MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE

OKURIBITO / DEPARTURES (2008)

2012-02-14T15:18:00.006-05:00

A feel-good pic about a mortician? This award-winner from Japan (including Mr. Oscar®), proves the point in an honestly likable, life-affirming manner. Masahiro Motoki is just great as the classical ‘cellist who needs to find a whole new profession after his orchestra goes broke. He and his wife move to his old hometown where he accidentally falls into a new line of work: assistant to an old-school Japanese mortician/body preparer. The subject matter sounds like a total non-starter, and the film is perhaps too scared of its touchy subject matter, adding some easy black humor & awkward/funny situations to get us past any initial discomfort level. But once it begins to trust in our natural interest, the Japanese customs of preparing the dead for cremation, which take place in front of relatives during the funeral ceremony, are shown in fascinating non-invasive, non-gruesome detail. With its stately rhythms & unexpected theatricality, the gentle ritual almost looks like a magician’s levitation act. The supporting players are all wonderfully flavorsome types, especially Motoki’s elderly mentor who holds to a sly deadpan manner Walter Matthau & Jack Soo might have envied. It’s a quiet film, a nice film, perhaps a little too neat for its own good. But its final sequence of personal reclamation & forgiveness easily earns the display of honest sentiment. Yôjirô Takita stages everything simply and keeps the pace from bogging down (no small thing considering the subject matter), and the tech elements are stylishly handled. A pity that Joe Hisaishi’s original theme has such an echo of "Danny Boy’ to it, but this is nitpicking. NOTE: This film rates a ‘Family Friendly’ tab, so here's a quick reminder that this does not necessarily designate a ‘kiddie’ pic. It’s meant to point out a film the whole family could profitably watch together. Assuming, of course, that the described subject matter is considered age appropriate. Just be sure everyone is aware that the dead bodies in this film are NOT love-struck vampires.

DOUBLE-BILL: A subplot about an elderly woman who runs a public bathhouse in a fast changing neighborhood is reminiscent of XIZAO/SHOWER/’99, an even better family drama pic (from Hong Kong) about a father who also runs a traditional bathhouse with his retarded son, and the out-of-town son who wants to sell the old place.

THE DEVIL AT 4 O’CLOCK (1961)

2012-02-12T17:59:00.006-05:00

Over a long directing career that began in the silent era, Mervyn LeRoy went from dynamic & confrontational@ Warners in the ‘30s to plush & sedate @ M-G-M in the 40s, then calcified & studio-bound in his late pics @ various studios. But a fair amount of location shooting on this island-set adventure pic seems to have perked him up considerably. In fact, it gives everyone a nice jolt. Spencer Tracy is the aging priest who’s lost his faith and is now getting ready to hand over the reins to his younger replacement (Kerwin Matthews). But not before getting a final bit of construction work out of a trio of prison laborers, including skinny Frank Sinatra. Too bad the island’s active volcano choose that day for a big blowout party. Yikes! Okay, not the most believable set up, and the script over-lards the action by having Father Tracy & his gang of prisoners dashing up a lava-strewn mountain to rescue all the patients & staff from his personal kiddie leper hospital! . . . plus having Sinatra fall in love with a poor blind waif who’s never been kissed. Oy! Everybody gets their chance at a big heroic gesture (even the prisoners in SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION/’94 aren’t quite this sweet-natured), so don’t expect to buy into the big sacrificial ending. But its more fun than expected, and LeRoy keeps things moving along between the nifty explosions.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: There’s a big new Tracy bio from James Curtis with more than you'll ever need to know about the guy. (It’s worth it for the cover photo alone, an unblinking masterpiece from Irving Penn.) Apparently, Spence’s fragile health only allowed him to work mornings while Frankie’s carousing ways usually got him to the set post-meridian. By the end of the shoot, these two pals were hardly speaking.

THE TEMPEST (2010)

2012-02-11T19:27:00.005-05:00

Julie Taymor was in the middle of her noisy, not to say calamitous, stewardship of SPIDER MAN: The Musical when this Shakespeare adaptation quietly sank. (With domestic grosses topping at $250,000 against a 20 mill budget, only her on-going B’way fiasco kept this release from gaining HEAVEN’S GATE/’80 notoriety.) Whatever attention it did get came from altering the gender of Shakespeare’s alter-ego character, Prospero, to ‘Prospera’ for Helen Mirren; a swap that makes surprisingly little difference. Taymor had done the play before, there was even a PBS showing of her minimalist take on it. Now, with a decent budget & a starry cast, but unbound by the commercial straitjacket of Disney’s THE LION KING, Taymor risks turning into an over-enthusiastic bore, piling up concepts & ideas like a first-time shopper of canned goods @ COSTCO. Happily, THE TEMPEST is unexpectedly resilient, sloughing off all sorts of bad ideas while retaining its core of power & decency. Oddly, this tale of a wronged exile who reigns on an enchanted isle and learns to soften his/her revenge with acceptance for the limitations of life has never been filmed ‘straight.’ Previous attempts have been as varied in texture, intent, tone & authenticity as Greenaway’s PROSPERO’S BOOKS/’91; Jarman’s TEMPEST/’79 & Mazursky’s in ‘82; even FORBIDDEN PLANET/’56 with Robbie the Robot as Ariel. Taymor holds reasonably close to the original text, but only makes real contact when she calms down enough to let us see how Shakespeare repurposed past efforts for this last fully-rigged work before retiring to Stratford. And if the acting, like the over-used special effects, are all over the place, Mirren makes it worth seeing. Not that anyone bothered to look.

BLUEBEARD’S EIGHT WIFE (1938)

2012-02-09T15:52:00.005-05:00

On his first collaboration with Ernst Lubitsch, his filmmaking idol, Billy Wilder came up with the ‘meet-cute’ of a lifetime: Gary Cooper is shopping for pajamas . . . but he only wears the tops. Cue Claudette Colbert: she only wants the bottoms! If only the rest of this tale of sexual frustration were equally inspired. Coop plays a rich American who finds a bartered bride in Colbert’s sou-less French aristo, and she’s happy to get her dad (Edward Everett Horton) back on his feet. But when she learns how quickly Coop goes thru wives, she holds off on any lovemaking until he’s thoroughly broken. The first half gets by on lux production values, the stars' swank looks and enough funny bits to carry you along. But the film grows increasingly off-key (too mean-spirited by half) and out of touch with the times (more early ‘30s than late ‘30s), and Lubitsch seemed to know it. (This may stem from the source material, a lost Gloria Swanson silent from ‘23.) It was the end of the line for Lubitsch @ Paramount and his next two (self-produced @ M-G-M, of all places) were highly personal masterpieces, NINOTCHKA/’38 (again with Wilder) and THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER/’40 (with fave scripter Samson Raphelson.) In fact, of the six films he’d make before his tragic early death in ‘47, five were typically unmatchable. Maybe we’d value this one more highly if Lubitsch didn’t raise the bar so high for himself.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: (Actually, a Screwy Thought from Lubitsch.) As a gag, someone @ Paramount stuck a shot of a sleeping Gary Cooper in with the dailies. But to Lubitsch, who had yet to work with Coop, the shot was a revelation. ‘That man should play Hamlet.’ This from the man who also thought Coop & Greta Garbo were quite possibly the same person. ‘Did you ever see them together?’ Coop was no hayseed Westerner for Lubitsch, check out the sophisticated swell rattling off French in the Lubitsch/Ben Hecht DESIGN FOR LIVING/’33, or making an honest woman out of Marlene Dietrich’s jewel thief in the Lubitsch/Borzage DESIRE/’36. They never did get to HAMLET.

LA CIUDAD DE LOS PRODIGIOS (1999)

2012-02-08T17:59:00.002-05:00

A big, churning potboiler about a country kid (Olivier Martinez) who comes to Barcelona in the late-1800s to work hard & seek his fortune. But all he finds is closed doors & injustice. Squeezed on all sides, he hands out illegal pamphlets for Anarchists; narrowly escapes a firing squad; turns apolitical as an enforcer for corrupt/reactionary city politicos; consolidates the underworld factions under his own command & winds up marrying the beautiful daughter of his ex-boss. But is he content? No. He still pines for the only girl he ever loved . . . and lost. Raping her on the very night she was planning to give herself up to him! Now, she hates him almost as much as the politically powerful rivals who are trying to gun him down, or her revenge-seeking/cross-dressing papa!! It’s as if Jackie Collins had written the three GODFATHER scripts on a commission from TeleMundo. Ludicrous as it undoubtedly is, it’s also rather fun once you get a handle on who’s who & what’s what. Not so easy to do under the hand of megger Mario Camus who’s more interested in following the stylistic tics of Coppola & Leone rather than following the storyline.

THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (1943)

2012-02-07T19:09:00.003-05:00

Warner Bros. stars Bette Davis & John Garfield were the driving force behind the Hollywood Canteen, the WWII nightclub where actors ‘bussed table’ for enlisted men. But the film HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN/’44 probably isn’t the patriotic All-Star Warner Bros. revue you vaguely recall, it’s this one. Here, Garfield sings ‘Blues in the Night,’ a bit flat, but recorded live, not synch’d; and Davis sings ‘They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,’ equally flat but who cares. Most of the speciality numbers from Arthur Schwartz (music) & Frank Loesser (lyrics) are dandy (Hattie McDaniel, Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Jack Carson & Alan Hale; all standouts) and carry you thru the needlessly tiresome plot with Eddie Cantor, Dinah Shore, Joan Leslie & Dennis Morgan. Cantor gets a double role; and that’s a lot of Cantor! A shame since he shines in a solo spot and, in a panicky hospital scene, still shows the immaculate vaudeville technique of his palmy Ziegfeld Follies days.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Hattie McDaniel really tears the place apart in ICE COLD KATIE. Wonder if they snipped it out down South the way M-G-M did when a Lena Horne number threw off too much heat? Or did McDaniel’s heft make black sexiness (or is it sexy blackness?) safe below the Mason-Dixon line?

DOUBLE-BILL: Rather than HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN or the East Coast STAGE DOOR CANTEEN/’43, take a step up to the Restored Edition of Irving Berlin’s THIS IS THE ARMY/’43 out on Warners. Even with the addition of a cornpone story, it remains a whopping good show. But beware of any leftover Public Domain issues. They may be cheap, but they’re no bargain.

BUCK (2011)

2012-02-05T15:03:00.003-05:00

With his painful past as an abused child performer and his peaceful present as an acclaimed ‘horse whisperer,’ it’s easy to see the documentary potential in the life & ‘aw-shucks’ cowboy philosophy of Buck Brannaman. But as he travels around America’s photogenic landscapes, sometimes accompanied by his charming wife, daughter & feisty foster Mother, giving his 4-day horse clinics, the obvious the draw of the man & his profession gets scuppered by inept execution in this debut from producer/director Cindy Meehl. She, and her crew, seem to miss every shot, then fill in with backlit vistas or oddly framed personal interviews. We never do get much of a feeling for whatever it is Buck does, and the traveling format doesn’t give us much time to get ‘personal’ with any of the horses. And when she does cull one from the herd, the horse turns out to be an unteachable scary mental case. Surely, there's a better film hiding somewhere in Meehl’s mass of footage.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: With its heart in the right place, its nice protagonists and even a cameo from that fictional horse whisperer, Robert Redford, BUCK won an Audience Choice Award @ Sundance. Tells you more about Sundance than the film tells you about Buck.

I MET HIM IN PARIS (1937)

2012-02-04T18:33:00.002-05:00

‘Even light little comedies with her have never made under a million & a half domestic.’ That’s David O Selznick, convincing himself to cough up the bucks needed to get Claudette Colbert to star in SINCE YOU WENT AWAY/’44, his first production since GONE WITH THE WIND/’39 and REBECCA/’40. And here’s what he was talking about. Colbert’s a department store clerk who’s treating herself to a long-delayed trip to Paree. And she’s specifically leaving her dull steady, Lee Bowman, a real butter-and-egg man, behind. Off on her own, she’s an easy target for the surface charms of bachelor pals Robert Young (deeply insincere) & Melvyn Douglas (tart & supercilious). It’s a workable set-up (they all might start playing DESIGN FOR LIVING/'33!), but the jokes & situations are awfully forced & formulaic. And some dope @ Paramount decided that the French born Colbert shouldn’t be able to speak French. Halfway along, things pick up when they all take off for a ski resort in Switzerland. Megger Wesley Ruggles seems happier as the tone relaxes from farce to romance, and even the gags start to work better. Going on location may have a lot to do with it, too. The real sunlight, snow & breath clouds really help to set the scene, and though much of the skiing is the usual ‘process’ stuff, that’s a real bobsled heading toward Claudette. And the film throws off some real sparkle when Douglas & Colbert discover something to like in each other while skating in tandem. It hardly saves the pic, but they sure can skate.

BANDE A PART / BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)

2012-02-03T17:48:00.002-05:00

Before Jean-Luc Godard became didactically inscrutable, he made his international rep being entertainingly inscrutable. And rarely more so then here. Anna Karina is the needy girlfriend who helps the two guys in her life (active Claude Brasseur & inactive Sami Frey) design what they hope will be a neat little robbery in her own rooming house. But naturally, when they get down to it, things don’t go exactly as planned. The pulpy material is given a playful treatment with all sorts of sidebars & riffs adding texture & critical commentary, yet never quite losing contact with the narrative tropes of a classic caper plot. (The various interruptions constitute a veritable ‘olio’ of vaudeville turns with a spirited dance routine, a pantomime shoot-out & some whistling while you work between the nods toward ‘Pop’ culture & favorite poets.) It’s always a bit of a surprise to find Godard, a WideScreen personality if there ever was one, composing in Academy ratio (1.33:1), but, whatever the reasons, it fits the film’s off-the-cuff noir sensibility. But enjoy this one while you can, by the end of the decade, Jean-Luc had moved on to weightier affairs.

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (2010)

2012-02-02T19:26:00.002-05:00

This animated pic from DreamWorks doubles up on can’t-miss plotlines, seasoning a classic Underachiever-Makes-Good story with the heartfelt sentiment of a boy-and-his-dog tale . . . but with a dragon. Yet the pic’s main pleasure comes simply from seeing what DreamWorks animation can do when they rein in the incessant jokey tone & unrelenting ‘Pop’ references that swamp too many of their recent pics. The Viking Village of the story feels closer to Scotland than Scandinavia, and the dragons have been given the personalities of pussy cats for some reason, but the basic idea of warring parties (townspeople & dragons) who battle each other without ever realizing they just might have a common enemy, plays out with some of the wit & charm of a Dr Seuss fable. And the brave lad who’’d rather make peace than fight, makes a winning & companionable hero. The DVD has come up sharp & bright in spite of losing its theatrical 3-D effects, but John Powell’s music score has been pushed so far back in the SoundScape, it might be Muzak at the mall.

DOUBLE-BILL: The daydreaming wimp who takes on the bullies with his wits as well as his fists was a well-deserved smash in the Henry King/Richard Barthelmess pic TOL’ABLE DAVID/’21. It later served as the ‘straight’ template for many of Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd’s best comedies. Buster makes his dad proud, even taking on a hurricane in STEAMBOAT BILL, JR/’28 & Lloyd more or less remade TOL’ABLE (with laughs) in his masterpiece, THE KID BROTHER/’27.

THE OTHER (1972)

2012-02-01T17:57:00.004-05:00

It’s as if the director of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD/’62 filmed a script by M. Night Shyamalan, but it was the former actor Tom Tryon, adapting his own Penny-Dreadful novel & exec-producing, who came up with the Scary Tale & (probably) the idea of hiring Robert Mulligan to helm. Together they made the American Gothic/Bad Seed material lyrical & disturbing, a child’s garden of mortality. As the twin boys whose games disrupt life on a Depression-Era farm, Chris & Martin Udvarnoky, in their sole film credit, are a memorable double act of Good & Evil. And they’re surrounded by a host of loamy performances; look for John Ritter in a nice early credit. But it’s the great Uta Hagen, a theatrical legend in her belated screen debut as the twins sympathetic (and guilt-ridden) Grandmother, who makes you believe it. The tech credits belie the pic’s modest budget with lenser Robert Surtees turning the rural landscape into a leading (and willful) character, alternately welcoming & deadly; abetted by music man Jerry Goldsmith who’d soon consolidate his horror bona fides with THE OMEN/’76.

OSS:117: RIO NE REPOND PLUS / OSS 117: LOST IN RIO (2009)

2012-01-31T16:58:00.003-05:00

Much of the fun has leeched out in the second installment of Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS spy spoof series. Jean Dujardin, who’d soon star for Hazanavicius in THE ARTIST/’11, repeats as the impossibly vain, impossibly dense, impossibly inept international spy who this time is being targeted by a Chinese cabal while hunting down an ex-Nazi with a microfiche listing of French collaborators. But he’s not alone, there’s the old CIA pal who alternately saves him, then sets him up; plus a sexy Israeli Mossad agent for Dujardin to hit on, and spy with. The running gag is that Dujardin is still the same politically incorrect Frenchman he was when the first film took place, more than a decade ago, a mid-1950s guy dropped into the fast-changing social milieu of the mid-1960s. Every time he opens his mouth, sexist, racist or anti-Semitic bon mots tumble out. They all land like lead balloons to the knowing characters on screen. Alas, they also land like lead balloons on the audience. (At least, on a Stateside audience.) Worse, Hazanavicius plays around with the colors & graphics of ‘60s filmmaking, but never responds or connects to the ‘60s style the way the first pic did with the ‘50s. There are laughs here and there, but the film only starts to build some real comic momentum in the last act when Hazanavicius stages a delicious slow-motion chase in a hospital, complete with a series of slapstick ‘toppers.’ Watch out for that elevator; and an emergency phone call that spirals into a screen-splitting fugue. Soon, he’s pretty much ditched the ‘60s and started foraging late ‘50s Hitchcock for inspiration. The big climax (a combo platter of VERTIGO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST and SABOTAGE) brings back some of the visual elegance that made the first OSS spoof such a treat. But it was obviously time for everyone to move on.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/DOUBLE-BILL: Stick with the first film, OSS: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES/’06 and double up with one of Rowan Atkinson’s JOHNNY ENGLISH spy spoofs, big hits everywhere but in the States.

MADAME CURIE (1943)

2012-01-30T17:42:00.002-05:00

Greer Garson’s didn’t just accumulate mannerisms, she hoarded them. No surprise then that the modulated tones & gracious-lady grandeur, the fits of sparkling laughter & light-catching head poses soon grew insufferable. (And it still echoes in the cultivated tones of Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep & Diane Sawyer.) But in a few early pics (like GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS/39; RANDOM HARVEST/’42; and this one), the effect is less practiced and much easier to take. Mervyn LeRoy, who (unintentionally?) brought a triumphant all-of-a-piece italicized style to RANDOM HARVEST, falls back on his usual plush megging in this studio-bound bio-pic. But, with a sharper than expected script from Paul Osborn, it’s still effective. Osborn sticks closer to the facts than normal in these things, and he doesn’t push our buttons too hard at the big emotional moments. As you’d expect from the author of MORNING’S AT SEVEN, some of the family scenes are particularly lively, and the chemical reaction of science & romance often charming. Herbert Stothart phones in a typically unimpressive music score, but lenser Joseph Ruttenberg got an atypically dark & expressive look for M-G-M. And check out that whopping bit of studio artifice for the Science Academy right at the end. Margaret O’Brien, Robert Walker & Van Johnson turn up in small roles and there’s a pip of a pep-talk from wise old Albert Bassermann that might have come straight out of A STAR IS BORN/’54. No doubt, there’s a better film in the Curies (a fine new bio appeared in the ‘90s), but this old-fashioned piece holds up rather well.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: German refugee Albert Bassermann barely spoke English and had to learn all his lines phonetically from his wife. That’s her, playing his wife at a party. Guess who had the stronger accent? Yep, the missus.

ANNE OF A THOUSAND DAYS (1969) \ MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS (1971)

2012-01-27T17:00:00.007-05:00

After legendary stints @ Warners (‘31-‘45) & Paramount (‘45-‘70), producer Hal Wallis took his unit over to Universal for a final handful of hit-&-miss pics (‘69-‘75). First out was ANNE OF A THOUSAND DAYS with Richard Burton & Geneviève Bujold, a solid Tudor historical that was both a critical & commercial success. Two years later, much the same creative crew re-upped for MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS, a less well-received follow-up with Vanessa Redgrave & Glenda Jackson. Seen now, the film’s respective reps seem flip-flopped; ANNE’s a bit of a stiff and MARY’s a pip. Go figure. Some of the change stems from director Charles Jarrott, who’s a good deal looser in the later pic. (A faceless megger at the best of times, he’d self-destruct right after MARY on the disastrous LOST HORIZON musical remake.) He also gets a huge boost from lenser Christopher Challis who completely outclasses Arthur Ibbetson’s dutiful work on ANNE. (Dark glowering skies & dynamic angles help, but just have a look at the Old Master lighting he achieves in the chamber scene right after MARY’s Intermission Break.) John Hale did both scripts, but where ANNE never quite shakes off the poetic goo of the Maxwell Anderson lyric drama it's adapted from, MARY uses a freer dramatic structure and, of course, has the ultimate Wild Card in Glenda Jackson’s phenomenal Elizabeth Tudor. They add two meetings for the Queens who never met, which turn out to be one too many, but you hardly need to see them together to cast your lot against a sanctimonious hypocrite like Mary. The supporting casts of both pics look equally good on paper, but again, MARY gets the edge with undervalued scene-stealers like Patrick McGoohan, Timothy Dalton, Ian Holm & Daniel Massey harking back to the unmatchable character roster of Warners in the ‘30, where the young Hal Wallis got his start.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Vanessa Redgrave always made the controversial political headlines, but it was Jackson who gave up acting to serve as a British M.P. Redgrave is generally considered the actress of her generation, but sometimes it seems like cinema might have been better off if these two had reversed their career choices.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Hal Wallis was usually considered one of the coldest executives in Hollywood. But he comes off as a reasonable, if frustratingly terse, character in STARMAKER, his auto-bio. Worth it for the Jerry Lewis stuff alone. (And don’t forget, Wallis also did all those early Elvis pics.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Well, naturally.

MARGIN CALL (2011)

2012-01-25T18:40:00.003-05:00

J. C. Chandor’s debut as scripter/megger is a sort of upper-echelon GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS/’92 , less the David Mamet windy flourishes, but still Guys in Suits Selling Junk. The suits are more tasteful, the office is high-rise and the worthless properties are now those mystery-meat pies known as ‘derivatives’ that helped bring down the Wall Street investment banks in ‘08. But the kill or be killed ethos remains. The dramatic structure is beautifully handled, and Chandor gets buckets of great perfs out of his starry cast even when he fumbles his set ups. (For some reason, he’s stymied by boardroom logistics.) But even while holding our attention as the firm discovers their unsustainable position and preps a crassly self-serving junk sale, we don’t quite buy in. Perhaps because no one can quite explain what these loan packages are. (In the film, everyone asks for explanations a child could understand.) But with so little to connect the dots (or is it so few dots to connect?), the doomsday scenario remains computer-bound, bouncing around internally, like a thriller set in an Escher Box . . . or the justification for a Wall Street Year-End bonus.

DOUBLE-BILL: Maybe a documentary overview could help particularize & personalize the subject? Try INSIDE JOB/’10 to get a handle on things.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: There’s a load of fine acting in here. (Chandor casts like a whiz.) And while Jeremy Irons, playing a master of the universe type, proves yet again that no one acts as well while chewing his food, the ultimate ‘find’ is Kevin Spacey. Sure he’s hardly been off the screen for twenty-plus years, but not since L. A. CONFIDENTIAL/’97, when he surprised those who had pegged him as a classic supporting actor, has he shown such screen-filing star magnitude.

TORCH SINGER (1933)

2012-01-24T16:12:00.003-05:00

Poor Claudette Colbert has to navigate a dramatic U-turn in every reel of this ‘Women’s Weepie.’ First, she’s ‘expecting’ but unmarried; then, a single mom in a tenement with the similarly fixed Lyda Roberti. Blink and she’s back on her own, begging for help from the rich relatives of putative Pop David Manners. Nothing doing. So, she gives up the girl and sinks to singing the blues in lowdown joints. Spotted by club promoter Ricardo Cortez, she gets a quick costume change and hits the heights, a featured singer with a band & three swanky pianos. That’s when she backs herself into a radio gig, playing sob-sister to the kiddie set. And that’s just the half of it, dearie, blues! It’s fun to watch Colbert molt thru five looks and a passel of slinky Travis Banton outfits, even though she looks her very best when they just leave her alone. (Check out the makeup-free entrance; lighting courtesy of lenser Karl Struss, bone-structure courtesy of Mom & Dad.) Colbert sang in a few pics (THE SMILING LIEUTENANT/’32; ZAZA/’37) and easily pulls off her solos. The tremolo isn’t to modern tastes, but her phrasing & pitch are spot on. But that plot! It’s so over-cooked even levelheaded Colbert starts overacting . . . probably in self-defense.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The slightly bathetic last act shows Colbert using her radio show to look for her lost girl. One lead turns up an adorable little black child. Nope, not Colbert’s. But instead of the cringe-worthy gag you’re expecting, their little scene is played out with natural ease & simple affection on both sides. Perhaps this helped Colbert get cast in John Stahl’s adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s IMITATION OF LIFE/’34. A real groundbreaker, it came out the same year Colbert made CLEOPATRA for DeMille & IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT for Capra. IMITATION took on single moms, business & race relations in a manner that makes TORCH SINGER look hopelessly contrived; and it was far more progressive for its day than Douglas Sirk’s remake of IMITATION with Lana Turner in ‘59.

MURDER AT THE VANITIES (1934)

2012-01-23T17:09:00.003-05:00

The two main competitors to the Ziegfeld Follies both got the Hollywood treatment in 1934: GEORGE WHITE’S SCANDALS out via Fox in March 1934 & Paramount responding with this Earl Carroll’s VANITIES themed pic in May. (Ziegfeld got his posthumous last laugh in M-G-M’s THE GREAT ZIEGFELD/’36.) Carroll’s revues were little more than dressed up burlesque shows, but this clever little film spends most of its running time backstage on opening night, unraveling a murder plot. Mitchell Leisen had only recently been bumped up from art director to helmer, and he shows off with complicated set-ups that keep the cast & crew in constant motion behind the scenes, pausing only for occasional dressing-room interrogations, and choosing off-beat camera placements for the on-going show. Lots of fun from every angle. Jack Oakie steals the pic as a Stage Manager who insists that the show must go on while Victor McLaglen, a cop in a snazzy tux, attempts to solve the case. Kitty Carlisle makes her modest debut in film with Carl Brisson, one of the murder suspects. His Continental charm doesn’t quite work on film, but watch him in the Liszt Rhapsody ‘numbo’ where he goes proto-Liberace with white tux, white piano, white candelabra, curly hair & dimples. Then watch as a young, glamorous Duke Ellington (& Co.) gets that tune to swing. Add in a couple of new songs like ‘Cocktails For Two’ & ‘Marijuana’ and you’ve got some good, silly stuff.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY-I: Like McLaglen, Carl Brisson stared out as a professional boxer. Check him out in Hitchcock’s THE RING/’27.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY-II: It’s worth noting that when Ellington & his band get to work, a line of sexy black chorines are allowed to be just as provocative as their white counterparts. In fact, the stage briefly fills up with an semi-integrated line up. A rare event at the time.

THE GREEN HORNET (1939-40)

2012-01-23T17:02:00.003-05:00

Long available only as a smeary Public Domain dub on VHS, this well-worn 13-part Universal serial has received a significant visual upgrade in a new DVD edition from VCI. (Only Chapter 9 retains the familiar subfusc look.) Alas, nothing could be done with the actual films; they’re still the same cheap-O Kiddie-Matinee fare you may recall, fondly or not. The fun stuff comes right at the opening when Rimsky-Korsakov’s Bumblebee takes musical flight and the story recap scrolls (a la STAR WARS) over a flavorsome miniature of Times Square. Why Times Sq? Then we get two full reels of bad acting, telephone conversations (usually at a desk), stock footage and a minimum of either action or ratiocination. At last, with just a minute or two to spare, we reach the big cliffhanger. The writers obviously had fun thinking these up, but come next week, they’re always solved with a previously unseen cutaway shot of Kato and/or the Hornet jumping off the doomed train/bus/boat/car/horse/airplane just before disaster strikes. It’s hard to imagine today’s kids getting caught up, but there are fanboys for everything, so who knows. They’ll never look better, that’s for sure.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Funny to think that Comic Book & Radio Serial adaptations, once commercial throwaway fodder for Hollywood, now come with budgets in the hundreds of millions. Ah, progress!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Can serials be high art? They can when Fritz Lang leads us thru four glorious hours of DR. MABUSE: The Gambler/’22. Try the restored KINO edition.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010)

2012-01-22T17:33:00.002-05:00

Werner Herzog takes us on an art tour/meditation/travelogue inside the Chauvet Cave in Southern France. Here, more than 30,000 years ago, early man decorated the stone walls with portraits of the horses they revered, the wild beasts they feared & hunted, and their own hand prints (as if to announce their presence). Severe restrictions on cameras, lighting & Herzog’s crew mean that we have to work a bit to see everything, especially since the prehistoric artisans incorporated the undulating stone surfaces into their compositions. But the miraculous freshness in the drawings, paradoxically simple & sophisticated, is almost overwhelming. Drawn by our Homo-sapien ancestors when they still shared the world with Neanderthals, it begs the question of how Art and the need to leave one’s mark factored into our survival? (Yeah, sure. Go tell the school board.) The film was shown theatrically in 3D and, for once, the loss is felt on 2D. Not only do we miss the near tactile feel of seeming to enter the cave (and the need to dodge a veritable stone ‘forest’ of stalagmites & stalactites), but the contoured etchings & drawings that hug the curves in the wall’s surface are harder to ‘read’ without the depth effect. But, unless the film is scheduled to be shown at your local Natural History Museum in its original format, don’t hold back from seeing this one.

DOUBLE-BILL: Try this with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO/’56 to see how closely a span of 30,000 years can be bridged thru the art of drawing.

MERRILY WE GO TO HELL (1932)

2012-01-20T16:14:00.008-05:00

Dorothy Arzner, the only female director to work at any of the major Hollywood studios in the ‘30s, doesn’t have enough film credits to pass up one of her lesser-known works, especially when it turns out to be something of a find. Championed (or at least, remembered) for the fatalist/feminist orientation of her best known pic, CHRISTOPHER STRONG/’33, the one with aviatrix Kate Hepburn in the moth-themed gown, MERRILY manages something even rarer, a close cinematic rendering of the sexually open tone & alcohol-fueled spirit of an F. Scott Fitzgerald Lost Generation short story. Or does until things swerve toward bathos in the last act. In a warm-up to A STAR IS BORN/’37, young Fredric March plays a charming, but alcoholic reporter with a half-finished play in his desk drawer. Sylvia Sidney, at her prettiest, is the rich heiress who falls for him in spite of the warning signs. Tough times give way to success; the one thing they can’t handle. You expect lenser Leo Tover & the Paramount art department to ace the rooftop glamor of a Chicago penthouse, but the believable New York apartments are even trickier to pull off, as is the fuss-free sketch of the ‘speak-easy’ lifestyle. Skeets Gallagher is a stand-out as a good-natured pal with an ever-ready time-step, and there’s a nice early cameo for the already assured Cary Grant. Even when the story turns conventional, Arzner captured something unusual on this one.

DER HEILIGE BERG / THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1926)

2012-01-19T16:48:00.006-05:00

Before Leni Riefenstahl became Hitler’s pet documentarian, she debuted as an actress in this classic Mountain Film from the genre’s master, Arnold Fanck. The films were designed as visual poems, near-abstract musings on life, fate & nature, set in barely accessible Alpine locales amid raging blizzards & spring thaws, with simple storylines adding narrative traction to the inspiring scenery. Here, Riefenstahl, who was something of a scenic wonder herself, is a professional dancer (very Isadora Duncan), who awakens the passions of two dissimilar men. With skiing master Luis Trenker, she shares a deep spiritual bond; with young Ernst Petersen, a more playful attachment. Perhaps if she knew these two were inseparable friends, mountain climbing partners closer than brothers, she might have quit her role as catalyst to their ‘bromantic’ liebestod on the South Face. Or was it all inevitable? In a film that relies so heavily on surface appeal, we’re lucky to have the lovingly restored print from Germany’s F.W. Murnau Stiftung’s out on KINO. Ravishing snowstorms in the Alps, torchlit skiers reflected as they glide past frozen waters and, of course, a ridiculously handsome cast. Fanck was a whiz at getting impossible concepts like nature's regard toward philosophy or the wisdom of eternal friendship on film. But ask him for a ski race where you can follow the contestants, a dance performance that builds to a finish, or just about anything simple & straightforward, and he was all thumbs. Still, everyone should give one of these loopy tableau dramas a shot. This one gets a skiing difficulty rating of - Safe for Intermediates.

THE CHEAT (1931)

2012-01-18T16:21:00.003-05:00

The story’s the same, but the thrill is gone in this third iteration of Cecil B DeMille’s 1915 upper-crust shocker, a tale of sexual blackmail that merges tasty bits from Somerset Maugham’s THE LETTER with THE SCARLET LETTER. Tallulah Bankhead should be just right as the self-centered society wife who gets over her head in debt and sells herself to a rich ‘Oriental.’ Alas, except for her one-off in Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT/’44, Tallulah was never able to make friends with the camera. Not that it would have made much difference in this watered down telling. In DeMille’s galvanizing original, the suave predator flaunts a racist edge of barbarism that drove audiences wild, and made Sessue Hayakawa America’s first (and only?) Asian matinee idol. Even Pola Negri, who made her Hollywood debut in the 1923 remake, got manhandled by an Indian Prince. And who puts the moves on Tallulah? Irving Pichel, a Paul Muni lookalike with the cultivated tones of an English gentleman. Just what is he supposed to be? Decadent Caucasian with a suspect taste in Asian houseboys & home decor? Talk about throwing a wet blanket on things. And speaking of wet blankets . . . Harvey Stephens, debuting as Bankhead’s mannerly cuckold, cold-cocked his shot at leading man status right from the start. This was also the end of the line for legendary B’way helmer George Abbott. Brought out during the early Talkie craze for theater talent, and with some decent work to show for it, he apparently had had enough and largely stuck to the Great White Way for the next seven decades! (NOTE: Our poster is the cover from the 1931 novelization.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: A French remake from 1937, FORFAITURE, has Sussue Hayakawa back in his old role after 22 years. With Marcel L’Herbier helming a cast that includes Victor Francen & Louis Jouvet, where is this curio hiding? Until that shows up you can see DeMille’s 1915 original, one of his early triumphs, on either KINO or IMAGE. Or, to see what Bankhead was aiming for, but unable to pull off, try to see the astonishing, doomed Jeanne Eagles in her only surviving sound film, the recently restored THE LETTER/’29.

OSS 117: LE CAIRE, NID D’ESPIONS / OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES (2005)

2012-01-17T17:05:00.008-05:00

The creative trio from THE ARTIST/’11, writer/director Michel Hazanavicius, his actress-wife Bérénice Bejo & Jean Dujardin, first worked together on this good-natured send-up of classic late-‘50s/early-‘60s Spy vs Spy pics. Think DR. NO meets PINK PANTHER with Dujardin supplying both Sean Connery mojo & Peter Sellers fatuousness, while Hazanavicius fields the old story tropes & filming techniques, falling a bit in love with them in the process. As THE ARTIST demonstrated, these two are quick learners in matters of period style, and Bejo shares equally in the fun as the foreign Girl Friday with a secret agenda. While the plot is probably more of a joke than it need be, OSS is also more than the sum of its silly parts, thanks to a consistent period look (and outlook) & pitch-perfect tone. It’s paradoxically accurate & goofy, respectful & iconoclastic fun; far more effective than similar attempts at reviving the genre forms in parody pics like the AUSTIN POWERS series, GET SMART or those godawful Steve Martin Pink Panther reboots. It gets under the surface with a swank compositional style & ‘swellegant’ slapstick timing that recalls the late Blake Edwards at his best. So, while there's a generous share of howlingly funny high points, the confident filmmaking makes the whole package a real pleasure to watch all along the way.

DOUBLE-BILL: A sequel, OSS 117: LOST IN RIO/’09, sounds like a tip of the hat to Phillipe de Broca/Jean-Paul Belmondo’s THAT MAN IN RIO/’64, but maybe one of the ‘straight’ adaptations of the OSS 117 books from the ‘50s & ‘60s will show up on DVD. (see poster)

LAO JING / OLD WELL (1986)

2012-01-16T17:08:00.003-05:00

Even avid followers of Mainland Chinese cinema may be surprised to find Yimou Zhang as both co-star & cinematographer in this rural drama made a year before RED SORGHUM, his first film as director. Helmed by Tian-Ming Wu in a more naturalistic style than Yimou’s, the film retains some of the old communist ‘group think’ dramatics even when it tweaks a couple of Party Line officials who try to stop a night’s entertainment from a group of blind musicians. The public storyline deals with the restoration of the local well in a water-starved town. (The water supply is so bad that neighboring villages riot over dry wells.) And the private story is all about sexual jealousy between Yimou, who has married, and his assistant, who’s an ex-girlfriend. A cave-in during the dig tests everyone to the max, but Tian-Ming doesn’t wallow in the possibilities. In fact, the script leapfrogs over expected climaxes to spend more time showing life in town. It’s not always dramatically satisfying, but it’s consistently interesting even in a sub-par DVD edition that tends to lose detail in dark quarters . . . like when you’re down in a well!

DOUBLE-BILL: A more recent Chinese film, MANG JING (BLIND SHAFT)/’03, also takes us below ground. Not in search of water, but for coal, minerals & a deadly con game of murder & insurance scams. It’s Crony Capitalism run amuck in Communist China.

NO MAN OF HER OWN (1932)

2012-01-14T16:47:00.005-05:00

Clark Gable was on a rare loan-out from M-G-M when he co-starred with Carole Lombard in this Paramount programmer, their only film together. While they wouldn’t get together as Hollywood’s most famous couple for a few years, the sexual tension is already striking. In truth, it's the only striking thing in here, director Wesley Ruggles doesn't much enter into things. Gable’s a big city card sharp, fleecing the rich with a pair of well-dressed pals & sexy/available Dorothy Mackaill as bait. But when the cops come sniffing, Gable takes a powder and heads out of town until things cool down. That’s where he meets-cute with Lombard’s surprisingly liberated hick-town librarian. The flirtation is brief, but intense. And it’s marriage-on-a-dare, deception in the big city, redemption, tru-love . . . the usual. Gable is still figuring out his look & style, but Lombard gives one of her best early perfs; she finds a core of decency, personal balance & smarts in her small-town dreamer that promises a lot more than the script manages to deliver.

DOUBLE-BILL: Lombard’s small-town gal apotheosis comes in the blistering satire of NOTHING SACRED/’37, at long last available in a properly restored DVD from KINO.

FATHER IS A BACHELOR (1950)

2012-01-13T16:59:00.004-05:00

The last time William Holden worked for Norman Foster (of MR MOTO fame) he won the heart of Loretta Young, but his rival, Bob Mitchum, got to sing all the songs in the charming near-musical RACHEL AND THE STRANGER/’48. In this one, Holden ‘adopts’ five cute-as-a-button orphans and gets to sing all the tunes as a Medicine Show entertainer-at-large. But it’s a poor trade off, since the songs are blah and he lip-synchs to some mystery voice. (Mitchum did his own singing, and very well.) This is a sentimental small-town tale (and made for the small-town market), but less sappy than it might be with Holden playing the mush as briskly as possible. Of the five siblings, the four boys go for the rough-and-tumble, but Mary Jane Saunders as the kid sister is a Shirley Temple wannabe who gazes sadly at the camera. (She’d just debuted in SORROWFUL JONES/’49 playing Temple’s old role.) No surprises here, other than the misleading title (Holden’s not even related to the tots), but it’s less painful than it sounds. Hard to believe that Holden’s next was Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BOULEVARD/’50 which would completely change his career trajectory.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: BLACKFACE WARNING!! In the opening scene, Charles Winninger, who owns the Medicine Show wagon, is shilling his potion while Holden, in blackface, sings for the crowd. But who’s the wagon driver, seated next to Holden? Why, it’s an unbilled Dooley Wilson of CASABLANCA/’42 fame! What could have been going thru his head as he watched this white guy, caricatured in cork, singing his heart out to the voice of a stranger? The vagaries of American entertainment truly know no bounds. Wilson’s role wound up on the cutting-room floor, but you can make up for it by doing a Song Search to hear his classic ‘The Eagle and Me,’ a great Arlen/Harburg number from their undervalued musical BLOOMER GIRL.

THE BEST LISTS of 2011

2012-01-12T17:22:00.007-05:00

With so many end-of-the-year studio screenings, the number of MAKSQUIBS posts has suffered. So, as recompense, a small offering: a quick (if partial*) Check List on the best reviewed titles of last year. (TITLES listed alphabetically within their Category.)

WORTH ALL THE HYPE:

THE ARTIST - Michel Hazanavicius

LE HAVRE - Aki Kaurismäki

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS - Woody Allen

MONEYBALL - Bennett Miller

A SEPARATION - Asghar Farhadi

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY - Tomas Alfredson

WORTH SOME OF THE HYPE:

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN - Steven Spielberg (a character challenged RAIDERS sequel)

A DANGEROUS METHOD - David Cronenberg

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN - Simon Curtis (though you won’t believe a moment)

RANGO - Gore Verbinski (a visual treat with an ADD plotline)

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES - Rupert Wyatt

HARDLY WORTH THE HYPE:

THE DESCENDANTS - Alexander Payne (Ron Howard goes to Hawaii)

J. EDGAR - Clint Eastwood (a tepid response to a lip-smacking opportunity)

NOT WORTH THE HYPE:

HUGO - Martin Scorsese (it’s official, St. Marty is now critically untouchable, but the film is a bore & a lie)

MELANCHOLIA - Lars von Trier (for those who find late Tarkovsky too unpretentious)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *"Partial’ in both its meanings, since our list is ‘partial,’ as in biased; and ‘partial,’ as in incomplete, missing such well-received pics as BRIDESMAIDS, TREE OF LIFE, THE HELP, DRIVER, et al. for various reasons of choice & opportunity. Some of them may appear in full MAKSQUIBS Write-Ups when they go to DVD. (Now, get off the couch and head to your favorite Bijou!)

DARK CITY (1950)

2012-01-11T16:32:00.004-05:00

Charlton Heston got top-billing right from his debut in this tasty little noir that finds William Dieterle recharging his UFA/German-Expressionist DNA in some dynamically claustrophobic compositions & lots of shadowy style. It’s a cautionary tale about three con men (Heston, Jack Webb & Ed Begley) who lose their bookie joint, but find an out-of-town sap with a fat company check in his wallet. A ‘friendly’ game of poker should put them back on their feet, but the ‘mark’ suicides which leaves the boys stuck with a countersigned check they can’t cash without pointing the finger . . . at themselves. Worse, Webb & Begley pulled a fast one on Heston and played a rigged game; worser, the dead man’s psychopathic brother has hit town, read the suicide note and is now hunting them down one-by-one. Toss in a bit of romance with a hard-luck chanteuse (Lizabeth Scott) & a flirtation with the dead man’s widow (Viveca Lindfors), plus a sweet turn from Henry Morgan as a slow-thinking pal, and you’ve got a story that will run courses. Almost. The romance gets fudged, but at least it keeps you guessing. We don’t get too far off the studio lot, but Dieterle’s background at the UFA funhouse, along with atmospheric lensing from the soon to retire Victor Milner, make the sets work better than the real thing. (Dig that cozy Las Vegas casino interior.) There’s even the luxury of a score from Franz Waxman written between SUNSET BOULEVARD/’50 and A PLACE IN THE SUN/’51. Where’s this one been hiding? (It's yet another orphaned pic from Paramount that's been picked up by those clever folks @ OLIVE DVD. Thanks guys!)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Odd to spend four full-length songs-worth of screen time for a dubbed leading lady. But that’s Trudy Stevens making those throaty sounds for Lizabeth Scott. No doubt, producer Hal Wallis was still trying to mold Scott into his own Lauren Bacall.

MIRACLE OF THE WHITE STALLIONS (1963)

2012-01-09T17:28:00.007-05:00

This fact-inspired pic on how the famous Lipizzaner horses of Vienna were brought to safety during the last, chaotic months of WWII ought to be a slam-dunk. After all, it starts like THE SOUND OF MUSIC/’65 (with horses instead of singing Von Trapps) and wraps like THE INN OF THE SIXTH HAPPINESS/’58 (with horses instead of adorable singing Chinese orphans). Alas, as the head of the Spanish Riding Academy of Vienna, Robert Taylor looks stiff & spent, with an alarming dye job, and shows little rapport with either his two or four-footed cast. Worse, Curt Jergens, in support as a sympathetic Austrian officer, shows just how the part should have been played. Actually, for a Walt Disney Production in ‘63, there’s a decent supporting cast (Lili Palmer, Eddie Albert, James Franciscus), nice location stuff and some impressive military gear to go with the battle scenes & miles of horseflesh. But the script just moseys along, moving calmly from one mild incident to the another; no dramatic swing, no pace to the thing, a perfect storm of suspense elements and no one to piece it together. Certainly not Arthur Hiller, a routine Hollywood megger at best who can't even make contact with the horses. And there’s something downright insulting in the kiddie-cues that pass for a music score from Disney house composer Philip J. Smith, to say nothing of the ode to Vienna cooked up by the Brothers Sherman when some of the riding staff gets called to the Front to do their bit for the failing Nazi cause. Positively tone-deaf.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Did Disney have funds stuck in Vienna at the time? ALMOST ANGELS/’62, a fondly remembered film about the Vienna Boys’ Choir, was made just before this, also on location. It’s never been out on DVD. (Or VHS?) Does it hold up? Helmed by Andre Previn’s brother, Steve, and blessedly without a Philip Smith score, it has one of the all-time great plot hooks: one of the scholarship choirboys discovers that his voice is changing. Pure genius.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927)

2012-01-07T01:38:00.003-05:00

Paul Leni’s comic-thriller, the granddaddy of all those chillers where a group of nervous Nells & Nellies are forced to spend a night in an Old Dark House, looks fabulous in the PhotoPlay 2004 restoration out on KINO-DVD. Sourced from original nitrate elements and strongly supported by a new Neil Brand score, the film now plays better than it has in decades. The story’s an old wheeze about a dying man in a spooky old mansion, his eccentric will, and the night all the relatives show up to hear it read. Ghosts, secret wall panels, hidden doors, a couple of dead bodies . . . the works. It was dumb corny fun when it was new, but this new edition really helps the gags & chills pop. It’s why the restored visual quality is so crucial, it really shows off the superb atmospheric effects Leni got, with a big assist from lenser Gilbert Warrenton. (What a team. They’d top themselves next year with a true masterpiece, Victor Hugo’s THE MAN WHO LAUGHS.) There’s even a good cast from Universal’s contract players with a surprisingly modern perf from leading lady Laura La Plante and creepy stylized comic stuff from the rest of the grasping fortune hunters. Martha Mattox is a particular standout as a hatchet-faced housekeeper straight out of a Georges de la Tour painting. Now, if we could only get a similar upgrade on THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, especially on the dim 1928 synch-track score which robs the film of half its magic, romance & fatalistic power. What might Leni have given us if he hadn’t died suddenly in 1929 at the age of 44?

ARIZONA RAIDERS (1965)

2012-01-05T16:24:00.002-05:00

War-hero turned actor, Audie Murphy, rode with Quantrill’s men in KANSAS RAIDERS/’50, one of his first Westerns; here, in one of his last, he’s re-upped with the renegade gang of Civil War Southern sympathizers. The earlier film had Brian Donlevy, Tony Curtis, Richard Arlen, Dewey Martin & Richard Egan in support; the best this can offer is Buster (‘Flash Gordon’) Crabbe in his last (pre-Camp) credit. Still, for a little B-pic, it’s not half bad. This time around, Murphy gets caught in a raid that kills Quantrill and is serving hard labor when he’s ‘turned’ by Crabbe’s Arizona Raider. Together, they fake an escape so Murphy can infiltrate what’s left of his old gang. The pinch-penny budget doesn’t cramp things too much out on location and the serviceable acting style is fine. But the best thing in here may be a bit of sweet revenge from some justifiably savage Native Americans. When they ride off with a bad guy, you may want to give a cheer. And even Buster Crabbe comes off pretty well. The third act complications don’t exactly reach their potential, but you can pretty much fill in the missing pieces. What you can’t do is erase the full-reel lecture on Quantrill & his raiders that starts the film. (Well, you could toggle to the next film chapter.) What dunderhead Columbia Studios’ exec tacked this on? Especially since right after this deadening prologue, another narrator comes on to tell us the same damn stuff.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned, you can catch a younger Murphy with Quantrill in KANSAS RAIDERS. He plays a fresh-faced Jesse James in it, a role he returned to in his last film, A TIME FOR DYING/’69, but without the fresh face.

THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE (1960)

2012-01-03T16:42:00.003-05:00

Unexpected fare from Criterion DVD, a bargain-basement Kiddie Matinee pic about an under-water UFO that’s causing havoc in the Polar Cap sea-lanes. Mankind’s only hope is to find the thing with a nuclear sub and blast it to kingdom come before it can take off for its home planet and return with an armada of UFOs! Hey, not such a bad idea for a cheap Sci-Fi/Monster flick. Alas, nobody involved on this one seems to give a hoot. Even if you accept the extreme limits of a tiny budget & a six-day shoot, the lack of drive & imagination kill off most of the fun. Except for those who find the no-frills staging of B-pic vet Spencer Bennet and the look of defeat & occasional contempt from some of the actors worth a grim chuckle or two. But a bit of a surprise comes at the climax as the crewmen enter the mother-ship to confront the slimy one-eyed beast. There’s no interior! That is, no interior set. Just a bit of stark lighting, bare walkways and pools of blackness. Without quite registering the shift, we automatically begin to imagine the scene for ourselves. And, for a couple of minutes, the dumb thing comes briefly comes to life.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Funny that the one thing this pic gets right (not showing the interior of the space ship) is the very thing Steven Spielberg got wrong on the ‘Special Edition’ 1980 re-release of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND/’77.

JINRUIGAKU NYUMON / THE PORNOGRAPHERS (1966)

2012-01-02T17:49:00.004-05:00

A stunner. This exhilarating work from Shohei Imamura may be largely free of anything resembling actual pornography, but it’s got heaps of perversity, devilishly clever plot turns, some phenomenal acting, cinematic style to spare . . . and a dead husband reincarnated as a pet carp. At this point in his career, was there anything Imamura couldn’t get away with? As advertised, our middle-aged protagonist is indeed a pornographer, and proud of the service he offers, shooting zero-budget ‘sex loops’ with an imposing rack of multiple 8mm cameras. Always short on cash, he works as many angles as he can: selling reupholstered ‘virgins’ to elderly businessmen, borrowing against the mortgage on the house & barbershop of his common-law wife or supplicating the greedy Yakuza Protection racket. And his personal affairs are equally messy: his common-law wife avoids sexual contact; and when he gets something going, that darn reincarnated carp starts acting up. Truth is, she’d rather cuddle provocatively with her wastrel, college-aged son. Fair enough since the hubby’s all eyes for his 15 yr-old step-daughter, a budding relationship fully endorsed by the wife on her death bed. No wonder Mr Pornographer is unfazed when a Father/Daughter duo (make that Father/Retarded Daughter duo) shows up to shoot some action. Imamura ties this all together with a bravura technique of frames and masked camera shots, punctuated by the natural editing of those sliding Japanese doors, with multiple window panes and wall panels carving out mise-en-scène to die for. Plus hallucinatory jumps in time continuity, topped with a breathtaking rock & roll music cue during a fit of hysteria. This isn’t a film for the cinematically squeamish. Just be warned that Imamura rarely gives his characters identifying close-ups, so you may need to rewatch a scene or two to get your bearings straight. But this darkly comic tale is worth a bit of extra effort.

ATLAS SHRUGGED: Part 1 (2011)

2012-01-01T15:46:00.003-05:00

Even readers who reject the basic themes of Ayn Rand’s didactic novels; or who see the psychological & government obstacles in her plots as little more than convenient strawmen; or who simply resist wading into thickets of turgid dialogue unequaled by any best-selling author with the possible exception of Leon (EXODUS) Uris . . . even these folks will have to admit that her magnum opus deserves something a little better than a film that barely rises to the level of a LIFETIME cable movie. With a cast of charisma-free, zero wattage actors (the leading lady pauses between clauses at every climax); dark interiors that imply power shortages rather than power; and the oddly dated plot about replacing an old railroad track with an untested, experimental metal one for a new bullet-train; the only narrative interest lies in wondering if the pic’s producers, after licking their financial wounds from this fiasco, will make like the novel’s heroine (Dagny Taggart!) and successfully beg up the capital for Parts 2 & 3.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Rand hands might hate to admit it, but there’s no little irony in the fact that all the world’s bullet trains (China, Japan, Europe’s TGV) are heavily funded/subsidized by their various governments. Or is the mysterious John Galt behind this?

PLYMOUTH ADVENTURE (1952)

2011-12-31T18:00:00.003-05:00

Clarence Brown ended his long directing career with this poorly received, large-scaled MAYFLOWER bio-pic. It’s easy to see why the film was rejected, it reeks of good intentions & educational value; and while it freights a reasonable load of history, it’s also rigged with a juicy romantic triangle strapped on for show, like a useless jib. Yet, there’s unexpected life to the thing as Brown patiently builds real interest out of the conventional episodes and amorous foibles in Helen Deutsch’s carefully groomed script. Spencer Tracy, in his last romantic lead, is startlingly violent as the dour Captain, almost unfathomably hostile to his passengers & crew. And it’s the same oversized reaction that both draws & unnerves Gene Tierney, the proper, but unfulfilled wife of Pilgrim Leo Genn. (The eruptive passion may have reflected their personal involvement at the time.) A truly frightening attack against his own first mate (Lloyd Bridges) and an outpouring of grief at his own taciturn nature find Tracy making contact with demons he’d long avoided showing on screen, as if we were getting a look under the skin at the Ahab he never got to play. So, perhaps it’s worth putting up with a miscast Van Johnson and a level of British elocution from the supporting cast that would not have been out of place in the Royal Court. Things are less trying ‘below-the-line,’ with a Miklos Rozsa score that tweaks the Quaker ‘Simple Gifts’ hymn to fine effect, superb interior lensing from William Daniels (just watch Garbo’s man photographically hitting up Gene Tierney for a portrait) and a wallapalooza storm at sea from the effects department.* The cast even takes a cinematic curtain-call at the end; maybe they’ve earned it.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Back in the days of analogue special effects, ships at sea during a fight or a storm were about the toughest thing to fake. And techniques that barely passed in b&w looked even less convincing in color processing. So, a tip of the hat to M-G-M on this one. Where the heck were these guys when BEN-HUR was being shot in ‘59?

CORRIDORS OF BLOOD (1958)

2011-12-30T15:07:00.002-05:00

Boris Karloff didn’t get a lot of legit acting opportunities in the later stages of his career. His many glorified Guest Ghost appearances in over-ripe horror pics earned him top-billing, but scant screen time. So, he must have been pleased with this little British assignment (and its companion pic, THE HAUNTED STRANGLER/’58) which offered a bit of elbow room for his rusty acting chops. Set in Victorian England, which is smartly handled at the cost, Karloff plays a top surgeon desperate to find an effective anaesthetic. But when he winds up addicted to his own formula and in league with a gang of cutthroats, something’s gotta give. The two lines of action (scientific research gone wrong and blackmailing criminal lowlifes) don’t quite add up, but it makes for a kind of geriatric Jekyll & Hyde story, which obviously appealed to Karloff. Robert Day, who helmed most of THE AVENGERS for tv, gets a lot out of his tight budget, and out of a surprisingly good cast, including the young Christopher Lee who does a neat villainous turn. But you only have to compare this with similar cost-conscious efforts Karloff made for Val Lewton’s unit @ RKO to realize how dull & unimaginative it is.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The Lewton pics, BODY SNATCHER/’45; ISLE OF THE DEAD/’45 or BEDLAM/’46 are all superior entries in the field. Or, for a different take on Pain-Free surgery, there’s THE GREAT MOMENT/’44, a bit of a lost cause for the great Preston Sturges who wasn’t able to get the film released in its original form. But it’s still a fascinating miss.

THE CONSPIRATOR (2010)

2011-12-29T16:25:00.002-05:00

Robert Redford’s latest disappointment takes on the case of Mary Surrat, mother to one of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination plot and housekeeper/hostess to the rest. It’s A Few Good Scapegoats for Civil War ‘recreators,’ showing how a panicked administration railroaded civilians to the gallows with a speedy military trial. (Though the proceedings against the men go largely unheard.) It does generate a certain dramatic momentum, what courtroom drama doesn’t, but only the parallels to recent legal jurisdiction decisions in the current War-on-Terrorism briefly enliven Redford’s rote presentation. Habeas Corpus be damned . . . and all that. Obvious or not, it's a legit argument, and a deeply compelling one. But everybody in the fine cast steps so carefully around their characters, nodding soberly at all the historical ramifications, that the film rarely churns up much emotion. Only Kevin Kline, chewing a bit of scenery as the self-justifying Secretary Stanton, goes for broke with Robert Bork whiskers & the righteous conceit of a heartless Dick Cheney. Kline adds a gleeful scare in the midst of Redford’s regrettably tasteful proceedings. Even in the sure-fire prologue, where Redford juxtaposes the assassination plot with dressy end-of-the-war-parties, the clarity & vigor needed to jump-start things is missing. And by the end, when Surrat’s son is pointedly not asked about his mother's complicity, we feel gypped.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Samuel Mudd (the doctor who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth) is briefly seen here with the other conspirators, but wasn’t tried with them. John Ford tracked his journey in THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND/’36. Not quite top-drawer Ford, but close enough, even if Mudd’s innocence remains in doubt and the film slanted.

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU (2011)

2011-12-27T13:13:00.002-05:00

In his megging debut, scripter George Nolfi really scrapes the bottom of the Philip K Dick meta-physical barrel. It’s one of those lame Free-Will fables with a TWILIGHT ZONE twist ending that lets everyone off the hook. Of course, these things can work if you ‘buy’ into the concept, but Nolfi hasn’t the action chops, cast or (sorry Dick fans) story to con his way in & out of the many meta-absurdities. Matt Damon’s a Kennedyesque politico who loses a race for the Senate but gains the love of his life (Emily Blunt) while practicing his concession speech in the Men’s Room. The sequence is so awkwardly written, and the leads have such striking antipathy, you think she must be part of the film’s other-worldly conspiracy. But no, that team is Guys-Only; a cadre of sharp-suited soul handlers who manage our future trajectories without our knowing it. Can Damon outfox his team of life planners? Will tru-love wreck both their futures? Does the grand Pooh-Bah in the sky really believe that Americans would elect a bachelor President? And why can’t a buff young man out-sprint a slow-moving bus in Midtown NYC traffic?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: In the opening reel, Nolfi uses cameo appearances of real journalists, news anchors, politicians & celebs to add verisimilitude to this tall tale. But the famous faces actually work in reverse, pushing us out of the story just when we need to be pulled in.

ANNA BOLEYN (1920)

2011-12-26T16:04:00.005-05:00

Even with a trail of successful comedies & dramas under his belt, including CARMEN/’18 and THE OYSTER PRINCESS/’19, ANNA BOLEYN was the big cinematic breakthrough for Ernst Lubitsch. Suddenly, a complete film vocabulary is joined to his matchless character analysis, story sense & visual wit. Under Lubitsch, the well-known story of Henry VIII & second wife Anne Boleyn has pomp & show, but also keeps an eye on the human-scaled foibles that turned courtship & the whims of fate into tragedy. (And it daringly makes a knowing villain out of wife #3, the clueless Jane Seymore.) The purposeful editing & natural feel for mise-en-scène are handled with new found confidence, moving us along in a lively fashion between public spectacle & private intimacies; still effective today in spite of the overly-enthusiastic perfs from leads Emil Jannings & Henny Porten. A cast of thousands (well, hundreds) provides extra luxury, as do the striking sets & fine lensing from Theodor Sparkuhl, who came to the States about a decade after Ernst. (Lubitsch undoubtedly helped him land @ Paramount.) Note the consistent use of various framing devices, a Lubitsch speciality, not only via doors, windows & arches, but with various lens masks directly on the camera to help accent & dramatize shots. A master was being born; and Hollywood took note, making him the first big ‘get’ from UFA/Germany when Mary Pickford grabbed him for ROSITA in ‘23.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Mary Pickford never got over the critical & financial success of ROSITA, which she grew to revile and even tried to suppress. (It survives in a compromised Russian print.) Yet, after seeing Chaplin’s A WOMAN OF PARIS/’23, Lubitsch had his anti-epic epiphany and moved to the sophisticated romantic comedies he’s still famous for.

DOUBLE-BILL: Why not try Donizetti’s operatic Tudors instead of another movie version. The gorgeous Russian soprano Anna Netrebko has made a specialty singing ANNA BOLENA and DG has her with the Vienna State Opera on DVD. Or wait for the up-coming MET version, already seen via HD-broadcast in theaters.

BON VOYAGE (1962)

2011-12-25T21:08:00.005-05:00

There are hints of an attempt to break past the bounds of Family-Friendly-Fare in this Walt Disney Production about solid Midwesterners (Fred MacMurray & Jane Wyman) who take the kids along on a long-planned trip to Paris. But any spark gets smothered by the hangdog, second-hand look that was studio house style under boss Ron Miller, Walt’s son-in-law. As Disney turned his attention to theme parks (with a few exceptions like MARY POPPINS/’64 and JUNGLE BOOK/’67), cinematic flat-lining set in, especially on films with MacMurray as a bargain-basement James Stewart (and alter-ego Walt). This one dribbles on for over two hours with remarkably little location shooting to buttress the stock footage & coarsely handled studio mock-ups & process transparencies. And what other studio was still shooting in Academy Ratio in 1962? Yet, so many odd events transpire. Mom looks ready to throw a party celebrating daughter Deborah Walley’s budding sexuality. "All stirred up,’ is the terminology. Dad gets drunk not once, as a gag, but three times, just about every time he goes out. Little Kevin Corcoran gets to take a pee touring the Paris sewers in the Paris sewers; and big brother Tommy Kirk does even better, sharing a prostitute with dear old Dad. Okay, it happens consecutively; and things don’t progress past a cafe demitasse, but still . . . in a 1962 Disney pic! But who would notice amid the tone-deaf dialogue, thuddingly obvious character development and appalling technical work?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Vincente Minnelli’s THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE/’58 tackles a lot of the same themes with swank, charm & the elegant comic touch of Rex Harrison & Kay Kendall worrying over the over-taxed hormones of Sandra Dee & John Saxon.

NIKUTAI NO MON / GATE OF FLESH (1964)

2011-12-23T15:12:00.002-05:00

The urban chaos of Tokyo in its post-WWII devastation is the teeming backdrop for Seijun Suzuki’s visually extravagant film about an ad-hoc prostitute collective & the macho thief who disrupts their well-run business. Suzuki returned to the subject, in a more soberly realistic b&w style in THE STORY OF A PROSTITUTE/’65, but this film’s gaudy colors & theatrical look emphasize the pinch-penny studio sets in the city (which come off brilliantly) and blasted landscapes (which don’t). The girls keep their end up, working & living in a partially bombed-out warehouse, by holding strictly to their ‘house rules,’ most especially, ‘Never Give Anything Away.’ But when the wounded Jo Shishido turns up, it’s just a matter of time before his schemes & manly charms take their toll. Suzuki was always fighting with his home studio, Nikkatsu, but they must have been pleased by the ample doses of sex & violence with tru-love answered by ritualistic soft-core S&M punishments. Great for the Box-Office! A secondary plot involving Shishido’s mob ties and some stolen penicillin helps to tie everything up, but it’s the bright lights of corruption & revenge that make this one another Suzuki treat.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Rather like the prostitutes in this film, once Suzuki got free of the restrictions & genre formats @ Nikkatsu, artistic freedom turned out to be a two-edged career sword. Do any of his later films measure up to his best as galley slave @ Nikkatsu?

IN THIS OUR LIFE (1942)

2011-12-21T15:01:00.004-05:00

After Bette Davis scored on loan-out to Sam Goldwyn in THE LITTLE FOXES/’41, playing ten years older for Lillian Hellman’s dysfunctional Southern-family melodrama, Jack Warner bet on another dysfunctional Southern-family melodrama, a Pulitzer Prize winner, with Bette playing ten years younger. But the sophomore curse was on John Huston’s second directing effort and he seems utterly bewildered by the characters & tone. Davis, trying too hard for youthful zest overplays wildly, but what excuse does everyone else have? (Even Max Steiner’s score goes off the rails.) Davis & Olivia de Havilland play yin & yang sisters Stanley & Roy, and Olivia’s got the mannish coif to go with the name. Davis is the bad seed who steals Olivia’s beaux (Dennis Morgan, George Brent) with a flirtatious glance, and then rues her choice. But this time, Olivia’s patience-act & Davis’s out-of-control id are too transparent to be taken seriously or hold much interest. A pity because there’s loads of red meat in the underdeveloped subplots: Southern race issues (pretty advanced stuff for the day); family business & medical secrets; female empowerment & male emasculation. The film does improve in the third act, with Davis & papa-bear Uncle Charles Coburn turning in some powerfully creepy scenes, but this sort of thing would only come into its own in the ‘50s under the likes of Tennessee Williams, Douglas Sirk . . . and a more mature John Huston.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Sirk’s superb WRITTEN ON THE WIND/’56 and William’s CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF/’58 (less than it should be in Richard Brook’s film) show what this film might have been. (Though, if you do rent it, be sure to watch the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in CAPRICCIO ESPANGNOL on the EXTRAs. Jean Negulesco did even better on his follow-up, GAITE PARISIAN, which feels less cramped, but we’re lucky to have them both.)

TONIGHT AND EVERY NIGHT (1945)

2011-12-19T11:18:00.002-05:00

A smidgen of truth lurks behind this splashy Rita Hayworth WWII musical: there was a Windmill Theatre in London and it did manage to stay open during the ‘blitz;’ the rest is pure Hollywood. And that’s okay because the tasty package holds up surprisingly well, easily besting the better known Betty Grable competition over @ 20th/Fox. Mastered from a lip-smacking TechniColor print, Hayworth gets strong support from producer/director Victor Saville & from Rudolph Maté, who lensed most of Hayworth’s iconic pics. The opening two reels are particularly fluid, with angles, rhythm & a palette that’s more Powell/Pressburger than Harry Cohn/Columbia. Then the plot, such as it is, shows up in the form of Lee Bowman, an RAF pilot who can’t ‘land’ Rita until he’s sent into action. There’s a lot more chemistry in the secondary storyline with near-sighted dancer Marc Platt who settles for Janet Blair after being rejected by both the military board and by Rita. (Born Marcel Emil LePlat, he’s a Ballets Russe vet fresh off OKLAHOMA! on B’way where he doubled for ‘Curly’ in the Agnes de Mille dream ballet. And, man, can he dance!) No doubt, the film would be better known if the perfectly pleasant Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn score were stronger. But, with the exception of a dud comic specialty number, and a whacky green-trimmed horror that Blair wears on stage, this is a snazzy package that earns its teary wrap-up.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Jack Cole, the film’s unsung (and uncredited) choreographer, is usually remembered as a sort of proto-Bob Fosse. But he’s a Fosse with a lot more range (and steps!) and none of the self-loathing. Both of which make him, alas, the less interesting artist.

DOUBLE-BILL: Judi Dench & Bob Hoskins brought us something closer to the real Windmill Theatre Story in MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS/’05.

VANISHING POINT (1970)

2011-12-16T23:49:00.005-05:00

After the game-changing commercial success of EASY RIDER/’69, it suddenly became possible to set up a largely plotless film about hitting the road and speeding past a vanishing American Dream. This one, about a car delivery driver with a haunted past and a reckless spirit, has built a substantial cult following that’s not entirely undeserved. Barry Newman is more sullen than charismatic as the laconic driver who races his DodgeCharger ‘muscle car’ from Denver to California on a bet, outrunning the cops on his way thru the Western plains & deserts. He meets a few eccentrics, scores a one-night stand with hitchhiking Charlotte Rampling (at least, in the U.K. cut, this Angel of Death stuff was snipped Stateside) and runs a host of competitive drivers off the road, pausing after every crash to be sure no one got hurt. Lenser John Alonso gets the most out of the well chosen locations, as do the hell-bent stunt drivers, but Richard C. Sarafian consistently megs to the lowest common denominator. Finding ‘manna’ in the desert is a clever piece of business, but do the cops need to rape & be racists to keep us on Newman’s side? And those soggy romantic interludes! Some of the film’s cult following comes from the soundtrack, programmed in the film by ‘soul brother’ radio jock Cleavon Little, but its main appeal probably stems from a nihilistic attitude empty enough to accommodate just about any nonconformist idea that comes to mind.

TOKYO SONATA (2008)

2011-12-15T17:52:00.006-05:00

For the first two acts, this recent film from Kiyosho Kurosawa is a well-observed family-crisis drama, with low-key perfs, naturally-sourced lighting & artless camerawork. But things go off-the-rails into highly charged melodrama in a third act that’s more Nick Ray than Rossellini. The change in tone never quite convinces, it's a bit of a curate’s egg, but oddly interesting, especially when things teeter out of control. The main storyline follows Dad as he finishes a downsizing/outsourcing project only to find himself a victim of his own success and newly unemployed. Hiding the facts from his wife & sons, he starts acting out, as do his teenage boys. One gets out by joining the military and the youngest uses his school lunch money to pay for secret piano lessons. But things really get strange in the last act when the well-known actor Kôji Yakusho shows up as a luckless burglar. He winds up kidnapping the wife; she winds up driving his stolen getaway car (her first time behind the wheel!); they stop at a mall where she discovers her husband working as a janitor. And what a day he’s had; he's just found a small fortune left in the stall at the Ladies’ Toilet! And that's just the start of it. Whatever possessed Kurosawa to juice things up with all this coincidental dramatic drivel? And how the hell was he able to make us go along with him? By the end, when the youngest son plays Claire de Lune to gain admission to a music academy, you may have rejected the whole film . . . or found yourself oddly moved.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: While Kiyosho shares a name, if not any known lineage with that other Kurosawa, this film looks more in the direction of the great Yasujiro Ozu, specifically his sublime domestic dramedies I WAS BORN BUT . . . /’32 and its loose remake GOOD MORNING/’59.

WHEN LADIES MEET (1941)

2011-12-14T12:44:00.003-05:00

In a sexual roundelay that plays out like a double helix, Robert Taylor is the newly reformed bachelor who proposes to his long-time gal pal Joan Crawford. But she’s cooled down and now only has eyes for her smooth publisher, Herbert Marshall, a man who doesn’t let a wife interfere with his bedside manner. As luck and playwrighting convenience would have it, the wife (Greer Garson) & Taylor meet-cute at a dinner party, and hit it off in a platonic way. She’s even game for playing along with him to make Crawford jealous. Good thing these two ladies don’t know what they’ve got in common. It’s easy to see the possibilities in Rachel Crothers’ play, but the folks @ Warners VOD have opted for the remake of ‘41, rather than the ‘33 original which featured a far more promising cast: Myrna Loy, Ann Harding, Robert Montgomery & Frank Morgan in for Crawford, Garson, Taylor & Marshall. This is especially rough on the first half of the piece which tries for sparkling comedy, but lands with a thud. Nobody here knows how to throw a line away. It’s probably all too dated to work anyway, but the earlier film might at least be an interesting period piece. Here, everyone’s just insufferable. Yet, when Crothers drops the witty repartee and gives the ladies their big nighttime ‘bonding’ scene, opening their hearts to each other before discovering their guilty secret, you can feel how effective this might have been on stage. Rubbishy, but effective .

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Did it seem as obvious at the time as it does now that it’s the two ladies who should be getting together at the end? And was it intentional?

THE TOURIST (2010)

2011-12-12T15:53:00.003-05:00

Stupefying. After THE LIVES OF OTHERS/’06, his superb debut on East German ‘Stasi’ mentality, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s sophomore pic is this wan attempt to recreate a witty Hitchcockian thriller. It’s got all the ingredients: Innocent Man On The Run; Beautiful Female Spy; Flirting On A Train; Glam Locations; a McGuffin . . . the works. But it never comes to a boil; heck it never hits sous vide. And the stars seem to know it. As the naif who steps into international intrigue, Johnny Depp looks blurry & out of sorts while Angelina Jolie looks positively spray-painted as a sashaying secret-agent in haute couture & a phony British accent. The film tries to wow us with sweeping Venetian vistas, luxurious hotel suites & a fancy-dress formal ball, but Donnersmarck can hardly get things past a stately walking pace (does he think we might miss something?), and the infamous German sense of humor only makes things worse. In tiny parts, Timothy Dalton & Rufus Sewell show just how to play this sort of thing, but no one else in front or behind the camera has a clue. Then, just when you think the worst is over, they haul out one of those ludicrous switcheroo/’got’cha’ endings. As if this coffin needed another nail.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Stanley Donen’s CHARADE/’63 does Hitchcock-lite to a 'T.' Plus a neat ‘got’cha’ ending.

THE WAGONS ROLL AT NIGHT (1941)

2011-12-11T16:44:00.003-05:00

Warners tossed Humphrey Bogart into one last B-picture in ‘41, the year HIGH SIERRA and THE MALTESE FALCON permanently bumped him up to Grade A starring roles. It’s a lumpy rewrite of KID GALAHAD/’37 that swaps boxing out for (wait for it) lion taming! (Even the trailer thought twice about this, hiding the circus element.) In GALAHAD, Eddie G. Robinson accidentally discovered a natural slugger and rode him to the top; here, Bogie finds a local kid who’s a natural cat handler. It sounds pretty silly, literally so with a dismal background score that can’t figure out whether to play things straight or for laughs. Sylvia Sidney, after two years off the screen, dropped in to play the old Bette Davis role, now a Fortune Teller & Girl Friday to Bogie’s circus manager. (She dropped back out for another four years after this one.) As the kid, young Eddie Albert is charming, and looks just like DUMBO’s Timothy Mouse in his spangled outfit. But the only interesting element, an add on to the GALAHAD template, is Bogie’s neurotic over-protection of his little sister, Joan Leslie, when she gets a crush on Albert. Bogie really knew how to throw a crazed fit. Don’t get your hopes up though, one of the lions goes crazy, in a surprisingly scary climax, and sorts everything out for a quick finish.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Of course, there’s KID GALAHAD/’37 with Robinson & Davis; or KID GALAHAD/’62 with Elvis Presley, Gig Young and Charles Bronson. Bronson & Presley. Who knew? But why not stick with the circus milieu and watch the best damn circus film of '41, or any other year, DUMBO.

MATRIMONIO ALL’ITALIANA / MARRIAGE ITALIAN-STYLE (1964)

2011-12-10T16:03:00.003-05:00

There are more than a dozen film & tv adaptations of this Neapolitan dramedy, including one helmed by author/star Eduardo De Filippo. But Vittorio De Sica’s film, with Sophia Loren & Marcello Mastroianni. is the one everyone thinks they know. But do they? It’s not the silly, light-hearted romantic comedy promised on posters or squibbed in review books, but a surprisingly dark, even cruel, tale of lust, lies & a self-centered lothario. For twenty odd years, Marcello serially uses Sophia as a prostitute, as a family nurse, as a mistress, as an employee at one of his shops and finally as manager of his business interests. Marriage isn’t in the picture. The film neatly divides the story in two with Sophia at first tricking Marcello into marriage and then convincing the jerk to do the right thing for the right reasons. De Sica’s work feels hemmed in during the first half, Filippo’s sour comedy doesn’t always give him much breathing room. But everything clicks in the second half when the sentimental drama & the gags feel perfectly integrated, and perfectly calibrated. Modern audiences may be surprised at just how much of a sexist shit Mastroianni’s character is, especially since he doesn’t sweeten the bitter comic pill. (The Berlusconi mindset shows how little some Italian attitudes have changed.) And in a real tour-de-force perf, Loren is outstanding. Has any movie Goddess ever looked so enticingly beautiful in so many different ways as she does in this film? But beyond the va-va-va-voom, what an actress she could be when (and only when) working with De Sica. As Filumena she seems capable of giving everyone from Chaplin to Anna Magnani a run for their money. (WARNING: Beware of Public Domain copies. Look for the new KINO/Lorber DVD which has a fine WideScreen image.)

CONTEST: Name two British Dames who tried on Filumena in stage productions to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of any NetFlix DVD.

TOAST OF THE TOWN (1937)

2011-12-08T18:28:00.003-05:00

The real story of how Jim Fisk all but cornered the gold market, and started the ‘Black Friday’ panic of 1869 in the process, is hiding in plain sight on this routine bio-pic. Edward Arnold, whose big personality worked best in small doses, is the wheeler-dealer who made (and lost) a fortune playing the Yanks against the Rebs before conning his way back on top in New York with partners Cary Grant & Jack Oakie. Naturally, there’s a girl in the picture (Francis Farmer) for Arnold to pine for and Grant to nobly renounce. Stranded between hambones like Arnold & Oakie, Grant overacts alarmingly when he isn’t making cow-eyes at Farmer. But no one seems especially comfortable in this misfire. Arnold had better luck with a similar role in DIAMOND JIM/’35 (courting Jean Arthur to a Preston Sturges script), and a lot more rapport with the unlucky Ms Farmer on COME AND GET IT/’36. Everything’s a little forced here, and the episodes don’t feel complete; the financial doings rattle on and Farmer’s big stage show is all bows & curtains. Yet, it’s quite a lux production from indie producer Edward Small, with a top scripter (Dudley Nichols) and cleverly helmed by Rowland V. Lee, who knew how to squeeze a modest budget. But they all missed a great American morality tale and it's still waiting to be told. Perhaps a modern take on how the Koch Brothers almost cornered the Silver Market?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Switching commodities, step back to 1909 for an early D.W. Griffith two-reeler, A CORNER IN WHEAT, one of his greatest early achievements. Still in lovely physical condition, beautiful & haunting.

TEMPLE GRANDIN (2010)

2011-12-06T15:12:00.008-05:00

There’s nothing on Mick Jackson’s CV that seems to lead to this knockout HBO bio-pic on Temple Grandin, a young woman who didn’t so much triumph over her autism as thru it. A leading specialist in livestock handling (don’t get sentimental, she made her mark building a better abattoir), her equally remarkable mother ‘mainstreamed’ her thru high school, university & the employment sector. Building on a stubborn persistence, Grandin corralled her unique abilities at visualization into ‘Moo Science,’ thinking & feeling as a cow. You can pick at the script for telegraphing story points & goals, but cleanly handled time-shifting construction help it maintain a lively pace and freshen up a pretty well-worn story arc; while any small faults are more than compensated for by the emotional completeness of Temple’s phenomenal journey. (The film is much closer to the truth than these things usually are.) The performances couldn’t be better, bouquets to all: the cowboys, good & bad; to Mom & Aunt Ann (Julia Ormond & Catherine O’Hara); to David Strathairn’s teacher-of-the-year; and especially to Claire Danes whose Temple must be the best assumption of this sort of role since Daniel Day Lewis began to write with MY LEFT FOOT/’89. Anyone who can watch this touch-averse freshman let her new blind roommate hold her arm for guidance, or start singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in a key too high and not tear up may now leave the room.

DOUBLE-BILL: Included as an EXTRA on the Criterion DVD of Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE/'59 is his extraordinarily graceful, deadly grim short-subject on a horse slaughterhouse in Paris, LE SANG DES BÊTES/’49 (BLOOD OF THE BEASTS). As mesmerizing as it is unwatchable, it certainly shows you what Ms Grandin was out to change. WARNING!: The Franju short is definitely not Family Friendly material. (Speaking of EXTRAs, watch the one on here to see the real Temple.)

READ ALL ABOUT IT: In addition to her own books, there’s a fine portrait of Temple Grandin by Oliver Sacks in his 1995 collection AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS.

ZIFT (2008)

2011-12-02T16:46:00.002-05:00

No doubt Bulgarian helmer Javor Gardev overdoes it on his debut pic, dishing out turbo-charged Neo-Noir style like gravy on a Blue-Plate Special. But you can’t help but grin at the fun he has following a convict on his calamitous first day out of prison. Shot in dank WideScreen b&w, the story fills us in on more than a decade lost in prison where Moth (it’s his nickname . . . don’t ask) turned himself into a fierce, heavily tattooed fighting machine. But his release comes at a price as a series of goons & official types chase him down to find out where he stashed that ultra-valuable diamond that helped to send him up in the first place. As the hard-luck convict, Zahary Baharov is physically imposing, and just as convincing playing his younger, more innocent self. A good thing since Gardev runs him thru his places with a mini-series’ worth of violence, sex (pretty graphic), foot chases on slippery surfaces and deadly poisons. The complicated plotting & visual references run the gamut from D.O.A./’50 to GILDA/’46 (with Bulgarian lyrics to ‘Put the Blame on Mame,’ no less), all the way up to EASTERN PROMISES/’06. And, of course, there’s a lying femme fatale who’s either worth killing . . . or dying for. It’ll be interesting to see how Gardev follows this up. He’s worth watching, even when you aren’t sure what the heck is going on.

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN (1927)

2011-12-01T17:39:00.003-05:00

Considering the name recognition, historical importance & long-running success as a theatrical property, it’s surprising that this late silent is the only feature-length film of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel. No doubt, Universal hoped for grosses comparable to those two other out-of-fashion ‘barnstormers,’ WAY DOWN EAST/’20 and BEN-HUR/’25, and budgeted accordingly. But lightning didn’t strike thrice. Piece by piece, there are some handsomely developed action sequences from director Harry Pollard: ESCAPE OVER THE ICE FLOES!; KIDNAPPED OFF A RIVERBOAT!; FLOGGED SLAVE REFUSES TO GIVE IN! But the much edited final cut largely reduces Stowe’s complex narrative to the marriage of light-skinned slaves Eliza & George, and their forced separation before baby makes three. Moving the time frame up to the Civil War doesn’t help things either. A Union Army ride to the rescue comes off as overkill while the Emancipation Proclamation only undercuts the horrors of unending slavery. The film does earn points by using lots of actual African-Americans actors, especially James Lowe’s Uncle Tom who’s no obsequious dodderer, but an honest man of strength, restraint & purpose. (He never worked in the industry again.) Still, it’s tough to get past the usual lies of a Southern gentry on the plantation with happy ‘darkies’ dancin’‘, singin’ & scarfin’ down watermelon. Even if you do, there’s still Mona Ray’s blackface Topsy. Not done up in the artificial vaudevillian mask of minstrelsy, but as realistic mimicry. So much worse.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: D.W. Griffith stole the famous ice floe sequence off the stage for the climax on his stupendous 1920 version of WAY DOWN EAST, and it’s never been topped. (The one in here is pretty good until they botch the ending.)

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

2011-11-30T17:54:00.005-05:00

Everybody’s hiding some kind of love that dare not speak its name in John Huston’s expansion of Carson McCuller’s novella. Set at an Army base way down south, Major Marlon Brando is married to Liz Taylor, but only has eyes for soldier-boy Robert Forster. He’s got a thing for horses, rides ‘em barebacked & bareass, but will stand at attention to watch La Liz sleep the night away. Not that she knows, she’s too tired from love-in-the-afternoon with Brian Keith, the Colonel next door who’s devoted, in a chaste way, to Julie Harris, his neurasthenic wife. She, in turn, despises him, preferring to gossip with their fey, Philippino houseboy. Whew, that’s a burgoo & a half! The film is usually considered one of Huston many misfires from this period, and he does lose control of the material at times, but there are extraordinary things in here. Certainly, no one in the cast is phoning it in. Taylor is a perfect fit for a change, even her squally voice doesn’t hurt; broad of bust, broad of beam & more than a tad mean, she’s wicked funny. Brando, in a role meant for Monty Clift, plays as if on a dare, beating himself up in a vanity-free mode that prefigures LAST TANGO/’73, though the accent is close to impenetrable. These two might be Brick & Maggie the Cat a few years down the road. With all it’s faults, you can’t keep your eyes off this one. NOTE: Huston desaturated the original prints, leaving a golden tone and pale hues on a nearly b&w image. But when the film flopped, the studio switched back to full color. The current DVD offers Huston’s ‘golden’ look, but the accompanying trailer gives a good idea of what the fully loaded TechniColor prints must have looked like. The difference is startling.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)

2011-11-28T16:31:00.005-05:00

The penultimate release in the six canonical James Bond pics* is heavy on big sets and light on storyline. Based largely in Japan, it’s the one with kidnapped space capsules and our first good look at Super Villain Blofeld. Why it’s Donald Pleasence with a monocle shaped scar!; he’s trying to start a shooting war between the US and the USSR! And there’s Sean Connery’s 007, undergoing a new form of torture as five Asian vixens doll him up to ‘pass’ as a humble Japanese fisherman! (With that nose?) Lewis Gilbert, fresh from helming ALFIE/’66, nips the incipient bloat of THUNDERBALL/’65 while lenser Freddie Young gives it all a classy look, plus better-than-usual process work and a visually memorable poisoning. If only it were more involving. Blame Roald Dahl’s script which comes up short on the narrative thru line. Then again, it’s not so much the action scenes & stunts, nor the evil plots & hi-tech gadgets that separate the better Bonds from the lesser, it’s (of all things) his level of rapport with the leading ladies. And there ain’t no heat between Bond and his babes in this one.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The last of the ‘first cycle’ Bonds, ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE/’69, is famously spoiled by its grotesquely inadequate (and grotesque) Connery replacement, George Lazenby. Even so, it’s got the best female lead of them all in Diana Rigg and retains the balanced blend of playfulness, action & villainous sadism that made these early entries work. Connery’s one-shot return in #7, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER/’71, swapped playfulness with self-referential mockery, a misfiring mistake that continued in even the best of the Roger Moore pics. The films have been in reaction mode ever since; currently the pendulum is stuck in an ‘overcorrected’ position, perhaps permanently.

StotDII: Note our posters - On the Left - Britain, where girls come first; On the Right - the States, where the preference is for action. This explains too much!

KATYN (2007)

2011-11-25T17:16:00.004-05:00

Poland’s ‘Man-of-Cinema,’ Andrzej Wajda, was a vital 81 when he made this film about the WWII Katyn Forest massacre, a national tragedy for Poland, where 20,000 POW officers were taken out of their detention cells and shot like cattle. It was made all the worse when the occupying Germans used the incident as propaganda against the Russian Army and then, after the war, when the Russians moved in, rewritten as a Nazi atrocity. Wajda wants to do more than point the finger at those responsible, the Russians have long been held as the perpetrators, he wants to show, thru a series of loosely related personal stories, mostly on the homefront, how this open wound refracted thru Polish society; the noble, the ignoble, the stupid. It’s a great topic, an important one. But, as so often with Wajda, the film is considerably less than the sum of its parts. The opening is just right as masses of displaced Poles approach a bridge in the country. There are thousands on foot, fleeing the Germans. Ahead, two boys come running with news, the Russians are coming! It’s no fanciful metaphor; it’s the Polish dilemma in a nutshell. An equally telling sequence shows one of the POWs’ father, a professor whose university is summarily closed by the SS as a hotbed of free-thinkers. The entire staff is forced into vans and taken on a one-way trip to a Concentration Camp. Terrifying stuff, superbly staged, the finest thing in the film. And there are other impressive moments, but also too many that are jumbled or merely judgmental. Those noble, ignoble & stupid people again. Perhaps it’s all true, but Wajda never convinces us. And by the end, when the film jumps back to show the nuts & bolts of the massacre, we’re prompted to feel the devastation, the inhumanity, the sheer waste. You may not respond.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Pawel Komorowski’s STAJNIA NA SALWATORZE /’67 is a WWII Polish-Resistance tale worth tracking down. (See below)

THE LONGEST YARD (1974)

2011-11-24T18:10:00.005-05:00

This classic football fable looks more cheerfully Politically Incorrect than ever, and the years have added a nostalgic charm to its many virtues. Burt Reynolds, at the start of his decade-long run at the top of the heap and already looking the worse for wear, is just right as the don’t-give-a-damn ex-pro who gets stuck in a segregated Southern prison after tearing up his rich wife, her rich car & a short cop. Under orders to whip up a sacrificial team of prisoners for a tune-up game against the Semi-Pro prison guards, he doesn’t just find a team, he also finds himself. Robert Aldrich and regular lenser Joseph Biroc shoot from the hip, trying to catch as much spontaneity as they can, letting function dictate the compositions. Even fans will admit that the comedy & drama fall into the crude, rude & lewd department, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But perhaps 'savagely blunt' gets closer to the mark. That’s what triggers the comedy, excessive bluntness, which bubbles up not only from the physical mayhem & comic reversals, but goes a bit deeper from the detailed character set-ups in the pic’s first half. Aldrich certainly takes his time doing this. At one point he lets a whole Laurel & Hardy routine play out in a swamp between Reynolds & another chain-gang convict. But that’s why he can afford to let the big game carry the entire third act. (M*A*S*H*/’70 is an obvious point of reference.) As chief bad guy, Eddie Albert lets his tailoring do much of the work, this prison warden looks like the Chamber of Commerce, and a super strong cast of up and coming character actors all get their moment. The only downside is seeing Burt Reynolds in the ugliest pair of pants in film history, noting the odd resemblance to Marlon Brando, and knowing what miserable career choices he would soon start to make.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The cheesy singing cheerleaders (a sort of lowdown MOTOWN act) are a lot more entertaining than most SuperBowl halftime spectaculars.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL / SCROOGE (1935; 1938; 1951)

2011-11-23T19:59:00.011-05:00

M-G-M hoped to continue their winning ways with Dickens adaptations following DAVID COPPERFIELD/’35 and A TALE OF TWO CITIES/’35) with this Christmas classic. Initially planned for Lionel Barrymore who was under contract & already established on radio as America’s Scrooge, his severe arthritis put him out of the running. (Of course, he played a ‘near’ Scrooge for Frank Capra in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46, but try to hear one of his annual outings of the real thing on radio, especially the ones he did with Orson Welles & his Mercury Players on the Campbell Playhouse.) Reginald Owen wound up playing Ebenezer, and he’s perfectly fine, but the project was demoted to a glorified ‘programmer,’ with all departments going thru the motions under hack megger Edwin Marin. With the storyline already squeezed to fit on a measly six reels, the half dozen ‘improvements’ are as wasteful as they are unfortunate. And where are Ignorance & Want; the kids who hide by the feet of Christmas Present? It’s fun to see Gene, Kathleen & young June Lockhart as Crachets, and Leo G Carroll hollers splendidly as Jacob Marley, but everything else is bland, bland, bland. The best reason to watch this may be as a comparison with the marvelously efficient story construction on the much-loved 1951 British version. Alastair Sims’ stupendously effective, perfectly judged Scrooge has always been its calling-card, but a recent restoration from VCI (on a 2007 two-disc edition) makes it easier to appreciate the craftsmanship of Noel Langley’s script & Brian Desmond-Hurst’s helming. Moving, funny, and damned scary at times, it’s only two reels longer than the M-G-M film, yet manages twice the story. And the cleaner visuals show how well the lensing & art design serve Dickens’ tricky mix of exaggeration, sentiment & toughness, keeping everything in balance. It’s also the only version to include the devastating (and motivationally important) deathbed scene for Scrooge’s sister. And there's a big EXTRA on the VCI edition, an interesting, if occasionally crude, British version from 1935 that shows, thru a poor print and some savage story editing, some nice visual style. Those willing to squint, will find some neat moments, including a nice bit when the shadow of Christmas Future seems to drape itself over Scrooge’s face. Creepy! (The Recommendation below is just for the 1951 film.)

DOUBLE-BILL: More like a QUINTUPLE-BILL! Clive Donner who edited the Sims pic directed a notable tv version (in color) with George C. Scott in excellent form/’84; and don’t forget the sui generis magic of MISTER MAGOO’S CHRISTMAS CAROL/’62 with a score by Jule Styne who repurposed a discarded song for use in FUNNY GIRL. You may have heard of it, it became ‘People.’

THE FIGHTER (2010)

2011-11-21T16:53:00.003-05:00

Micky Ward’s championship career as a welterweight boxer in the ‘90s proves as generic as the title on his bio-pic, though not in a bad way. It’s his life outside the ring with an emasculating mother/manager, an older crack-addled brother/trainer & a strong-willed girlfriend with contagious self-confidence that puts a fresh pair of legs on those winded dramatic tropes. David O Russell helms in a fast-and-loose style, playing up the comedy (and comic horror) in Ward’s large, female-tilted Irish-Catholic family; and he makes this 1990s story feel more like Rocky Balboa’s ‘70s. (Lowell, Mass. tends to run behind the trends, anyway.) Even better, he pulls back from the cinematic boxing pyrotechnics that have dominated the screen since Martin Scorsese overfed the beast in RAGING BULL/’80. As, respectively, controlling mom & scapegrace brother, Melissa Leo & Christian Bale got lots of attention for their fierce, noisy perfs. They’re awfully good, but it’s hard to think of anyone missing with these juicy roles. (Bale is especially fine right at the end, adding a graceful exit that leaves the spotlight on his talented brother. Really moving stuff.) And Amy Adams is just-right as the new girlfriend with excellent film taste. But the film gets its footing from Mark Wahlberg’s stoic decency & body mass, a masterclass in selfless believability. He also nails the accent with more conviction (and less fuss) than anyone since Robert Mitchum ordered a cup of coffee in THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE/’73.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY / DOUBLE-BILL: How come so many boxing pics feature brothers or brothers-in-law in their story lines? CITY FOR CONQUEST/’40; ROCKY/’76; RAGING BULL, even that post-boxing pic, ON THE WATERFRONT/’54.

KEEPING MUM (2005)

2011-11-19T18:28:00.002-05:00

Imagine one of the darker Ealing Comedies, say KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS/’49, & that old American standby about those murdering biddies, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE/’44, merging with MARY POPPINS/’64. That’s the idea behind this blackly comic tale of a dysfunctional family and their new, sweetly sensible, if criminally insane housekeeper. American writer Richard Russo (NOBODY’S FOOL/’94; EMPIRE STATE/’05) brings a mordant tone & Old Testament sensibilities to a picturesque English village where Rowan Atkinson, nicely playing things straight, is the absent-minded Vicar who’s lost control of his life at home & work. His lovely wife Kristin Scott Thomas is all but throwing herself at the sleazy local golf pro (Patrick Swayze) for comfort & attention while their clinging son is getting trashed by bullies at school and their daughter is busy screwing trash. Enter new housekeeper Maggie Smith, practically perfect in every way, to sort things out . . . with a blunt instrument. You know the filmmakers are playing for keeps when a barking dog gets ‘offed’ in the night, and those taunting classmates are deliberately placed in harm’s way. What a jolly lot of accidents! Once you adjust to the down-and-dirty playing level, the wickedly sharp acting and neatly rhymed story win you over. But it's not the slightly eccentric, but friendly, little town farce you were expecting. (Be sure to run the Deleted Scenes with director Niall Johnson’s commentary track to see the bad choices & structural mistakes that kept this film from hitting its full potential.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Dame Maggie made quite a few of these dark site-specific British comedies. Try the Yorkshire-based A PRIVATE FUNCTION/’85, with pigs & Michael Palin, which Alan Bennett wrote for her before their tour-de-force one-woman monologue BED AMONG THE LENTILS/’88.

THE INVISIBLE BOY (1957)

2011-11-18T16:49:00.005-05:00

M-G-M scraped the bowl to find a second-helping of Robbie the Robot, the breakout ‘personality’ from FORBIDDEN PLANET/’56, in this cheaply made (and very weird) Kiddie Matinee pic. (Originally shown in sepia-tinted prints!) No longer set far in the future, this present day Cold War story has Robbie in storage, sitting in pieces till an under-achieving boy screws him back together. The son of a brilliant scientist, the kid’s been turned into an instant genius after being left alone with his dad’s Top-Secret ‘electronic brain.’ This rebel computer has started to think on its own, and it plans to use Robbie & this newly invisible boy to take over the world! Will the nerdy father hand over the coded control numbers; or stoically watch as Robbie the Robot dismembers his disobedient boy? Er, once the kid returns to his normal ‘visible’ state. As a study in parental indifference, lax military security, God-like sacrifices a la Abraham & Isaac, and eavesdropping computers who only pretend to be asleep, there’s a lot of odd ideas bubbling just below the surface of this shoddy little pic. Too bad it’s in such a lousy production. Even the kid, Richard Eyer, a standout brat in William Wyler’s FRIENDLY PERSUASION/’54, stinks up the joint.

DOUBLE-BILL: Rent a set of LOST IN SPACE tv episodes and have a Robbie the Robot fest.

THREE FOR THE SHOW (1954)

2011-11-16T16:48:00.003-05:00

Betty Grable, the top-grossing female star of her era, is something of a lost cause to modern audiences. (Then again, imagine trying to explain Madonna to future generations.) In this, her penultimate film and last musical, made on loan-out to Columbia from 20th/Fox, she’s been given a breathy singing voice (to sound more like Marilyn Monroe?), but is in good company on a trim little musical about a B’way star who finds herself simultaneously, if innocently, married to both halves of her writing team, Jack Lemmon & Gower Champion. (Yep, it’s another variation on ENOCH ARDEN, by way of Somerset Maugham & an earlier Jean Arthur pic.) Happily, no one presses the ‘dumb farce’ button too hard. Instead, choreographer Jack Cole conjures a neat routine for these three to barely miss each other while dashing around their shared apartment. Since the fourth co-star is Gower’s real-life wife & dancing partner, Marge Champion, there’s not a lot of suspense in how things will work out, but this let’s everyone concentrate on some unexpectedly well-staged musical numbers. In addition to some Gershwin & a few pop songs, Jack Cole goofs around with some Borodin (he’d just done the all-Borodin KISMET on B’way), Tchaikovsky, Liszt & Rossini to good effect. Helmer H. C. Potter and lenser Arthur Arling aid the theatricality with some spotlighting effects that rarely work this well on film. Grable's famous legs hold up nicely, and she looks swell if you remember to tame the color (the make-up is fierce), plus it’s always a kick to watch Lemmon sing & dance in these early credits. But the real surprise are those Champions. Always neat as a pin and efficient in their every move, here, especially in a big duo that closes the second act, they supply the missing element in their quiver: heat. And what a difference it makes! What a shame that musicals have gotten so expensive that they can’t be modest little charmers anymore.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Everybody knows that Marge Champion was filmed playing some of Snow White’s scenes as an aid to the Disney artists. But the cartoon character she actually looks like is . . . Wilma Flintstone!

DOUBLE-BILL: Blake Edward’s deliciously deranged MICKI + MAUDE/’84 where it’s the guy (Dudley Moore) who finds happiness with two wives.

DARLING (1965)

2011-11-15T17:54:00.006-05:00

An emblematic peek under the covers of London’s ‘Mod ‘60s’ (and Britain’s cinematic New Wave), Jon Schlesinger’s acclaimed film now looks as studied & hollow as its hedonistic heroine, Julie Christie. (1965 was her breakout year, with this & DOCTOR ZHIVAGO.) Frederic Raphael’s script has a real sense of place & dialogue, but he scores too many easy points and opts for a stilted structural device with Christie dictating memoirs to some unseen party. (A late addition mandated by a nervous producer?) As Christie evolves from fresh young thing to rich, EuroTrash misery, we go along past lovers and a modeling career, with little satisfaction from either. Intellectuals & minor royalty, sybarites of all persuasions, an abortion, an orgy, booze, pills, furs & a yacht, but alas, no repose. If only Christie’s emptiness were met with something stronger than ‘clever’ juxtapositions of rich people and their clueless behavior . Laurence Harvey is perfectly cast as a smooth operator, and Dirk Borgarde manages to make his writer an oddly sympathetic heel. (It helps to be the scripter's alter-ego.) Too bad second-tier lenser Ken Higgins had so much trouble figuring out how to shoot Christie to her advantage. He only unlocks the magic toward the end when we’ve lost all patience.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: A couple of years after this, Frederic Raphael came back with two near-classic screenplays. A more benign look at the glamorous rich in the adored dramedy/romance TWO FOR THE ROAD, with Hollywood helmer Stanley Donen cleverly adopting French New Wave techniques; and a fabulous reteaming with John Schlesinger & Julie Christie in an adaption of Hardy’s FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. Christie still goes thru men like tissue paper (Alan Bates, Peter Finch, Terence Stamp), and she still can’t act, but under the rapturous gaze of lenser Nicolas Roeg, you’d be crazy to care. One of the great underseen literary epics.

STAZIONE TERMINI / TERMINAL STATION (aka INDISCRETIONS OF AN AMERICAN WIFE) (1953)

2011-11-13T19:35:00.003-05:00

Producer David O Selznick must have been hoping for an Italian BRIEF ENCOUNTER/’45 when he ‘silently’ produced this small-scale end-of-the-affair story. He cast his wife, Jennifer Jones, as the married half, and Montgomery Clift, just off FROM HERE TO ETERNITY/’53, as illicit lovers trying to find a bit of privacy in the middle of Rome’s brand new, bustling, ultra-modern Stazione Termini which added prestige & size to a slender plot. When director Roberto Rossellini turned him down*, Selznick went with Vittorio De Sica & his collaborators who, no doubt, hoped for a Hollywood-sized payout between making the devastating UMBERTO D/’52 & the delightful GOLD OF NAPLES/’54. Selznick was even a De Sica fan, he had briefly considered a remake of BICYCLE THIEVES for Cary Grant. (Really!) But he rebuffed De Sica’s 90 min. cut which used the public spaces & open design of the station as a third main character while adding lively vignettes from passers-by to constantly interrupt the lovers. Selznick wanted to concentrate on the uncomfortably neurotic interplay between Jones & Clift, and slashed three reels of atmosphere out of the pic for the American release; adding an exceedingly odd musical short (with Patti Page) to bump up the shrunken running time. The original cut, which unfortunately has a technical problem with its music track on the Criterion DVD, is still a miss . . . but, it’s an interesting miss. And it lets you see what De Sica was aiming for.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: De Sica cast the train station’s Commissioner with a Selznick look–a-like. A subtle dig at the man who makes everybody wait for his say-so before anything can happen.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Selznick may have been on to something with Rossellini. The same year, Ingrid Bergman & George Sanders starred in his remarkable VOYAGE TO ITALY, playing just the sort of unhappily married couple Jennifer Jones and her unseen husband might have been in this film.

IDIOTS AND ANGELS (2008)

2011-11-12T13:31:00.002-05:00

Bill Plympton’s distinctive artisanal style of hand-drawn animation is well-suited to this fable on man’s infinite capacity to ignore his own best instincts, his ‘better angels;’ even when they’re as plain as the nose on his face . . . or a set of wings growing out of his back. There’s no dialogue, but grunts & groans tell us all we need to know about the grumpy gun dealer who sells illegal weapons at a dive bar where a small but loyal group of oddball losers congregate. They each have their ‘pipe dreams,’ visualized for us as if Eugene O’Neill had written a pantomime, but then reality brings them back to their drab lives. And that’s when the unwanted wings start to sprout. Fought against, then fought for and fought over (some of the action is pretty grotesque), they annihilate everyone’s plans and turn inertia into ambition before blowing up in everyone’s face. It’s a wild, exhilarating, anarchistic ride. Plympton is especially gifted in clever visual transitions & substitutions, though, on the down side, his storyline & visuals can turn repetitive. But adventurous types won’t want to miss this. At its best, it’s a considerable achievement from an artsy animator best known for one-reel absurdities. NOTE: This feature-length cartoon is not for the kiddies! On the other hand, your teenage son just might flip over it.

BELLS OF ST. MARY’S (1945)

2011-11-11T19:45:00.004-05:00

No one has ever been able to explain how Leo McCarey held his loose-limbed pics together, especially the phenomenally popular Bing Crosby/Father O’Malley duo of GOING MY WAY/’44 and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S. With their wise, twinkly priests & benevolent, good-humored nuns, they might be taking place on another planet: roughhousing city kids turn into angelic choirboys; cloying subplots reunite families; and weepy finales get boosted with miraculous displays of generosity in true faith & hard cash. Yet, with only slight indulgence, they remain irresistible. Part of the secret may be McCarey’s background in silent film comedy. Present at creation to Laurel & Hardy, he developed a relaxed feel for the rhythms of comic pacing & the patience to let episodic structures bloom. In this one, Crosby’s padre is sent to give Sister Ingrid Bergman’s rundown parochial school the once over. Will its doors close forever? If anything, we’re less connected to the real world than in the first film. Maybe a good thing. Lesser story materials & less memorable songs hardly matter since these films don’t rise & fall on the usual pluses & minuses. It’s all in the way McCarey riffs on his gags & sentiment, as if he’s playing jazz. It’s also why Ingrid Bergman, given a rapturous close-up from lenser George Barnes, reaches a level of spirituality far beyond anything she achieved when playing Joan of Arc in ‘48.

DOUBLE-BILL: Instead of GOING MY WAY, try McCarey’s decidedly odd final pic, SATAN NEVER SLEEPS/’62 which manages to relocate GOING MY WAY to ‘Red’ China! William Holden & Clifton Webb get the young priest/old priest roles played in GOING by Crosby & Barry Fitzgerald.

CONTEST: Listen as this Catholic school recites the Pledge of Allegiance. Notice something missing? Name and explain the gap to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of any NetFlix DVD.

MAN BAIT / (aka) THE LAST PAGE (1952)

2011-11-10T15:26:00.004-05:00

Hammer Studios made this tidy sexual-blackmail thriller a few years before they started rebooting horror pics in ultra-saturated color with Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee. And while it only reaches about 60% of its potential, it’s (just) odd enough to warrant a look. George Brent is appropriately gray as an unassuming bookshop manager with an invalid wife and an assistant who’s long pined for this nice unavailable man. But he’s also got a live wire in the shop, the young, sexy (and slightly slutty) accounts girl, Diana Dors. She's being chatted up by a lout who gets her to initiate a blackmail scheme against Brent after a reckless kiss. But when things go too far, people start to die, and Brent becomes the likely suspect. Terence Fisher, Hammer’s house helmer, gets some moody atmosphere out of actual London locations, and the bookshop is a claustrophobic marvel. (Is it a real place?) If only the blackmail scheme and the intimations of psychotic behavior had been fully exploited. With that in mind, note the credit for adaptation. Why it’s Frederick Knott of DIAL M FOR MURDER fame. Too bad they didn’t really let him run with this, the last act shows glimmers of something much stronger. But hold on for a great ‘thrill shot’ during some amateur sleuthing near the end. It’s worth the whole movie.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: The classic read on quaint old London bookshops is 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD by Helene Hanff. You can read it in less time than it takes to watch the so-so movie they made of it in 1987.

THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (1972)

2011-11-08T15:44:00.006-05:00

Ray Milland is the terminally ill transplant specialist who needs a fresh body to graft his healthy head on. ‘Rosie’ Grier is the death row inmate who volunteers in the hope of gaining a little extra time to prove his innocence. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, did I mention that the good doctor is a horrible racist? If only the movie were as outrageous as its set up. Alas, this goofball release from Grade B film marketeers American International Pictures has the heart, soul & look of ‘70s a tv Movie-of-the-Week, with a few car & motorcycle chase scenes thrown in. A big fandango with 14 police cars is impressively destructive, but megger Lee Frost hasn’t a clue on how to put cause-and-effect into an action scene, random mayhem is his limit. Still, in its tactless way, the film is not without social/political interest as a blunt bigotry litmus test.. But it does go awfully flat whenever it tries to be funny. If it simply let its absurdist tendencies play out, it might have been nearly entertaining. That is, if someone other than Milland knew how to act.

DOUBLE-BILL: The idea of a white bigot trapped inside the body of a black man had recently appeared in Francis Coppola’s disastrous attempt at FINIAN’S RAINBOW/’68, made twenty years after the stage show opened & twenty years before it might have worked as a period piece. And don’t forget WATERMELON MAN/’70. Still a better pairing might come from another double-headed film fiasco, HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING/’89, the career-cratering follow up pic for helmer Bruce Robinson & Richard E. Grant just off their indispensable WITHNAIL AND I/’87

L’AFFAIRE FAREWELL (2009)

2011-11-07T16:04:00.003-05:00

This mesmerizing Cold War endgame pic is a tru-life spy story that might have been written by John Le Carré.* It’s largely about Sergei Gregoriev (well played by Emir Kusturica), a highly placed Russian official who proves his trustworthiness not by leaking Soviet secrets, but by showing how many contacts & how much intelligence has leeched from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R. President Reagan (a delighted Fred Ward) & his staff, especially the CIA (Willem Dafoe), are gobsmacked. Now that he has their attention, Gregoriev hopes to leak enough info to decimate Soviet intelligence operations. Not for money or revenge or a ticket to freedom, but because he believes it can get his beloved, but moribund country out of deadlock; basically, he’s doing it for his son. And he pulls this off, not thru the usual Spy vs Spy channels, but with the terrified assistance of a mid-level French official living in Moscow with his family (Guillaume Canet). It may look like domestic intrigue, but the stakes are as high as they come. Christian Carion, who helmed & co-scripted, does a beautiful job keeping the operations clear and ratcheting up the tension. Even better is how the film incorporates the complicated family lives of these men, and in showing how their heroic actions may have done more in bringing down the Iron Curtain than all the Reagan White House military defense spending could muster. A superb film, and a bit shocking to note that this exciting & important work didn’t rate a theatrical run in the States.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *A barely recognizable David Soul plays an aide to Reagan named Hatton, but he’s made up to look just like Lyn Nofzinger. He gets to sit with the Prez and watch THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE/’62. SPOILER ALERT!: They show who shot him!

DOUBLE-BILL: Why not try John Le Carré’s RUSSIA HOUSE/’90, Fred Schepisi helms Sean Connery & Michelle Pfieffer in a Tom Stoppard script. It’s an underrated film with similarities to this story. How much did Le Carré know?

IERI, OGGI, DOMANI / YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW (1963)

2011-11-05T19:59:00.002-04:00

KINO/Lorber’s much-appreciated DVD upgrade restores Vittorio De Sica’s tri-part comedy to its gorgeous, sexy, hilarious self. The tour of Italy starts in Naples where poor women can only keep out of jail by staying pregnant. But even when your wife is Sophia Loren, seven squalling kids are enough to make Marcello Mastroianni too pooped to pop. Then we’re off to Milan where a chic Sophia tries to drive away ennui with a new Rolls-Royce & a new romantic prospect. But can Marcello’s bookish intellectual handle a luxury car & a luxury woman? Now, to Rome where Marcello’s businessman is stopping in town to pay a few bribes and spend some quality time with his favorite call-girl. Guess who. But there’s a distraction on the neighboring terrace, a young seminary student who’s thinking of ditching God for Sophia. (There’s a difference?) De Sica’s broad comic tone is wonderfully assured here, combining smooth film technique with warm-hearted perfs from his irreplaceable stars. It’s not only that he gets the details right, he makes them specific, The film is a tourist's dream, but not a tourist’s trap. A big difference. It’s often forgotten (and bizarrely held against him by film academic types) that De Sica, the great Neo-Realist humanist, was also one film’s greatest entertainers. Working beautifully with Giuseppe Rotunno on magnificent locations (and cunningly matched studio interiors, what editing!), he generates huge laughs just on the camera set ups. The middle segment, an adagio between allegros, is a bit thin, Antonioni & Visconti appear to be the targets, but it shares in the remarkable use of space & composition. Five decades on, the film remains the most civilized of racy entertainments imaginable.

CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (1939)

2011-11-05T19:44:00.004-04:00

One of the first straight-ahead anti-Nazi pics, CONFESSIONS is so cleverly pieced together & excitingly paced, you hardly notice how thin this episodic FBI procedural actually is. The first act is all Germans & German-Americans plotting, spying, beer drinking, sneaking in on the S.S. Bismarck & congregating at the local German-American Bund. Finally, the F.B.I. comes into the frame when Edward G. Robinson shows up in the fourth reel, something of a late-entry record for a top-billed star. But Eddie’s always worth the wait, and with his paradoxically calm/staccato professorial manner, he teases out the conspiracy, picking off suspects and playing them against each other. No rough stuff from a country that’s still officially neutral, Eddie finesses confessions out of them. On paper, it doesn’t sound like much, but Anatole Litvak helms with an energy level that moves too fast to feel didactic as we go on a Stateside tour of pro-Nazi rallies for kids; a political riot in a NYC rathskellar & watch Gestapo enforcers operating in midtown. And the film is loaded with clever visual touches like the crisscrossing waiters who the camera follows from one conspirator to another or the florid expository montages (probably from Don Siegel) with swastika ‘wipes’ and just about every ‘optical printer’ trick in the book. The courtroom scenes are a bit of an anticlimax, Henry O’Neill is an underwhelming prosecutor, and the film loses dramatic density when George Sanders’s conflicted Nazi agent goes missing. But Francis Lederer is just right as a thickheaded, overconfident immigrant who buys the Nazi propaganda Paul Lukas spews out in the style of Hitler playing an East-Side Manhattan beer garden.

DOUBLE-BILL: Warners made a comic variant in ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT/’42. It’s pretty lame stuff, even with Bogie, Conrad Veidt & Peter Lorre in the cast. But the change in tone from the jittery pre-Pearl Harbor days to the laughing-in-the-dark atmosphere of early war losses is fascinating.

HAMSUN (1996)

2011-11-02T19:03:00.004-04:00

Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell uncovers a family drama right out of August Strindberg in the last act of the life of Norwegian author/Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun, and his wife & family. Max von Sydow & Ghita Norby are simply magnificent as a mutually dependent husband & wife who can’t bear the sight of each other. And, more than just the story of an aging literary lion who terrorizes his family as his talent recedes, there’s extra historical interest in the enthusiastic support they gave to the Nazi occupation. Troell only lets us see the paths that brought them to their appalling (and highly unpopular) positions peripherally. The roots of Hamsun’s long festering hatred of the British apparently dated back to WWI, but are never spelled out. This has the advantage of avoiding simplistic ‘cause-and-effect’ answers on motivation, and lends unusual complexity to the portrait of willful political ignorance so often seen in brilliant, but congenitally stubborn people. Happily, that’s a condition which seems to have bypassed Troell who helms, writes, edits & shoots his work and who took a great risk in letting Sydow act in Swedish, Norby in Danish and everyone else in Norwegian. (Heck, it was Greek to me.) Er, except, that is, for Hitler & his gang who speak German in the devastating meeting Hamsun has with the Fuhrer. One of many highlights in this remarkable, under-seen film.

DEEP IN MY HEART (1954)

2011-11-02T18:24:00.003-04:00

Hollywood calculus on Broadway composer bio-pics runs in direct disproportion to talent. Hence, Jerome Kern. George Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart & Cole Porter get awful pics, while George M. Cohan, Kalmar & Ruby & Sigmund Romberg ‘win, place & show.’ Maybe it’s lower expectations.* Whatever the cause, this film’s a breezy, unexpected charmer for anyone not completely allergic to operetta. Stanley Donen, who couldn’t have been thrilled with the assignment, strips down the usual fusty M-G-M look for speed & forward momentum, and Roger Edens, long-time second to master-of-musicals Arthur Freed, called in every favor he had on the lot to stuff his first solo credit with fab specialty numbers. José Ferrer, just skewered in THE BAND WAGON/’53, was a bit of a cold fish, so he’s just right for Rommie, a man who put all his passion into big slurpy melodies. Ferrer’s real life wife, Rosemary Clooney, stops by to share a verse, but José really scores acting out an entire B’way show in an eight minute marathon ‘numbo.’ (The fictitious show, JAZZ-A-DOO, is presumably BOMBO, a big hit for Al Jolson in 1921, which means BLACKFACE ALERT!.) Gene Kelly does a nifty duo with brother Fred; Cyd Charisse is incredibly sexy in DESERT SONG and, a bit later, her husband, Tony Martin, incredibly virile on Oscar Hammerstein’s God-sent lyric for ‘LOVER COME BACK; Jane Powell & Vic Damone aim for the fences in full operetta mode; Ann Miller looks, for once, like a complete dancer; and Edens, in a casting coup, has an Isolde up his sleeve, the great, rather matronly Wagnerian soprano Helen Traubel. She pours out the goods as Romberg’s mentor, then brings it down to a fine thread for a frankly gorgeous ‘SOFTLY, AS IN MORNING SUNRISE.’ Lots of opera stars tried to make the move from The Met to Hollywood, but few took so naturally to it. No wonder Edens immediately worked up a smash Las Vegas act for her, that Jerry Lewis & Blake Edwards hired her or that she co-starred with Groucho Marx in THE MIKADO.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Naturally, the one guy the studios really wanted was the one guy they never got: Irving Berlin. Not only did he have the biggest catalog of hits, he had, by far, the most dramatic life story. Dickens couldn’t have dreamed it up. But Berlin was too smart to sell. A tough & savvy salesman, he preferred quasi-bio-pics which let him dip into his catalog over & over & over.

DOUBLE-BILL: Romberg’s shows were considered old-fashioned even when they were new, but that didn’t stop Hollywood from turning them into hit films, even in the silent days. Ernst Lubitsch’s THE STUDENT PRINCE/’27 is bittersweet perfection, with Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer & a naughty dachshund all giving the performances of their lives. (But it needs a better musical soundtrack then it currently has.)

THE MOUNTAIN (1956)

2011-11-01T17:46:00.004-04:00

At a paunchy 56, Spencer Tracy is a tough sell as either a skilled mountaineer or as the big brother of 26 yr-old Robert Wagner in this handsome, but empty Edward Dmytryk film. A plane crash in the Alps, near the brothers’ village, has brought outsiders to town: state officials, mail inspectors, newsman, insurance agents. But when the sanctioned rescue party fails to reach the crash site, Wagner presses his retired brother to help him make the dangerous climb for plunder. Tracy reluctantly goes along as protector & guide, but when they find a survivor among the wreckage, their mission has to change . . . or does it? Edward Dmytryk, trying for the calm authority of Fred Zinnemann or William Wyler, shows effective patience during the climbing sequences, but Ranald MacDougall’s script paints the contrasting brothers with too broad a brush. Tracy’s good/noble peasant vs Wagner’s venal/callow youth. How much stronger the drama would play if we could at least partially sympathize with the young man’s desperation to get away from cows, sheep & simple souls. But only the superb cinematography of Franz Planer rises to the dramatic level Dmytryk is aiming at. And what a show Planer makes of it! Shooting on location in the enviable VistaVision format, there’s so much depth & clarity to the images, even the special effects & process shots go far above the norm. No small consideration when you’ve got to fake every mountain climbing scene for the physically restricted Tracy.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Okay, how ‘bout: HEAR THIS, NOT THAT? Get a real taste of mountain air with Richard Strauss’s ultra-humongous AN ALPINE SYMPHONY/ EINE ALPENSINFONIE. What version? Well, Christian Thielemann conducting the Vienna Philharmonic on DG is pretty tough to beat.

BLONDE VENUS (1932)

2011-10-29T18:59:00.007-04:00

The ratio of Sublime to Inane swings noticeably in the six Hollywood collaborations of Marlene Dietrich & mentor/helmer Josef von Sternberg. Skeptics to the legend lean toward the earlier films (where Marlene has cheeks as well as cheek bones) while true believers opt for the delirious excess of the final two. So, where does that leave this mid-point entry?* Here, Marlene plays the loyal & loving wife of radium-poisoned Herbert Marshall. To save him, she stoops to conquer, chantuesing in a nightclub where she promptly falls for Cary Grant’s ‘swellegant’ racketeer. Sternberg usually had the older suitor (or husband) as masochist/reject, but VENUS adds button-cute Dickie Moore as a wild card; he’s Dietrich & Marshall’s son, and that changes the equation. The film holds its place in popular culture because of ‘Hot Voodoo,’ the song where Marlene emerges from a gorilla suit, but it’s sacrificial MotherLove that drives the narrative. (Alas, none of the songs are memorable.) With Sternberg, it’s never quite clear how much of this is supposed to be taken seriously. (Dietrich sacrifices, sins, gives up her son, sinks to the depths, rises to stardom, then gets it all back. 'Is that all there is?') But with Jules Furthman on script, the swift transitions move the outrageous story ahead like a graphic novel for the soap opera set, and his kidding-on-the-square dialogue perfectly characterizes while getting healthy laughs. And not only for Dietrich & Grant. Just see what he does for the amazingly assured Hattie McDaniel in an early appearance.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: * With seven films, why is #5 midpoint? Well, THE BLUE ANGEL, made in Germany, is sui generis. DISHONORED/’31 was #3, but gets dropped as their sole misfire. (But keep the great execution finale.) Here’s the full line-up: BLUE ANGEL/’30; MOROCCO/’30; DISHONORED/’31; SHANGHAI EXPRESS/’32; BLONDE VENUS/’32; THE SCARLET EMPRESS/’34; THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN/’35. (Though in America, BLUE ANGEL got released second, after MOROCCO . . . but in an inferior English-language edition.) Note the missing year of 1933 when Paramount untied the Gordian Knot and gave Dietrich to Rouben Mamoulian for the ill-considered SONGS OF SONGS. Then, back to Sternberg for the last two films. Confused yet?

NIGHT FLIGHT (1933)

2011-10-27T17:23:00.003-04:00

Like any long-sought treasure, few ‘lost’ films are able to meet the inflated expectations of unavailability. But this rarely seen David O. Selznick production, from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s book, turns out to be a true buried beauty. Hardly a great film (heck, it’s not even a good film!), it’s so handsomely designed & visually inventive, it disarms normal objections. Meant as an all-star follow up to Selznick’s DINNER AT EIGHT/’33, it top-bills John & Lionel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery & Myrna Loy; all that’s missing is a storyline. No matter, helmer Clarence Brown, an avid flyer, seems positively liberated by the assignment, as is his inspired lenser Oliver Marsh. John Barrymore, in another superb perf from his brief glory years (1932-34), agonizes in an office impressive enough for a small-time fascist dictator as the tough-minded boss of a So. American mail service. He’s just instituted night flights and won’t let fog, rain, black-outs, impassable mountains or worried spouses stop him. A commander out of wartime, he sends young pilots like Gable, Montgomery & the likable William Gargan to possible death, all to advance the cause. (Gable’s miscast, but Montgomery has some remarkable scenes.) Hayes, who’s wistfully insufferable, and Loy play the not-so stoic wives, while a fidgety Lionel Barrymore grumps as his kid brother’s second. Selznick tossed in a bit of corny melodrama involving a polio serum to shore-up the film’s episodic structure and damned if he didn’t reuse it on MADE FOR EACH OTHER/’39. But it’s the romance of the air, captured by all the tech departments working on some kind of painterly high, that holds the film togteher. The trick work is unusually fine for its period and the real flying sequences are beautifully caught, quite spectacular. Why even Herbert Stothart’s musical score has its moments. Now that’s unusual. (Be sure to check out the vintage Harman/Ising cartoon for some mint-condition 2-strip TechniColor.)

DOUBLE-BILL: The hard-shelled guy sending flyers into harm’s way may echo Howard Hawks’ THE DAWN PATROL/’30. But then, Hawks’ ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS/’39 strongly echoes this film. And Gable, a fly-boy here, will take on a variant of Jack Barrymore’s role when he makes COMMAND DECISION/’46.

HEROES OF TELEMARK (1965)

2011-10-26T17:03:00.004-04:00

Five years after Kirk Douglas dropped Anthony Mann for Stanley Kubrick on SPARTACUS*, the two tried again with this by-the-numbers WWII ‘impossible mission’ story. Kirk plays a Doubting Thomas professor who’s roped into the resistance when Richard Harris shows him evidence of ‘heavy-water’ production at a mountainside factory. Shut it down or the Nazis get the atom bomb! But when the British commando squad goes kaput, it’s up to a handful of skiing Norwegian patriots to play saboteur, including Professor Kirk. It’s a good premise, there’s even a whiff of truth in the story, and the snowy locations are cool (no pun intended), but everything’s bent to accommodate Kirk’s inflated sense of himself. How much better if this scientist/professor, the ‘indispensable man,’ wasn’t mission-ready at all. Maybe even a bit of a klutz who had to be shown the ropes. Literally. (If nothing else, it’d give poor Michael Redgrave something to do.) And the script scrimps on detail, so all we do is tag along. It’s not really a bad pic. Well, except for the ramped up finale which puts a gaggle of tow-headed tykes in harm’s way. But it’s sad to see Mann, on his last completed pic, running on auto-pilot. (Extra demerit points to composer Malcolm Arnold for ripping off his own score to THE BRIDGE OF THE RIVER KWAI/’57.)

*It was a friendly break due to ‘artistic differences.’ Honest! BTW - Co-star Peter Ustinov always insisted that everything good in that pic was shot while Mann was still helming.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Why not try MAX MANUS/’08, a WWII Norwegian Resistance pic made by actual Norwegians.

STUPEUR ET TREMBLEMENTS / FEAR AND TREMBLING (2003)

2011-10-23T16:07:00.007-04:00

Alain Corneau’s brightly colored film of Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical book (on her year working as an office assistant in Japan) is basically LOST IN TRANSLATION/’03 meets AMÉLIE/’01. A young Belgian woman (named Amélie, of all things!) wangles a job in Japan, hoping to revive the Asian self she remembers from living there as a little girl. But, like that other AMÉLIE, this film has a paralyzing case of the ‘cutes’ and, like LOST IN TRANSLATION, not enough meat on its bones to fill out a feature. What keeps it going are the constant misreadings this Amélie makes of her co-workers and the truly balmy office culture that has been grafted out of Western Capitalism & Japanese etiquette. If only Sylvie Testud’s Amelie weren’t such a nincompoop. It only justifies the staff’s behavior toward her, making the inscrutable East ‘scrutable.’ When Amélie daydreams herself into flights of fancy over the city-scape, the only thing that really flies out the window is our sympathy. But try to hang in there for her final day at the office. (Or fast-forward.) Moving up the office chain of command & offering formal regrets; suddenly, everyone starts acting their parts, toeing a thin line between honesty & face-saving politeness. And the possibilities of the film briefly come into focus.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: In Paramount’s delightful omnibus comedy, IF I HAD A MILLION/’32, Charles Laughton, in a segment directed by Ernst Lubitsch, works his way up a similar chain of command and manages to tell us everything we need to know about his office in a neat three minutes. Leaving about 80 minutes for another six succinct stories from other parties.

GENGHIS KHAN (1965)

2011-10-22T18:36:00.002-04:00

Omar Sharif & Stephen Boyd play tit-for-tat Mongolian Warlords in this bizarrely cast Irwin Allen (less-than) historical epic about the founding father of the great Khan dynasty. Filmed on an unexpectedly lux scale, it lumbers along with a cast of thousands hacking away at each to little effect. Meantime, a big international cast (James Mason, Françoise Dorléac, Eli Wallach, Robert Morley, Telly Savalas, Michael Hordern, Woody Strode) collect their checks & try to keep a straight face. (YellowFace in the case of Morley & Mason. PC it ain’t, but Mason is deliciously naughty and they make a funny team. Heck, the rest of the cast are about as Mongol as these two are Chinese.) With films like WHERE THE BOYS ARE/’60 on his CV, and two Dean Martin Matt Helm pics coming up, Henry Levin was just the megger for Irwin Allen. They did manage to get Geoffrey Unsworth as cinematographer, but then went with Dusan Radic’s ludicrously overripe score. Happily, they shave a good 30 years off Khan’s life, so we get out after two hours. But not before seeing Beijing interiors that glisten like a Las Vegas Peking Duck joint and palace grounds that might serve as a Ming Dynasty Miniature Golf course. Sink your shot on the last hole and you get to watch the movie all over again!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Sergei Bodrov’s MONGOL/’07 was supposed to be the first in a Genghis Khan trilogy. Impressive in its physical production, frustratingly opaque in storytelling, the sequels have yet to appear. And now Bodrov’s prepping a film with Jeff Bridges & Julianne Moore! It’s not about the Khans.

MARIA LARSSONS EVIGA OGONBLICK / EVERLASTING MOMENTS (2008)

2011-10-22T18:22:00.004-04:00

Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell, who directs, co-writes, shoots & edits most of his work. never recaptured the broad appeal he won Stateside with THE EMIGRANTS/’71 and THE NEW LAND/’72. This recent saga, a true tale from his wife’s family that might have pleased a similar audience, went begging for attention; such is the commercial black hole that passes for foreign-language film distribution in the States these days. Here, in the opening decades of the last century, the hard working family is headed by a violent-prone dad whose flirting eye & taste for ale threaten their precarious hold on room & board. He and the stoically strong mom & seven kids stick it out in Sweden as many of their friends & relatives take off for America. While their lives over the first quarter of the last century are both finely observed and filled with plenty of interest & incident (unions, radical politics & ship dock labor all get a fine workout), the story turns on, of all things, a bourgeois hobby: Mom’s fixation on photography. A camera won at a fair back in her courting days is pulled out for pawning. But the gentlemanly proprietor at the nearest camera shop insists that she try it out before consigning it. The passion for picture-taking comes and goes over the years, but it lends purpose & identify to her life, as if justifying a grueling existence. Troell tends to overdo the autumnal mist of times past, how much more effective the soft focus of the photos would appear against a vividly sharp & naturally colored environment. And the slight, self-congratulatory tone he affixes to this artisan-mom is unnecessary. But her story is never less than appealing or revelatory. No small thing.

DOUBLE-BILL: The complete EMIGRANTS Saga is really too long for Double-Bill material. At 6 hours, it’s a triple bill all on its own! But with Norway in for Sweden, you can compare & contrast family dynamics with George Stevens’ classic I REMEMBER MAMA/’49. Those Scandinavian mothers are an indomitable bunch!

MAX MANUS: MAN OF WAR (2008)

2011-10-20T13:49:00.002-04:00

Don’t look for a post-modern ironic edge or sickly comic ultra-violence in this tru-life tale on the Norwegian resistance heroes of WWII. Joachin Rønning & Espen Sandberg’s film is as square & straightforward as a Baby-Boomer war epic, and with much the same positive charge; more GUNS OF NAVARONE/’61 than INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS/’09. Max Manus was already a vet from fighting Stalin on the Finland front when he returned home to find Norway occupied by the Nazis. He was soon caught in the early days of the resistance, but made a legendary escape crashing thru a third story window. (The actual escape happened from the hospital where he was being treated after the blind jump.) Trained in Scotland, he returned to Norway where he effectively ran the expanding resistance movement even as his tight group started to fall under pressure from Nazis and local collaborators. The film’s story construction occasionally veers from solid to stolid, and the action scenes don’t always hit their full potential, but the story generates so much power & good will, and raw emotion in the last act, that you’ll feel like cheering rather than nit-picking.

DOUBLE-BILL: Errol Flynn & Ann Sheridan joined the Norwegian Resistance (Hollywood Division) in Lewis Milestone’s remarkably tough & effective EDGE OF DARKNESS/’43.

THE WAY BACK (2011)

2011-10-19T17:28:00.004-04:00

After MASTER AND COMMANDER/’03, Peter Weir took eight years to return to the screen with this putatively true prison escape pic. The story is less about a daring escape from a Siberian Gulag in the early 1940s then about the ensuing heroic 4,000 mile trek by the seven escapees and a young Polish woman who joins them later. The film moves along on a Homeric series of impossible physical obstacles (water, weather, victuals, Russians) that have to be met, conquered or finessed, but the characters and story feel underdeveloped, psychologically & dramatically inert. Only in the third act, when the number of survivors has narrowed, do we get the kind of interpersonal dynamics that coax the film to life. Weir probably errs in holding off on the backstories, they’re doled out to provide variety over the course of the long march to freedom. The lack of personal information keeps us from making a full emotional investment in the characters. On its limited terms, it’s hard to find much to pick at (other than Colin Farrell chewing up the scenery as a proletariat tough guy), but the film never justifies its existence and tanked commercially with a near career-stopping thud.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For snowbound Siberian wildness, try Akira Kurosawa’s DERSU UZALA/’75 about an aging man of the forest and his friendship with a modern surveyor.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945)

2011-10-17T17:20:00.008-04:00

A young woman revisits the wilderness retreat she & her late father so loved. She’s come for his memorial, to spread his ashes over the paths they once rode together. Galloping hard on the dangerous route they shared, she pushes against her tight leather saddle, nearing an auto-masturbatory climax. She lowers the urn with her father’s ashes and positions it between her legs, the precious metal phallus sacred and upright. Climax is achieved at the crest of the trail; the urn pops open and her father’s ashes triumphantly ejaculate to the right & left of the horse's rearing flanks. Ecstasy, exhaustion . . . relief, release. This scene, surely the most sexually perverse image in cinematic history won’t be found in LAST TANGO IN PARIS, GOING PLACES or SALO, nor should you look for it in the collected work of David Lynch, Russ Meyer or even DEBBIE DOES DALLAS. Astoundingly, it’s in this mainstream studio success made at the very height of Hollywood’s self-censoring Production Code under the watchful eyes of the all-powerful Catholic League. And it’s only the first in a series of outrages committed under the cool gaze of beautiful, balmy Gene Tierney, impassive as a sphinx in sunglasses in John M. Stahl’s TechniColor masterpiece on the evils of over-possessive love. Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price Darryl Hickman and an unborn child are the main victims in this gloriously ripe melodrama, but they couldn’t have done it without the remarkably consistent efforts of technicians & designers who made the locations (fabulous house interiors, abstracted courtroom, shimmering lakes & woods) and costumes (Tierney often changes a wrap just to match the wallpaper) perfectly wed to story & character arcs. (Leon Shamroy’s TechniColor lensing is simply loaded with iconic images.) And even at its most outrageous, when you expect to see Carol Burnett peeking around the corner, taking notes for a parody, you might also find Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray & Vincent Minnelli standing in line to take their shot at the form, with CinemaScope added to the mix.

DOUBLE-BILL: The link between the underappreciated John M. Stahl and deservedly anointed Douglas Sirk is particularly strong since Sirk remade two of Stahl’s best, IMITATION OF LIFE/’34;’59 and MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION/’35;‘54. Sirk didn’t remake this one (though there is a lousy tv version to avoid), but he did make WRITTEN ON THE WIND/’56 which shares some of the good girl/bad girl/man-in-the-middle situations and courtroom flavor of LHTH.

THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN (1973)

2011-10-14T15:05:00.002-04:00

Long before the current craze for Scandinavian murder mystery novels, this Swedish police procedural was transplanted to San Francisco where its serial killer found a home among the changing social fabric of the day. Crudely megged by Stuart Rosenberg who seems to be aiming for frank realism, the story never comes together in a manner we can follow, and the little character vignettes don't add enough to the mix. (The film trots out youth, porn & gay subcultures as if they were circus oddities.) It’s left to the actors to gain our interest, but everyone seems slightly miscast. Walter Matthau lowers his considerable brow, chews gum & works hard to stay in a dour mood (the pic’s title is, er, ironic) while his new cagey partner (Bruce Dern) tries for seedy charm, but can’t get past the alarming hair color he’s been given. Lou Gossett has a bit of life to him, but he gets little screen time, and the baddies are an unpromising lot. If only Rosenberg was able to get some pace & excitement going on in the action set pieces he might have jump-started things. No such luck.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Matthau book-ended this tepid number with Don Siegel's twisty revenge masterpiece, CHARLIE VARRICK/’73 and Joseph Sargent’s solidly-crafted, audience-pleasing THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE/’74, another police procedural that gives off just the sort of tangy NYC vibe & suspense, thanks to Peter Stone’s winning script, we don’t get from San Fran in LAUGHING.

RAWHIDE (1951)

2011-10-13T19:15:00.006-04:00

This chamber-sized Western doesn’t strain for big effects, it's content to be solid & well-crafted, with a vet cast & crew all working near the top of their form. It’s your basic hostage drama: a lonely outpost; four escaped convicts; a stagecoach due to arrive with a load of gold; and a couple of strangers (plus a toddler) trying to survive the ordeal. Tyrone Power & Susan Hayward get roles that are just the right size for them, they make a very sympathetic duo. And the bad guys are unusually intriguing: soft-spoken Hugh Marlowe, kindly Dean Jagger, George Tobias (as a Ukrainian) & the young, wild-eyed Jack Elam as the psychopath. Helmer Henry Hathaway is just nuts about Elam’s OTT features and gives him the sort of showcase treatment he gave Richard Widmark on KISS OF DEATH/’47. Milt Krasner’s lensing & Robert Simpson’s editing are exceptionally sharp, they help Hathaway turn clean logistics into crackling suspense. (A scene where the toddler wanders off into scrub land earns a D. W. Griffith Seal-of-Approval.) Scripter Dudley Nichols tended to wear his intellectualism on his sleeve (note the dramatic unities of time, place & action), but this time his allegiance to classical form loosens everyone up. Only a perfectly dreadful background score (lots of ‘Oh, Susannah’) lets down the team.

I GIRASOLI / SUNFLOWER (1970)

2011-10-11T16:59:00.004-04:00

The good news is that KINO-Lorber has put out legit copies of this title, along with two more Carlo Ponti produced pics starring his wife, Sophia Loren, all helmed by Vittorio de Sica. (Ciao, crappy Public Domain DVDs!) The bad news is that we get a fine clear copy of . . . SUNFLOWER, their artistic nadir. Loren knew she was at her best under De Sica, his great gifts with non-pro actors undoubtedly came into play, but she was only right about their comedies.* This alas, is a soapy concoction about a rushed WWII marriage between Loren & Marcello Mastroianni and his subsequent disappearance at the Eastern front. Sophia searches all the Russias until she finds her man . . . and then the complications set in. There’s hardly a believable moment in the whole soggy contraption, even cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno phones it in, while Henry Mancini’s slushy score tries to outdo Maurice Jarre on DR. ZHIVAGO/’65.* Near the end, a couple of atmospheric scenes in & around the Milan train station with a defeated Mastroianni show what the film might have been, but it’s hardly worth hanging around for. Hard to believe that De Sica, scripter Cesare Zavattini & co-producer Arthur Cohn’s next was a film as superb & sophisticated as THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS/’71.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Of course, Sophia won her Oscar for the heavy dramatics of De Sica’s TWO WOMEN/’61 rather than any of their delectable comedies where she is truly incomparable. **And, wouldn't you just know it, Mancini got Oscar nom’d for this sludge-fest. ***On the other hand, while Holocaust-themed pics tend to earn Oscar’s favor, FINZI-CONTINIS actually deserved its Best Foreign Pic nod.

JOHNNY ENGLISH (2003)

2011-10-10T17:53:00.007-04:00

This spy spoof of all things Bondian, James Bondian, left little trace Stateside, but it scored big in Europe, hence the current sequel, JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN/’11. It’s a bit of a silly mess, but when it’s funny, it’s very funny. Rowan Atkinson is a mid-level clerk at MI-5 who gets to play secret agent when all the double-0s go down. Naturally, he’s a disaster who somehow manages to win the day with the help of a beautiful femme fatale spy & his trusty assistant. This came out just after the final AUSTIN POWERS and got mis-marketed as a rip-off. But it's more Peter Sellers/Blake Edwards PINK PANTHER than Mike Meyers redo, and infinitely better than Steve Martin’s sorry attempts to revive Clouseau. If only the ‘80s Bond pics weren’t already self-parody. Peter Howitt megs with almost too much pace, he doesn’t properly set up his gags, and the sexual attraction between Atkinson & Natalie Imbruglia’s vampy spy remains inexplicable. (Though the affectionate loyalty of sidekick Ben Miler is just great.) John Malkovich plays the super villain, a Frenchy who wants to be King of England, with the oddest French accent on record. Since Malkovich lives in France & speaks the language, this is . . . an attempt at humor? But it’s hard to care about what misses the mark during the three or four set pieces that really come off. Shriekingly funny stuff, even when you see what’s coming a mile away.* Atkinson’s best work may have been on tv: an early solo gig, Mr. Bean sketches, the glories of Black Adder, but the good bits in here are very welcome.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Is there a Comedy Corollary to Hitchcock’s Rule of Surprise vs Suspense? As he used to explain it, if a bomb explodes under a conference table, you get five seconds of surprise. But, let the audience know there’s a bomb under the table, and you can build up five, even ten minutes of suspense. So, if you see a joke coming, assuming that it’s well played, of course, do we get five extra minutes of anticipatory comic tension before the pay-off? Check out the first deleted scene on this DVD to see if knowledge of a coming joke whets the appetite . . . or dulls it.

FANTASIA (1940)

2011-10-07T21:08:00.005-04:00

The latest edition of this classical music cartoon compendium has been visually buffed up for Blu-Ray release with dazzling results, even on a regular DVD. Alas, the original FantaSound tracks, a pioneering 7-channel stereophonic system, were lost decades ago. (Mixed down to 3-track or mono for previous reincarnations, the current multi-directional digital manipulation is a hit or miss affair.) The commercial failure of the pic remained a particular sore point for Walt Disney. Consensus held that it tanked when high brows rejected it as ‘kitschy’ while unwashed masses felt Walt had gone ‘high hat.’ Only the comic relief of Mickey in Dukas’ THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE and the ballet menagerie in Ponchielli’s DANCE OF THE HOURS earned approval. But this explains little. PINOCCHIO/’40 also flopped in its first release. So did BAMBI/’42. Only DUMBO/’41, with its short running time and simplified technical production, held to a financial model that broke Disney’s post-SNOW WHITE losing streak. And FANTASIA’s first-run Road Show expenses only made the nut tougher to crack. So too, the film’s revue format, as Sam Goldwyn & Louis B Mayer discovered with THE GOLDWYN FOLLIES/’38 and ZIEGFELD FOLLIES/’46. The real loss is that Disney bought into the ‘accepted wisdom’ explanations and never put quite so much of himself in a film project again. After this, his deepest personal involvement went toward the war effort and then into theme parks. A shame, since FANTASIA looks better (and more entertaining) than ever. Even the less successful ideas, like those nubile teenage centaurs fresh from Schwab’s make-up counter, have gained a certain period charm. And what modern day focus group would have left Evolutionary Theory, pert breasts, demonic wickedness & nudity in a ‘G-rated’ feature? At its best, which is often, the film is a knockout.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Many theaters in that crucial late-‘60s re-release played the film with short reels with Projector A running all the odd numbered reels thru a ‘Flat’ framing gate, for a screen ration of about 1.77:1, slightly clipping the top & bottom off the picture. Projector B played the even numbered reels with the traditional Academy Ratio framing gate of 1.33:1.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY II: Look closely during the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony when Bacchus enters at the beginning of the Second Movement. He’s accompanied by two black female servants. These two are all that remains of the black servant characters who once helped the pastel colored centaurs with personal grooming. Note a red carpet that unfurls in front of Bacchus all by itself. The black bearers have been erased! These servant characters were deleted for the ‘60s re-release with edits and some reframing which now seems to have been redone to smoother effect. Watch for some tell-tale 'walking' foliage that’s probably covering up these lost Grecian Blackamoors.

DOUBLE-BILL: The great choreographer George Balanchine visited Disney (with Igor Stravinsky) when he came to Hollywood to work on THE GOLDWYN FOLLIES. Disney must have been paying close attention since he nipped some staging ideas out of that pic for this film’s hilarious DANCE OF THE HOURS ballet travesty.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: While it’s still fashionable in academic film circles to view FANTASIA with condescension, our greatest dance critic, Arlene Croce gives it the sophisticated treatment it well deserves. See her Write-Up in the March 12, 1984 edition of The New Yorker, also collected in her book, WRITING IN THE DARK: Dancing at The New Yorker.

BOXED (2002)

2011-10-06T16:30:00.006-04:00

The twist in this standard-issue IRA hostage tale holds real dramatic promise, but not enough to freshen up the relentlessly ordinary treatment it gets from its cast & debuting writer/director Marion Comer. Apparently, before the recent cessation of hostilities, IRA terrorists had a circuit of so-called ‘tame priests’ who they could call on to administer last rites before killing a prisoner. The priests offered absolution to the vicitm . . . and kept their mouths shut. Then, it's on to the next soul. With a running time of 77 min., Comer might well have stuck with this moral dilemma as her play’s engine. Instead, we get a big fat gimmick as the IRA operatives bring in the wrong priest! A young, questioning pup who’s already in conflict with his superior (the ‘tame’ guy, natch) and with his own ideas on how to serve Jesus . . . blah, blah, blah. The actors attack their lines as if they were still auditioning for their parts and the physical look of the video-to-film (then back to video!) DVD transfer hardly helps. And yet . . . there’s a legit idea hiding in here. Pity.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: There are loads of better IRA dramas around, but this film is more in line with a classic hostage pic like THE PETRIFIED FOREST/’36. Our soggy priest would have killed to play the Leslie Howard role.

WALLENBERG: A HERO’S STORY (1985)

2011-10-05T17:06:00.002-04:00

Raoul Wallenberg, one of the most intriguing & admirable characters of the Second World War, was a rich Swedish ne’er-do-well when he reinvented himself at his country’s consulate in Budapest. With little more than personal charm and the creative use of forged documents, he managed to put a large percentage of the local Jewish population under Swedish protection and save thousands from both the occupying Nazis and the Hungarian ‘Arrow Cross" fascists. And, apparently, had a great time doing it. Until the war ended and the new Russian occupiers spirited him away. This well-received mini-series, written by Gerald Green who also wrote the HOLOCAUST mini, is skillfully structured, if on the blunt side, and exceptionally well directed by Lamont Johnson, an undervalued helmer of film & tv. But what really makes it work is Richard Chamberlain’s perf as Wallenberg. While he never quite registered in features, here, his delight at seeing will-o’-the-wisp decrees & strategies taking hold over Nazi generals, Hungarian collaborators & even his own staff, is infectious. Yet, the dire urgency of the situation also comes thru. Not all the characters find similar balance, a romantic subplot never convinces and some of the Jewish characters might have found gainful employment on Manhattan’s Second Avenue, but Kenneth Colley’s Eichmann gets under your skin. (If only he didn’t look like THE PAJAMA GAME’s Eddie Foy, Jr.!)

DOUBLE-BILL: A Swedish telling, GOOD EVENING, MR WALLENBERG/’90, with Stellan Skarsgard, uses a darker pallet to concentrate almost exclusively on the last chaotic days of the Nazi occupation in Budapest.

FLAWLESS (2007)

2011-10-04T18:01:00.002-04:00

It’s best to ignore the jarringly tone-deaf contemporary scenes that bookend this period diamond-heist pic if you want to try the plot twists & suspense in Michael Radford’s smoothly helmed caper. As an elderly maintenance man with a plan, Michael Caine hasn’t been in a film with this many ‘reveals’ since GAMBIT back in ‘66. Now a senior citizen, he works double-duty, adding the amoral string-pulling action John Abbott played in GAMBIT to his normal Michael Caine activities. And with slimy diamond brokers & two-faced insurance executives as adversaries, it’s not too hard to root for some personal payback for him and partner Demi Moore. As the oft passed-over female exec at the diamond exchange, she’s got a grudge of her own. But is she partner or patsy in Caine’s scheme to loot a small cache of gemstones? And why a small handful of rocks when there are millions? As things go awry, you can’t help but notice holes in the story (is Caine the only maintenance guy in the whole building?), but Radford keeps it moving along, even sacrificing suspense when it threatens to leave too much time to think. There’s a typically fine cast of Brit Shits for that clubby grey-suited atmosphere, but American-in-London Moore never picks up on the kidding-on-the-square tone. She plays it all too straight, reveling in the 'serious message' of those phony framing scenes and looking less flawless than clueless.

DOUBLE-BILL: They’re remaking of GAMBIT. Why not catch the 1966 original before they wreck it.

HOW THE WEST WAS WON (1962)

2011-10-02T18:21:00.006-04:00

It’s not so much the Wild West that’s tamed in the latest remastering of this pic as those disfiguring ‘joins’ between the three interlocked pictures of the original CINERAMA format. Just as important, the color scheme on the three separate film negatives have been re-equalized for a much smoother match across-the-frame. (Check out the trailer to see the difference/improvement. It was probably mastered from the 70mm single image re-release transfer print. See poster, below.) Too bad the DVD producers couldn’t also fix the clichéd plot, corny acting and the technical peculiarities of CINERAMA that made close-ups nearly impossible and all the interiors look like warehouses. Dashing past three pioneering generations and an entire continent in 2 & a half hours leaves only so much time for character development and the plot plays out like a highlight reel with one major ‘WOW’ set piece per section. The All-Star cast makes it easy to follow the various plots, but the acting is right out of a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast. Except . . . except for the remarkable reel and a half segment on the Civil War helmed by John Ford. Listen carefully and you’ll immediately hear the tone of the film change as composer Alfred Newman brings back a motif from his own 1940 score for Ford’s HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY. (Ford had just borrowed Newman's 'Ann Rutledge' theme from YOUNG MR. LINCOLN/’39 for THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE/’62.) The actual war scene is fine (John Wayne as Sherman & Harry Morgan as Grant), but it’s the bookend scenes back on the family farm that really sink in. Suddenly, everything on the screen seems to matter. The acting grows in stature; triangular compositions find dramatic possibilities in CINERAMA’s visual oddities; the pacing breathes the song of life; and the late-Fordian tone of melancholia briefly takes over. Then, it’s back to the show.

DOUBLE-BILL: Try this with a WideScreen 70mm Western made all the way back in 1930, Raoul Walsh’s flop epic, THE BIG TRAIL. The format & early Talkie technology makes this both stiff & fascinating. Like HTWWW, it’s mighty shy with cutting and close-ups, but it has the real smell of the West on it. And that shockingly handsome, callow youth playing the lead is a kid by the name of John Wayne.

KNOCK ON WOOD (1954)

2011-09-30T18:02:00.003-04:00

Danny Kaye plays a touring American ventriloquist who unknowing smuggles some Top Secret military documents across Europe in this farcical Spy vs Spy caper. (The diagrams have been hidden in his two dummies.) That’s the set up on this Melvin Frank/Norman Panama comedy which isn’t all that different from some of their previous vehicles for Bob Hope. (They’d find a more Kaye-specific tone on THE COURT JESTER/’56 though Danny always held this London-based pic as his personal favorite.) The plot works up two sets of foreign spies with Danny as innocent man-in-the-middle. Once the body count starts to rise, Kaye looks like the new London Ripper. Now on the lam from spies, cops and even the general public (only his g'friend/shrink Mai Zetterling believes him), Kaye has to assume a series of identities to stay undercover: stuffy car salesman, Irish pub mate, Russian Ballet dancer; all to solid comic results. (The ballet pastiche sounds cringe-inducing, but as staged & helmed by choreographer Michael Kidd, it’s sharp, accurate & unexpectedly hilarious.) But whatever happened to those dummies? After an opening scat duet & a startling moment as Danny loses control of his jealous wooden pal, that’s it. Couldn’t they have played some part in the chase or, at least, shown up for the finale? Kind of a wasted opportunity.

DOUBLE-BILL: For a classic portrait of a psychologically poisoned pair of puppet & puppeteer, see Michael Redgrave and his mahogany alter-ego in DEAD OF NIGHT/’45. Others swear by Anthony Hopkins’ work in MAGIC.’78, but its awfully gimmicky.

VOINA I MIR / WAR AND PEACE (1966-67)

2011-09-27T18:55:00.007-04:00

Ever wanted to see what a billion dollar movie would look like? Not in today’s billions, where a CGI-laden comic book pic costs up to a quarter bill. No, a billion bucks back when a billion really was a billion. Made in the high-flying days of Breznev’s Soviet Union, there’s no way of knowing just what this USSR-approved version of the Tolstoy novel cost. The rumored figure was $100,000,000, but even Hollywood bookkeeping could never top the account ledger shenanigans of a Kremlin cultural slush-fund. Initially shown in an 8 hour cut, it’s now weighs 6 & ½ and boasts a cast in the tens of thousands. (That’s an entire Russian Army on the home team and a second Russian Army dressed as the invading French.) Plus ballrooms, Moscow mansions, country estates, 70mm SovColor, endless speaking roles, gowns, cannons . . . and precious little modern fakery. It’s an amazing achievement . . . but is it any good? Well , er . . . Nyet. They gave the project to Sergei Bondarchuk, a politically acceptable hack of some talent who knew how to play the government funding game. And then he also took on the leading role of Pierre, that sadly romantic, illegitimate intellectual. (It’s as if Bill Clinton gave Rob Reiner a couple of billion to make MOBY DICK and Reiner not only directed but also cast himself as the whale.) Bondarchuk must have been doing the festival circuit back then since the film is a stylistic magpie of misused up-to-the-minute techniques. There's lots of acting in the big Russian declarative style, Prince Andrei comes off as a sort of Darcy via Jane Austen, and the Natasha grows on you once she stops trying to outdo Audrey Hepburn.* But when you get past the fine costumes & art direction, only composer Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s stunningly effective score seems Tolstoy-worthy. The film is both a must-see, and a miss. WARNING: The 5-DVD edition on RusCICO/Image gives a decent idea of the film, but an older 3-DVD set on Kultur (a tv sourced PAL conversion?) is a savagely cropped, visually smeared travesty.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Speaking of Audrey . . . she makes a perfectly enchanting Natasha in King Vidor’s 1956 version. And in about half the running time, you get almost as much of the story as you get here. There are lots of good things in that film, but what were they thinking when they got Henry Fonda for Pierre? Especially when Peter Ustinov, born to play that role, was available and even working for Paramount which released the film. Those who’d like to get almost all of the story without picking up the book might check out the 20 episode BBC version with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre. It’s horribly compromised by its budget, but, if you can adjust, worth seeing.

THE SCARECROW (1920)

2011-09-25T18:52:00.006-04:00

The latest KINO ReMastering of their BUSTER KEATON - SHORT FILM COLLECTION, 1920 - 1923 is (with one notable exception*) essential viewing. Only three (of nineteen) titles remain seriously compromised in either completeness or visual quality, and four come in both digitally-polished & ‘plain’ versions. (Visual ‘noise’ vs. crisper image, you decide.) The best additions are 14 newly produced Visual Essays by an enthusiastic assortment of scholars, accompanists & programmers (none of the usual bloviating suspects) who bring fresh voices & ideas, neatly illustrated with clips & stills. Some offer a spirited defense of a less acclaimed title, but the best may be the DIY Keaton compilation feature proposed by SCARECROW essayist Ken Gordon. Virginia Fox was the regular female lead in the series, but Keaton had a uniquely easy, even sexy rapport with the delightful Sybil Seely who partnered on the three shorts that make up this putative feature. Act One would be their second film, THE SCARECROW, which covers the courtship. It’s in Keaton’s less rigorous knockabout style. Hilariously so. It tends to be remembered for a fanciful opening sequence between Buster & roommate Joe Roberts who live out a sort of child’s dream of grown up life in a house filled with trick devices. And there are also some phenomenal gags between Buster & Luke the Dog. But it’s really all about pursuing, proposing and wedding Sybil. Act Two, the honeymoon act, would be ONE WEEK/’20, which was actually filmed first, and Act Three, the tour de force slapstick existentialism of THE BOAT/’21. It’s like having another feature-length masterpiece for the Keaton canon.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *As for that notable exception . . . For some reason (contractual?), KINO has chosen an early reconstruction of HARD LUCK/’21 which was pieced together from inferior elements and is, crucially, missing the famous final gag. You can find a better edition on KINO’s ‘KEATON PLUS’ DVD. Go figure.

ASSIGNMENT-PARIS (1952)

2011-09-22T17:40:00.003-04:00

It’s a kick to see a film set in the Paris bureau of the old International Herald Tribune, the paper of choice for every American traveler in pre-internet days. But this reasonably sound East/West-Commie-Spy tale comes over like an assignment no one wanted. Even the title gets it wrong; it should be posted to Paris, assigned to Budapest. That’s where the previous Hungarian correspondent has gone missing and where Marta Toren (a largely forgotten Ingrid Bergman type) has just returned from, with hush-hush info on the anti-communist underground movement. And she wants to go right back. But it’s that hot new reporter, Dana Andrews, the smoothie making a play for her, who gets the dangerous gig from their suave editor George Sanders. Office politics? Sanders also likes the lovely Ms Toren. Did he give Andrews the job just to get rid of the competition? It’s a good set-up, and lenser Burnett Guffey makes the back streets of real Paris & fake Budapest pulse with foggy menace. But that’s as far as it goes. Robert Parrish megs in a flat, paceless style, and there’s zero European flavor in the plywood interiors. Worse, the story doesn’t really go anywhere, quickly growing as tired as Dana Andrews looks. He seems to be suffering from sleep depravation long before the Budapest Reds lock him up & work him over.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Try Nunnally Johnson’s NIGHT PEOPLE/’54 for a similar Cold War thriller from this era. Greg Peck stars, but it’s Broderick Crawford, talking a mile a minute, and the early ‘Scope lensing that make it pop.

A LADY TAKES A CHANCE (1943)

2011-09-21T16:59:00.006-04:00

Jean Arthur’s big film for 1943 was George Stevens’ THE MORE THE MERRIER, but she also got roped into making this modest city-gal-meets-cowboy indie. And why not? It’s a relaxed charmer; it co-stars John Wayne in his first romantic-comedy; and her husband was the producer. Jean’s on a bus trip out West when she stops to see the rodeo. Wayne’s a contestant who gets bronco-busted right on top of her. How’s that for a meet-cute? They get on right from the start, but he wants to rush into bed and she wants to rush into domesticity. Something’s gotta give, especially since Jean’s just missed her bus. Most of the gags still come off and director William Seiter doesn’t worry the ones that don’t. (Wayne does, though. He’s still a newbie at these things.) Hardly the most fluid of meggers, Seiter knows enough to give Arthur plenty of elbow room and she sure knows how to use it. Whether cracking that unmatchable voice or finding that you can’t jump on a truck bed when you’re wearing a tight skirt, the lady had more technique (and heart) than a dozen of today’s rom-com queens.Note the new title and reversed billing positions for this re-release poster when Arthur had stopped making films and Wayne had become Hollywood's top cowboy.

DOUBLE-BILL: Stevens' THE MORE THE MERRIER/’43 is the logical paring, but why not try this with Joshua Logan’s Marilyn Monroe pic, the heartfelt, if slightly obvious BUS STOP/’56 as a chaser. Don Murray & Arthur O’Connell have roles just like the ones Wayne and his bud Charles Winninger play here. But who in their right mind (other than Norman Mailer) would choose Marilyn Monroe over Jean Arthur?

ON THE DOUBLE (1961)

2011-09-20T19:29:00.004-04:00

This was the third time Danny Kaye got double-exposed to play screen lookalikes. WONDER MAN/’45 had id & ego twins; ON THE RIVIERA/’54 had Danny the nightclub entertainer impersonate Danny the famous aviator; and this WWII farce finds him going toe-to-toe with himself as a Yank Private who ‘volunteers’ as body-double for a targeted British General. RIVIERA is the smoothest of the three, the backstage atmosphere helps sell the concept and the construction had been twice-tested via Maurice Chevalier’s FOLIES BERGÊRE/’35 and Don Ameche’s THAT NIGHT IN RIO/’41. But this lesser (and lesser known) film is the most interesting. Writer/helmer Melville Shavelson, who had also worked on WONDER MAN, tried for a darker, edgier tone, with real wartime ambience, real inter-personal relationships & real deaths on every other corner, but then he pulled back from all the implications. Jokey voice-over narration got slapped on and more of the usual Kaye tomfoolery. At least, that’s how it plays. Did Shavelson have Roberto Rossellini’s GENERALE DELLA ROVERE/’59 in mind? There, Vittorio De Sica plays a second-rate con man who impersonates a resistance hero . . . all the way to the firing squad. Even as it stands, there’s good-natured tumult to be had, until things collapse in the messy third act. Danny works very well with Dana Wynter as the General’s long-suffering wife, and he has an alarmingly odd, hilarious scene with Margaret Rutherford at her battiest. Kaye also earns points for tackling Welsh double-talk. A double-talk first! Lensers Harry Stradling & Geoffrey Unsworth make it all look unusually handsome & elegant for a ‘60s comedy, and the double-exposure tricks hold some nifty surprises. (Watch that cane on the General’s desk.) But it would take the military quagmire that was Vietnam to make WWII fit for the black comedies of Richard Lester & Blake Edwards later in the decade.

APPALOOSA (2008)

2011-09-18T20:22:00.004-04:00

The Western is the default genre of choice for a surprisingly long & starry list of actors who occasionally direct. Now, Ed Harris joins Robert Redford, Billy Bob Thornton, Kevin Costner & Tommy Lee Jones out on the trail. This is a chamber-sized morality tale, a throwback in theme & style to the ‘50s Westerns Randolph Scott made with helmer Budd Boeticher. But Scott’s blunt authority is swapped for a harmonious duet, Harris & Viggo Mortensen as lawmen for hire. They ‘fix’ towns in trouble, shooting first & asking questions later. And there’s double-trouble in Appaloosa: Jeremy Irons’ law-defying rancher and Renée Zellweger’s moral-denying new-girl-in-town. Harris works too hard at keeping a deliberate pace, the restrained editing & reliance on two-shots starts to feel self-conscious, even self-congratulatory. (‘Look Ma, no reverse over-the-shoulder close-ups!) But his adherence to the rules of filmmakers past grows more organic (and largely pays off) as the plot starts to twist in the late-innings. But probably nothing could have been done to help Ms Zellweger. She looks like she’s having an anaphylaxis reaction to something. Real bee-stung lips? And might she lay off on the Shirley MacLaine vocal tics? Concentrate instead on Viggo M who grew a perfectly awful patch of facial hair for the role. He’s great.

SAMSON AND DELILAH (1996)

2011-09-17T17:19:00.006-04:00

We set the bar ‘limbo low’ on biblical epics. Just keep down the giggle factor and we’ll watch the old tales again & again. That must have been the reasoning behind the series of oft-filmed Bible stories remade for TNT back in the mid-‘90s. On paper, the casts & creative teams look tempting, but the films are dull, faintly tasteful things; and they don’t stick in your mind the way a truly terribly version might. Helmer Nicolas Roeg was winding up his career, but he doesn’t phone it in, he’s really trying . . . he’s just no good at this sort of thing. He lined up a favorite scripter, Allan Scott from DON’T LOOK NOW/’73 and THE WITCHES/’90, but the big gestures, physical mayhem, primitive plots of revenge, pseudo-poetic talk, even the famous hair cut; they seem a bit embarrassed of the material. (So embarrassed, someone made a tiny 'jump-cut' just as Samson reveals the big secret to Delilah.) . As Samson, Eric Thal tries on grief-stricken dignity toward the end, but since his early athletic feats didn’t convince, it’s hard to feel much pity. Still, he’s a paragon of historically-informed behavioral acting next to the contemporary stylings of Dennis Hopper’s conflicted Philistine general and Elizabeth Hurley’s ‘Cover Girl’ Delilah. Anyway, who hires Diana Rigg for a SAMSON & DELILAH project and then casts her as Samson’s mother? Who cares if she’s 60 years old. It's Emma Peel, fer G_d's sake!