A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST (1934)

The filming is downright primitive under Christy Cabanne’s non-interventionist helming in this Monogram Poverty Row production of Gene Stratton-Porter once popular novel.  (Five filmings from 1924 to 1990.)  But perhaps raw & obvious is the right way to go on this rural Pollyana tale of hard-luck kid Elnora Comstock (Marian Marsh) whose embittered, careworn mother (Louise Dresser) blames the child for the premature death of the father, drowned in the swamp on his way home for the birth.  Largely raised by the kindly, childless neighbors over the years, and by two rich benefactors (a local dowager and a sparkling Eastern college boy) who take pity on the girl, she rises above schoolyard taunts and tattered homemade clothes to graduation honors and beyond, even finding peace with her mother.  No surprises in how the story turns out, but plenty of surprises in Monogram putting together such a top-notch cast.  Admittedly mostly stars on their way down, but Marsh had been starring with John Barrymore & Richard Barthelmess just a couple of years back; Dresser co-starring with Will Rogers in last year’s STATE FAIR.  Ditto Henry B. Walthall earlier this year, in John Ford’s JUDGE PRIEST.  While Ralph Morgan (brother of Frank) usually busy @ Fox.  How’d Monogram ever afford them?  (But worth it, the film apparently did a lot of business.)  Currently available only in subfusc prints, but pretty interesting on many levels . . .  other than moviemaking!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  To see Dresser really go to town on this sort of role, try THE GOOSE WOMAN/’25.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/08/goose-woman-1925.html

L'ARMATA BRANCALEONE / FOR LOVE AND GOLD (1966)

Mario Monicelli’s warts and all (but mostly warts) spoof on noble knights and all things mediæval could have been titled VITTORIO GASSMAN AND THE HOLY GRAIL.  Twenty years before Monty Python got there, this large-scale farce on muck & loyalty still comes across with its big battles (bloody & bonkers) and a ridiculous, yet oddly believable, view of the pre-renaissance Middle Ages as human comedy.  Gassman, principled master to a motley crew of wandering swordsman (and one Jewish peddler) are heading to his home-base castle at Aurocastro; if they can only get there between warfare (Saracen Pirates; rival Christian Brotherhoods) and the tempting Waiting Ladies (engaged virgins to demur; devouring dominatrix to try on) they come across.  Epic Euro-comedies usually aim low and miss, but Monicelli aims down & dirty while taking the high road.  (Past pics include BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET/’58 and THE ORGANIZER/’63*, so dumb comedy not his style.)  No doubt, a lot of laughs get lost in (subtitle) translation, dialect riffs only native Italians will spot*, but more than enough comes thru for the non-cognoscenti.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Monicelli’s masterpiece, THE ORGANIZER, criminally under-seen.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/i-compagni-organizer-1963.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Popular enough in Italy for a sequel : BRANCALEONE ALLE CROCIATE/’70 (not seen here).  The original (recently restored) barely got a token Stateside release in 1981.

TRAMPS (2016)

A trifle from NYC indie writer/director Adam Leon about a pair of twenty-somethings, would-be grifters, strangers who meet cute (and anonymously) after a suitcase swap on a subway platform goes wrong.  He’s bagman/she’s getaway driver; attractive antagonists who’ll awkwardly discover romance. The film might be a Sundance submission that missed the cut (was it?), now streaming to help indie film fans over the long wait before the next festival.  Callum Turner, dropping his British accent, is a would-be chef living at home (in Queens?) with his Polish mom (she runs an informal horse-betting parlor from her living room) and an older brother who needs a favor: drop everything and cover me on a ‘bag swap.’  Naturally, Turner takes the wrong suitcase from some innocent person and winds up on a hunt for the ‘right’ suitcase with getaway driver Grace Van Patten.   It’s a long night’s journey for two soulmates, ending with everything back in place and a first big step together as a couple.  Leon shows a jagged, short attention-span style, calming down as we go along, but can only do so much to get us to care about these self-centered petty thieves.  The only way these stories work, especially when the tone is this light, is for the leads to win us over with natural charm.  Something Turner pulls off with a naturally friendly appeal, but Van Patten doesn’t show.  Too hard in her approach.  Perhaps a less informal filming style could give Leon the chance to literally light up her face in a way that might let us see what he sees in her.  Instead, she’s a pain.  And the best scene in the film is a brief funny anti-climax when we discover what was hidden in that briefcase, and how utterly unnecessary all the skullduggery was.  A real ‘shaggy dog’ story.

JERICHO OF SCOTLAND YARD (2005)

Another British police procedural?  Well, yes and no as it’s different than 90% of the others.  Also better.*  Instead of the current default model: troubled lead investigator/less quirky apprentice seconding/impenetrable North UK accents/equally impenetrable clues that don’t add up; this one is both set in the late-fifties/early-sixties, and to some extent uses the filming style of that era.  Though looser in camera technique and franker in violence & sexual content, but finding a bright period color palette with grain to match and multi-composition within the frame you might have seen from a British director like Mike Hodges (though he’s more ‘70s) or in the cycle of mid-‘60s Hollywood detective films that might have starred Paul Newman, James Garner or even those late-career urban crime dramas Frank Sinatra walked thru in a failed attempt to stay with-it and relevant on the big screen.  Like a particularly nasty one imaginatively titled THE DETECTIVE/’68.  And with Robert Lindsay in the lead here, we’re not so far from '60s Sinatra physically.  Only this film is good.  Those late Sinatra films are stinkers; out-of-touch squares trying to be hip.  They made four of these JERICHO films*, each about 100", only the first seen here, and it follows a typical format of having two seemingly unrelated crimes (one murder/one kidnaping) turning out to be connected when Lindsay and his team of vets and a beginner are pulled from the murder case of a Black ‘nobody’  to the kidnaping of a rich immigrant whose fortune, wife and kids are all facade/no foundation.  Physical period detail and (far less seen) gestural period acting given unusually close attention, not just costumes & cars, but posture & the entitled habits of social position.  The cast is all good (Tom Burke exceptional as a too loyal son), but it’s Lindsay’s show.  Busy in the UK, but not much seen here once a promising Stateside career collapsed after his Tony-winning B’way turn in ME AND MY GIRL was stopped in its tracks by Carl Reiner in the disastrous  BERT RIGBY, YOU'RE A FOOL/’89.  It’s never too late.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The quality of these Brit-Crime dramas hardly seems to matter as they’re all so similar.  Only the ones that turn too cute for words becoming truly unwatchable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Three more of these were made, so I guess that makes for a Quadruple-Bill.  Hopefully they're as good as this one.

COMPANY BUSINESS (1991)

A critical & commercial write-off for M-G-M on release, writer/director Nicholas Meyer’s Spy vs Spy Cold War dramedy now seems a modest, but tasty treat, an amuse-bouche for sophisticated palettes.  Meyer, who wrote THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION/’76 before saving STAR TREK twice (WRATH OF KHAN/’82; UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY/’91), has an unusual ability to hold tone across serious & comic boundaries.  (Not the same as being semi-serious or semi-comic.)  Here, refreshing a favorite old standby: the under-appreciated vet who gets a second chance unaware he’s being brought back not to succeed, but to fail.  Naturally, he proves them wrong, screwing up their devious plans by coming thru with the goods.  This one has former CIA man Gene Hackman, currently reduced to freelance industrial espionage gigs, called back to Washington headquarters to handle a Russian spy swap.  Mikhail Baryshnikov’s the token incarcerated spy Gene’s escorting back to Soviet agents in Germany (along with two million in cash as sweetener), or is until they smell something fishy just before handoff, escaping on a dangerous (or is it merry?) Euro-chase to stay alive and find out what’s really going on.  With top-tier tech work on location (mostly Berlin underground and Paris above) from D. P. Gerry Fisher; Ken Adam production design, Michael Kamen score (listen for a bit Tchaikovsky arranged for balalaika) and a super supporting cast, it’s easier than usual to follow along, twists and character reveals very satisfying.  No surprise with Meyer in charge, his main fault is being too clever for his own good, but the years have made this civilized entertainment only more civilized.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Baryshnikov, no longer a kid at 43, looks and acts better than in anything else he did that didn’t focus on dance, hated the film and never made another feature.  Pity.

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY (2017)

Late in the day gay-coming-of-age story: late for our mid-20s protagonist, late in a film cycle on the subject, and now nearly a decade after its release, but so well observed and acted, it hardly matters.  We’re in Yorkshire, England (where writer/director Francis Lee is from), farm country where a young Josh O’Connor (his face not quite settled, other than those protruding ears) is running the small family sheep farm by default, and nearly by himself, as his father is invalided after a stroke and Mom busy running the house.  He’s increasingly miserable, drunk most nights after pub visits where he’s up for shagging a local bar-mate as long as it doesn’t require more from him than the sheep get when he thrusts his arm up their bum as part of his farm duties.  But a temp hire of a slightly older/far more mature Rumanian immigrant (Alec Secareanu) upsets his routine because the stranger is happy to get the work, preternaturally gifted with the animals, and an (unconscious?) object of lust self-denied.  Met with unreasonable belligerence simply for being a good worker, the resentment explodes during an isolated spring lambing trip where a shove becomes a fight and the fight becomes a sort of mutual rape.  (I know, an old cliché, but the sex for a change looks something like sex.)  Naturally, the relationship doesn’t run smoothly (unspoken love at first fuck?), while an unexpectedly upbeat ending feels whipped up for drama and an easy exit.  But the handsome locations and leads make it easy enough to accept.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Lots of misleading comparisons with BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN/’05 on this one.  Instead, try MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE/’85, mostly for the evolving relationship between Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/my-beautiful-laindrette-1985.html

ACCENT ON LOVE (1941)

Highly prized/highly paid, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is probably the best known of the Hollywood Ten, the ‘card carrying’ members of the Communist Party who went to jail in the late ‘40s rather than ‘cooperate’ (‘naming names’ of other members) to Washington’s HCUA investigators.  The public justification was that they were, as a group under Russian orders, slipping Commie Doctrine and 'The Party Line' into film scripts to warp weak American minds.  (And good luck finding anything more dangerous than a communal rooming house for single women to share during the wartime housing shortage.  Gals voting on common space issues?  The horror!)  If they’d only gone back to 1941, they might have salivated over this ‘original’ Trumbo story (heavily indebted to Frank Capra’s film adaptation of Kaufman/Hart’s YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38; its stupid, lazy screenplay credited to John Francis Larkin) which touches a Marxist third-rail in having George Montgomery’s junior investment exec, toss fat-cat Capitalist father-in-law Thurston Hall to the side so he can be his own man, working with his hands (and a shovel) digging ditches for the WPA and sharing a tenement flat with Portuguese foreman J. Carroll Naish & famille.   (Carroll also Marxist, but in looks & accent Chico Marxist!)  Montgomery also dumping his wife for fetching immigrant Osa Massen.  All living in a crumbling tenement apartment building owned by (wait for it) father-in-law Hall.  Naturally, this being Hollywood, an overnight stay at the flat opens Pop’s eyes to inequality.  He even drinks a toast to FDR.  Yikes!  On the other hand, the film has a rare pro-divorce message.  (Take that Catholic Joe Breen, head of the Production Code.)  The film, so chock-a-block with touchy issues, it’s a shame execution such a washout under director Ray McCarey, kid brother of the great Leo McCarey.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Ray McCarey, starting in comedy shorts like big brother Leo, but then going on to make tons of forgettable features, unlike Leo who in his early shorts put Laurel & Hardy together and then relatively few films, but some were classics like THE AWFUL TRUTH and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’45  before drying up and offering MY SON JOHN/’52, possibly the most ridiculous of all the anti-commie fear mongering pics.  It’s the one where mom Helen Hayes thinks son Robert Walker has turned ‘red’ when she finds out he’s been playing tennis.  (Maybe Leo was doing penance for his brother’s soul.)   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-son-john.html

CONTEST:  *Ray McCarey not the only less prominent kid brother working on this movie.  Name the other creative sibling with a more famous older brother to win a MAKQUIBS Write-Up of a streaming pic of your choice . . . assuming I can get it online!

TEHRAN TABOO (2017)

Hard to imagine a more timely moment for writer/director/animator Ali Soozandeh’s (Iranian-born, now living-in-exile) look at religious hypocrisy & sex (passion or paid-for) in a tradition-challenged modern Islamic State.  Structured in the form of a loosely bound relationship relay among a cross-section of twenty-somethings: prostitute with kid in tow; techno-musician pushing against old forms & disinterest*; pregnant wife with two illegal abortions behind her; deflowered fiancée desperate for a hymen repair job; not the slice of Iranian life you’d expect.  Sexual bartering used and abused by taxi drivers, landlords & pencil-pushers, rising all the way up to doctors and judges.  A constant threat from government enforcers, zealots with  military or religious agendas, fronting a second line of offense behind the daily offers of bribes in cash and/or sexual favors.  A societal pressure cooker that forces top talent to flee and those who can’t to take to the streets . . . as currently playing out.  All of it despairing and believable, presented in a sort of modern digitally-assisted rotoscope technique (filmed live-action manipulated into animated form) that has its pluses (buildings, backgrounds and objects well suited to the system with interesting color-sweetened transitions) and minuses (people in general and faces in particular losing individuality the closer you get).  A pity as some of the twists and reveals that connect separate story strands together lend a satisfying puzzle-solving aspect, but only deliver a fraction of the emotion they might have.  Worthy, in a good way; but Soozandeh has yet to put out another feature.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Ali N. Askin’s wide-ranging score a big plus.

CAR WASH (1976)

Coming out between JAWS in’75 and STAR WARS in ‘77, this little Black-oriented ensemble comedy (a day-in-the-life of an urban car wash business) may have broken as many cultural Hollywood norms as those films did financially in reconfiguring Summer Blockbuster release patterns.  And while, unlike JAWS and STAR WARS, there have been relatively few follow-up think pieces or anniversary reissues to boost its rep (it’s a lot of fun, but more important for its influence), the film deserves credit for bringing Blaxploitation tropes & attitudes to the Hollywood ‘Majors,’ not as sidebar action, but as the main event.  Plus,  its all-black R&B soundtrack, which the largely Black working crew pace themselves to on the cleaning line, was even more influential, especially in using disco-friendly cuts.  (Note that COOLEY HIGH/’75, the previous feature from director Michael Schultz, a rare Black in that position at the time, was from bargain basement A.I.P.  This film, from Universal, if IMDb can be believed, had about the same 7 mill budget as JAWS.)  A series of tidy endings wrapping things up for all the main characters doesn’t show Joel Schumacher’s original screenplay at its best, but the gay friendly attitude he snuck in (under the guise of the usual gay panic reactions) was also new, if less quick to catch on.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Schumacher (White, Jewish, Gay) got his start with three Black-themed scripts, SPARKLE/’76; CAR WASH; THE WIZ/’78.  Then fetishized BATMAN & ROBIN/’97.  So much for ‘write what you know.’ 

TROOPER HOOK (1957)

In the last of six films together, Joel McCrea finally got top-billing over co-star Barbara Stanwyck.  It was hardly worth the wait.  A modest, by-the-numbers indie Western with an anti-racist message typical of the period (Native Americans doing double-duty as a less politically contentious stand-in for Blacks), but, in the hands of director Charles Marquis Warren, it’s largely undistinguished (or should that be indistinguishable?) over a flood racially progressive Westerns.  And while Warren had an undeniable knack for developing long-running tv Western series (GUNSMOKE, THE VIRGINIAN, RAWHIDE), a feel for the pace & variety needed for features was missing.  As if his imagination was as compressed as the gray-scale favored on old tv Westerns.  (Lucky here to have uncompressed cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks.)   Hard not to think of half a dozen Western specialists who might have made more on this story of terrorizing Indian Chief Nanchez (Rodolfo Acosta) whose capture frees Stanwyck’s kidnaped ‘squaw’ of the last eight years and their little boy.  Now McCrea’s soon-to-retire Cavalry Sargent, charged with delivering them to her ‘real’ husband (John Dehner), finds he’s growing attached to them in his gruff, military manner.  McCrea particularly good working thru the tough/tender clichés;, Stanwyck having a harder time, especially after a blown introduction where she looks powdered and neat as a pin amid Indians taken after a military loss.  She only partially recovers; and you can’t help noticing all the missed dramatic opportunities.  But credit for a lack of condescension these progressive ‘50s films offered as corrective to decades of Indian slaughter.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Treating the American Indian as frontier terrorist, though common enough in programmers & Western serials, is seen less in A-list films than you may imagine.  They tended to mourn the disappearance of America’s ‘noble savage’ as if they were a species gone extinct.  Which attitude more dismissive?  Discuss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  On DVD or streaming, TROOPER usually defaults to Academy ratio (1 : 1.37), as it was shot.  But the film was designed to be cropped down (via screen scrims or an aperture plate in the projector) to about 1.77.  So, if your set up allows, feel free to enlarge one step.  Just don’t use the anamorphic setting.

HOUSEWIFE (1934)

Unheralded home vs work love triangle (interloper Bette Davis said of this one: Dear God!  What a horror!) sees over-burdened housewife Ann Dvorak making do on George Brent’s puny salary while fortifying him with ambition to break out of his office manager position at a mid-sized Chicago advertising agency.  At home, she gets the worst of it, while at work entitled husband Brent catches it from his demanding, do-nothing boss.  But all changes when former high school pal Bette Davis reenters his life after eight years in New York becoming a big time ad copywriter.  She’s just joined his firm with a salary that dwarfs his.  Humiliating.  Taking a chance on himself (but only upon Dvorak’s encouragement and secret savings), his new company turns the corner just in time, soon big enough for him to hire Davis!  And while he’s openly pulled from his new lux home by an emboldened Davis, Dvorak also has a new admirer in older top client John Halliday.  None of this played out in the usual hand-wringing manner, but met head-on with both women knowing their strengths and weaknesses.  Quite an interesting angle, and retaining a Pre-Code attitude in spite of coming in (just) Post-Code.  It freshens a lot of the clichés.  (Well, not all of them, there’s a kid in the pic to catalyze a happy ending.  Boo!)  If only director Alfred E. Green weren’t such a stick-in-the-mud, the proto-feminist elements might be more celebrated.   With Davis displaying a great slouch, but still in her brief platinum blonde period.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  One moment holding this back demands a BlackFace ALERT!  It comes during one of the film’s highlights, an hilariously awful radio program for Halliday’s classy cosmetics company which hits rock bottom when a pair of lousy BlackFace comedians come on.  But then something fascinating happens.  None of the four principals had advance notice (they’re watching a final rehearsal) and, plainly disgusted by the act, immediately demand a complete rewrite.  (Ironically, director Green’s last big hiit?  THE BlackFace friendly JOLSON STORY/’46.)  It may be the first rejection of the still highly popular practice in film.  Indeed, last year’s Al Jolson starrer, WONDER BAR/’33, also from Warner Bros., features what may be the most infuriating BlackFace ‘Numbo’ ever filmed as its showiest musical sequence.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/01/wonder-bar-1933.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention to meat prices in 1934.  Listen as Brent bemoans yet another leg of lamb dinner as beef and chicken are too expensive on the budget Dvorak is so careful to hold to.   (Just bear in mind, lamb in the ‘30s likely to be closer to mutton than what we’d get today.)

THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN (2019)

Appalling.  Even those who go for drippy Boy and his Dog stories (here an adult with dreams of Formula One racing) have limits on just how much soggy manipulation & cheap sentiment they can take.*  Director Simon Curtis, who followed this with a pair of harmless DOWNTON ABBEY pics, seems able enough, but this is an embarrassment from its wet nose to its floppy tail.  Milo Ventimiglia, a car mechanic trying to move into professional racing, adopts a puppy on a whim, unaware his golden retriever, voiced as a croaky old soul by Kevin Costner, is a fount of cracker-barrel commonsense, user-friendly philosophy and medical expertise.  Lucky for Milo, he can’t hear the loyal pooch rattle on; we’re less lucky.  Enzo (that’s the dog’s name, as in Ferrari) narrates incessantly, and is full of shit, metaphorically and literally.  (Gary Cole’s mean FIL gets the mess on his new white carpet.  ‘Good dog.’)  With story beats courtesy of some over-priced film school, the tears and triumphs come with monotonous regularity, but can’t hide a certain awkwardness from the cast who, to their credit, can smell the equivalent of a Hallmark film as surely as a dog can smell a rotisserie chicken thru a paper bag.  (As wife/mother, Amanda Seyfried gets off easy, coming in late/leaving early.)  And just to add insult to injury, the film sends us home with an uplifting hint of reincarnation.  Enzo Lives!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  It’s always had something of a rotten rep, but Tom Hanks’ TURNER & HOOCH/’89 is a pretty irresistible (adult) boy and his dog film.  (Lots of drool, though.)

DARK JOURNEY (1937)

Backed by  Alexander Korda’s glossy production, Victor Saville’s smoothly muscular direction and especially as lit by dream-team cinematographers Georges Périnal & Harry Stradling, Vivien Leigh looks spectacularly pretty in this stylish WWI romance & espionage number.  She’s second-billed to Conrad Veidt, in a rare English language romantic lead (an odd couple in many ways, even in height where he towers over her by nearly a foot), the both of them Spies in Disguise working undercover near the end of the war out of neutral Sweden.  She runs a posh dress shop and brings in coded secrets woven into the patterns & hems of the latest Paris styles; he’s a wealthy Baron who left Germany to live the safe, luxurious, bachelor’s life.  Only he’s secretly running German covert ops out of Sweden.  Lovers and enemies, but not coming to a head since neither knows the full story . . . for a while.  Glamorous stuff, and with more action than you might think, mostly in the opening and closing scenes.  Some of the model ships at sea less than convincing, as was typical at the time, the action far more effective at closer range.  How different this one would have been a year later when background rumors of war were growing louder by the day.  So, in addition to a love story, and its resolution, you get a feel for the attitudes just before the political tide turned as another World War became inevitable.

PHINEAS AND FERB: STAR WARS (2014)

No doubt you’ve heard, LucasFilm is vowing to ‘fix’ the STAR WARS franchise . . . again.  (Read all about in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/movies/shawn-levy-star-wars-stranger-things.html)  Picking up the mantle/albatross is producer/director Shawn Levy (NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM, STRANGER THINGS, DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE, many more).  Of course, diehard Star Warriors have been demanding a return to ‘canonical principles’ since the third film (Episode #6 to true-believers), RETURN OF THE JEDI/’83, took  the saga to the toy shop; while oddly, this recent bout of hand-wringing comes hot on the heels of ANDOR/’22, the best received addition to the canon in decades.   Still, if you want to see what it’s all about, you could do worse than to watch this affectionate/deeply fun hook-up with the long-running kids’ animated series, P&F.  It’s a delirious burlesque of the original plot with only slightly more detailed animation than usual for the series, the show’s characters larded into a relatively faithful ‘New Hope’ storyline with absurd ease.  (And plenty of Easter Eggs nestled inside.  Like The Rite of Spring, less a Stravinsky than a FANTASIA homage, bumping into the classic John Williams score.)  But only those who get this on DVD will get the chance to see what’s gone wrong with STAR WARS as Disney’s stuck extended clips/trailers for a continuation to the animated CLONE WARS called REBELS*, and it’s a drab, self-serious, CGI-hideous sample of the problem.  Whereas the cartoony special is all airy, goofy fun in support of the action-oriented set pieces, REBELS is a downer.   Back in 1977, when A NEW HOPE was just called STAR WARS and in its first-run, the gasps, cheers, laughs, danger, F/X and heroics tumbled over each other cheek by jowl on the big screen to exponential effect.  Maybe instead of market research, the current LucasFilm execs could simply get this DVD.  A Disney product, I'd bet they could get a free copy via inter-office mail pouch.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Perhaps too much attention paid to Star Wars fanboys who mostly like CLONE and REBELS.  But if you want to expand the audience beyond acolytes . . .  Well, good luck, Mr. Levy.

HIS PICTURE IN THE PAPERS (1916)

Stealthily game-changing light comedy uses a handsome leading man in a role typically cast with a physical comedian or even a slapstick grotesque.  But since that leading man was Douglas Fairbanks, in his breakout film*, it paved the way for dozens of Cary & Hugh Grant types to play these roles in the future.  (Come 1920 - ‘21, Fairbanks moved on to the large-scale period adventures he’s best known for.)  John Emerson, an actor who really wanted to direct (yep, even in 1916), found a cache of story treatments submitted to Triangle Studios by a young Anita Loos (they soon married) and a young actor (Fairbanks) no one thought could act running out his option.  The knockabout farce they made follows Doug, the scion of a health food mogul, who prefers steak & cocktails to plant-based goop, but tries to make good and get his picture in the paper to placate Dad.  No less than D.W. Griffith though it unfit for release (Could they cut it down to a short?) and only the delayed delivery of a new feature for its big NYC premiere got this on the screen as temp substitute.*  An immediate commercial & critical hit, the Fairbanks, Loos, Emerson team made half-a-dozen like it in 1916 alone.  The ones that survive all fun, if in various states of repair.  FLIRTING WITH FATE from a few months later, in much better physical shape, and much better directed by Christy Cabanne.  But its storyline (despondent Doug hires a hit man on himself . . . than changes his mind) less original.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *As yet, Doug is ‘stash-less’ which gives his face an ‘unfinished’ look.

READ ALL ABOUT IT :  *Anita Loos tells the whole unlikely story herself in A GIRL LIKE I.  Loos now best known for GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, but as a writer in the early ‘30s, she was Hollywood’s IT girl.

THE ATTACK (2012)

Writer/director Ziad Doueiri (Lebanese born/U.S. trained/now Paris-based) gives us an unsatisfying film seemingly from the sidelines of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.  Being 'unsatisfying' the most honest thing about it since attempts at resolution, understanding or explanation certain to ring false.  Still, he can’t avoid making choices in character and development that hit the points he wants to make, so the film inevitably feels dramatically predigested.  Structured to mimic the Five Stages of Grief,  played out as an investigation, it follows an honored Palestinian surgeon (a secular Muslim working in a Jewish/Israeli hospital) who learns his wife (a practicing Christian) died a suicide bomber, leaving many fatalities, including children.  (Doueiri not more specific about the victims, and crucially leaving these events off-screen.  Indeed, the only body we see is the remains of the wife.)  Did he ever really know her?  Or their relationship?  Starting a journey to find the truth behind the tragic events leads to a series of disheartening encounters with in-laws, Muslim extremists, her mentoring priest (offering philosophical conundrums with an Old Testament’s threatening tone).  If no man is an island, the good doctor comes about as close as you can get.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Ironically, most Arab countries banned the film, not for content, but for location as it was filmed in Israel.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Left unexplained is why the main theme for the couple in their romantic flashbacks should lift most of its melodic element from Rodgers & Hart’s ‘Blue Moon.’

THE 1,000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE / DIE 1000 AUGEN DES DR. MABUSE (1960)

Up against his old nemesis one last time, silent film titan Fritz Lang, in his penultimate turn as director, seems rejuvenated, a vigorous presence compared to the spent force of the last few years.  (More Mabuses followed; none with Lang.)  And while this can’t compete with his silent and sound Mabuses of the ‘20s and ‘30s*, this low-budget winner has qualities of its own.  It also proved highly influential on soon to come James Bond & Mission: Impossible franchises.  Naturally, master criminal Mabuse wants to take over the crime underworld and has 1000 camera eyes to keep him informed, monitored from a forgotten, underground Nazi inner-city bunker.  Opening with an assassination of a reporter who’s about to spread the news (a steel needle to the brain), Gert Fröbe plays the gruff investigating police inspector who comes across the series of plots and counterplots that make up the conspiracy.  Top billed Dawn Addams and Peter van Eyck on the lookout for her violent husband; Wolfgang Preiss a blind Irish psychic, the man who knew too much too soon; and Werner Peters, the bumbling insurance salesman whose act is too bumbling to be believed.  Could they be working for Mabuse?  Could they be Mabuse?  The film turns talky in the second act, but everything else is a pacey blast of OTT reversals, revelations, and surprise explosions.  Plus one two-way mirror to stop an uxoricide in the nick of time. Hard to be sure if the stingy budget helps or hurts.  It does tend to make you more forgiving.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Lang’s first DR. MABUSE, a five hour silent decades ahead of its time in content and technique from its opening shot.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/02/dr-mabuse-1922-2nd-writeup.htmle

TOP SECRET AFFAIR (1957)

Would-be sophisticated opposites-attract number, a romantic-comedy for high-powered media mogul Susan Hayward and two-star General Kirk Douglas.  He’s up for the Nuclear Agency job she’s guaranteed to someone else.  Something’s gotta give.  Assignment: wreck his chances (and his reputation) with an embarrassing magazine profile.  And Hayward’s got the staff of brilliant media sycophants to do it.  Problem No. 1: the General’s no pushover, but a paragon of achievement on and off the battlefield.  Problem No. 2: a last ditch effort to trip him up by seduction (pictures to come) backfires when she falls for him.  Happy ending?  Not quite.  Burned before, Douglas rejects the offer.  And since hell hath no fury . . .  It’s back to your corners for the next round.   PHILADELPHIA STORY playwright Philip Barry would have known just what to do with this set up, but he died a decade back, and the trio of scripters on the case are all thumbs in wit, construction and romance.  (They do a bit better in the big courtroom finale,  but can't stop Hayward from dumping work to become a wifely woman.)  Director  H.C. Potter’s best films (MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE/’48; THE FARMER’S DAUGHTER/’47) suggest a good fit, but something went off on his career and this proved his last film.  It plays like one of those B’way ‘laugh riots’ from last season that quickly die on the big screen.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Yet it’s all but essential viewing for film mavens as original announced stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, in what would have been their first film together in nearly a decade, had just begun production with wardrobe tests when Bogart took ill.  So there’s a certain morbid curiosity in seeing what Douglas & Hayward do with roles meant for even bigger film legends.  Hayward seems to be playing the same script Bacall had.  But ain’t got the style.  (Check out Bacall in DESIGNING WOMAN/’57 to see the diff. -  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/designing-woman-1957.html)  But Douglas must have gotten/demanded a near compete rewrite.  Note faint echoes of two 1954 Bogart hits (THE CAINE MUTINY; SABRINA) that have grown even fainter.  The film would have been a very sad farewell had he lived.

SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN (2012)

Surprisingly, the old fairy tale gets a less revisionist treatment than you expect in this debut feature from director Rupert Sanders.  Re-ordered, with different emphases (see title) and a whole new fourth act (Snow becomes Joan of fucking Arc), but all the expected elements are on call: dark forest; huntsman ordered to kill the runaway princess, poisoned apple, Prince Charming, dwarves; the works.  Alas, the tone and look, call it Dank Goth, meant to be creepy-crawly merely unpleasant (like something stuck to your shoe), CGI effects overused and acting from the principals inexcusably bad.  (The last two faults typical unforced rookie errors from director Sanders.)  A wan Snow White from Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth’s Huntsman saddled with lame comic relief comeback lines between he-man chores, and Charlize Theron’s Queen a pop-eyed shrieking harpy.  Those Down-Under accents also no help.  Fortunately, halfway in the Dwarves show up, immediately attack the good guys, and for a while take charge of the movie.  At last, a rooting interest; even after they figure out who the good guy are.  Bob Hoskins in his final role a particularly wonderful little fellow . . . and nearly short enough not to need help from clever camera angles.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Disney’s 2025  attempt to go Live-Action on their own 1937 SNOW WHITE animated classic opened D.O.A.  Not seen here, perhaps more interesting for compare & contrast purposes with this.  Elsewise, there’s always the 1937 fairest of them all.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/02/snow-white-1937.html

THE CAPTURE (1950)

Director John Sturges’s rise from Columbia programmers to mid-list (and beyond) at M-G-M before picking up A-list projects all around town was about as methodical a progression as mainstream Hollywood careers get.  Never visually fluid in style, he moved stories one foot in front of the other foot from his first film on.  Sturges, who became particularly known for Westerns  (O.K. CORRAL: MAGNIFICENT SEVEN) was still new to the genre when he made this  ‘Modern Western,’ a morality play about Lew Ayres’ guilt-ridden oil foreman in Mexico who mistakenly kills an innocent suspect after a payroll robbery.  Unable to get past the incident, or the unwanted acclaim, he pulls up stakes and winds up (purposefully) as the hired hand at the ranch of the late man’s wife (Teresa Wright) and young son.  Turns out, she also hides conflicted emotions about her late husband and soon figures out the lethal connection yet is drawn to this stranger.  And that’s before another accidental murder (this time of the real payroll robber) puts Ayres on the run.  Fatalistic as hell, it’s almost entirely told in flashback to the local Mexican Priest (Victor Jory!) for extra penance.   The main creative force on this one, not Sturges (who shoots it like a psychological noir Western), but ambitious/pretentious producer/writer Niven Busch who often bit off more than he could chew.*  This one jumping between simplistic psychiatric analysis and the contrivances of a ‘well-made’ play.  That said, it remains darn watchable and has believable Mexican flavor that lends a distinct tone to the film.   Especially when Aryes is on the move or stopping at some local café or cantina.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Busch probably took his best shot at the psychological Western in PURSUED/’47.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/pursued-1947.html

METROPOLIS / METOROPORISU (2001)

Before the legendary lost original cut of Fritz Lang’s astounding (and confounding) silent wonder, METROPOLIS, was found hiding in plain sight at a Brazilian film archive (recovered, restored and released in 2010*), Lang’s technically brilliant World-of-Tomorrow Sci-Fi (a chilly cautionary about a thriving society on Earth’s surface living off the forced labor of a slave colony below; visionary in all senses of the word), it had seen so many editions you never knew what you’d find inside.  Timings varied by up to an hour, a tinted 16mm print from Australia might have tossed some storylines/added others; a star composer maybe chopped it up with rhythmic editing to fit his music and look ‘more modern.’  So, in 2001, when Japanese director Rintarô's anime version came out, the cherry picked elements from the original, didn’t seem quite as unjustified as they do today.  The original’s revolt of the slaves who are being treated like robots?  Now, it’s the revolt of mistreated robots!  (Echt Japanese, that.)  Maria, saint of the poor and her false mechanical double?  Now, she’s Tima, a robot who thinks she’s human. ( A bigger problem is her teeny, tiny anime mouth & nose.)  The fair-minded son of the world’s overlord?  Now he’s an evil, power-mad adopted son.  The rest of the story mostly dropped, and since its all spectacular animation, the thrill of the old stop-motion animated future also missed.  Yet on its own relentless terms, with forward looking warnings of AI takeovers, the film works, and delivers a ‘cool factor’ that covers a lot of running in place. Listen up to the inventive music track, lots of jazz and a spectacular sound cue at the climax when Ray Charles blasts out ‘I Can ‘t Stop Loving You.’   What Lang & scripter wife Thea von Harbou would have made of this is anyone’s guess.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The mad, magnificent, full-length METROPOLIS/’27.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/02/metropolis-1927.html

CAIRO STATION / BAB EL-HADID (1958)

Internationally prominent Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine (are there any others?) pulls off a tricky act here.  Literally so since he not only directs, but also stars as a sympathetic murderer, though more because of how the movie morphs from a Neo-Realist intro to film noir suspense and OTT melodrama.  All the acting leaving subtlety & naturalism behind for grand indicative gesture.   It’s laid out for us at the opening as Cairo Station’s longest serving newsstand operator clues us in on who’s who and how it comes together every morning: ‘People come, people go.  Nothing ever happens.’  He might be the old timer at GRAND HOTEL, but at Cairo’s main train depot it’s lower class travelers & workers hurrying to catch a route, sell a snack or tout rival labor organizers fighting for or against the union.  Plus all the pesky illegal workers trying to sell soft drinks before the police confiscate their supply.  Drink fast, I need the bottle back for the deposit!  Then there’s Youssef Chahine as Qenawi, the crippled young man who starts working for the newsstand owner, then slowly reveals his twisted nature, unable to pursue dreams of work, status or romance, pegged as little more than a lame beggar and laughed at by the flirtatious young woman he thinks he could make a life with.  And once he cracks, all the stories start to crash into each other: worker riots drawing attention away from those body parts leaking out of shipping crates.  Is the girl even dead?  (No wonder the film was banned for years.)  The actors, eager to drop any pretense of simple observation, tear passion to tatters in the usual OTT Egyptian acting style of the day.  So be prepared.  In a mere 77", it’s quite the stylistic journey!  Rossellini to Sirk, no stops.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  You know Chahine has crossed some sort of line when he has composer Fouad El Zahiry drop a bleeding chunk of Miklós Rózsa noir saturated music into the score.