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.

YUNOST MAKSIMA / YOUTH OF MAXIM (1935)

Once a staple of Soviet Film Studies, The Maxim Trilogy (or Maksim or Maksima) has long dropped out of sight.  (So too Soviet Film Studies!)  But to judge by the first of the set (RETURN OF MAXIM/’37; NEW HORIZONS/’39 follow), that’s a pity.  The trio, written and directed by Grigoriy Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg, cover the tumultuous years 1910 to 1917 (though year-of-release 1935 is the film’s true focal point) as pre-Revolution Tsarist Russia simultaneously comes to a boil and runs out of steam.  Seen thru the eyes and actions of Maxim as he lives thru a Marxist sentimental education, he’s a naive young man whose life experiences lead him toward political radicalization.  There are parties (not the political kind), secret clubs (the political kind), schooling with anti-capitalist mathematical story problems (a hilarious scene) and near constant surveillance from the Tsar’s secret police.  (Nothing secret about them, they’re everywhere and always in uniform.)  Printing and passing out leaflets  about as far as anyone goes, but that’s enough to get you arrested.  Round ups leading to months in jail (a great place to meet fellow travelers) or to fill a quota for execution.  Eventually, Maxim’s tagged a habitual disturber of the peace (those leaflets) and is exiled from all the Russias.  The sentence both matriculation and set-up for eventual RETURN in the next film.  Though not before declining ‘comradely handshake of farewell from destined girlfriend, for kiss of remembrance.  Da!’  Boris Chirkov, Maxim in all three pics, is allowed to build up a winning presence rare in these Soviet films.  And the sophisticated use of  editing, dissolves & compositions (in spite of early Soviet Talkie ideas on narrative continuity) adds depth of texture and technical interest.*  Plus the largely diegetic score of political period songs well known to the proletariat, leaves just enough space in the opening scene for a snow ride where they let a young Dmitri Shostakovich have his head.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Parts two and three : RETURN OF MAXIM and NEW HORIZONS.  The last with guest appearances from Lenin and Stalin.

LINK: Free youtube link to Y.M. here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg93RFh5sEY

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Lenser Andrey Moskvin would later shoot IVAN THE TERRIBLE/'44; '46 for Sergei Eisenstein.

DONGJI RESCUE / DONG JI DAO (2025)

Think of it this way: If Michael Bay can reduce the Japanese attack on PEARL HARBOR/’01 into a loud, pseudo-patriotic, fast-paced, dumbed-down Michael Bay film, why shouldn’t Chinese directors  Zhenxiang Fei and Guan Hu give a ‘Pop’ patriotic spin to a heroic WWII incident that took place on a small isolated island in the East China Sea where Native fisherman were living under brutal Japanese occupation.  Especially when these two filmmakers easily best Bay at his own game.  The actual incident started when an American submarine successfully torpedoed the Japanese freighter Lisbon Maru, unaware that 1,800 British P.O.W.s were locked inside.  (Beyond this, truth leaks faster than water on the fast-sinking Lisbon Maru.)  One prisoner, blown off the ship’s deck and out to sea, is rescued by the kid brother of a pair of fisherman living alone of the far side of the island.  His older brother knows saving this man will mean nothing but trouble and tries to throw him back like an undersized catch.  Yikes!  Sure enough, word gets around, and the Japanese, already feeling disgraced by the ship attack, hold the entire island responsible.  Meanwhile, 1800 prisoners in the holds below deck are sure to drown when the ship sinks.  On the island, Japanese miscalculate with extreme cruelty which backfires, causing an uprising by the islanders who mount an attack before taking to sea with a flotilla of small fishing boats to try and save what men they can; the attack heroically led by that once reluctant older brother.  Marvelously characterized and cast, with spirit and humor in the first half, followed by astounding action footage (CGI fakery kept to a minimum) in the second; islanders showing pluck, cunning, sacrifice and courage.  Showmanship and flair aided by the use of a striking, extra-wide  format (frame ratio 2.85 : 1) while story and character development never let up.  Particularly so for older brother Bi-An (Yilong Zhu) who brings a level of physical swagger to personal vengeance rarely seen since Daniel Day Lewis bared his torso and started to run down his enemies in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS/’92.  Stirring stuff, reveling in its sure audience manipulation.  Plus a moral: Learn to hold your breath underwater for a good four minutes!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  Best guess is that co-director Zhenxiang Fei (mainly with tv background) played kid brother to director Guan Hu whose last film was BLACK DOG/’24, a sort of anti-epic epic as subtle and abstract as this one is broad and concrete.  Note cinematographer Weizhe Gao came along with him.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/04/black-dog-gouzhen-2024.html

DOUBLE-BILL:  A documentary on the incident, THE SINKING OF THE LISBON MARU (not seen here), released in 2024.

THIS REBEL BREED (1960)

Descriptions of this zero-budget exploitation indie might as well be promising THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE meets 21 JUMP STREET (the earnest  ‘87 series, not the winking 2012 film).  Drug-fueled, racially-charged High School on the edge of violent gang-led implosion admits a pair of undercover cops posing as (very remedial) students to investigate the problems.  And damned if this description ain’t accurate.  At last, truth in movie advertising!  But directors Richard L. Bare & William Rowland so incompetent, the product so dreary, so starved of invention, there’s hardly a bit of fun to be had.  Worse, in trying to squeeze out an extra dribble of cash (from where? - Drive-In triple-bill rentals?), they tacked on a few make-out sequences which pop up at random moments for half-minute orgasmic rug rolls with skimpily-clad sexpots & horny boyfriends not in the rest of the film.*  Even a belly dancer as Special Guest Boob.  Rita Moreno is in here for the big dramatics as a Hispanic with a taste for White boys.  One knocks her up before getting knocked off.  (And why not?  When Moreno knocked off work she presumably was nailing her audition for WEST SIDE STORY/’61.)  BTW,  Moreno already 29, and all the other speaking parts cast with ‘teenagers’ also nearing 30 who’d soon be seen on tv; like Mark Damon in swarthy Mexicali make-up; Al Freeman Jr. there to give racial peace a chance; Richard Rust trying to hook the whole school (and selected kid brothers) on ‘Mary Jane.’  This ought to be a hoot.  Instead, it’s a pass.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The re-release with softer-than-soft-core trimmings retitled THE BLACK REBELS.  Pretty insulting; especially as the Black gang gets less footage than Whites or Hispanics.

SKYLARK (1941)

Even in the ‘20s. ‘30s, and ‘40s, when B’way’s footprint on mass culture was at its height, reigning stage divinities rarely made the movie version of their latest smash.*  Take Gertrude Lawrence, the hard-to-photograph stage star of this Samuel Raphealson play.  Here, she’s been replaced by Claudette Colbert as an advertising man’s wife who succumbs to ‘the Five Year Itch’ when husband Ray Milland puts business first once-too-often and a flirtatious Brian Aherne pitches woo.  Colbert proves one of the best substitutes in locating the elusive Lawrence charm, poise & presence.*   (Previously, Colleen Moore, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford & Ginger Rogers took turns; later Deborah Kerr.)  Raphaelson’s rueful, but rather sour play is perilously ‘opened up’ by ‘Hollywood Ten’ scripter Allan Scott.  (One of the few on the Communist Blacklist who actually tucked a bit of Leftist ideology into a film.  Listen up in a subway sequence where bickering husband Milland & wife Colbert hear out various riders’ comments, including a proletariat type behind his newspaper.  It’s Scott’s best addtion to the play.)  Elsewhere, he’s content to dumb things down with physical shtick and a kitchen cooking fiasco for Colbert.*  Director Mark Sandrich shows a limber touch when he can (see prologue), but elsewise has to deal with the arguments on work, life and compatibility reduced to a level that makes Colbert’s final choice even more unsatisfying than I think Raphealson wanted it to be.  Still, if not particularly funny, pretty interesting as a period piece on marriage & mores if you read between the lines.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Katharine Hepburn, an apparent exception to the substitution rule on her ‘comeback’ role in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, only got the film because she controlled the show rights.  *BTW note Kate also played the kitchen fiasco scene from this film for her PHILLY follow-up in WOMAN OF THE YEAR/’42.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  To see Colbert really run with the idea of fixing a stale marriage with a flirtation, Preston Sturges to the rescue in next year’s THE PALM BEACH STORY/’42.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-palm-beach-story-1942.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  STAR/’68, the Julie Andrews/Robert Wise bio-pic on Lawrence famously missed capturing the aura that saw Noel Coward, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Kurt Weill all write SongBook Standards for a woman unable to stay on key.

THE INNER CIRCLE (1991)

Pushing 90 and still active, few filmmakers of Andrei Konchalovsky’s stature have a C.V. as uneven as this Russian exile.  Showing good form in pulpy Stateside action/suspense like RUNAWAY TRAIN/’85, brilliantly sharp as recently as 2020 in his bureaucratic ‘Party Line’ takedown DEAR COMRADES!* (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/dear-comrades-dorogie-tovarishchi-2020.html), then serving up five embarrassments for each winner.  But he’s rarely been so evenly divided between his best & worst instincts within a single film as in this fascinating, fact-based life of Ivan Sanshin, personal projectionist to movie fan (and deadly critic) Comrade Josef Stalin.  Tom Hulce does a great job as the star-struck projectionist (watch him load film without looking) who can’t believe his luck, or notice how his good fortune is ruining his life with fragile wife Lolita Davidovich.  He becomes entangled with Stalin’s Inner Circle; she becomes emotionally entangled with the child of arrested neighbors.  Konchalovsky oversells everything in typical Russian fashion (the heartier the acting the better), whether scooping out caviar or baring your soul.  But while Hulce has the acting chops to cope with extremes, Davidovich is all at sea, unable to regulate.  Her tragedy seems less preordained fate than poor life choices.  And Konchalovsky never noticing the wheels are coming off his conception.  Still, fine scene setting (Moscow 1939 - 1953) and great supporting players almost get the project back on track.  Coarse & powerful/banal & thought-provoking; it’s the Konchalovsky dilemma.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Konchalovsky was at his very best in early collaborations with Andrei Tarkovsky on two stunning masterpieces, IVAN’S CHILDHOOD/’62 and ANDREI RUBLEV/’66.  A stabilizing influence who kept Tarkovsky grounded in narrative soil.  (And there are rumors of a third film: planned, shot, never released.  MosFilm!, please check your archive!)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   Armando Iannucci’s mordant/alarming THE DEATH OF STALIN/’17.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-death-of-stalin-2017.html

THUNDERBIRDS (1965 - ‘66)

Irresistible.  Of the fantasy/adventure puppet shows created by Sylvia & Gerry Anderson in the mid-‘60s for British tv (filmed in SuperMarionation!; still syndicated ‘round the globe), this 32 episode series about a top-secret/family-run/last-resort rescue outfit is the best-remembered.  Not that it's so superior to similar Anderson shows of the ‘60s.  It’s more that where the others made do with half-hour time slots, THUNDERBIRDS got a full-hour.  Subtracting commercials and credits means a bit over 20" vs. a bit over 40"; the latter proving a perfect length for set-up, characterizations, unfolding disaster; late plot twist and dangerous mission hitch before saving  things from catastrophe in the nick of time!  Set a century in the future (2065) our heroes a family of five grown-up boys, The Tracys, commanded by their widowed dad, and living on a secret island with Grandma and a few non-family assistants (technical genius 'Brains' like a nerdy sixth sibling) while underground silos store fabulous jets & space rocket rescue vehicles.  Stories mostly the same: futuristic technology goes haywire and the family is contacted to save the day.  (A ‘clip’ show ends season one and a Christmas Special ends the series.)  What makes it so charming & fun is watching them solve all the technical tricks in scale within the limitations of marionette puppetry.*  (Occasional cheats come via close-ups of real hands and real scenery.)  Spot the modest improvements in detail work: immovable mouths loosen up; eyes start to blink, hair is restyled, but keeping extravagant eyebrows on all the villains.  A ‘Cool Britain’ vibe lasts for the first ten episodes (very SECRET AGENT MAN; THE AVENGERS) with Barry Gray’s pulse-pounding score (bongos to the fore, then refraining till the penultimate episode).  And note how Dad Tracy favors eldest son Scott (the only one with dimples!); and constant changes to London agent Lady Penelope’s coifs and couture.  Plus sexual tension on the isle; so much testosterone and only one eligible gal.  (Son Virgil Tracy mentions a wife and kids, but we never see them.)  But if there’s no sex, we do get plenty of suggestive space docking and surface drilling.  Yikes!  That rubber cement glue used for all those scale-model space ships and hovering jet planes must have lingered in the air on set.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The Tracys always end ship to ship or ship to base messages saying ‘F.A.B.’  Apparently, it’s no anagram, simply a phrase like A. O. K. or Roger & Out acknowledging reception.  F.A.B.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One thing Andersons & crew can do little about is getting water and fire to match scale.  A problem only solved (if that’s the word) once CGI came on the movie scene.

HIGHEST 2 LOWEST (2025)

Spike Lee has made better films (a few) and worse (quite a few), but never one more unnecessary.  A glossy, but empty remake of Akira Kurosawa’s stunning realization of Ed McBain’s KING’S RANSOM, reconfigured as a suspense-filled experiment in film structure for HIGH AND LOW/’62.  The basic set up remains: cash-strapped mogul holding the line on quality & integrity in his product (Lee swaps out shoes for music) has the rug pulled out from him in the middle of a risky business gamble when his son is kidnapped.  Suddenly his financial maneuvers all meaningless.  Dropping company deal-making for family business, he bites the bullet on bail bargaining to save his son only to discover the kidnappers took the wrong kid; they grabbed the chauffeur’s boy.  Yikes!  Will he still go thru with the payout?  It’s a pulpy plot (hey, Ed McBain/87th PRECINCT - see post directly below!), but what Kurosawa did with it was genre genius.  A long still-life Act One, set entirely inside the family’s apartment.  Short Act Two leaping into movement on the street/in the subway for the cash drop-off.  Act Three a brief presto of a chase, then a quick cadenza of a coda.  (Kurosawa not a Western classical music buff for nothing.)  Lee sticking to usual hostage genre tropes & tripe (second & third act all nonsense - that ultra-coordinated  bail drop!), lets his aging star, Denzel Washington, take the glory where Kurosawa all but pushes Toshiro Mifune out of the pic.  Mifune 42 at the time; Washington older and thicker than you remember, is 71.  Worse, he works too hard to show he’s still got what it takes when he ought to be paring back.  (Call it Kirk Douglas syndrome.)  Over-produced/under-characterized, with a weirdly ineffective ‘cool jazz’ score by Howard Drossin and would-be chart-busting hits to show Washington’s still got ‘the best ears in the biz.’  Where’s Quincy Jones when Spike needs him?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Go with the obvious choice, HIGH AND LOW.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/07/tengoku-to-jigoku-high-and-low-1962.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Look sharp when Washington & chauffeur Jeffrey Wright investigate a lead at a crummy apartment building.  The apartment number?  A-24.  Get it?  Lame-O, Spike.

COP HATER (1958)

First try filming 87th PRECINCT, the popular paperback police procedurals by Ed McBain, is both pulpy and priceless.  Pulpy because this cheaply made/down & dirty NYC indie looks a good half-step below episodic tv of the time (unintentionally perfect for what hack director William Berke is going for); priceless because it preserves bits of NYC back-alley ‘nabs’ from back in the day.  Even rarer, real interiors: ‘dive bars,’ tenement halls & kitchens, plus aging institutional buildings filmed check-by-jowl with whatever faceless underdressed sets they could afford.  And doubly priceless as it also preserves a rising new style of urban Method Acting (the post-Elia Kazan model) that John Cassavetes codified starting with FACES/’64.  The big difference that whereas Cassavetes & Co. never seemed to have met a person who wasn’t a struggling Method Actor, this team act as if they’ve stayed in touch with paid-by-the-piece laborers.  The lack of self-referential mannerism, even when the acting’s awkward, keeps them relatable and believable.  With debuts (or nearly so) for Jerry Orbach, Vincent Gardenia, a lithe/sexy Robert Loggia, et al.*  Story and execution nothing special, but it’ll do as a series of cops from the 87th get randomly shot.  Some psycho?  A gang of trouble-making toughs who failed the audition for the original cast of WEST SIDE STORY?  A gun humper hot for his latest 45 caliber?  Well, it works for the 1'15" running time; and the books would go on to be a tv series, tv movies and various international iterations, while McBain would also go on.  You know him better under his real name, Evan Hunter.  The one he used writing THE BIRDS/’63 for Alfred Hitchcock.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Check out Glenn Cannon, co-starring with Orbach at the time in THE THREE-PENNY OPERA at the Theater de Lys, the longrun Brecht/Weill/Blitzstein revival that established Off-Broadway as a commercial enterprise.  Cannon’s great as a punk kid being interviewed by a slick newspaper reporter.  The whole thing looking like a Chelsea pick-up.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Loggia’s fiancée is written as ‘deaf and dumb,’ actress Ellen Parker who plays her is neither.  Still, kudos (to novelist McBain?) for making her condition largely incidental, not the focus of the story.  Very unusual at the time.

THE LAST SUNSET (1961)

After officially emerging from the ‘50s Hollywood Blacklist of Card-Carrying-Communists (and those who may simply have rubbed shoulders with one) in 1960 with the one-two-punch of SPARTACUS and EXODUS, longtime top-tier screenwriter Dalton Trumbo* solidified his renewed standing with this solid Western for Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas who also produced.  Based on a novel by Howard Rigsby*, it’s a neat piece of plotting that can’t nail the ending, but still worthy under Robert Aldrich's firm control; stately, but flaring up whenever Joseph Cotten’s ex-Confederate officer hits the bottle and in some imaginative action under clouds of dust, courtesy of cinematographer Ernest Laszlo.  The main story has Sheriff Rock Hudson following Kirk Douglas into Mexico with a warrant for his arrest on a murder charge.  Douglas, not only escaping the law, but trying to rekindle an old relationship with Cotten’s wife Dorothy Malone, stuck on their cattle ranch with pretty young daughter Carol Lynley.  Hudson & Douglas make unlikely hires to get the herd back to the States for sale . . . and Douglas to trial.  Trumbo can’t quite finesse this major plot point, but, hey, there’s a movie to be made.  Hudson near his best here, much helped by having to play with an actor as naturally theatrical as Douglas, the ball coming back harder than he throws it.  (Benefits also work in the opposite direction.)  And the cattle drive sees shifting allegiances as Malone leans in to Rock while daughter Lynley falls for Douglas.  With a good twist up ahead to drive the finale after having survived rough terrain, a trio of mutinous cow hands (Jack Elam, Neville Brand, James Westmoreland) and a Capitalist tribe of Indians.  Trumbo no doubt delighted by these smart Native traders.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Check out the three-inch heels on Kirk’s boots.  There’s a clear shot near the end on a wharf.  Kirk usually touchy on the subject even allows 6'4" Rock to describe him as a short guy.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *TRUMBO/'15.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/trumbo-2015.html

CONTEST:  *Either Rigsby or Trumbo must have had Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES in mind when they were figuring out two major plot points.  Figure out the connection and put it in Comments to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choosing.

O AGENTE SECRETO / THE SECRET AGENT (2025)

Extrapolating from the four films I’ve been able to see, Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho has been turning out well-made, enigmatic, politically-minded shorts, tv & features for two decades.*  (Not much distribution Stateside.)  Now, he's upped his game from solid to great.  This film awarded everywhere but the Oscars®.  (Four noms/zero wins: you can always count on Mr. O.)  The film a portrait of Brazil in 1977 (there’s also a 2025 epilogue) less focused on military rule and atrocities than the wide, often banal effects (deadly in their own way) of a corrupt government: venal cops threatening to ’plant’ evidence on shakedown targets; eagerly cooperating bureaucrats in State offices; highly organized Southern gangs using Quotidian Horrors and Mob Murder to control the obsequious North of the country.  Actor Wagner Moura (probably new to most viewers*) in protean form, is Marcelo/Ambrose, a man trying to leave the country, along with his young son after the mother’s death from cancer, finds he's being blocked by past politics.  Going North for possible escape, he travels under an assumed name and pays the expected bribes & fees to get his papers & passport in order, waiting it out in a house of similarly desperate people.  Filho handles the large cast. sweeping action & events with the dexterity of a Disney artist with a multiplane camera, everything clear (character & narrative) with lines of action indirectly indicated rather than being pointed out.  The elliptical style giving a timeless/universal quality to events.  With the sort of thrillingly choreographed suspense and compound street chases Francis Coppola was a master of when he still regularly made movies.  Filho’s film immensely satisfying on multiple levels.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Now 50, if looking about 35, Moura is suddenly a hot property with upcoming co-stars like Colin Farrell, Ralph Fiennes & Kristin Stewart.  You may already know his voice as he was ‘Wolf’ in the superb PUSS IN BOOTS sequel, THE LAST WISH/’22.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/01/puss-in-boots-last-wish-2022.html

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Try Filho’s hauntingly enigmatic NEIGHBORING SOUNDS/’14, a film that blows up inside your head months after watching it.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/o-som-ao-reder-neighboring-sounds.html

THE JAZZ SINGER (1952)

No BlackFace in this remake of the 1927 Al Jolson original.  So, progress?*  Alas, not much else improved.  No doubt someone at Warner Bros. thought popular nightclub entertainer Danny Thomas could carry a film.  After this, Thomas never tried again.  Now best known for his charity hospital (daughter Marlo still fronting donations), Thomas was a pleasant rather than riveting presence, just the thing for tv.  (Even more successful as a producer.)  Monologist rather than jokester, his strength as a performer something the film fails to get across.  So, we’re left with the old story of a Jewish Cantor Father assuming his son will carry on the family tradition at Sinai Temple rather than go into showbiz.  Tempting songster Peggy Lee’s around to encourage his ambitions, but Danny backtracks when he doesn’t make a quick breakthru.  Not much director Michael Curtiz can do with this one; Thomas changing his direction with the wind, Peggy Lee disconnected from the main action (not a peep about religious differences, and backstage insider stuff completely outgunned by next year’s THE BANDWAGON/’53), while attempts to make the plot less melodramatic only thins out the atmosphere & texture, the two main things going for the 1927 original.  That and Jolson’s raw, almost disturbing, force.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In a parallel Father/Son story, the 1927 original (considered Hollywood’s first Talkie) was directed by Alan  Crosland, father of this film’s editor, Alan Crosland Jr.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *BlackFace is back, baby!  For all you masochists, BlackFace returned (less black than fleshly gray & clownish) when Jerry Lewis remade JAZZ SINGER for a 1959 live tv production ‘in Living Color.’  Real deal Yiddish theater star Molly Picon brings verisimilitude as Momma and Eduard Franz repeats from here as ‘Poppa.’   And if you think Jerry doesn’t take over shabbos services while still wearing traces of that clown-face makeup, you’ve got another think coming.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBe0qy5k8vk

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Nothing we’d call ‘jazz’ found in any version of this story.  The term has narrowed over the decades; but who’d go to see THE SYNCOPATED ‘POP’ SINGER?   (A perfect title for the Neil Diamond/Laurence Olivier iteration of 1980.)  ALSO:  A real Jazz Singer story might be found in the loving relationship between American Songbook composer Harold Arlen and his father, longtime Cantor at Temple Adath Yeshurun in Syracuse, NY, who used to sneak his son’s tunes into services.  Imagine hearing bits of ‘Blues In The Night’ in the midst of his cantorial melismas.

CUT BANK (2014)

Passable attempt at reviving a revival by writer Roberto Patino and director Matt Shakman, each with recent top-tier streaming credits (GAME OF THRONES, WESTWORLD,  WANDAVISION, THE GREAT), here showing more affection than aptitude for the 1980s Neo-Noir revival they’re trying to hollanderize.  Specific target, as usual, J. & E. Coen’s BLOOD SIMPLE/’84; but less a reasonable facsimile thereof than stylistic homage, like a finals project at UCLA Film School.  Starting with that mysterious title, actually the name of an actual town in Montana where Liam Hemsworth (distracting tall & handsome) is part of a convoluted plot to fake a mail carrier’s murder and split town with the reward & his girl.  But too many cogs spoil the loot and soon real bodies start to pile up.  Some of this is faintly amusing, some just dumb (especially the women's largely reactive roles, with misogyny displacing misanthropy).  Console yourself with the clever casting choices: Billy Bob Thornton now playing out-of-the-loop Dad instead of creepy town weirdo, that’s taxidermist Michael Stuhlbarg.  And if John Malkovich is a bit dried out as the only law in town, it’s sweet to see Bruce Dern, the foul-tempered, deceitful mailman who plays fake victim in the plan, nail the same role he’d have taken in 1984.  Dern no mere character-actor legend, he’s fucking immortal.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Seen BLOOD SIMPLE?  A couple of years later, John Frankenheimer pulled off a Neo-Noir no one thinks of any more: 52 PICKUP/’86.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/52-pickup-1986.html

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS / SENNEN JOYÛ (2001)

The early death of ‘millennial’ anime-tor Satoshi Kon (at just 46 in 2010) seems an even greater tragedy (an artistic tragedy) after seeing this remarkable film; possibly his finest.  Its story, advanced in an unusual narrative form, vibrantly visualized and ‘meta’ to the max, using a particularly fluid technique & superior characterization (as drawn & written, with nothing prefabricated) a perfect fit for telling the life and career of studio actress Chiyoko Fujiwarara just as her old studio is being torn down.  A young cameraman and an older interviewer are out to get a rare one-on-one chat and surprised to find the reclusive actress (older, but still beautiful) so open & welcoming.  And here’s where Satoshi Kon (who also co-wrote) shows his special qualities as the contemporary reporters come along inside her memories.  At times, watching from the side, other times participating in the action.  The older reporter having been a besotted intern/assistant on her post-war projects, he’s either working on-set or playing a part in front of the camera (sometimes as he appears now, sometimes as he was then)  Underneath the reporters’ hunt for her personality, Chiyoko also on the hunt for a man she helped cheat death when he was being hunted by the military.  The two promising to meet again after the war; a promise symbolized by a key that comes & goes throughout the course of her working life.  Told without definite lines of division between what she’s living and what’s she’s shooting on film.  Often stepping in and out of the narrative continuity in a fashion that puts the SpiderVerse (and its constant confusion) to shame.  Wonderfully uplifting as pure anime (Satoshi had the best color palette in the biz), the film’s also not afraid to be wonderfully sad in the telling.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Young anme master Makoto Shinkai picked up the gauntlet from Satoshi Kon, see YOUR NAME/’16.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kimi-no-na-wa-your-name-2016.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Satoshi Kon loved to quote from classic Japanese cinema, here Akira Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD/’57 shows; and isn’t that Kenji Mizoguchi’s  THE LIFE OF OHARU/’52?

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988)

Opening with an apologia (from the Nikos Kazantzakis novel?) to anticipate accusations of blasphemy, we’re told upfront this is not a tale of the Christ from one of the Gospels.  But it is: The Gospel of Martin.  And Scorsese acolytes have long bent over backward to praise the film and spread the Not-So-Good-News: Jesus not only sacrificed his life to save mankind, he also gave up a putative home life as suburban dad with wife, kids & carpentry business.  (Or at least thought of doing so, a la  Ambrose Bierce.*)  That’s the bit that got Scorsese in advance trouble with the usual suspects (Conservative/Evangelical Christians who hadn’t seen the film . . . and never would), but St. Martin didn’t help his cause with barriers that kept ‘friendlies’ away, too.  Jesus as expert crucifix carpenter (such irony; and think of the shipping fees from Nazareth); Harvey Keitel’s Judas as henna-haired BFF; scripter Paul Schrader’s streetwise locutions (plus not a single line of dialogue given to a person of color . . . in the MidEast?); and in Willem Defoe a Christ more Scandanavian in looks than Max von Sydow’s Jesus in George Stevens’ dismal THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD/’65.  (At 2'44" this one only seems as long as TGSET’s full-cut of 4'20".)  Oddest of all, with all the echoes of rough-hewn religious bio-pics from Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini*, Scorsese’s endeavor, doesn’t feel so different from those mercenary, commercially-oriented Hollywood epics; and the religiosity even worse.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Get a lot closer to the subject with Monty Python’s THE LIFE OF BRIAN/’79.  Really.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/05/life-of-brian-1979.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Specifically, Bierce’s short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,’ appearing here as An Occurrence at Golgotha Heights.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:   *But the poster following a different director; Otto Preminger from his classic Saul Bass period.

LES CHOSES DE LA VIE / THE THINGS OF LIFE (1970)

Well received breakthru toward what might be called ‘Quotidian Bourgeoisie’ came to quintessential French director Claude Sautet midway along his stingy fourteen film output.  Told in non-chronological flashbacks after a car crash has stopped forward momentum on a life’s worth of decisions (personal & business/public & private) for middle-aged builder & family man Michel Piccoli, that French Everyman of moral indecision.  As a builder, he and his longtime partner are up against opposing plans by their backers while at home (if indeed Piccoli currently has one) he’s promised younger lover Romy Schneider they’re starting anew in a fresh city, but has also promised grown son Gérard Lartigau (hard to imagine as Piccoli’s son) to join him and his girlfriend for two weeks at the old family vacation home . . . with ex-wife attending.  (How amicable are these two?)  Well done and well cast, but whatever was advanced about this in 1970, now looks pretty common.  The film far surpassed by every Sautet film made after it.  (At least, the one’s I’ve seen!)  The list an extraordinarily sophisticated group of original ideas lifting the lid on that Quotidian Bourgeoisie so often looked down upon by French intellectuals & cineasts.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Look for them here: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=sautet; along with a special appearance from his debut pic.  New to Sautet?  Plump for CLASSE TOUS RISQUES / THE BIG RISK/’60 and UN MAUVAIS FILS / A BAD SON/’80.

WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (1986)

Simple and effective, even when it stumbles, this nuclear cautionary uses hand-drawn animation with a flat palette to tell its story of ‘little’ people calmly living thru quiet desperation in the aftermath of world destruction from an atomic bombing.  Our retired couple (voiced by Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills, they’re the entire cast), long moved from the city to a small house in the country.  With the coming crisis announced on radio and in the paper, the husband attempts to follow all the advise in official government pamphlets (a step and a half beyond the old ‘duck and cover’ instructions) and hold out till service is restored.  Totally on their own, without a soul to turn to, media to inform, power or water; between diminishing resources and advancing radiation poisoning, the outcome is inevitable.  Director Jimmy T. Murakami changes gears during some dream sequences with a more fluid/fantastic style, but mostly keeps things to a Lake District/watercolor æsthetic that turns gray & empty as time passes.  The film's main trouble stems from the ingrained British condescension toward the unsophisticated middle-class, presumably coming from writer Raymond Briggs, who makes the husband a docile follower of rules, and the wife not so much down to earth as slow on the uptake.  (Of course, thinking that a nice cup of tea can fix anything isn’t too far off the mark!)  More interesting today as a socio-political take on the times (trendy enough to get David Bowie to do the title track) than as film, but it gets by.

DOUBLE-BILL:  For real artistic engagement with the folly of war and destruction in animated form from this period, there’s the unique style of cartoonist/animator R.O. Blechman with a resoundingly successful version of Igor Stravinsky’s THE SOLDIER’S TALE/’84 (Max von Sydow, Andre Gregory, Serge Gainsbourg among the vocal cast) which (alas) only seems to be currently available in a version cut in running time and aspect ratio.

DEEP IMPACT (1998)

SUMMER: 1998.  OMG!  There’s a gigantic meteor headed toward Earth!  Look again . . . SUMMER: 1998.  OMG!  There are TWO gigantic meteors headed toward Earth!  ARMAGEDDON, ‘Pop’ flavored extinction from Michael Bay thru Touchstone/Disney* while director Mimi Leder for Paramount/Dreamworks puts out this more sober-sided global finale.  JAWS producers David Brown & Richard Zanuck take first-position credit, even against Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks.  It certainly doesn’t feel like a Spielberg movie*; nor for that matter Brown/Zanuck.  What it very much does feel like is a Sherry Lansing-era Paramount production, a paradigm (or is it parody?) of when she was Head of Production.  Uncredited among the film’s producers, the Lansing touch of highly polished secondhand goods, faux serious tropes (here, mostly ON THE BEACH/’59) and over-qualified talent given little to do, are all in place.  Old pros to lend unearned gravitas; up-and-comers lucky to get ten lines of dialogue.  No one actively disgracing themselves (other than composer James Horner and Téa Leoni’s hair), and the 1998 state-of-the-art special effects have their moments, but the film has almost no personality.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Compare and contrast with ARMAGEDDON.  (not seen here)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Except for the use of Spielberg mentored director Mimi Leder who briefly held a niche as the rare woman who crept onto the Hollywood short lists to helm action fare after a big Spielberg launch.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  People have varied opinions on what’s improved and what’s been lost with the move away from ‘practical’ effects and the rise of CGI.  But no one doubts the improvement in Hollywood pizza since the ‘90s.  Check out that disaster Charles Martin Smith is eating in the prologue.

ELEANOR THE GREAT (2025)

Venturesome actress Scarlett Johansson had her own ‘but what I really want to do is direct’ epiphany in this modest One-Little-Lie-and-How-It-Grew story; a sort of Senior Citizen DEAR EVAN HANSEN: Holocaust Edition.  94-yr-old June Squibb stars as the 94-yr-old fabulist who moves into her daughter’s Upper West Side Manhattan apartment after the death of her Holocaust survivor BFF/roommate.  Demanding, feisty, always kidding-on-the-square, her over-tasked daughter signs her up for JCC activities she ducks out on.  Instead, wandering down the hall and into a Holocaust Survivor support group.  Embarrassed to be there on false pretenses, she impulsively relates the real-life experiences of her late roommate as her own.  Yikes!  Worse, an eager-beaver journalism student (Erin Kellyman) gloms onto these purloined memories for a school project.  Worse², the kid’s a grief-stricken nepo-journalist.  (Dad Chiwetel Ejiofor, yet to grieve for his wife, the girl’s late mother, is a tv commentator.)  And before you can say Jacob Rabinsky or belated Bat Mitzvah*, our faux Concentration Camp pixie centenarian is getting press coverage, tv attention and general kvelling.  Naturally, this house of cards must collapse, but not before the distasteful set up leaves a foul taste in your mouth.  (Those sit-com comeback lines for Squibb from scripter Tory Kamen are the least of it.)  And as for Johansson behind the camera?  The expected over-reliance on close-ups to do the work.  (One measly piece of narrative info conveyed visually when Squibb sits alone on a beach bench.)  Still, kudos to Johansson for landing one of these directing debuts without having to also star in it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In our continuing survey of food and cooking gaffes on film, note the poorly stocked section of shelf-stable pickles Squibb complains about to show her ‘fearless’ character.  No one noticed they’re loaded with jars of Ba-Tampte Pickles, traditional salt-cured Kosher varieties that must be kept under refrigeration.  Now that would be something to complain about!  ‘Are you trying to kill me and my friend with your spoiled pickles?’

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *For a late in life adult Bar Mitzvah, check out one of the sweetest of all DICK VAN DYKE SHOW episodes: BUDDY SORRELL: MAN AND BOY/’66.

THIS IS MY DESIRE / EYIMOFE (2020)

Debut film of twin Nigerian brothers Arie & Chuko Esiri* is fittingly a twinned story; fraternal not identical.  DESIRE both a portrait of two disparate personalities and of Lagos, Nigeria.  The first, and more original of the two, is something of a Book of Job update about a single forty-something man,,a naturally gifted electrician  trying to get everything together for his move to Spain.  But a series of tragedies and losses take away almost everything he has: sister & nephews, inheritance, job, cash reserves, all of it playing out in a slow motion series of unforced errors.  But it’s his demeanor (calmly accepting, stoic; with one exception) and the way he manages to be down & out yet holding his head above water that sustain interest; along with the portrait of life in Lagos.  If this man can carry on . . .   The second story navigates the fast swings from favor to failure of a younger woman, a bartender with fashion model looks, who longs to run a dress-shop in Italy, but has nothing but trouble trying to put together the forms needed to travel out of the country and restart her life in a more promising fashion.  It’s those good looks that lead to the troubles, constantly proposed for dates, but not proposals.  Except from the guy she doesn’t want: her landlord.  What about that White American with a crush and a hefty wallet?  Meanwhile, her younger sister has tied herself up in an iffy pregnancy and a baby-selling racket.  Here, the twins preference for indirection/indication rather than clarity leaves a few too many unfilled holes, but there’s enough to hang on to.  (And the first story also get a hopeful epilogue.)  Easy to forget how one of film’s earliest appeals came from its ability to bring the world to viewers in costumes, customs, cultures and countries we might not otherwise experience.  The Esiri brothers have mastered that part already.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *CLARISSA, their free adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s MRS. DALLOWAY, a hot item at this year’s Cannes.

FELIDAE (1994)

A big international seller in print (less so Stateside), Akif Pirinçci’s serial killer story came with a twist, the cast is all cats.  A few humans make appearances, the felines call them ‘can openers,’ but this elsewise relatively straightforward catch-the-killer pic, structured as a standard ‘procedural,’ came within a whisker of getting picked up for a live-action Hollywood feature.  That idea fell thru (too much ‘hard R’ sex & violence?), so it stayed in Germany as a rare adult animated feature.  Director Michael Schaack’s hand-drawn style, something between '70s-era Disney & Bakshi, proves a good fit for charting new-to-the-neighborhood tomcat Francis who immediately lands inside the invetsgation when a mutilated cat appears below his window.  He makes a perfect lead to take us thru character introducions and exposition as new acquaintances pass on rumor & info . . . before passing on.  Yikes!  Suspects include an experimental unit of human researches using stray cats for testing; a cat cult of fatalistic ferals; a tough old bruiser; a slinky gal who’s always in heat (yowl!); an elderly sage who’s computer literate; et al.  Plenty of egos and misadventures for Francis to come against.  Yet the story isn’t nearly as involving or fun as the set up promises.  Needlessly fantastic on a story that needs straight playing for the suspense, waggish humor and seriously bleak tone to come across.  Maybe with new film technology (and Guillermo del Toro?) time's ripe for that Live-Action production?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Martin Rosen’s lesser-known follow-up to Richard Adams’ WATERSHIP DOWN/’78, THE PLAGUE DOGS/’82, shows a better approach to this sort of material.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-plague-dogs-1982.html