JEW SÜSS / POWER (1934)

During his lifetime, this British movie was the major film credit for German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger*, one of the Weimar Intellectuals who spent the war years in Hollywood.  (Another of his novels, from 1933 on the rise of Nazism, THE OPPERMANNS, written when & where it was happening, just republished to considerable acclaim.*)  This one makes a fascinating, if not exactly easy watch.  (Accents, poor British sound recording & subfusc surviving picture element often make it a tough go.)  And director Lothar Mendes, one more alumni from Max Reinhardt’s theater, proves to be no Ernst Lubitsch, William Dieterle or Otto Preminger.  Yet the elaborate production, with a story like The Rothschilds, but seen thru a glass darkly . . . very darkly, is compelling stuff.  Conrad Veidt may be difficult to follow when he speaks, but feelings, motivation & tragic triumph come thru playing an 18th century financial whiz who leads a life outside the Wurtemburg ghetto by helping incoming Duke Karl Alexander with his considerable debts.  Before long, Josef Süss Oppenheimer is both minister and friend.  But at a price, as the Duke is as irresponsible in private as he is in public matters. It will cost Süss his daughter and his affair with a non-Jewish woman.  Yet in letting him become so powerful, the Duke will need a cabal of ‘gentlemen’ to take down this infidel servant, while remaining unaware of just how far Süss is willing to go for revenge.  Producer Michael Balcon lays it on for Mendes in production values & cast.  And if Frank Vosper, also in Hitchcock’s THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH this year, over-indulges as the grasping Duke, the Jewish contingent of Cedric Hardwicke as a psychic rabbi and ironic pal Paul Graetz make up for it.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK: *The NYTimes acclaimed Lion Feuchtwanger’s remarkably prescient 1933 novel two days in a row.  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/books/review/lion-feuchtwanger-oppermanns.html  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/opinion/the-oppermanns-feuchtwanger.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Not to be confused with the anti-Semitic 1940 Nazi-era German film of the same name.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Out the same year (and no doubt an inducement to get this made), THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD/’34.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-house-of-rothschild-1934.html

DOG (2022)

A surprise hit for co-directors Reid Carolin & Channing Tatum, making a cautious debut with that old standby The Road Pic.  The twist is that the two wounded war vets making this trip,  slowly warming to each other as long festering physical & psychological injuries rise to the surface and start to heal, are Man and Dog.  Specifically Army Ranger Tatum and Belgian Malinois ‘Lulu.’  With standard tropes for a (Grown) Boy and his Dog story, the tears begin with the opening credits, accompanied here by pages from the dog’s war service scrapbook, and pick up again on reaching destination, the funeral of a fellow vet, then right thru a coda that returns the dog to army base.  It’s everything in between that falls short.  Paint-by-numbers delays as Mr. Pooch dashes off-leash; mad pursuit; mischief & misunderstandings (by man and dog);  kindly stranger offers comfort & advice.  Eight or nine such turning points (that'd be about one per reel back when films came on reels).  All fine, all heartwarming (plus two for comic relief), but progressively uninvolving.  Still, by topping & tailing on the good moments, emotional buttons get pushed to send the customers out happy.  Sometimes, that’s all you need.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Don’t worry, one episode is there to show off the ‘Magic Mike’ bod.  (Tatum picks up a pair of free-spirited types.)  Physique buff as ever.  Even better, that moonpie face seems to be aging into something beyond bland handsomeness.  Previously unknown angles & planes now take the light adding interest & expressiveness.  Is it possible the guy can act?

FEUD: BETTE AND JOAN (2017)

Eight-part mini-series (mostly) from Ryan Murphy gets so much right seven-eights of the way, the collapse in the final chapter feels like self-sabotage.  Overdrawn & cartoonish at times, but these larger-than-life Hollywood personalities likely wouldn’t have had it any other way.  And not just Joan Crawford & Bette Davis as they vie for leverage filming WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE and HUSH, HUSH . . . SWEET CHARLOTTE, but director Robert Aldrich, mendacious studio head Jack Warner, bitchy gossip queen Hedda Hopper, et al.  Murphy uses phony documentary interviews with Joan Blondell & Olivia de Havilland as helpful scorecard to point the way for non-devotees.  Harmless, but is it needed?  (It’s really there to serve as Murphy’s personal mouthpiece.)  But what a dead-on cast: Stanley Tucci particularly funny as awful Jack Warner; and someone had the wicked idea to make Crawford’s housekeeper/assistant Mamacita (a German who Joan at first mistook for a Mexican domestic she was expecting, hence the moniker), played by Jackie Hoffman, a lot like Agnes Moorehead’s housemaid in CHARLOTTE.  As expected, both leads easily hit their marks, but Susan Sarandon gets to have a lot more fun as Bette Davis than miserable Jessica Lange playing the dogged Crawford.  This imbalance the likely explanation of what goes so dismally wrong in the final episode where Murphy tries to even out our sympathies and their career arcs, but can only do so by seriously misrepresenting Davis’s career post-JANE/CHARLOTTE, bringing it to Crawford’s level of non-achievement while missing what real parallels exist.  (Joan made tv with a young Steven Spielberg/Bette with a young Ron Howard.  Later, Davis turns into Crawford on her last completed film project THE WINDS OF AUGUST against Lillian Gish.)  He even suggests that CHARLOTTE flopped.  (It actually did quite nicely.)  Skipping over Crawford’s weird (not to say cruel) usurpation of her daughter’s soap opera role and ignoring Davis’s stunning Emmy-winning late work on STRANGERS.  If it doesn’t fit Murphy’s grand thesis, it’s out.  Leaving a bad taste in your mouth after so many bonbons and bon mots.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Often lost in the argument, HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE deserves a fresh look.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/hush-hush-sweet-charlotte-1964.html

TWO FOR THE SEESAW (1962)

Best remembered for his next play, THE MIRACLE WORKER, William Gibson actually had a longer B’way run with this intimate two-hander on an unlikely NYC affair between a MidWest lawyer headed for divorce and a much younger downtown artsy type, yin/yang lovers having mutual mid-life crises: his coming right on time/hers earlier than expected.  Henry Fonda & Anne Bancroft starred (later Dana Andrews & Lee Grant) before director Robert Wise, just off WEST SIDE STORY, got Isobel Lennart to ‘open up’ the play ever so slightly for Robert Mitchum & Shirley MacLaine.  Not particularly well received at the time, it now looks considerably better.  Mitchum something of a revelation playing a man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit type with unexpected tenderness.  Leaner than you recall, even his hair looks leaner, he’s a confused  stranger in a strange town hoping to restart his life & career.  MacLaine, on the other hand, has worn this characterization thrice too often.  After THE APARTMENT/’60, her spritely kook act always looked studied.  But she largely gets away with it here since faults and motivation merge when she’s looking over her shoulder at 30.  Cinematographer Ted McCord (in what he thought would be his last pic*) gets the sort of detailed b&w look then going out of style in Hollywood.  Presumably Wise had to fight the studio for every layer of chiaroscuro.  With all sorts of grownup touches in sleep-overs, sex and affairs signaling the fast decline of the Production Code.*  Unpushy and not too sentimental, it’s a modest thing, but neatly served.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Was this the first mainstream Hollywood film to use ‘queer’ for homosexual?  And in a surprisingly non-judgmental way for 1962.  (MacLaine briefly thinks Mitchum might not be interested in staying over and asks if he’s ‘queer.’  ALSO: Note that instead of using split screen to place Mitchum & MacLaine in a shared shot as they talk on the phone in separate apartments, Wise uses simple stage craft, ‘building’ the composition into the set.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  More grownup, ‘daring’ treatment of Manhattan-set sex next year in LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER/’63.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/love-with-proper-stranger-1963.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: *Showing quite the range, the next collaboration between Wise & McCord was THE SOUND OF MUSIC/’65.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-sound-of-music-1965.html

VANAMEHE FILM / THE OLD MAN: THE MOVIE (2019)

Stop-motion animation from Estonia, crude, rude & lewd in execution and content, loaded (or rather unloaded) with scatological barnyard humor, a specialty for writer/directors Oskar Lehemaa & Mikk Mägioff.  (The DVD comes with a few early two-minute ‘Old Man’ shorts even darker in tone.)  An elaborate prologue provides ‘historical’ context as a champion Milking Farmer loses his cow (and his complexion) when an untended udder explodes into a Nuclear Milk Bomb.  The gross fallout lactose rich & sticky.  Two generations later, his great-grandchildren are dropped off for a summer working the farm with grandpa.  Mucking out the barn chore Number One (the muck mostly Number Two), but once the three kids get the hang of teat patrol, the latest Milky-the-Cow takes off for the woods.  Catch her or another Lact-apocalypse is bound to happen.  Or will if the cow isn’t first beheaded by that gang of unemployed car-shop repairmen.  Only Ms. Cow is hiding in plain sight at a rock & roll music festival in the forest and can’t be reached without pleasuring a giant tree tunnel to orgasm.  Yikes!  (Or is it, Wha?)  Then there’s that giant bear swallowing everyone up.  No prob.  Just sing loudly and ride the wind as he farts you out . . . anally speaking.  Aghast & entertained all at once, it’s the film that put the little piggy’s ‘here sui’ in sui generis.  (Family Friendly?  Maybe for kids who eat their boogers.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For something in the same pig sty but less Punk Rock, there’s SHAUN THE SHEEP.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/shaun-sheep-movie-2015.html   OR the delightful sequel:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/a-shaun-sheep-movie-farmageddon-2019.html

SHOWMAN (1963)

Brother documentarians David & Albert Maysles (GIMME SHELTER/’70; GREY GARDENS/’75) got their start with this modest time-capsule peek at producer/presenter/publicist Joseph E. Levine just as he was pivoting from exploitation shlock (GODZILLA/’57; HERCULES /’58) to quality fare (THE GRADUATE/’67; LION IN WINTER/’68; A BRIDGE TOO FAR/’77).  Vittorio De Sica’s TWO WOMEN was the bridge  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/08/two-women-la-ciociara-1960.html), and here he goes on a ‘working’ victory tour carting Sophia Loren’s Best Actress Oscar® to Rome via L.A., NYC, and hometown Boston.  A squat bullfrog of a guy (think East Coast Sam Spiegel), always on the move as he schoomzes similarly built office ‘yes’ men (naturally, the sole rather handsome senior exec, he might have stepped out of MAD MEN, gets the heave-ho), debates issue-oriented producer David Susskind on Boston radio over the merits of A RAISIN IN THE SUN/’61 vs HERCULES, checks box-office receipts, attends a tribute dinner to himself, etc.  Impervious to jet lag (or does all the fat cover signs of fatigue?), he’s in and out of Rome overnight after delivering Mr. Oscar to a delighted Sophia.  Then . . . back to working the next project.  More than Levine, what the film really shows off is the radical improvement in versatility possible with ever smaller cameras and a revolution stemming from the new lightweight sound equipment.  A technical achievement that gave rise to cinéma vérité, here applied to documentaries.  It lasted about a generation before the rise of ugly video-tape systems.  Now, all digital and much improved.  Yet this somewhat primitive artifact of its era still feels fresh.

FINIAN'S RAINBOW (1968)

Another case of once socially progressive ideas/ideals turned hopelessly regressive by the time it got to the screen, this hard to revive B’way show with its immensely charming score proved something of a last call for a host of Hollywood vets (in front & behind the camera) and utterly incompatible with a whelp Francis Ford Coppola trying to make a film musical en plein-air, seasoned with a dash of New Wave tics.  Lyricist’s E.Y. Harburg’s head-scratching book brings Fred Astaire’s Finian from Ireland to America with a pot of stolen Leprechaun gold to bury near Fort Knox where it’s bound to multiply; a mint-flavored tobacco leaf that neither burns nor smokes; a racially mixed Southern commune to sing & dance behind the leads; a manly foreman to strum a guitar & fall for Finian’s daughter Petulia Clark; a racist Senator transformed into a Black man as a lesson in equality; a girl who dances rather than . . STOP!, go back to that Black transformation. God knows, this BlackFace element has stopped many attempts at revival.  (Actually easy to finesse; simply have everyone react as if there’d been a change in his makeup.)  Well, you get the idea.  Post-war ‘40 race issues, mixed with populist ‘30s ideas Harburg loyally stuck with.  But in this disaster, even the great songs feel off, arranged to ape ‘Pop’ 45s of the day, while the longer comic scenes flatline.  Stick it out to be rewarded with the one number that shows what Coppola must have been aiming at, a close harmony number for an all-Black quartet, ‘Necessity.’  Only, you’ve got to hold your nose since one of the quartet is a substitute, Keenan Wynn as that Senator in BlackFace.  Yikes!  And even that isn’t as hard to watch as Tommy Steele’s super-charged Leprechaun.  He makes Mickey Rooney look laid back.  (And yes, our poster is indeed a Paperback Tie-In.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Is this the shortest male cast in Hollywood history?  Fred Astaire, Tommy Steele, Don Francks, Al Freeman Jr., none over 5' 7".

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Make that LISTEN TO THIS.  From Hollywood’s ‘What-If’ file.  Independent animators John & Faith Hubley got as far as story-boarding FINIAN in the mid-‘50s to a finished soundtrack when the plug was pulled.  Frank Sinatra stars, with Ella Logan & David Wayne (from the original B’way cast), plus Louis Armstrong, Jim Backus, Barry Fitzgerald and Ella Fitzgerald.  It’s never appeared, but this LINK has about twenty minutes of often fascinating outtakes, mostly Sinatra.  But the best comes late when Ella Fitzgerald takes on “Necessity.’  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5uNOZdgiEw

DEAD FOR A DOLLAR (2022)

Legitimately dedicated to Budd Boetticher, late-‘50s master of concise/economical Westerns, this Walter Hill chamber Western gets a paradoxically large-scale look of infinite desert vistas that would have profited in a theatrical presentation.  Starring a nearly accent-free Christoph Waltz as a principled, if quick-to-draw, bounty hunter, he’s gone from playing villains to Clint Eastwood roles.  Hired to track down Rachel Brosnahan, Hamish Linklater’s abducted wife, she turns out to be no abductee, but in Mexico with a Black army deserter who’s less lover than temporary partner in her escape to freedom.  Hill, working from a story idea by Matt Harris, is given two wildcards: outlaw territorial boss Benjamin Bratt and just released cutthroat cardsharp William Dafoe, each nursing a separate grudge against Waltz.  Hill runs this poetically illogical story construction so well, you fall right in line with most of the story and action.  But he makes two serious missteps Boetticher would never have countenanced.  First, Dafoe really has no good reason to be in the story.  Good company, but peripheral to the narrative.  Boetticher cut his moral fables to the bone, and usually came in two reels shorter for the effort.  And second, he’d never have gone for the hazy, desaturated color used here.*  We might be watching one of those ‘sepia-toned’ prestige prints reserved for a few first-run theaters . . . er, theatres, while the rest of the country made do with plain ol’ b&w.  Hill also comes up shy on the logistics and action chops needed to get full potential out of his climax, leaving the final gun battle short on suspense & believability.  What he does build is enough goodwill to get away with a film that doesn’t quite add up.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Now 80, Hill has a brave, if uneven, output.  And few directors got off to a start as strong, as unheralded, as under-appreciated as he did in HARD TIMES/’75.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/hard-times-1975.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Favored cinematographer Lucien Ballard always gave Boetticher the bluest of skies to set off Randolph Scott's leathery neck.  (As did second-choice lenser Charles Lawton.)

HOCUS POCUS 2 (2022)

After waiting three centuries for the witchy Sanderson sisters to get back to Salem and seek revenge in 1993, three more decades not much of a stretch for this sequel.  With an extended prologue to fill in a slightly revamped setup in 1693 Salem, the girls go back to the future when ‘called’ by a trio of High Schoolers and an occult shopkeeper who has their old book of spells under lock & key.  Naturally, it’s Hallowe’en, with half the town ‘Goth’d’ up for the occasion, even a Sanderson lookalike contest, so the gals (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy) fit right in.  And not looking much older, Najimy hardly at all!  (Now, that’s spooky.)  Credit readers will spot a number of positions men had in the original now taken by women (director, scripter, editor) while the film (if memory serves) feels much the same.  Director Anne Fletcher & editor Julia Wong use an odd rhythm in the early going, very choppy, but about an hour in, there’s a big musical number for the witches that soon infects the whole town (already in the streets for Hallowe’en) and the film comes roaring to life.  Happy sailing after that, in spite of Disney Channel levels of acting by the High Schoolers.  (Now, that’s scary, but not a deal breaker.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The producers must have known how good the musical number was.  And while director Fletcher has things like STEP UP on her C.V., it has such a different vibe to it, you half wonder if they secretly brought back Kenny Ortega from the first film to handle it.  (They also add on a faux recording session with a new number during the credits.  Excellent!)

DOUBLE-BILL: Might as well see how HOCUS POCUS 1993 holds up.