IO CAPITANO

Writer/director Matteo Garrone (GOMORRAH/’08) has a major work here; awards, Oscar nom., yet not much seen.  A tough watch, but superb, raw, timely, deeply moving.  The story is old and currently unpopular, immigrants leaving their homes for something better, in this case Africans going to Europe.  A touchy topic these days.  Senegalese cousins Seydou & Mousa, 16, but looking like young men, ignore all advice and risk a journey north that proves violent and terrifying, heading thru Africa to Libya and the Mediterranean, then across the sea for Italy to find work and send money home where their families live in flimsy lean-tos hardly better than migrant camps.  Moussa the natural alpha-male, urging on less impulsive Seydou.  But as horrors & brutalities pile on (bribery at every juncture; desert transport by truck and foot more like a death march; outlaw shakedowns and torture; senseless military arrests), it’s Seydou who turns leader and caretaker; though he too will need the kindness of strangers to survive.  Harrowing stuff, yet Seydou’s biggest fear still to come when he’s given charge of the boat taking nearly a hundred refugees on the last leg over the Mediterranean to Italy after a couple of minutes instruction on how to captain a ship.  Stunningly realized by Garrone, technically the film is immaculate, with one location topping the last, a cast filled with unmatchable non-professionals, with incidents of sweeping action and escalating terror seemingly caught on the fly.  International anti-immigration sentiment no doubt made this one a tough sell, but the film demands to be seen and understood.  Its terrible beauty beautifully captured.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The Greeks in their wisdom would follow tragedy with Farce or Physical Comedy to clear the palette with roars of laughter.  Is such a thing even thinkable today?  Could we watch a lightly sentimental cartoon on fresh immigrants coming to America like Spielberg’s AN AMERICAN TAIL/’86 or Rodgers & Hammerstein’s corny FLOWER DRUM SONG?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/01/an-american-tail-1986.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/flower-drum-song-1961.html

ALL FALL DOWN (1962)

Always in the shadow of Tennessee Williams (who he was unfavorably compared to in spite of successes COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA; PICNIC; BUS STOP), playwright William Inge died long before his current (if partial) critical reclamation.  But easy to see why he was seen as a backup Williams in Inge's adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s overwrought novel about a dysfunctional family down South.  Warren Beatty, in his arrogant pretty-boy prime, repeats the Angel of Death* he’d just played in Williams’ THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/the-roman-spring-of-mrs-stone-1961.html), but sans suspect Italian accent, as irresponsible prodigal son to suffocating mom Angela Lansbury (very Shelley Winters here) and libido-free dipso dad Karl Malden.  Brandon De Wilde (remarkably good considering) is the worshipful kid brother/family peacemaker who finally spots the feet of clay, and Eva Marie Saint is a visiting cousin who brings out a new leaf on Beatty only to discover the new growth is no different than the old.  While director John Frankenheimer, only his third feature after much tv work, can’t find a level of artifice everyone can work in, so the acting is something of a free-for-all.  For the film, hysterical playing and physically drab presentation prove a bad combination.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Next year, next big brother with feet of clay as De Wilde sees Paul Newman plain in the far superior HUD/’63.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Something our foreign poster picks right up on.  (see above)

CONTEST/LINK:  Wildly misrepresentative trailer, even for Hollywood.  Plus a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up on a streamable film of your choice if you can name the tune & the film the trailer uses as playout.  https://www.tcm.com/video/61703/all-fall-down-original-trailer

THE HIGH COMMISSIONER (1968)

For a while in the 1960s, tv networks like ABC and CBS briefly tried to be major players in the movies*, but they rarely got ‘First Look’ at the best material.  Dog-eared scripts working their way down from established Hollywood studios was more like it.  Something that helps explain this, a political thriller, not without potential, but showing fingerprints and coffee cup stains from rival development execs who’d rejected it months ago.  Fortunately, star Rod Taylor is such a darn likable chap, even weathered and a bit thick, as the Aussie detective plucked from the Outback to pick up Australian High Commissioner Christopher Plummer in London on an old, trumped up murder charge, you swallow the narrative bait.  It’s really political payback (from an uncredited Leo McKern), but Plummer gets a short stay to finish up his international conference.  Taylor agrees, but the shit hits the fan when a series of assassination attempts breaks out.  (One at Wimbledon, very MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, a hoot, especially when they go right back to tennis action post-shooting.)  But then, the lighter tone of the first half tries but fails to turn dark in the second.  Lili Palmer looks elegant as Plummer’s mature wife (15 yrs older and dying of cancer); Camilla Sparv is his loyal/sexy assistant; Daliah Lavi is a spy with a shifty nature and shifting skin tone; Calvin Lockhart is the cool dude/foreign diplomat; and a delightful Clive Revill is both comic relief in the first half and dead serious business in the second where he's even funnier.  Plus Franchot Tone, dying of lung cancer at the time, playing an American Ambassador dying of lung cancer.  Director Ralph Thomas is all thumbs at action, but gets his laughs, even the unwanted ones.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *ABC’s initial film production unit ran from 1965 to 1972.  This British RANK product a probable pick-up to meet a release quota guarantee.  Nowadays, Disney owns the joint.

THE GUNS OF TIMBERLAND (1960)

Two years after THE PROUD REBEL/’58, Alan Ladd looks ten years worse.  Not older; worse.  In five years (and five films), he’d be dead, 51, mostly from alcohol.  (Something traumatic post-REBEL?:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-proud-rebel-1958.html)  But while this is a lesser film, and has the rep to match, it’s a bit of a sleeper.  Mostly, I suspect, from what’s left of the Louis L’Amour novel it comes from.  Unusually nuanced character development, lots of gray areas on all sides, the good, the bad, the conflicted.  A shame director Robert D. Webb so coarse & cavalier in all areas.  Ladd, partner Gilbert Roland and his hearty crew of singing lumberjacks invade a town to strip the forest that protects the watershed of a robust farming community where Jeanne Crain owns a major spread .  Why it’s that old standby plot: Open Range Ranchers vs Crop Growing Homesteaders, just like SHANE/’53, Ladd’s best-known film.  Only Ladd’s on the ‘wrong’ side of the issues yet structurally still the hero.  If only Webb knew how to finesse the film’s dramatic road blocks: two anachronistic Pop songs for a debuting Frankie Avalon; a jolly, heavily scored donnybrook (a lumberjacks vs. farm owners free-for-all hackiest of big-time Western directors Andrew McLaglen couldn’t have made worse); a feisty old bitty as comic relief; a happy ending pulled out of a hat.  Worst of all, putting Ladd next to Gilbert Roland, a working actor from the 1920s to the 1980s who never seemed to age.  Fortunately, cinematographer John F. Sietz, who shot almost all of Ladd’s late films, figured out how to acceptably light him as the film goes on.  Or do we just get used to the decline?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note the DVD is non-anamorphic and plays best left in Academy ratio without bumping up to fill a 1.85 : 1 frame.  Look out for falsely ‘corrected’ aspect ratios on some streaming services.

THE INFORMER (1929)

Not the 1935 John Ford classic (Dudley Nichols script; Joseph August D.P.; Victor McLaglen lead), but an earlier British version of Liam O’Flaherty’s very Irish novel on ‘The Troubles,’ shot silent before gaining a primitive soundtrack with Talkie elements.  Luckily, all original silent negatives surviving for this fine BFI restoration.  American-born German director Arthur Robinson (his only British production?) pulls off superb atmosphere, re-creating a stylistically believable, studio-bound 1920s Dublin.*  Check out the painted chimney shadows when we hit the rooftops of the city, an illusion all-of-a-piece with the film’s two international leads Lars Hanson (Gypo) and Lya De Putti (Katie).  He’s the jealous Irish Republican National who informs on his best pal when he thinks his girl (De Putti) is steppin’ out with him.  She’ll mirror the mistake in the third act, believing he’s been unfaithful with a girl he’s barely met.  These matching jealousies the main motivating difference between the two film versions.  In Ford/Nichols, motivation lies more with the ‘forty pieces of silver’ (actually £20)  Gypo is paid to inform on his BFF, the man who shot & killed the British Police Chief.  Just as big a difference comes in casting: Hanson’s Gypo no hanger-on, but falling down when he misreads the romantic situation; McLaglen more a tough enforcer, and thick as a brick.  Equally surprising, it’s Ford, not Robinson, who piles on UFA-style German Expressionism.  (A holdover from working at FOX when F.W. Murnau came to town?)  Both films now look a bit deliberately paced, afraid we’ll lose the thread of the story, but in their own way both significant achievements.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  While the basic plot has inspired many films, official remakes come from Ford in ‘35 and, in Jules Dassin’s intriguing, if uneven, Black take in UPTIGHT/’68.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/uptight-1968.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *No doubt, the superb, and very un-British, ‘finish’ to the photography due to Robinson bringing in German cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl.  Sparkuhl soon off to Hollywood, with great credits, mostly at Paramount, in the ‘30 and ‘40s.

RUST (2024)

Yes, you have to address the elephant in the room (see below), but first the film.  Something of a missed opportunity here, as this æsthetically up-to-date post-modern Western (nihilistic in tone, dark & brooding) has the look, feel & texture of the new ‘Old West’ sagas inundating streaming services, thanks mostly to the untiring (yet somehow tiring) efforts of fertile writer/director Taylor Sheridan.  His default manner a studied ultra-realist approach that in its own way is as stylistically ‘curated’ as a Natalie Kalmus-certified 1940s TechniColor epic.  Tastes change, artistic blather is eternal.  This one, jonesing for that Cormac McCarthy vibe, follows teen orphan Lucas Hollister (an overparted Patrick Scott McDermott) as he awaits hanging on an accidental killing of a hostile neighbor.  Rescued by the grandfather he didn’t know he had (Alec Baldwin), the two slowly work up a relationship as they ride South toward freedom in Mexico, hoping to outrun the attention a $1000 reward has brought them, and a veritable gold rush of ornery bounty hunters on the chase for it.  Majestic scenery alternates with dusty trails, scrub-land, forbidden Indian territory, and homestead interiors with single-source lighting that turns everyone into backlit silhouettes.  (And who thought it wise to repeatedly copy the famous opening/closing doorway shot from John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS/’56?)  Baldwin, who co-wrote with director Joel Souza, mostly lets his inner George C. Scott out (he’s got the rasp if not the gravitas), but somehow misses the deadly serious joke on the consequences of setting a Dead or Alive reward too high.  No need to fend off professional bounty  hunters when they’re doing the job for you, killing each other off to earn the prize!  Just stay out of harms way and watch them annihilate each other.  Eventually, you and the boy will outnumber the surviving tracker.  Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah would have loved it.  Burt Kennedy probably stuck the unproduced script in some forgotten drawer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention paid to the very real tragedy of ‘live’ ammo getting mixed with blanks in Baldwin’s rifle, leading to a practice shot killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.  Sad to say, this is anything but unknown on film sets.  From drowned extras in NOAH’S ARK/’28 to Jean Harlow’s ‘double’ (filmed from the back & dubbed) to finish SARATOGA/’37 after her death at 26; to the plane you never see land at the end of FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX/’65 because the stunt flyer crashed it; or another ‘live’ ammo incident, the self-inflicted gunshot that killed Brandon Lee on THE CROW/’94.  Many, many, many more such stories.  The common element?  If there’s any way at all to finish the film it’s always released.  They don't call it show business for nothing.

COMPLÈTEMENT CRAMÉ! / WELL DONE! (2023)

Wealthy, but depressed, a recent widower takes a sentimental journey to the French estate where he’d met his late wife.  But it’s closed!  Or rather, being redeveloped as a sort of luxury B&B and the ad he saw wasn’t for guests but for a British butler.  Ahead of the plot already?  (Ahead by about seven or eight decades, yes?  Good Lord, what was debuting writer/director Gilles Legardinier thinking?)  And whom to get to play the charming Brit who plays butler so he can rekindle some personal memories while fixing up the lives & loves of the staff along with the grounds & plumbing?  Why Mister Charm himself: John Malkovich; speaking his own weirdly uninflected French.*  Fanny Ardant, owner of this pile, appears in brief flashes under the odd staccato editing Legardinier favors when he’s not pointlessly circling chess games on the grass, hélas.  Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert and a good score under Ernst Lubitsch couldn’t have made this work in 1931.  Released in France as COMPLÈTEMENT CRAMÉ!/’23; later in selected English-speaking territories as WELL DONE!; now scheduled for Stateside showings (in near empty bijoux) as MR. BLAKE AT YOUR SERVICE!  Best avoided under any name.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *On a positive note: if your French is as bad as mine, Malkovich’s flat non-idiomatic delivery is understandable in a manner not possible when native French speakers rattle on.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Is it possible the inspiration for this came from something as wonderful as MY MAN GODFREY/’36?

THE RUNNER / DAVANDEH (1984)

Draw a line from the boys in Vittorio De Sica’s mid-‘40s Neo-Realist classics to Antoine Doinel of François Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS/’59, then thru Ken Loach’s KES/’69 and you could well land on the orphaned urchin in Amir Naderi’s THE RUNNER . . . and not be the poorer for it.  This semi-autobiographical work one of the few mature projects Naderi completed before leaving Post-Shah Revolutionary Iran.  Ten-yr-old Madjid Niroumand is Amiro (Naderi’s alter-ego), a street kid living in a Southern port town of oil refineries and a constant flow of international traffic, freighters, planes, trains, Amiro longs to join.  Yelling for attention when they pass, as if to say take me along or at the least SEE ME!  Odd-jobbing to survive (garbage picking, shoeshines for foreigners, collecting bottles gathered by the tide), then fighting to keep what’s his from older boys.  He gets some help from the local guys he plays fierce competitive games with.  (Stamina his secret weapon.)  But while they have homes/families of some sort, Amiro lives on an abandoned ship with little but magazines for company.  Just for the pictures since he can’t read.  Industrious, honest and determined to improve himself, his serious, square face occasionally breaking into a smile so big you could walk inside it.  And the expected movement  toward self-improvement in the third act doesn’t spoil the film with sentiment and good intentions, but does raise the stakes as Amiro finds a program that teaches him to read those magazines, and to see a way forward beyond his mad dashes in the deadly serious games he plays to win.  Remarkable stuff, acclaimed in its day, now too little seen.

DOUBLE-BILL:  The Criterion disc (and presumably their site) has a double-bill from Naderi included, WAITING/’74, a five-reeler made a decade earlier, also with autobiographical elements, but here in dreamlike code.  Again, a young boy (this one as striking as a fashion model - YA PARIS VOGUE?) living with elderly relatives in a perfectly preserved ancient city with little water.  His daily task to fill a large pressed glass bowl with ice he receives from a mysterious house after finding his way thru a maze of streets.  All mood & texture, where RUNNER is rough & solid, this is poetic poverty and utterly bewitching.

KIDNAPPED: THE ABDUCTION OF EDGARDO MORTARA / RAPITO (2023)

Fine as film, even more fascinating as a slice of Italian history, Marco Bellocchio ‘brings to the screen’ (as film trailers used to say on hard-to-sell period historicals) the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a six-yr-old Jew from a large wealthy family in 1850s Bologna who is kidnapped by the Pope.  At heart, that’s the story: call it PIUS IX AND THE BAPTIZED JEW.  Casually baptized in secret as an infant by a house servant, this act proves enough for the church to gather the boy and ‘orphanize’ him when his parents refuse to convert.  Held with other ‘removed’ boys, Edgardo's fate sealed by his finer qualities: exceptionally bright, well-behaved, observant, obedient, eager to please & be praised; a perfect candidate for Catholic indoctrination in ecumenical schooling.  Remarkably, international opinions & repercussions go entirely with the family, an event fed by press and public opinion which only hardens Pharaoh’s heart, so to speak.  And when the parents finally get to see their son, it’s less emotional reunion than ritualized abandonment.  Even an outburst with Mother only pushes Catholic authorities further against her for needlessly upsetting the boy.  Eventually, the case will be taken up as a liberal lever in the Italian Risorgimento, the progressive movement to unify the State under a figurehead King.  (Yes, Italian politics were counterintuitive even then.  For Freedom; Vote Royalty!)  Bellocchio is especially good at setting time & place (the Order of the Inquisition still active in the 1850s!), as well as keeping a lot of family & religious characters sorted, never sensaltionalizing the maddening facts.  Perhaps the film could use a bit of sensationalizing; it grows too tasteful at times.  It also runs a bit long (too many dream sequences?) along with a few odd musical choices  (Rachmaninoff?; Shostakovich?)  But this is nitpicking on a film that got lost in COVID days and deserves more views.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  With a name like Bellocchio, how could Marco not be a filmmaking natural?  Yet the brilliance of his debut with FISTS IN THE POCKET/’65 proved a mixed blessing, placing too much good work in the shade or taken for granted.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/fists-in-pocket-1965.html