THAT CLICK (2019)

Famed photo-journalist at LOOK and LIFE magazines, celebrated celebrity portrait photog Douglas Kirkland, who died recently at 88, gets a career bio as busy & surfacey as his work. Tall & dashing, he ingratiated his way into early opportunities with photographer Irving Penn and in emotionally open shoots with stars like Liz Taylor & (most famously) Marilyn Monroe, using the photographic equivalents of a reporter’s softball questions.  For Kirkland, exuding positivity from every pore on assignment, he’s Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment/ Celebrity Edition.  He’s tops at this stuff, but halfway thru, the film either runs out of things to say or (more likely) the subjects lack the mythic qualities of yore.  Instead of Marilyn, it’s Michelle Williams who played Marilyn.  Instead of Audrey Hepburn & Peter O’Toole in Paris with William Wyler on a trifle like HOW TO STEAL A MILLION, Nicole Kidman & Hugh Jackson make Baz Luhrmann’s soporific AUSTRALIA.  A nice technical touch has director Luca Severi using the entire frame on old home movie clips, so the left hand side of the image, usually cropped to remove sprocket holes, is shown, gaining about 20% extra image.  It’s a bit like those museum worthy prints that show the emulsion at the edge of the print.  Ironic in a film that mostly avoids interesting technical details on cameras, illumination strategies and lens choices which might have shed light on Kirkland’s forthright, unfussy work habits.  At the end, you wonder how much interest his work would hold if the subjects weren’t already famous.  Not unlike that other Canadian icon of portrait iconography, Yousuf Karsh.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: There should be more films on photographers.  Till then, see Fred Astaire play a Richard Avedon-inspired shutterbug with Audrey Hepburn as reluctant model in Stanley Donen’s Gershwin musical FUNNY FACE (with Avedon as technical consultant).

SLIGHTLY SCARLET (1956)

Lesser James M. Cain from budget-conscious producer Benedict Bogeaus & vet helmer Allan Dwan is a pretty mixed bag.  At its WideScreen TechniColored best giving some idea of what Douglas Sirk might have done with a Cain novel, but too often not at its best, just slightly ridiculous.  (Something Sirk crucially skirted in his finest socially aware melodramas.)  Secretary Rhonda Fleming and kleptomaniac sister Arlene Dahl play good redhead/bad redhead against John Payne, the ‘good’ badman they’re both interested in.  A mob guy with a conscience, he’s trying to play both sides of the fence running the gang while nasty conscienceless boss Ted de Corsia takes it ‘on the lam’ after roughing up a newspaper editor, killing the old guy.  Fleming, who works for the newly elected mayor, can’t see that Payne is using her to place mob-friendly pals in power positions; she’s too busy cleaning up Dahl’s latest mess and worrying over her deteriorating mental condition.  Eventually, de Corsia returns home to push Payne out of the picture and everything comes to a head.  It’s a neat construct, especially watching Payne, who’s sympathetic side curdles with easy access to power, but characterization & plotting are barely sketched in.  And what’s with secretary Fleming’s high-end lifestyle?  To say nothing of Dahl’s OTT crazy & crazier nympho act.  Sirk would have had a ball, but Dwan as so often, merely gets in & out as painlessly as possible.  A missed opportunity then.  But probably too outré to revisit today.  Still, who’d want to skip cinematographer John Alton doing his ‘Prince of Darkness’ film noir thing in TechniColor R.K.O. SuperScope.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Seeing redheads Dahl & Fleming together on screen is nearly as satisfying as having British character actors Reginald Gardiner, Reginald Denny & Reginald Owen all in the same pic.  Finally, able to get ‘em straight.

CONTEST: The DVD edition from VCI Entertainment comes with three John M. Cain movie trailers (THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY/’44 the other two).  A rare, if not unique example of one video company plugging a competitor’s product.  It’s a tactic found in the best known work of one of this film’s stars.  Name the star, the film where this helpful customer courtesy occurs and the specific new policy to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

WATCHER (2022)

Under-cooked and over-praised, this woman-in-jeopardy thriller has Roman Polanski on the brain (mostly ROSEMARY’S BABY/’68 and THE TENANT/’76), but can’t pull it off.  Here, the young bride’s foreboding new apartment is in Bucharest; her ambitious husband is always at work and thinks she has an over-active imagination; a new friend from down the hall goes missing; weird noises are coming thru the walls; a man directly across the street stares thru the window at her all night long (she stupidly waves at him); and the city is on the lookout for a serial killer.  But hey!, she’s probably just got new town/foreign adjustment jitters.  Writer/director Chloe Okuno, in her feature debut, treats our pretty victim as if she were Lana Turner in some 1940s movie, lounging around all day waiting for something bad to happen or hubby to come home.  Whichever comes first.  Supposedly an actress, maybe she’d sign up for language classes, an acting lab, audit a college course to help her Romanian, go to the movies to hear it spoken or keep the tv on to see if osmosis kicked in verbally. (When she does go out to a film, it’s in English: WAIT UNTIL DARK/’67 with Audrey Hepburn in jeopardy.  The one good joke in the pic.)   How ‘bout a cooking or culture class, and a stop at the fruit market on the way back.  (Even Lana might do that, just to surprise hubby when he got home.  Then he’d be late, supper burnt  and she’d be even more miserable.)  Perhaps if the acting were stronger or the pacing & rhythm as uncannily right as in a Polanski film we might tumble for the situation.  (Only the creepy villain really comes across.)  And with the cast given all the time in the world to pick up their cues, every story beat has plenty of time to fall apart . . . or fall flat.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  As you’ve likely seen ROSEMARY’S BABY, try THE TENANT/’76, still seriously overlooked Polanski.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-tenant-1976.html

MERRILL'S MARAUDERS (1962)

Decent, dutiful, just a little dull, adjectives rarely associated with irascible writer/director Sam Fuller, but apt for this standard-issue WWII mission pic about General Merrill’s American contingent of 3000 volunteer soldiers, part of a multi-national Allied operation to retake Burma from the Japanese.  Jeff Chandler, in his final role (dead at 42 from post-surgery complications when the film came out), is at war with his superiors, his ever-expanding assignment, and even the island’s physical properties, but never lets up in spite of casualties and his own deteriorating heart condition.  Fuller’s one-note script covers too much and not enough, the men’s personalities not registering even with nicknames like Bullseye, Chowhound & Kolowicz.  (Wait, that’s a real name, not that Claude Akins looks like a Kolowicz.)  Then skips the final assault.  Also missing: dense jungle, fetid swamps & the dreaded heat.  All these far better suggested by Raoul Walsh & Errol Flynn in their Burmese mission pic, OBJECTIVE, BURMA, made toward war’s end in ‘45 when darker, more realistic portrayals had become possible.  Here, you only get echt Fuller in some fairly lame comic business that seems to interest him more than the heroics.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, OBJECTIVE, BURMA/’45; its fine, Oscar nom’d Franz Waxman score generously sampled here sans credit.  OR: The more personal WWII pic Fuller thought he might be allowed to make right after this, THE BIG RED ONE.  Finally made in 1980, but heavily cut before a full-length restoration in 2004.  (You root for it to work, but it’s largely disappointing.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/big-red-one-1980.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: As Hollywood moved further away from the war years, the age of all those soldier boys also moved, from the teens & early 20-somethings who’d been drafted, toward 30 or even 40-somethings who had studio connections or been in the war a decade before.  The loss of fresh young faces sent to battle and possible death taking a dramatic toll on nearly all the many, many major studio WWII films made from the ‘50 to the ‘’70s.

BABY IT'S YOU (1983)

One of writer/director John Sayles’ best films, and (incidentally?) one of his least didactic.  It’s a classic high school first-love mismatch between Rosanna Arquette’s ‘nice’ middle-class Jewish girl & ‘dangerous’ lower-middle-class Italian smoothy Vincent Spano.  Set in a ‘60s that’s already Bruce Springsteen Jersey (some of his music anachronistically used between more appropriate ‘60s pop and Sinatra): HER - college-bound (specifically all-girls Sarah Lawrence); HIM - landing in Florida for nightclub opportunities between busboy duty . . . in other words, nowhere.  But when met as seniors, Spano dressed to emulate Sinatra in his Reprise Records ‘Ring-A-Ding’ days*, more Hall Monitor than student, a temptation and an embarrassment to Arquette.  And while Arquette is less judgmental than her friends, she still plays by the rules, won’t put out, and nabs the lead in the school play.  All of this finely observed by Sayles & cinematographer Michael Ballhaus.  But only in the second act, when it perfectly catches the college scene of the period, does the film surpass itself.  Sayles, who would have been in college just a few years later, captures the deep-felt fleeting moments about as well as anyone has: the quick, close friendships, awful blind dates with preppy boys from other elite schools that turn out to be not awful at all, the teacher who broke you down to rebuild . . . maybe for the worse, the new academic prejudices replacing old parochial prejudices, the inevitable breaking away from her past.  All with unblinking, uncanny accuracy.  The best forty minutes of filmmaking he ever did.  And what an eye for newcomers in cameos from then-unknowns like Fisher Stevens, Robert Downey Jr (hardly seen) and the sort of featured turn from a debuting Matthew Modine that presage a star-in-the-making.  (A position Modine frustratingly maintained without ever quite grabbing the ring.)  Sweet ending, too, with Sayles finding just the sort of visual element to tell the tale that was usually missing in his work.  Here, it’s seen when Spano, who looked five years older than Arquette back home, suddenly looks five years younger than she does when he meets her out of his element on campus.  A quietly devastating, insanely moving touch.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Something of a theme song here, Sinatra’s ‘Strangers In The Night’ was a rare 'old-line' success to make its way around British Invasion and MoTown hits to top the 45rpm ‘singles’ market.  Less known is that Sinatra thought the song was crap and hated having to sing it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The most Sinatra-like thing Spano does is get caught attempting to rob a tux-rental shop on prom night.  Sinatra did something similar (was it a drug store?) at about the same age, but his mom used her local political connections (and a bit of blackmail) to get the charges dropped.

DAMNATION ALLEY (1977)

Infamous as the pricey flop 20th/Fox figured would be the big Sci-Fi hit of 1977, studio execs dissing that cheap, goofy thing George Lucas had opening a few months earlier, you really didn’t need hindsight to spot this as a nothing burger.*  A post-nuclear holocaust road pic that’s almost shockingly incompetent.  (A small group of survivors from one of the last functioning military defense stations drive cross-country in a rough-and-ready tank to reach what’s left of civilization.)  A dud on every level: acting, story construction, special effects.  Naturally killing off their one Black principal, a sacred ‘70s film tradition.  More interesting than anything on screen is figuring out how anyone could have watched this and STAR WARS, their ‘other’ Sci-Fi release that year, than decide to push DAMNATION ALLEY, imagining the other film would quietly die.  Of course, the answer is: they didn’t see STAR WARS.  They probably didn’t bother to look at either film.  (These are important Hollywood execs!  You think they have time to watch movies?)   What they did see were box-office reports on hack journeyman director Jack Smight’s last two films before this, AIRPORT 75/’74 and MIDWAY/’75.  Typical commercial crap from Universal Studios under the Lew Wasserman regime.  Both made money.  That they were horrible films never entered into the equation . . . or showed on the money flow charts.  The former a sequel to a wildly popular film; the latter an all-star WWII actioner outfitted with Universal’s rumbling ‘Sensurround’ gimmick woofers.  (That they took notice of, shaking theater walls with Fox’s own Sound 360° . . . whatever that was.)  Amuse yourself imagining Dominique Sanda’s C.V. after this failed attempt at Hollywood stardom: Directors I’ve worked with include De Sica, Visconti, Bertolucci & Smight.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *They really could read box-office reports; quickly reviving old Double-Bill models to pair this with an honest to goodness B-pic made with one-tenth the budget.  See poster.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For a post-nuclear dystopian road pic, there’s MAD MAX and its various sequels.

AN CAILÍN CIÚIN / THE QUIET GIRL (2022)

Already a surprise hit in the U.K., this quiet, deliberately paced gem punches far above its weight.   Its idyllic rural Irish setting belied by a desperately unhappy, regressive young girl, a bed-wetting tween unpopular at school and at her home, a failing farm with older sisters who ignore her, an over-burdened pregnant mother without much time or inclination, and an unloving, disreputable father.  But a way out is presented when an older couple, childless cousins of the mother, offer to take the girl for the summer on their well-appointed dairy farm.  The two filling an ache from their own past.  The wife sympathetic from the start, the husband at first wary to the point of indifference.  (Like much that happens here, you’ll guess events & secrets before being told, a kind of gentle suspense built from withholding info till needed.)   Beautifully handled by writer/director Colm Bairéad, trusting the material and his audience, never rushing or pushing, working the intimacy for its own benefit in a thoughtful tone that thrives & concentrates using the old squarish Academy Ratio frame.  Cleverly set in the early ‘80s, this being rural Ireland (Gaelic and all), it might be taking place two or three decades earlier.  It lends a timeless quality and helps the film pack a hushed emotional wallop.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Ken Loach’s debut feature KES/’69 comes to mind.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/kes-1969.html

HINTERLAND (2021)

With a serial killer loose amid the general chaos & political upheaval of post-WWI Vienna, returning war vet/released P.O.W. Peter Perg (Murathan Muslu), a police detective before he enlisted, is unofficially assigned to find the man before he kills again.  A good setup for a dark thriller in this Austrian production that unfortunately bogs down from too many coincidences and improbabilities.  (The victims not random but conveniently linked to Perg’s wartime past.)  But within this plot, twists come honestly (especially the big reveal at the climax), and most of the tasty, well-chosen cast give off good period flavor.  Only female lead Liv Lisa Fries, division forensic doctor, is coddled with ‘relatable’ contemporary touches as a sop to modern tastes & sensibilities.  But the real excitement lies in a physical production that’s barely ‘physical’ at all.  Instead, most backgrounds & streets are layered into the composition via CGI realizations used not merely to augment reality, but to trade naturalism for German-style Expressionism.  As if the old UFA studio æsthetic of Fritz Lang & F.W. Murnau had suddenly acquired computer assisted art design.  A cityscape alive with instability and canted angles that might collapse at any moment.  Yet apparently unchanged by centuries of use.  A rivetingly suggestive look totally appropriate for the dissolving society norms threatening a republic that can’t find its footing.  It’s really something to see.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Erich Maria Remarque, of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT fame, wrote a near-sequel about post-war defeated German soldiers in THE ROAD BACK.  Something of a film maudit when James Whale made it in 1937, the 100" film was progressively butchered and refitted with broad humor (largely to get German Export approval) down to about 70".  Recently restored to something like Whale’s original cut, three problems remain: A first act that can neither find nor hold a tone; a lousy leading man in John ‘Dusty’ King (soon headed to cowboy fare); and hard to find decent copies (a complete cut on youtube looks awful).  Wait for better editions to show up as the film grows in interest & confidence as it plays, with powerful sequences on many of the same issues found in HINTERLAND.

BARABBAS (1961)

Not the typical overblown Early Christians Epic you expect from this period.  Instead, an episodic Biblical extrapolation (from Nobel Laureate Pär Lagerkvist’s novel) with everyone on their best behavior (well, everyone but a gloriously sadistic Jack Palance), working in a tone as subdued as lenser Aldo Tonti’s restricted color palette.  Director Richard Fleischer, a B-pic whiz rarely at his best on A-list projects, keeps the lid on uplift and emotion, even from lead Anthony Quinn (no small thing) as the man chosen over Jesus to be pardoned by a crowd at Pontius Pilate’s Jerusalem court.  Unable to fathom why he deserves this, or to process a trade-off that protects him from capital punishment in perpetuity, especially after witnessing the Crucifixion, Barabbas survives a series of encounters over the decades (and all over the Roman Empire) with believers and non-believers.  Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman (exceptionally good as his partner in the sulfur mines), Harry Andrews (reasonably effective in the impossible part of Peter), Ernest Borgnine, eventually coming up against Palance in gladiatorial conflict.  Lots of intelligent decisions made simply by backing off overstatement (screenwriter Christopher Fry having gotten a lot of that kind of thing out of his system on BEN-HUR/’59, itself tops in the overblown division).  Quinn was really batting it out of the park at the time.  But with GUNS OF NAVARONE just before, then LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and ZORBA THE GREEK coming right up, this downbeat Christ-crossed-my-path fable gets lost.  It shouldn’t.

DOUBLE-BILL: Quinn’s next big religioso, THE MESSAGE/’76, also got lost in the shuffle.  Possibly because it had to work around the traditionally camera-shy Prophet Muhammad.