LOOK IN ANY WINDOW (1961)

Since coming to Hollywood with Orson Welles’ Mercury Players, William Alland had done a bit of everything.  As an actor, he’s the shadowy reporter on the hunt for ‘Rosebud’ in CITIZEN KANE/’41.  Post-WWII service, he wrote & produced B-pics with little distinction till finding his niche at Universal in Sci-Fi & horror: IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE/’53; CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON./’54; THIS ISLAND EARTH/55; THE MOLE PEOPLE/’56 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-mole-people-1956.html), et al.  But he only directed once; this micro-budget seven-day quickie meant to establish rising ‘Teen Idol’ Paul Anka as a new Sal Mineo.  (Physically, the young Anka more proto-Dustin Hoffman.*)  In this debut, the poor kid’s in a bad way: Manly Mom Ruth Roman, busy emasculating unemployed Dipso-Dad Alex Nicol, is hankering for wealthy horndog neighbor Jack Cassidy.  Jack’s ignoring his wife who’s contemplating a coffee-fueled tête-à-tête with that widowed Euro-neighbor next door.  Meanwhile Gigi Perreau, Cassidy’s boy-curious teen daughter fights off a hot rod boyfriend to make nice with unthreatening soft-rod Anka.  But once he gets into Pop’s liquor supply, Anka comes on too strong.  (If Gigi weren’t stronger than drunk Paul, those shattered wine glasses already put out for  tomorrow’s big Fourth of July pool party might not have been just symbolic.  Yikes!  (Or is it mazel-tov?)  No wonder the kid is acting out as the pervy local Peeping Tom.  Enter Detectives Tweedledum and Tweedledee, one ready to force an old-school confession from any suspect, the other all modern psychology, understanding the kid’s depraved because he’s deprived as WEST SIDE STORY’s Officer Krupke might have put it.  Presented in a smeary/lo-fi image, the film lists no cinematographer (who’d want to take credit?); with generally lousy tech work to match.  Where has this sleazy, sticky-to-the-touch, campy Midnite Madness Movie been hiding?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Anka didn’t turn into a Mineo or a Hoffman, but he did write the film’s theme song.

THE BALLAD OF LEFTY BROWN (2017)

With a decent Olde Timey Western story, a more than decent Olde Timey cast, even real Olde Timey 35mm film in the camera, this Montana-set tale of horse rustling, inheritance, State politics, railroad rights, murder & revenge ought to be better.  Briefly: After Montana’s first Senator-Elect Peter Fonda is ambushed hunting for a horse thief on his land, his body is brought home to wife Kathy Baker by longtime ranch-hand pal Lefty Brown (Bill Pullman).  Vowing to catch & punish the killers, Pullman finds this was no simple heist, but part of a complicated political power grab that leads all the way up to . . .  Well, we’ll leave it at that.  On the way, old friends will switch sides, invisible assassins will take shots, and he’ll join forces with youthful antagonist Stephen Alan Seder (a local Montanan in a winning debut).  So what’s the film’s problem?  Sum it up in three jobs & two words: writer/producer/director Jared Moshe.  Rare to see this level of sheer incompetence, especially in direction, what with all the professional protection on set.  Though, at first it can be hard to spot behind the modern taste for a constantly moving camera.  Since you never hold on ‘the right shot,’ you barely notice the ‘wrong’ ones while literally covering your tracks.  But with so much uncoordinated logistics in action set pieces that have to add up to have effect (sieges, shoot outs, stand-offs), it becomes impossible to miss.  (Plus, there’s a horribly misjudged ‘neck-tie party’ finale.)  So, unless you’ve got a hankering to see Bill Pullman go full old-codger Walter Brennan (admittedly rather entertaining), pass.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Though usually found in splashy supporting roles (with three Oscars to show for it), Brennan’s last win was more of a leading role against Gary Cooper in William Wyler’s THE WESTERNER    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-westerner-1940.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *F.W. Murnau revolutionized the moving camera shot & tracking with THE LAST LAUGH/’24.  But the modern taste for mindless continuous camera movement likely grew out of MTV music videos in the ‘80s.  After that, the deluge.

TAKE OUT (2004)

Multi-Oscar’d for ANORA/’24, this micro-budget indie was effectively writer/director Sean Baker’s debut feature.  (An earlier film barely distributed.)  Baker, who also shoots his films, has Shih-Ching Tsou, now his regular producer, credited as co-writer/director* in this simple, story, strongly handled in quasi-documentary fashion (much of it caught on-the-fly in ‘stolen’ location work) following a thumpingly miserable day for illegal Chinese immigrant Ming Ding.  Up to his neck in loan shark debt, he’s woken by goons before heading to the storefront Chinatown joint where he’s the main bicycle delivery guy.  Borrowing just over half the payment he needs to raise from his few friends, he largely takes on all that night’s deliveries (thru a rain-soaked night) to reach his goal.  The bulk of the film consisting of interpersonal relationships in a tiny professional kitchen (seen-it-all manager, two taciturn cooks and a fellow delivery pal taking it easy to let Ming earn extra tips).  Their work a dance of speed & efficiency in a tight space.  But it's mostly dangerous bike runs thru slick/crowded streets before quick one-on-one interchanges with scores of customers.  Tiny Black-Out sketches where Ming (with little English) hopes for decent tips.  And it’s here that Baker really shows his evenhanded tactics as dramatist.  No matter how penny-pinching, curmudgeonly, or decent, each one treated as a real person, care and consideration given to all.  Even when there’s a mix-up between chicken or beef.  You’ve got to go back to the very early Jonathan Demme of CITIZEN’S BAND/’77 and MELVIN AND HOWARD/’80 to find its nonjudgmental like in American film.  Here, even with a touch of melodrama to set up the touching ending (a debatable choice BTW), Baker’s already giving benefit of the doubt to just about everyone on screen.  Shot in low-resolution digital that fits the material, he’s since learned how to add physical beauty, as appropriate, to the mix.*  But as fiimmaker, Baker was pretty much all there right from the start.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For those who might find ANORA a bit too scorching, THE FLORIDA PROJECT may be the better Baker entry point.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-florida-project-2017.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Apparently self-funded by Baker and Tsou, the film had what sounds like a fabulous twenty-to-one return on its budget.  Then again, when the total budget is about $3000 . . .

FRANKENSTEIN (2025)

In spite of claims for this new version of the old Mary Shelly shocker: frank, faithful, ‘real,’ in the long list of film adaptations of THE NEW PROMETHEUS, the final moral of FRANKENSTEIN has always been the same: the dangers of man playing God.  Or has been till now.  This time, the classic myth on man & monster teaches a new lesson: Beware of Passion Projects.  Sure, there are exceptions like John Huston’s THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING/’75, but you’re far more likely to get Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS/’24.  (Not seen here; but then, not seen anywhere.*)  And Guillermo del Toro falls right into the trap with this heavy-laden FRANKENSTEIN.  Immediately hailed by critics and viewers before its speedy skedaddle to NetFlix streaming, it’s a cross between a Tim Burton ‘goth’ rehash and an over-dressed Franco Zeffirelli extravagance that can’t be bothered with a mere God & Man conflict.  In fact, we skip right past the human element to hit up John Carpenter’s THE THING/’82 for resurrection.  (Or if you insist, Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby’s THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD/’51.)  Hence our North Pole prologue.  And del Toro doesn’t even bring his specific vision alive, ‘practical’ sets warring against model work and rubbery CGI wolves, sheep and stunting.  Acting little better . . . or rather, so inconsistent in style, it’s all but impossible to adjust between high theatrical camp and mumbling method.  (But credit for getting dramatic milage out of Oscar Isaac’s bad doctor at nearly a foot shorter than towering Jacobi Elordi’s ‘Creature.’  And since commercial results have been buried in the Black Hole of NetFlix mystery numbers game, there’s little chance this gifted writer/director will take a Francis Ford Coppola lesson from it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Without any claims toward ‘accuracy,' surprise yourself with the 1931 original.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/frankenstein-1931.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Even Alfred Hitchcock was restrained from giving in to his longtime passion project, the otherworldly MARY ROSE, by a clause in his ‘60s Universal contract that allowed him to make any project he fancied, funded by up to 5 mill by Universal, except MARY ROSE.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Of course, The Monster is Dr. Frankenstein’s personal passion project.  And look how that turned out.

BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS (2018)

Excellent, if barely released film from Danish writer/director Per Fly.  A true story of espionage, violence, diplomacy & love in the run-up to the Iraqi War.  United Nations centered, and more Graham Greene than John Le Carré with Fly refusing to overload for shock or suspense the way most Iraqi projects do.*  The story largely behind the scenes where the action lies in diplomatic maneuvers.  The coming conflict not about land or Sunni/Shiite belief, not even government control, but about dollars.  Oodles of it from various oil supplies and oil suppliers, here stemming from a reasonably corrupt U.N. project that trades a cut of oil revenues for food.  But first, an obscene amount siphoned off before distribution, 30 to 60 percent taken in the form of bribes or ‘honorariums’ before what's left filters down to the ’needy.’  Ben Kingsley, in towering form, runs the program, a master player whose naïf assistant (an almost distractingly handsome Theo James) is raised to second in the initiative after the suspicious death of his immediate superior.  James, an idealistic type whose father died in a Mid-East terrorist bombing, is learning on the job as Kingsley consistently compromises principle (and percentage) to get what he can networking thru a seemingly incomprehensible system of bribery.  But James soon finds himself playing the game himself, working just the sort of balancing act he’d hoped to quickly faze out.  All further complicated by a U.N. official trying to kill the Oil for Food program (Jacqueline Bisset, excellent, and her face surgically untouched - hurrah!), and by Belçim Bilgin’s beautiful Kurdish activist who may simply be using James for her own political purposes.  With relationship and loyalties in constant flux, it’s the most unsentimental education in global power politics imaginable.  Yet easy to follow and fashioned without special pleading or cheap exploitation.  Business as usual in a faraway war being leveraged for personal gain.  Each setback a new opportunity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Try THE QUIET AMERICAN/’02, where Greene used Vietnam as his petri dish in war and morality.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-quiet-american-1958-2002.html

THE PACKAGE (1989)

Reasonably effective, if commercially unsuccessful, throwback to those politically paranoid early’70s thrillers sees Master Sargent Gene Hackman losing his ‘package,’ hard-ass army man Tommy Lee Jones, on his way back from Germany to a court-martial in Chicago.  Only problem, Jones ain’t who he says he is, and the Men’s Room donnybrook that allows Jones to escape was carefully planned.  Part of an elaborate conspiracy between right-wing Ruskie and Americanski officers to stop (at any cost!) the implementation of a post-Cold War anti-nuclear peace treaty.  With an assassination to top things off.  Got that?  Neatly run about two-thirds of the way (script from non-prolific John Bishop; faceless direction by the highly prolific Andrew Davis*).  Johanna Cassidy gets slim pickings as Hackman’s supportive ‘ex,’ but Dennis Franz brings welcome verisimilitude as a streetwise/helpful Chicago cop (the brief look at his family homelife the best things in here), and John Heard giving away whatever mystery there is as a chilly desk-jockey Colonel out to nail the field-savvy Hackman. But the fun abruptly stops in the middle of the third act when Hackman makes a lame escape and the film suddenly starts to cherry-pick story beats from THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’62 and THE DAY OF THE JACKAL/’73, films in an entirely different league than this workaday number.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Directors John McTiernan and this film’s Andrew Davis must have been short-listed on all the same ‘safe’ A-list Hollywood thrillers of the late-‘80s and ‘90s.  Solid, if faceless professionals, McTiernan broke out on DIE HARD/’88’s; Davis on THE FUGITIVE/’93.   Of the two, McTiernan perhaps with a bit more filmmaking personality, Davis with the longer run near the top.  (Or do I have them reversed?)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  CANDIDATE and JACKAL refer to the original films, not their unhappy remakes.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-manchurian-candidate-1962.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/06/day-of-jackal-1973.html

LE COUPERET / THE AX (2005)

From the Donald Westlake novel, a satiric black comedy on modern business practices, written & directed by, of all people, politically-minded, Greek-born/French-based Costa-Gavras, of Z/’69 and MISSING/’82.  (And note, a Korean remake, NO OTHER CHOICE/’25, on the horizon.*)  A cleverly lethal fable about solid company man José Garcia downsized out of his cushy job as top exec at a paper manufacturing company.  Now in his forties, with wife, two kids and a mortgage, he’s two years on the job hunt and coming up empty.  Too many mid-level types trying for the same few positions.  Nothing to do but eliminate the competition . . . literally! Make that lethally.  Collecting resumes thru a phony job search ad, he culls replies to find likely hires and moves fast to bump off the best and improve his chances.  Costa-Gavras no comedy technician (don’t hold your breath for compound gags), but he does get his points & laughs across by loudly charging forward.  With nice complications at home with the family and nice suspense when he hits the road for hits.  José Garcia’s dispensable exec carries the film as the sort of hangdog optimist Alberto Sordi brilliantly overplayed in ‘60s Italian films and Jack Lemmon annoyingly overplayed in ‘70s Hollywood.  (Garcia even looks a bit like Lemmon.)  A tricky postman-always-rings-twice ending isn’t properly set up, but the film mostly comes across.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Easy to imagine a wilder, weirder, funnier version catching fire in ways this one doesn’t.  Perhaps the Korean remake will take us there.

BLIND ALLEY (1939)

Though better known by its 1948 remake (THE DARK PAST/’48 - William Holden; Lee J. Cobb - dir. Rudolph Maté*), the first version of James Warwick’s B’way play is the better film.  Or rather, makes the better impression.  Less from quality than timing; a decade’s growth in audience sophistication on psychiatry making the story’s simplistic underpinnings, still fresh in 1939, looking shopworn a decade later.  Freud still alive when this opened, ‘the talking cure,’ here at its most Freudian (kill Dad/bed Mom) something of a magic trick that could happen in a single ten-minute session.  Well-directed by Charles Vidor (dig the film's negative-image dream sequence), with a powerfully unbalanced Chester Morris as the escaped killer (playing in vicious James Cagney mode and getting away with it) who takes Professor/Shrink Ralph Bellamy and his lake house guests hostage while he and his gang wait for a rescue boat.  And what a nifty cast of crack pots on both sides: Ann Dvorak, the moll who wants Morris cured of his debilitating nightmares till she realizes he might lose his dependency on her; a cool, calculating Milburn Stone before he was Doc on GUNSMOKE; Melville Cooper’s wised-up cuckold showing unexpected toughness; even Joseph Mankiewicz’s real life psychologically fragile wife Rose Stradner as Bellamy’s frightened film wife.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *As mentioned, remade as THE DARK PAST.  OR: The fascinating first Hollywood film to seriously tackle psychiatric cures & sanatoriums, PRIVATE WORLDS/’35 (Claudette Colbert; Charles Boyer; dir - Gregory L Cava) where the treatments now look absurd, but the psychological interactions between the staff show somebody knew the score.

THE EXILES (1961)

Essential urban ethnography from writer/director Kent Mackenzie goes inside a closed world of directionless Native Americans who’ve left old ways and lands behind to settle in scruffy L.A. nabs with little but temp jobs, tomorrow’s elusive promise, tonight’s bar crawl and overnight ceremonial gatherings to rehash old customs under an alcoholic buzz.  A pair of thirty-something men get special attention over one very long night, driving around a noirish cityscape as they search for comradery, booze and likely dating prospects.  The women far more integrated into the commercial world, but given few options in this dating scene.  Their reluctant choices only getting worse as the evening and the alcohol level wear on. Shot in the manner of a documentary, this ‘planned’ naturalism goes back to documentary pioneer Robert J. Flaherty’s NANOOK OF THE NORTH/’22.  And this film might be too depressing to watch if the presentation didn’t come with such compositional artistry, capturing in crepuscular tones lost manners and dingy neighborhoods where Mackenzie so brilliantly shot & edited with Robert Kaufman in some of the same out of the way L.A. areas where they started with their award-winning student film BUNKER HILL 1956.  Check out the almost surreal funicular used in both films and previously seen in Anthony Mann’s THE GLENN MILLER STORY/’54 and James Whale’s fascinating Pre-Code IMPATIENT MAIDEN/’32.  That last a real find . . . if you can find it!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For an East Coast view of another ‘under-belly’ society, ON THE BOWERY/’56 is a more traditional documentary that holds to non-scripted storytelling.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/01/on-bowery-1956.html  ALSO:  Mackenzie’s student film BUNKER HILL/’56 mentioned above is included in the fine Milestone DVD restored edition of EXILES.