never too late to pack a few essentials and take off by foot.  Then bus, cab, train & ship.  Near 90, Caine shuffles along with his trusty cane, catching breaks thru the kindness of strangers without sprinkling too much fairy dust in helpful advice on the way; though it’s a near thing.  Journeyman director Oliver Parker is roped in by William Ivory’s workaday script.  All the WWII flashbacks usurping precious acting opportunities from our leads.  But the film has its touching moments and doesn’t plead for tears; nor needs to.  Caine & Jackson left with dignity intact.  Jackson in particular, fierce as ever when need be.  (Unlike the sweet-natured gal who plays her in the flashbacks.)  Sadly, Jackson died shortly before the film came out, while Caine, who announced his retirement upon completion, saw the film fail to get Stateside distribution.  Boo!  (PBS picked it up.)  That’s showbiz.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  These self-acknowledged screen farewells rarely go even this well.  But there’s built in affection toward films like GHOST STORY/’81 and THE WHALES OF AUGUST/’87.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/ghost-story-1981.html

THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE / OCHAZUKE NO AJI (1952)

Sandwiched between EARLY SUMMER/’51 and TOKYO STORY/’53, two Yasujiro Ozu classics that fit expectations on the Ozu oeuvre, this modest marital dramedy gets overlooked.  Doubly so as behind an imposing title that promises utmost Japanese subtlety, lies a small film with a light tone.  Yet the film is all Ozu, and not to be missed, especially if you’ve seen WHAT DID THE LADY FORGET?/’37.  That film something of a trial run for this one fifteen years later; offering a unique opportunity to see Ozu’s response ripen from simple sit-com to emotional resonance.  In both films, a poorly matched, childless couple, rapidly stiffening into incompatible middle-age stasis (wife: snobby, custom-bound, social striver; husband: comfort-loving/low-ambition compartmentalist) are jarred out of their routine when their visiting ‘modern’ niece starts speaking up for herself, skipping arranged marriage meetings, going about the city on her own (she’s a crack pinball player), coming home at all hours and finding her own dates . . . whom she also treats poorly.  (The guy loves it!)  Seeing how much of this is just like LADY;  yet how much Ozu has grown as observant filmmaker (the whole last act becomes thrillingly emotional after a marital crisis clears the air for renewal), is like having a privileged moment alone with Ozu.  What could be more valuable?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  This is more like a whole course on Ozu, but here are the films mentioned above.  (Anyway, is there an Ozu film not worth seeing?)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/early-summer-1951.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/tokyo-story-1953.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2026/07/what-did-lady-forget-shukujo-wa-nani-o.html

POLICE PYLON 347 (1976)

Poet and pulp-fiction writer Kenneth Fearing got a lot of mileage out of THE BIG CLOCK, his sole story picked up for feature adaptation.  A twisty murder story with the usual innocent man having to prove his innocence before an eye-witness works up his portrait.  With Ray Milland & Charles Laughton, the 1948 original was set in a publishing house before this French policier made it an all cop inside job followed by relocation to the Pentagon as a military suspenser for Kevin Costner in NO WAY OUT/’87.  (And more! - there’s also an unofficial ripoff with Denzel Washington as OUT OF TIME/’03, again in a police setting.)  Not a lot of surprise left in the story, generally look to your boss to find the guilty party.  What does surprise is that this French version, from regular Yves Montand/Simone Signoret collaborator Alain Corneau is the stinker of the bunch.  Mostly because the victim, Stefania Sandrelli’s sloe-eyed vamp, is such an insufferable tease (stalker?) on the pair of middle-aged men (Montand and François Périer) she’s targeted.  One slaps her; the other brains her with an ashtray; audience cued to applaud.  Ugh.  Only Simone Signoret, invalid wife to Périer, has a bit of fun plotting from her bed.  Are all Corneau films this dull?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  John Farrow’s original shot at THE BIG CLOCK/’48 is an over-rated film noir, but it sure beats the other tries.

12 MONKEYS (1995)

A polite way to describe the films of Terry Gilliam is to call them maximalist.  A more accurate description might compare them to a hungry teenager overloading a dinner plate at his first open buffet.  If only someone had told him you can go back for a second plate if you’re still hungry.  This one, philosophical future preposterous Sci-Fi, comes off better than most, it certainly did commercially.  Bruce Willis is the time-traveling guinea-pig for a group of experts trying to figure out the mystery of the 12 Monkeys, a gaggle of infectious primates who unleashed a plague, killing about 5 billion Earthlings.  Unfortunately for Willis, time coordinates not always on-target for the correct year to find out about the deadly man-made monkey virus and bring the info back-to-the-future.  Christopher Plummer and lunatic son Brad Pitt keep popping up at various landing points, as does helpmate Madeleine Stowe.  But don’t sweat the big stuff, the whole shebang is a shaggy-dog story (oops, shaggy-dog tragedy) with a ‘red herring’ not as a wrong turn, but as solution.  Brad Pitt nearly steals the pic with his escalating rants of insanity, letting his inner Gene Wilder out.  (If only he didn’t pull the same stunt every time he comes on screen.)  And Gilliam’s big sentimental finish?  Indefensible.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  At one point in the ‘present,’ Willis & Stowe go to the movies to watch VERTIGO and THE BIRDS at an Alfred Hitchcock retro screening.  Later, Gilliam riffs on VERTIGO story beats.  It adds little to the film, but does offer a chance to see how much available prints at the time needed the major restoration (largely overseen by Robert Gitt) it got for it’s successful re-release a year later in 1996.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Gilliam credits Chris Marker’s half-hour short, LA JETÉE/’62 as source, probably good advice.

STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1940)

Hour-long B-noir earns its cult rep from one of Nathanael West’s last scripts (dead this year at 37), thru some off-the-beam direction by gadabout writer/producer Boris Ingster (first of only three directing gigs*), but mostly in the no-holds-barred cinematography of RKO film noir specialist Nicholas Musuraca, largely shooting on the studio backlot NYC tenement block.  Then there’s the half-reel dream sequence for leading man John McGuire (pretty good) as he re-imagines the murder trial where his testimony could send young cabby Elisha Cook Jr to ‘the chair,’ now repeating as a nightmare with all that circumstantial evidence pointing at him.  (Both cases absurdly weak, a black mark on West.)  The girl in the pic, McGuire’s worrying fiancé Margaret Tallichet (pretty bad), mopes around to bring the running-time up to feature length and be a possible victim, but keep your expectations under control and there’s lots of Hollywood-style German Expressionist art direction to gaze at via fancy dissolves, canted angles, pore revealing close-ups and psychologically penetrating double or triple exposures.  Presumably done with an optical printer, yet showing no grain deterioration.  In silent days, these effects got done right in the camera by rewinding the negative for another exposure, leaving grain unchanged.  But that technique little used for over a decade, since the Talkies came in.  So how’d Musuraca do it?  (Assuming it was him and not the special effects unit.)  Elsewise, top-billed Peter Lorre shows up here and there to look suspicious & vaguely disturbed; threaten the girl and (no surprise) eventually confess to the killings.  (Lorre filling in with one-shot jobs in the interegnum between his wonderful MR. MOTOs at 20th/FOX and upcoming classics under contract at Warners.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Right at the end of his career, Ingster hit the jackpot, producing a slew of MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. episodes.

PUNJAB '95 / SATLUJ (2026)

Controversial, still officially unreleased film on a painful period for the Sikh community in the Punjab region of India where a separatist uprising was used by government and military authority as an excuse to abuse human rights to anyone who objected to State policy . . . or simply was around at the time and in the way.  Tens of thousands of innocents affected: abducted off the streets, jailed without trial, tortured, murdered, pressured to inform, with illegal treatment used as a lever for extortion.  (Or just for the fun of shooting someone and speeding up a 'quota' promotion.)  And barely a soul speaking out, especially those who lived in the region, till human rights activist Jaswant Singh took a stand, spoke out, forced newspapers to cover the atrocities, went abroad to let the world know what was going on, then returned home in spite of the danger to continue the fight.  A remarkable story, and one that was in a way mirrored by the treatment of the film itself which is still being held back by the current Indian film censorship board (in spite of different people and parties in office at the time).  Banned, censored, over a hundred cuts ordered, finally switching from a theatrical release to legally unfettered streaming options only to be taken down from all Indian platforms after two days.  Yet for all the goodwill, good production values, good cast and good intentions, the film remains dramatically inert.  It’s nearly a built-in defect in many bio-pics, but just piling on ever-worse incident is not development.  Here, there’s likely a better film to be found in a behind-the-scenes look at the troubles in getting this 5released than there is in the one they’ve found to tell of this still important, still unfinished episode of shame in recent Indian history.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Costa-Gavras knew how to make these political stories come across on screen: Z; THE CONFESSION; STATE OF SIEGE.

LA GRANDE GUERRA / THE GREAT WAR (1959)

In the late ‘50s/early ‘60, the height of the commedia all'italiana movement, it seemed like everyone in Italian cinema knew how to make movies.  (Well, everyone at Cinecittà.)  None more so than Mario Monicelli.  And while this broad-shouldered WWI dramedy feels less distinctive/more corporate than surrounding personal masterpieces like BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET/’58 or THE ORGANIZER/’63, this remains masterly mass-appeal cinema.  A really big show, too, with a cast of thousands in stunning set pieces recreating marches, battles and (this being Italy) retreats, mostly against the Austrians during the first years of the war (1914 - ‘16).  Less comic than advertized, it has the bracing/bitter aftertaste of a strong aperitif, the comedy character driven by supporting stragglers and complainers of the 7th regiment, and in leads Vittorio Gassman (as quick-thinking shirker) and Alberto Sordi (the eternal coward).*  It takes a minute adjusting to the post-dubbing everyone used in Italy at the time, but once done, the film plays beautifully, with an exceptional turn from producer Dino De Laurentiis’s wife Silvana Mangano as the company ‘companion.’  Were these official positions at the time?   (Note all the De Laurentiises littering the credits; though it's Giuseppe Rotunno on camera, and Nino Rota on the score.  No ‘nepo’ hires where it counts.)  And just when you think Monicelli is turning soft and sentimental (after burlesquing that famous Christmas truce between warring French & German soldiers by placing a chicken in No Man’s Land), he pays for any sentimentality with an unwilling ultimate sacrifice.  The film fully deserving its big critical & commercial success.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Instead of a mature Monicelli masterpiece, try COPS AND ROBBERS/’51, a modest, yet hilarious minor work for two aging echt Italiano farceurs in Fabrizi and Totò.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/guardie-e-ladri-cops-and-robbers-1951.html

 SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *A Hollywood remake of the time would have used Tony Curtis & Jack Lemmon; and botched the ending.

PRIMAL (2019)

Russian-born/Chicago-raised, gifted animator Genndy Tartakovsky returns to his best form in this prehistoric fantasy about MAN and DINO-BEAST.  The Adult-Swim series a visual knockout.  (And it better be as there’s no traditional dialogue, just grunts, snorts & screams in this paleo-world.)  With a storyline all but entirely about survival, Tartakovsky manages to find plenty of variety within a narrow narrative window as Early Man (‘Spear’) and Late Dino (‘Fang’) bond thru hunting game and fending off attack after losing their families to (I think) a T-Rex.  Obviously, Tartakovsky knows these two were never on Earth at the same time (or did he visit that Biblical Museum down South?), but the stories regularly deep dive into genre material of fantasy and horror.  Realism not a goal.  Instead, a sort of learning curve of ‘mutualism’ for brain and brawn, though that’s a 60/40 split between Caveman and Dinosaur, more partners than benevolent owner and loyal pet.  The tastelessly amusing, if one-note FIXED/’25 was released just as this series reached its end.  (Three seasons, only the first seen here.)  And if not the visual/narrative bomb-blast of his astounding SAMURAI JACK/’01 - ‘17, PRIMAL isn’t trying to recapture that sharp-edged look, moving to near-naturalistic backgrounds (at times almost like watercolors), interspersed with blasts of blistering speed, macho aggression and ultra-violence more often found in Graphic Novels.  Exceptionally well developed in character & story, with excellent production all the way down to its eclectic rock-influenced score and imaginative sound design.  Next up for Tartakovsky, theatrical feature BLACK KNIGHT.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Tartakovsky has done lots of kid-oriented work, so if that’s not your thing, go with SAMURAI JACK, best in earlier episodes.

OUT OF TIME (2003)

Denzel Washington became a film star the moment he came on screen in tidy white shorts fit for tropical climes as Chief of Police in THE MIGHTY QUINN/’89.  But he moved to A-list perennial when he worked with director Carl Franklin on the first-rate L.A. detective Neo-Noir DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS/’95.  So, expectations ran high when Washington & Franklin reconnected for this Chief of Police story, still in tropical climes (now Florida) in less fetching black shorts as uniform.  And the film?  Inexplicably slipshod.  Actually, explicably slipshod.  DEVIL adapted by Franklin from a classic Walter Mosley detective novel.  TIME an ‘original from Dave Collard, a hack writer with few credits before or since.  You’ll see why.  Tricked into ‘borrowing’ seized Fed cash for dying mistress Sanaa Lathan to get that European operation, Washington slowly sees it’s all been an elaborate set-up.  He’s being played.  He takes the fall; someone else takes the cash.  But who?  Meanwhile, those mean guys from The Fed hot to get their cash back (it’s needed for court), while Washington’s soon-to-be ex (Eva Mendes) starts seeing thru his multiple lies as problems escalate.  (Collon must have doted on Kevin Costner in NO WAY OUT/’87, itself a remake of THE BIG CLOCK/’48, as a kid.)  Washington’s fine (considering), and Franklin pulls off some nifty action moves, but nothing is believable; and the rest of the acting is (a-hem) inexplicably bad.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Also inexplicable, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS was initially a box-office bust.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/02/devil-in-blue-dress-1995.html

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)

Winning, intensely likeable ‘original’ (adapted, like its near-cousin THE MARTIAN/’15, from an Andy Weir novel), seems to be following the heavily-trod path of one of those Earth Doomed By Approaching Meteor films.  All tropes on-board as an international staff of problem-solving scientists and a mixed-crew of brave astronauts go full-speed-ahead to save the planet from extinction.  Here, with a failing sun going on as understudy in a role usually played by fast-moving space-mountains.  The film a smart, funny version of duds like METEOR/’79 and SUNSHINE/’07, just to name two unhappy attempts.  But what truly sets this one apart from previous good versions is how it shifts in the second act* toward a different main storyline, the one where a single person accidentally finds himself alone on some g-normous (space)ship, stumbling toward competence, confidence & enlightenment by mastering his vessel.  Even finding a partner to accompany him on the journey.  All straight out of Buster Keaton in THE NAVIGATOR/1924.  Admittedly, Buster does it in an hour while directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller take 2½*, but you can’t miss the parallels.  Even if Keaton gets a cute deadweight girl for a mate while Ryan Gosling, in a showstopping turn as a Middle-School teacher/contrarian scientist who’s pulled into heroic orbit, gets a stalwart CGI granite figure who nearly steals the pic.  Oddly, what plays best and sticks with you here are less the big set pieces than quotidian moments simply watching Gosling on routine duty.  Not so for Keaton, perhaps because his set pieces so obviously real things really happening, captured on film at 22fps (give or take) for our amazement.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The general nit being picked against PROJECT is its length.  But the filmmakers use every minute for something necessary and the film earns its 156" running time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Film structure is scrambled between past & present all thru the film so that act divisions crisscross along with time lines.  But architecture very clear from the film’s start which happens to be in the Second Act.

ÉL / THE STRANGE PASSION* (1953)

One of Luis Buñuel’s greatest films from his Mexican period; also one of his least liked.  ÉL (HE, or should that be HIM?) often said to be as close to a self-portrait as Buñuel ever got, opens with typical perversity as beautiful young boys in a lux Catholic Church, aristocratic looking with antiseptically clean bared feet, receive a ritualistic foot bath, then patted dry before being tenderly kissed on said foot by their chubby middle-aged priest wearing his finest vestments.  Maybe it was all less suggestive in 1953.  But even if it were more innocent at the time, it certainty doesn’t stop rich land developer Francisco Galván (Arturo de Córdova) from a bit of foot-fetish transubstantiation from little boy toes to ladies’ pumps, especially the delectably shod foot of engaged beauty Gloria Vilalta (Delia Garcés).  Losing her in the crowd, he happens upon her at a dinner party at his grossly over-decorated estate.  And, before you can say FATE (or linear leap), he’s replaced her fiancé with himself and his suffocating jealousy and accusations of infidelity.  Climaxing (if that’s the word for an unconsummated marriage) with his own DIY attempt at a chastity sew-up.  Yikes!  And the wife doesn’t leave because . . . ?  Well, where exactly shall she go?  How exactly would she support herself?  At the Church, the priest tells her to give the rich creep another chance.  Mother says stick it out; it’s probably your fault.  And Buñuel?  Po-faced to the point of seeing absurdist humor as this Grandee goes over the bend, something comic about his epic lack of self-awareness.  With a final cascade of hallucinatory mockery that’s up there with any of Buñuel’s ultra-vivid dream sequences.  And, just this once, showing his hand.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Criterion’s 2025 edition comes with three unusually compelling EXTRAs.  A conversation with Guillermo del Toro who, comparing Buñuel with Hitchcock (the other director he feels the closest to), says while EL is Buñuel at his most Hitchcockian (at least in formal design), Hitch’s most  Buñuelian is MARNIE/’64.  (Hmm, the ‘correct’ answer is FAMILY PLOT/’76.  Indeed, the attack on a priest at mass anticipates PLOT, so too bits of VERTIGO/’58.  While the Hitchcock ÉL is most indebted to is SUSPICION/’41.)  Also included is a neat visual essay and a priceless interview with later Buñuel Euro-collaborator writer Jean-Claude Carrière who actually succeeds in getting Bunuel to talk about himself and about film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That anodyne English title accompanied the original Stateside release which clipped about ten minutes off the full 1'33" running time.

LADY ON A TRAIN (1945)

After keeping Universal solvent in her teen heyday (late-‘30s/early-‘40s), soprano sensation Deanna Durbin survived a chubby adolescence only to shed pounds and lose star standing as she hit her twenties.*  Surprisingly, the studio didn’t give up easily, here laying out a lux cast (lux by Universal standards) of small-potato swains, but top character support around Durbin in this well produced comic whodunnit that almost works.  The comedy tanks badly (comedy writing hard!*); but ‘straight’ film noir elements unexpectedly fine; from its Miklós Rózsa score to Elwood Bredell’s chiaroscuro lensing, and, frankly, AI could write a decent murder mystery.  Durbin’s a nepo daughter taking the train to New York when it stops just long enough for her to witness a murder in a room across the elevated tracks.  Only problem, no one will believe her.  (This set-up, fresh at the time, would be famously used by Agatha Christie a decade later in  4:50 FROM PADDINGTON.)  Neat twists (Dan Duryea NOT the bad guy!) and a rattling pace from director Charles David.  Something of a film Jack-of-all-trades in Europe, David only directed twice, his second and last RIVER GANG/’45, a Universal B-pic starring Gloria Jean, a teenage singer meant to be ‘the next’ Deanna Durbin.  No dice.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Two years after this, Durbin would walk away from the screen, marry this film’s French director (49 years wed), never look back, move to France and refuse all offers for books, interviews or recording.  She’d had it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One good joke in the whole script: at a nightclub, but in mourning, Duryea orders a martini for his very proper Aunt.  But with a black olive.    

A LITTLE PRAYER (2023)

One of those modest films where you know what you’re getting into before you get into it.  A sure Audience Prize winner from some mid-list film fest; always a bad sign.  A rueful domestic tale best-destined for The New Yorker as a piece of short fiction you never get to.  An acclaimed ensemble cast that underwhelms.  (Other than pater familias David Strathairn, always good; even better acting under his pseudonym,  Sam Waterston.)  Capturing the sympathies of many a super-hero hardened critic who take it under their wing like a charity case.  (Only Angus MacLachlan’s third feature as writer/director since 2014.)  Not that it’s bad.  It’s adequate.*  More’s the pity; a tasteless moment might hot things up.  Strathairn’s the even-keeled Dad who runs a modest Heating-and-Cooling Factory & Service company with his son, a hail-fellow-well-met type who’s been papering-over serious personal issues (alcohol, drugs, infidelity, domestic violence) since returning from two military deployments.  Happily, the daughter-in-law is a dream for Strathairn and his wife (a costumed tour-guide docent at a local historical ‘colonial’ campus).  No doubt all the young couple needs is the baby they’ve long been trying for to get the relationship back on track.  Instead, we get the other sister back to the homestead with her needy hot-button issues and difficult little girl, having once more left her no’count drug-brewing husband, to lech on the family teat and be a role model for bad parenting.  MacLachlan’s careful to undersell this dramatic burgoo, only to juice things up in the last act with four or five big reveals.  I didn’t buy into any of them, but tens of others felt differently.

READ ALL ABOUT IT :  *I’ve stolen this idea of ‘adequate’ being worse than 'bad' from Orson Welles who said much the same in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich talking about Maurice Evans, the top Shakespearean during Welles’ Mercury Theatre heyday.  WELLES: He took on practically everything in Shakespeare, the critics raved, and the people packed in to see him.  BOGDANOVICH: And he was bad?  WELLES: Worse - he was poor.  Or so it’s transcribed (make that mis-transcribed) and printed in THIS IS ORSON WELLES.  But on the original audio tapes Welles clearly says: Worse - he was adequate.   FUN FACT: Evans, now probably best-known as Mia Farrow’s doctor in ROSEMARY’S BABY, was a ringer for Jack Benny!  Undoubtedly one of the many reasons Ernst Lubitsch thought of Benny (of all people, radio comedian of genius Jack Benny!) to play that great, great Polish Shakespearean, Josef Tura.

VIGIL IN THE NIGHT (1940)

As if doing penance for past pleasures, Carole Lombard (coming off the delicious melodrama of IN NAME ONLY/’39) and director George Stevens (fresh from Kipling’s tallest tale, GUNGA DIN/’39*) went all high-minded on the noble (if underpaid/appreciated) profession of nursing as seen in A.J. Cronin’s novel.  The popular Scotch novelist having something of a cinematic moment with VIGIL closely following THE CITADEL/’38 and this year’s THE STARS LOOK DOWN, both British-made prestige hits for M-G-M.  This one opens with Lombard (more Goddessy beautiful than ever*) trying to stay awake all-night with her young diphtheria patient before turning duty over to kid sister Anne Shirley (looking like the young Lana Turner) who immediately drops the ball, then lets Lombard take the blame.  Similar incidents pile up against a blameless Lombard as benefactors, bosses and big shots leave our good nurse holding the bag whenever things go wrong.  And they go wrong a lot!  Nonetheless, Carole perseveres, eventually proving her worth during a raging smallpox epidemic in a London isolation ward with the help of Brian Aherne, a devoted doctor who’s bothered to take note of what’s really going on behind the snubs and shifts in blame.  Heck, even that deadbeat sister comes thru by the end.  Dreary and self-sacrificial as this all is, the film builds sympathy, narrative interest and character as it goes along, but those two British-made adaptations have the edge on this one in almost every way.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, THE CITADEL and THE STARS LOOK DOWN.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/citadel-1938.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-stars-look-down-1940.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Plenty of big, stunning close-ups of Lombard at 32.  Stevens and cinematographer  Robert De Grasse obviously transfixed.  ALSO:  *That GUNGA DIN plot largely repurposed by Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur from their own play, THE FRONT PAGE/’31.

WHAT DID THE LADY FORGET? / SHUKUJO WA NANI O WASURETA KA (1937)

Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu was ‘discovered’ by post-WWII Western audiences via TOKYO STORY/’53, a quietly powerful family drama of grace notes, interpersonal subtleties and a diminuendo ending.  And while the film is representative of his style, and one of his greatest (make that one of film’s greatest), it also limited perception of Ozu’s range, losing sight of broader comic instincts.  So this minor effort, a sit-com of domestic strife, may mistakenly come as a surprise from this source.  What is surprising is its ‘Spare the rod and spoil the Wife’ moral.  Easy to forget how recently Hollywood dropped that sexist trope: the Happy Ending after Wife (or intended) got a good spanking and came to her senses, secretly pleased her man still cared enough to beat her; friends jealous since their husbands would never step up to bat.  Yikes!  Still easy to find in the 1960s.  And of course going back to The Taming of the Shrew and beyond.*  But who’d expect to find it in 1937 Ozu?  Here, it presents as a ‘much-deserved’ slap in the face from a weak-willed science professor, tired of being bossed around by the wife.  (Note: The couple childless, but the film’s last mini-arc pushes them, quite explicitly, toward the marital tatami.  The entire situation only coming to a head when his modern niece visits, rudely ticks off her nag of an Aunt, and tells Uncle to take charge of things.  NIECE: Lying for him when he’s caught spending the night at his assistant’s apartment when he was supposedly at a golfing weekend.  UNCLE: Egging on his handsome assistant to court this upstart niece.  Alas, the film, perfectly judged, acted and constructed, right down to some proto-‘pillow’ shots between scenes, is pretty weak tea.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Every modern production of TotS thinks they’re the first to have noticed (and fixed) Kate’s complete capitulation to Master Petruchio.  Making it unobjectionable by ironic playing or as comic over-reaction.  But has anyone ever seen a production that doesn’t undermine the groveling?  A tradition that likely started on the second night of the original 1594 production.