DEMOLITION (2015)

Never has a leading man taken as many showers in a single film as Jake Gyllenhaal soaps his way thru in DEMOLITION.  He’s in great shape so it’s no burden to look at him, but you’d be hard-pressed to see this much skin on a gym-mate you’ve been spotting for years.  So, under director Jean-Marc Vallée, working off Bryan Sipe’s script, the fleshly display feels more like actor bait than the psychological profile of recent widower Gyllenhaal he going for.  Something that holds for most of his attention grabbing actions and constant narration (of his own narrative) in his character’s emotional arc.  Catatonic grief to macro-aggression, all Method Acting exercise, showy displays of obsessive-compulsive disorder, jump-started when he writes an overly confessional complaint letter to a vending machine company after his wife’s death in a car crash that left him physically without a scratch.  Psychologically a walking wreck, he’s unable to grieve, unable to resolve issues he had with his wife, unable to work normally, unable to do anything but demolish objects.  But he needs to break thru something more than a wall.  Enter the previously anonymous woman he wrote those letters to, single-mother Naomi Watts, along with her sexually confused teenage ‘emo’ son.  You know the drill on these things, push everyone away until you hit bottom, then build your way back to a new sort of balance.  But when the film’s not too obvious, it’s pushing too hard.  Having Watts show at a memorial gathering or seeing Gyllenhaal, in surrogate father mode, take up duty as target practice to the boy’s William Tell act.  Talk about irresistible actor bait!

DOUBLE-BILL/WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  A year before DEMOLITION, Vallée made another recovery from personal tragedy film in WILD/’14 (not seen here).  OR:  Similar territory covered in uneven but better fashion: FEARLESS/’93; dir. Peter Weir with Jeff Bridges.

FIVE CAME BACK (1939)

Neat-o programmer about a small passenger plane going down in a jungle near a tribe of head-hunters.  Yikes!  Everyone’s a character in this smartly plotted GRAND HOTEL on a Plane story directed by John Farrow (not bad John!), working on airless studio-bound R.K.O. sets, off an original script by Nathanael (DAY OF THE LOCUST) West a year before his premature death, along with Dalton Trumbo & Jerome Cady.  Piloted by one-time WWI ace Chester Morris, the plane carries newsworthy elopers Patrick Knowles (rich) & Wendy Barrie (pretty); a big-shot gangster’s 5-yr-old boy guarded by henchman Allen Jenkins; scheduled-to-hang prisoner Joseph Calleia escorted by John Carradine; retired couple C. Aubrey Smith & Elisabeth Risdon; plus wandering tart Lucille Ball.  (Lucy wonderful and  startlingly beautiful in the broken-dame dramatic turns she often played at the time.)  One of those films that shouldn’t work at all, but thanks to the Hollywood Factory æsthetic, is all of a piece, which makes it easy to swallow.  Also easy to watch under Nicholas Musuraca’s lighting, later R.K.O.’s go-to film noir D.P. master.  Something that can’t be said of Farrow’s less rigorously stylized remake 20 years on (BACK FROM ETERNITY/’56*) from the dying days of Howard Hughes’ moribund R.K.O.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For a more realistic take on the Downed Plane Must be Fixed to Save Survivors formula, try Robert Aldrich’s all-star THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX/’66.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/flight-of-phoenix-1966.html

HONOR AMONG LOVERS (1931)

As the only female director working regularly at the height of the old Hollywood studio system (mostly the 1930s; mostly at Paramount, R.K.O, M-G-M), Dorothy Arzner now gets more than her fair share of critical attention; too often for the ‘wrong’ films.  (A thesis behind every article.)  She was probably at her best for Paramount in (late) Early Talkies dealing with Modern Women and Romance.  That’s what we’ve got here as Claudette Colbert shows off her brains and her figure as Personal Secretary to Fredric March, an inherited Master-of-Business type sporting a dashing mustache and lording it over his stuffy Board of Directors at work, and various gals of the moment on the town.  Only Colbert refuses to join the club, stuck on rising broker Monroe Owsley, a man she could start a life with from the ground up.  March’s society pals only seeing her as a ‘working girl,’ even if her work is totally legit.  But stopping March’s constant passes with a quickie wedding to Owsley proves disastrous as he’s soon in over his head financially.  Meanwhile, March has grown up to realize he doesn’t want Colbert as just another bed-mate, but as his one-and-only.  A bit of melodrama in the last act (accidental shooting) is fun, but strains our good sense.  So too, the class-will-out plot mechanics.  Yet the film as a whole is unusually satisfying.  A Paramount paradigm of this sort of thing, especially for Colbert who’s enchanting.  (IMDb only lists a certain Caroline Putnam on wardrobe, but that form-fitting slinky silk item and the half-length fur number have got to be the work of costume designer Travis Banton, already working at Paramount.)  Nice support, too, with Charles Ruggles as a dissolute millionaire squiring a very young, very dumb, very funny Ginger Rogers amongst the East Coast elites.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Made the next year, Arzner’s MERRILY WE GO TO HELL/’32 moves from financial to artistic circles; reversing sexes with March as struggling writer & Sylvia Sidney as wealthy mentor.  It also shows how fast Talkies were getting back on their feet technically.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/01/merrily-we-go-to-hell-1932.html   

OR:  A similar situation ironed-out M-G-M style by splitting the love interest into two parts for WIFE  VS. SECRETARY/’36 - with a powerhouse cast: Gable, Harlow, Loy; James Stewart.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/wife-vs-secretary-1936.html

MUSIC BY JOHN WILLIAMS (2024)

Laurent Bouzereau, who’s been making bios & backgrounders as DVD Extras for decades, found he had to expand his format into a full-length feature to even begin to cover the prodigious 60+ year career of film & concert composer John Williams.  (Longer if you count his session work & early jazz albums as pianist.)  And if the smooth result is more broad than deep, that’s probably appropriate for Williams, a man whose output rivals a baroque workhorse composer, more Vivaldi formulaic than Bach inspirational.  A mere list of his directors: Spielberg & Lucas most famously, going back to Wyler & Hitchcock (FAMILY PLOT/’76, a particular delight), forward to Howard, Columbus & Abrams, just gives a taste.  Plenty of clips & interviews (he seems universally adored by colleagues & family), but maybe most fun for early secrets at the piano: for Henry Mancini, that’s him on keyboard for PETER GUNN; for Elmer Bernstein opening a generation’s tear ducts with the piano intro on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. And credit to Bouzereau for somehow, after all these years of familiarity, recreating the frisson in sight & sound of the BLAST OFF that opens STAR WARS/’77.  (A job Steven Spielberg, right after JAWS/’76, urged Williams to choose over the far more prestigious A BRIDGE TOO FAR/’77.)  Not covered in here is the elephant in the room: Williams’ magpie penchant for compositional suggestion.  You hear it everywhere.  STAR WARS famously glancing toward the sound world of Holst’s THE PLANETS, a love-theme that looks at Tchaikovsky and that opening fanfare that might be a fake-out from Korngold’s KINGS ROW/’42.*  Still, if Williams can be charged with standing on the shoulders of giants, is there another composer with more themes that instantly recall specific films?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *These musical ‘suggestions’ not to be confused with the sort of wholesale quotes (orchestrations & all) of someone like M-G-M’s notorious Herbert Stothart.  Oscar’d for THE WIZARD OF OZ/’39, likely for the great Arlen/Harburg songs, his main contributions consisted of copying bleeding chunks of classical clips (from Mussorgsky to Debussy) into the background score.  Williams less in debt than influenced.  Favorites you can easily spot include SUPERMAN/’78 (listen to the music playing under the company logo in Universal films of the 1940s); E.T./’82, a hard one to spot, but the sound world is right out of the last (3rd) movement of Howard Hanson’s Third Symphony/Romantic.  Perhaps most surprising, SCHINDLER’S LIST/’93 is too close for comfort to the opening ideas in Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 2.  Far less known than Bruch’s First, the reference recording of this fine piece ironically features Itzhak Perlman.  Yep, the same soloist who plays on the SCHINDLER soundtrack.

ILLICIT (1931)

Famed for his Frank Capra collaborations (IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT; LADY FOR A DAY; MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, et al.), writer Robert Riskin came to Hollywood after this B’way ‘problem play’ was bought by Warners after a one-month run.  Trimmed, rather adapted by Harvey Thew, without input from Riskin or co-author Edith Fitzgerald, then handed to duffer director Archie Mayo.  It’s not much of a movie, but still fascinating as a look at Love, Marriage, and the mores of modern maidens circa 1930.  Barbara Stanwyck, whose reputation preceded her even in 1931 thanks to LADIES OF LEISURE/’30 and TEN CENTS A DANCE/’31 (even lower Pre-Code morals yet to come), is the free-spirited live-in lover of James Rennie, a scion of Wall Street type eager to go legit.  Not so Babs; gossip & social disgrace be damned.  Her own parents, and every marriage she knows died once the knot was tied.  Finally folding under the pressure of an Act One curtain, she proves herself right in Act Two.  The only way to keep our love alive is to live separately, illicitly visiting her lover as a playmate for ‘overnighting.’  Loads of Pre-Code types & ideas in here; plenty of drinking too with life-of-the-party Charles Butterworth continuously blitzed.  Plus both principals with a past ready to spark back to life at any moment.  (Ricardo Cortez for her/Natalie Moorhead for him).  Naturally, there’s a copout ending, but in its plainspoken way, the play’s argument remains interesting if not quite modern.  The film should be far better known, and would be if groom James Rennie were a leading man worthy of the young & vivid Stanwyck.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For a 'Mod' look at this sort of on-again/off-again romance, Stanley Donen & Frederic Raphael’s trope-breaking beauty TWO FOR THE ROAD/’67 with Audrey Hepburn & Albert Finney.  PLUS: Remade with Bette Davis two years on as EX-LADY.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/ex-lady-1933.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/06/two-for-road-1967.html

THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940)

Aware they couldn’t rely only on teen coloratura Deanna Durbin to make good on the entire studio payroll (Deanna was popular, but getting chubby-cheeked post-puberty), Universal Pictures began a second wave of their iconic early ‘30s monster movies. (Even expanded the canon with Curt Siodmak’s WOLF MAN/’41.)  Surprisingly, they included Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY/’32 in the select group.  Always an outlier amid Universal’s monstrous clan: poetic, still, more atmospheric than corporal, fatalistic rather than destructive; the Mummy maxim: Leave Me In Peace.  That idea pretty much holds in this first of four sequels.  (Not seen here, the three to follow star Lon Chaney Jr who had just joined the studio.)  In this one, jug-headed archeologist Dick Foran and comic sidekick Wallace Ford follow a lead discovered on an ancient piece of pottery to a hidden tomb where a mummy awaits his daily dose of tea for the living-dead.  Father/daughter nightclub magicians Cecil Kellaway & Peggy Moran also on board while mummy protector George Zucco (who apparently gets killed off in all four pics!) tries to stop them from disturbing the peace.  Sounds close enough to work for Universal, but nothing feels or looks right.  And they let you know it by reusing bits of footage from the original MUMMY.  Hack director Christy Cabanne and producer Ben Pivar knew which side the studio’s bread was buttered.  So where Freund’s original beauty anticipated the imaginative suggestive horror of Val Lewton @ RKO (CAT PEOPLE/’42; THE LEOPARD MAN/’43); this reboot points ahead to schlockmeister William Castle.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Stick with the dreamy nightmarish original; OR: For a more modern reboot, Hammer Films’ excellent 1959 version.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/mummy-1932.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-mummy-1959.html

EL SUR / THE SOUTH (1983)

Spanish writer/director Víctor Erice, whose debut in SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE/’73 is credited with jump-starting the post-Franco cinema generation (and before Franco had even died)*, went on to a curtailed career of shorts & documentaries, finally releasing a new feature film last year with CLOSE YOUR EYES/’23 (not seen here).  Yet there’s an unaccountably ignored feature made between those two, hiding in plain sight (now out on Criterion, but largely a Film Fest prisoner in its day) and it's something of a wonder.  EL SUR’s lack of visibility outside of Spain is possibly caused by Erice’s displeasure at not being allowed to finish.  A ‘missing’ third act was supposed to follow the title and ‘go south,’ but either the producer felt it complete as is, or (more mundanely) he simply ran of cash.  It’s a chamber piece, but large in emotion and spirit, a haunting story of a 12-yr-old girl growing up in a sort of limbo, trying to puzzle out the mystery of her parents’ marriage while stuck between city & the countryside in a rambling house known locally s The Seagull.  The parents warily unhappy with their lives and what remains of their goals (father a doctor, mother unemployed teacher) apparently held back by their anti-Franco sentiments.  (It’s the ‘50s/’60s; Franco still in charge.)  Crucially, Erice gives the young daughter POV in his construction, so this coming-of-age set-up covers the emotional breakage of others as well.  Shot with the dense texture and pallette of prime Gordon Willis, the lighting as extraordinary as the interiors of the first GODFATHER film (from José Luis Alcaine, preferred D.P. for Pedro Almodóvar among other top directors), the pace contemplative, with hopes, desires & regrets muted to the point of extinction.  The missing third act, not at all a problem.  Maybe preferable.  For once, a producer may have been right to stop before the film ‘went South.’

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Erice’s SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE sounds like it couldn’t live up to its rep, but comes pretty damn close.

A DRY WHITE SEASON (1989)

Martinique-born filmmaker Euzhan Palcy hit something of a critical/commercial jackpot on her first two films, SUGAR CANE ALLEY/’83 and this So. African anti-apartheid drama, made when that policy was still in effect.  And while she wasn’t able to maintain her early status (only a handful of further releases), this now overlooked sophomore effort lands nearly all its punches.  (Or does till she missteps with a couple of unforced melodramatic errors right at the end.)  It’s a tale of one BLACK family and one WHITE family from ‘70s Soweto where tensions are already high and injustice rains down unequally.  As we quickly see when the teenage son of the Black family gets caught up in a riot he’s running away from.  No matter for the authorities, he was on the scene, yes?  Seeking answers (alive?; injured?; dead and buried?), the boy’s father asks his employer (he’s gardener to Donald Sutherland’s Afrikaner prep-school teacher) for help.  And the film becomes a series of tests on Sutherland’s beliefs in his government & personal values as he becomes civilly radicalized by what he sees, the tragic consequences and watching his own family split in two over the question of equal justice.  The cast is unusually strong (Ronald Pickup, Michael Gambon, Susan Sarandon, among them), with Janet Suzman as Sutherland’s wife (witheringly disdainful as an apartheid true-believer); the great Zakes Mokae as a civil-rights lawyer with his hands tied; Sutherland’s two kids who take opposing sides.  And then there’s a phenomenal turn by Marlon Brando, returning to work after a decade’s early retirement, as the White lawyer (not an Afrikaner) who knows he’s tilting at the windmills of So. African courts.*  It’s tough to find nuanced drama when sides and issues are so clear-cut, not a lot of wiggle room for anyone’s conscience.  But Sutherland’s personal guilt at his own willful blindness till choices are forced upon him  does a lot of that work all on his own.  The film holding up better than you may have thought.  (NOTE:  Another Family Friendly label on a film definitely NOT for the Kiddies.  There are difficult/bloody scenes of torture.  But hard to imagine a better intro to this topic for teen discussion.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Palcy works hard to keep her script from being too focused on Noble White Guy helps Impotent Black. Family tropes.  But they’re built into the storyline.  (Would this story get financed today?)  So, government police and military forces are well-stocked with Black members alongside their White superior officers, and in the village the Black cast is just as well characterized as the Whites living in restricted nabs.  But the split in footage remains a stubborn 60/40 tilt toward White screen time in dialogue & action. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *It’s a bit of a shock to realize that Brando, only 64 and big as a house, had been off the screen for a decade.  Yet even in a supporting role, he’s really working here.  Sadly, immediately after this, he sunk to phoning it in or parodies of earlier work.  Entertaining, but a waste compared to what he might have done.  His circle of advisors and confidants less friends than enablers.

QUERELLE (1982)

Ever since QUERELLE inadvertently turned out to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film (dead at 37 from a drug overdose), advocates & apologists for the wildly prolific/wildly uneven German filmmaker have bent over backwards (symbolically!) to configure it into something worthy of a high position in the Fassbinder canon.  But it doesn’t stick.  Conceived to look like a theatrical living-puppet adaptation of the Jean Genet novel (less PUNCH & JUDY than PUNCH & PUNCH), it plays out on highly artificial unit stage sets (lit to glow in eternal ‘Golden Hour’ tones more crepuscular orange than gold), as it parses a passel of passes from sailors in port, visiting brothels & bars in search of sex, booze and drug deals.  (Well, less sex than available orifice, any port in a storm.)  Brad Davis, physically very ‘Tom of Finland’, is Querelle, object of desire/bringer of death, who ought to be the leading figure (see title), but somehow is less interesting than everyone else hanging around.  Jeanne Moreau is the moody ballad singing wife of the bar owner who deflowers Querelle; and Franco Nero, in a remarkably wilt-free, crisp white Lieutenant’s suit, longs for unavailable sailors.  Plus frequent stops for on-screen quotes from Genet.  You keep expecting (hoping?) the whole show will morph into a Second Viennese School lyric drama by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg or Anton Webern.  Though with Fassbinder’s limited pallette and texture he’d never make it past three or four of the 12-tones needed to complete a serial row.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Considering the quality of films Fassbinder made immediately preceding this (VERONIKA VOSS/’82; LOLA/’81; LILI MARLEEN/’81), you have to go back to DESPAIR/’78 to find him similarly off-form.  And as that was his most recent attempt at an English-language project, perhaps he was one of the many European directors who floundered when away from his native tongue.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/despair-1978.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *This is getting close to the idea of Thomas Mann’s DOCTOR FAUSTUS, material that might have been a perfect fit for some imagined Fassbinder project.