UNION DEPOT (1932)

Low rent GRAND HOTEL/'32 with multiple/loosely interconnected storylines of everyday Jack & Jills not at some ritzy Berlin Hotel (The Adlon?), but at a train station patterned on NYC’s Grand Central.*  Crazy entertaining over a jam-packed 67 minutes, it reps best effort work from normally poky director Alfred E. Green, alive to every ethnic minority quirk in roving dialog grabs with lenser Sol Polito freely wandering art director Jack Okey’s vast station set.  Plus gasp-worthy chase sequences & narrow escapes amid crisscrossing tracks & trains, presumably from second unit man Al Alleborn.  Also at his best, young Douglas Fairbanks Jr., just out from a vagrancy charge with soused bud Guy Kibbee, hot to grab anything that comes his way amid the big city hullabaloo & hoi polloi.  And what adventure he finds: a violin case filled with counterfeit cash; a suitcase forgotten by traveling salesman Frank McHugh; swiping a station worker uniform to gain easy access (fair-play Fairbanks returning the ‘borrowed’ loot when possible); meeting-cute with Joan Blondell’s waiting-to-be-rescued chorine (served with a side of tru-love); a dozen more.  And when Fairbanks is inevitably caught, David Landau’s smart, sympathetic police detective there to figure out how dastardly Alan Hale figures into the cleverly designed switchback plot.  Fast & funny, touching & suspenseful, it’s loaded with Pre-Code sexual frankness even when Joan lets us know she’s basically a good girl.  Though under the impression Fairbanks is a rich swell, she’s perfectly willing to offer him 'private time' for a ticket to Salt Lake City.  Turns out, he is swell.  So too the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF HE DAY: *One of seven writers here, Gene Fowler may have gotten a peek at M-G-M's GRAND HOTEL script from best pal John Barrymore.  Not that he took much, though it would help explain Alan Hale’s German accent.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Filmed in ‘31, there’s not much in the way of background music, but use of diegetic sound cues & ambient noise is phenomenal for the period, showing how much Warners was able to do having recently ditched sound-on-disc for sound-on-film.

TIME BOMB / TERROR ON A TRAIN (1953)

Like its UK/USA titles, this straight-forward suspenser doesn’t oversell its premise: Munitions Expert Glenn Ford races the clock to defuse a detonator hidden on one bomb among eleven cars of sea mines on a designated London to Portsmouth train.  Clean location handling from cinematographer-turned-director Ted Tetzlaff (who never quite lived up to the promise of THE WINDOW/’49*, rest of cast & crew all top Brits: lenser Freddie Young, art director Alfred Junge, composer John Addison), with tasty character support and (alas) a subpar romantic angle between Ford & bored Paris wife Anne Vernon.  The idea is that the incident brings a return to the excitement they felt back in WWII, but Kem Bennett’s debut feature script not up to much beyond good basic construction right thru its neat final twist.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The British Boulting Brothers stayed in London to play similar tropes in their nuclear bomb thriller SEVEN DAYS TO NOON/’50.  Best in a docu-like evacuation sequence. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/seven-days-to-noon.html  OR: *WINDOW remakes & near remakes include current NetFlix streamer THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW/’21 (not seen here).  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-window-1949.html

FAVOLACCE / BAD TALES (2020)

Fast-rising Italian writer/directors Fratelli D'Innocenzo (brothers Damiano & Fabio) earned a passel of International Film Fest awards & nominations with this frustratingly opaque fable about Rome suburbanites and kids hitting nothing but life’s wrong notes and speed bumps.  The brothers have their gifts: holding tone & a deliberate pace, edit-friendly composition & merging variated acting styles (mannered to non-pro naturalist), psychological engagement with their characters (though the adult women get short shrift), but it all feels directionless.  (Intentionally?)  And they seem to know it, opening wih a long introduction, something of an apologia, blaming the vagaries of what’s to come (possibly true/possibly not) on a ‘found’ diary, picked up after the fact and arranged/partially completed by our unreliable narrator.  As if they were washing their hands of responsibility.  Meanwhile, try and figure out what’s driving all the bad parenting, sexual curiosity, suicide pacts (or accidental poisoning?) on display during a short summer break.  Perhaps Il Fratelli might try walking before attempting an existential Olympic hop, bound & jump.

DOUBLE-BILL: Robert Altman’s SHORT CUTS/’93 springs to mind.  Would Fratelli D’Innocenzo know it?

ÉDOUARD ET CAROLINE / EDWARD AND CAROLINE (1951)

Lesser Becker, still worthwhile.  Dead at 53 in 1960, with just over a dozen mature features on his C.V., even minor work from French writer/director Jacques Becker too precious to miss.  Like this charming Rom-Com (even Sit-Com at times), a near companion to ANTOINE ET ANTOINETTE/’47, if not its equal, with Becker raising social status from struggling pink-collar workers amid post-war Parisian shortages (and loads of real Paris street locations) to ‘50s surplus on but two interior studio sets for Anne Vernon, stay-at-home wife to Daniel Gélin’s as yet unheralded concert pianist husband.  She comes from money/he’s got a chip on his shoulder about it; and tonight their differences rise to the boil as her wealthy Uncle gives a fancy party to introduce Gélin to society types who can make his name.  It leaves him even more resentful and her faded evening dress looking even more painfully dated.  All very French, very ‘50s in social attitude & sexual politics: ‘comic’ marital blows; women at the party on the lookout for modest affairs; Vernon’s sleek cousin crushing on her.  (Vernon worth the crush.  Gélin, known from Hitchcock’s MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, a sort of handsome French Dustin Hoffman type.)  With story beats that zig just where you expect a zag: Vernon taking shears to her dated gown, doesn’t make tatters (a la Lucille Ball), but couture; Gélin throwing a tantrum not from a ruined dress but from fashion blindness.  Drinking at the party, surely he’ll ruin his big chance.  Nope, if anything, he plays better.*  Rich ‘Ugly’ American husband of society lady at the party, she’s got the wandering eye, he turns out to be a pretty upstanding guy, speaking horrible, but ‘correct’ French, and winding up as the film’s wise fairy godfather.  Becker isn’t as connected to this crowd as in ANTOINE (a bit broad in tone & detail), but the faults do little to harm to film’s charm.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *And why not, that’s Ravel-specialist Samson François (here playing Chopin) on the soundtrack to Gélin’s rather casual keyboard contact.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Naturally ANTOINE ET ANTOINETTE.  OR: Becker’s next, CASQUE D’OR/’52, his masterpiece.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/08/antoine-et-antoinette-1947.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/casque-dor-1952.html

BLUE IGUANA (2018)

British writer/director Hadi Hajaig (with but four releases in two decades), had a decent, if derivative idea here, landing think-on-her-feet London lawyer Phoebe Fox at a crummy NYC diner to recruit low-grade parolees Sam Rockwell & Ben Schwartz for a tricky hand-off of negotiable bonds for a stolen mega-diamond (‘the blue iguana’) back in England.  (The Stateside diner scene a late add-on to get Rockwell & Schwartz on board?*)  Once ‘over there,’ the boys join two other players, but the drop goes badly and the race is on to recover loot and bauble.  Silly violent stuff, but entertaining thanks to likable lowlifes, rat-a-tat dialogue & spot-on casting.  Rockwell & Fox outstanding, with great personal chemistry.  (Rockwell could have phoned it in, but the guy never does.  A champ whatever you stick him in, and finally showing leading man chops rather than having to steal pics in support.)  Third-act twists go on too long, but what really drags this down is its disconjunctive/over-active filming style, as if Hajaig grabbed the baton from Guy Ritchie’s ‘90s filming style and then couldn’t give it away.  He just gets by on action sequences (though the editing frenzy fails to camouflage a multitude of staging sins), but not with simple things like straight-ahead table conversations or simple exposition dialog, farragoes of over-manipulated jump cuts and pointless fast-tracking showoff shots.  Meantime, conveniently ‘planted’ setups for gags & plot twists (like having a Zombie Pic filming next door so any real gore goes unnoticed) is depressingly lazy.   Makes you wonder how badly those ultra-violent ‘90s comedy capers have aged.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The idea you’d cross the Atlantic to hire such lowlife losers only makes sense with a plot specifically targeting second-raters as a guarantee for failure.  The twist coming when they succeed against all odds.

COBRA WOMAN (1944)

Eye-popping TechniColor, backlot studio artifice, campy fabulist adventure, just the ticket for unlikely Hollywood film star Maria Montez.  Half a dozen films with aquatic consort Jon Hall during the war years, and, if you were lucky, Sabu as sidekick, besting villains, inane plots & strapless everything.  This one tops of the divinely silly lot, with Montez kidnaped by Lon Chaney Jr. on her wedding day and taken to the island of her birth where younger identical twin sister is the despotic ruler.  You’ll guess the rest of the plot, but not the decor; the nightclub floor show passing as ritual cobra dance (backup chorus-line in blue); fire-breathing mountain; a dozen more near death experiences for all three.  And with stylish director Robert Siodmak calling the shots*, unexpectedly specific setups that almost make sense of the nonsensical plot & island logistics, serving up the shortest running time of the series.  A plus because while you wouldn’t want to miss it (especially in HD), you may also find that one is quite enough.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *More than other directors in these films, Siodmak emphasizes music over adventure,  as if Montez were a beautiful Carmen Miranda whose run at 20th/Fox mirrored these in color saturation & brief popularity.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Hard to imagine serious, issue-oriented Richard Brooks co-scripted.  Even harder to imagine calm, sophisticated French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont married to Montez.

WATERFRONT (1944)

Americanized as director Steve Sekely, Austro-Hungarian war refugee István Székely must have been glad of steady employment anywhere, even Poverty Row Hollywood.  Here, it’s Producers Releasing Corporation, an outfit to make MONOGRAM PICTURES look like M-G-M.  Yet, even under these circumstances, you can tell he knows what he’s doing, especially in the first half of this Nazi Fifth Columnists story.  If only you could see it.  Subfusc copies the norm, so a largely nighttime undercover spy drama must be seen through a glass darkly, very darkly.  A shame since John Carradine is just the man to play a Nazi spy combing the San Francisco waterfront district to find fellow traveler/optometrist J. Carrol Naish, only to discover Naish has just been robbed, his ‘little black book’ of codes & contacts gone missing.  Calmly murdering even sympathizers once he gets what he needs, Carradine also enjoys serving up a bit of blackmail, threatening to expose a landlady’s relatives back in Germany when she points to a No Vacancy sign.  Before that, an elaborate meet-cute for two spies as Carradine recites ridiculous passwords while pretending to have his eyes examined; and later a neat scene where a detective sweats thru an interrogation while his suspect stays cool as a cucumber.  So what if the script falls apart in the third act, a decent looking print might have saved the day.  Not that we’ll ever know.

DOUBLE-BILL: Carradine starred in many a crappy B-pic between prestige supporting gigs.  One of the best he made that year (#9 of 11, also at PRC), BLUEBEARD for Edgar G. Ulmer, good enough to hope for a better print to turn up before having a look.

CAPTAIN ALATRISTE (2006)

Serious fun when not being serious, this deluxe Spanish Historical fiction (from a series of modern novels) follows unlikely Spaniard Viggo Mortensen (adding a mysterious element more obvious choices Antonio Banderas or Javier Bardem might have missed) in a ‘noblest soldier of them all’ scenario as he chafes at the iniquities of 17th Century Spanish society (royals, religiosos, retro rules) while staying true to all things Castilian, other than the lisp.  In a handsome production with an Old Masters’ look (think Velasquez), Alatriste is barely returned from noble fighting in an ignoble war against Protestant Flanders when he’s ‘enlisted’ to assassinate a couple of Dukes (Wales & Wellington) in from England incognito to visit the King, only to hold back from finishing the job.  The right thing to do, of course, but getting Alatriste into nothing but trouble, and setting the course for the rest of film on missions foreign & domestic; battles of heart, soul & territory.  Accomplished and nicely detailed at first, increasingly tangled political & personal issues in the film’s morally compromised second half find writer/director Agustín Díaz Yanes coming up short, his skills unequal to the task.  (Unlike Peter Weir’s MASTER AND COMMANDER out three years before this.)  Mixing old-fashioned duels and derring-do over twenty years (showing the merest touch of gray at the temples and nary a pound packed on) with uncomfortable societal attitudes toward women & religion treated in modern fashion as mere niceties everyone follows or ignores at the plot’s convenience.  Ultimately, the film wants to toma tu pastel y cómetelo también when issues get thorny.*   Something of a curate’s egg (an iris fade-out signals a decline), it’s conditionally enjoyable.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned, MASTER AND COMMANDER/'03.  And what became of the presumed sequels?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Googled English-to-Spanish for ‘have your cake and eat it, too.’  Close to the mark?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Full Official English title: CAPTAIN ALATRISTE: THE SPANISH MUSKETEER, but did this receive even a token Stateside theatrical release?

TOMORROW WE LIVE (1942)

Grade-Z cult director Edgar G. Ulmer, Poverty Row’s poet of the peculiar, started his symbiotic association with ultra-low-budget Producers Releasing Corporation with this typically odd, atypically half-baked project.  Later PRC films (BLUEBEARD/’44; DETOUR/’45) show what he was going after; not so much here.  Jean Peters’ prodigal daughter, home after dropping out of college, gets an unwelcome reception from Pop at his minimally functioning desert diner, kept afloat by renting out sheds to black marketeer/casino owner Ricardo Cortez (the only reason to have a look).*  Called ‘Ghost’ for having survived various attempted rubouts, he makes a fast move on Peters; she’s initially interested, but already spoken for by soldier boy William Marshall.  You can see the possibilities, especially when a rival gang goes after Cortez and a jolting montage of gun play snaps him into madness.  But the script is just too risibly blunt, the multi-branched storyline never comes together, and a bit of WWII patriotism slapped on as coda pure desperation.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Who could possibly be frequenting Cortez’s upscale desert nightspot in the middle of nowhere?  Then again, Las Vegas was raising early casinos at about this time, so maybe.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Better Ulmer from this period, BLUEBEARD; DETOUR; or with a near normal budget & legit cast, RUTHLESS/’48, something of a discount CITIZEN KANE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/09/detour-1945.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/01/ruthless-1948.html