INUGAMI-KE NO ICHIZOKU / THE INUGAMI FAMILY (1976)

Master of All Genres Kon Ichikawa* went out on a limb on this one: murder mystery, family inheritance/mother-love saga, comic-horror pic.  A big hit in Japan  (sequels; remake), yet never distributed Stateside.  Perhaps if Ichikawa hadn’t been tagged as a big-issue, serious subject kind of guy after acclaimed WWII films (FIRES ON THE PLAIN/’59; THE BURMESE HARP/’56).  After that, with few exceptions, he was under-served in the West in spite of a life that was long & productive to the end.  (1915 - 2008; 95 films.)  OR: Was the film simply considered too inscrutably Japanese, too plotty?; as indeed it is over the first two acts.  But you pick up enough of the pieces to catch up, and then some, in a phenomenally propulsive, lucid Act Three.  Anyway, Ichikawa’s compositional mastery carries you along at the densest of narrative moments.  It starts with the Inugami family gathered at the deathbed of their aged patriarch, a rich Pharmaceutical Mogul with three daughters from three different women.  (He never married.)  Even more complicated bloodlines among the relatives & in-laws along with a gaggle of  next generation hopefuls standing by for the will to be read.  Turns out, Inugami Senior is giving his entire fortune to a girl outside the family line.  But only if she marries one of his three grandsons.  (From those three half-sisters, got it?)  No wonder murder & mystery follow.  Will any of the three grandsons survive to marry into a fortune?  Inevitably, death brings in the police as well as loose cannon private detective Kôji Ishizaka, shuffling off with the movie.  Don’t despair if some details pass you by, all will click into place by the third act.  And in thrilling, audience pleasing, character driven fashion.  Immensely satisfying pop entertainment.  Ichikawa’s mise-en-scène, color grading & pallette, and unannounced segues into highly stylized vignettes, all second-to-none; worth every polished pixel in the 2021 restoration you should look for.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Probably the best introduction to Ichikawa is, from 1983, his women’s period drama, set in the clothing biz of the 1940s and as stunningly beautiful a film as you will ever see, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/07/sasame-yuki-makioka-sisters-11983.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Really?  Every genre?  Did Ichikawa ever do a musical?

DER FUCHS / THE FOX (2022)

Superbly handled WWII/coming-of-age story from Austrian writer/director Adrian Goiginger plays out like a real-life fable.  (Apparently it’s glancingly based on a true family incident.)  Young Franz, part of a large family barely eeking out a life in the countryside, is indentured to a prosperous farm in a distant county, only leaving upon gaining his maturity at 17 after a decade.  Homeless, jobless, without prospects, he joins the Austrian military not long before Nazi annexation.  Having grown up without social skills in the basics of personal interaction, he’s a well-behaved, dutiful odd man out in most situations.  But things change when he comes across, and adopts, an orphaned fox pup, going thru the first year of war with the animal increasingly attached to him . . . and vice versa.  Fascinating & believable, with Maximilian Reinwald a decade too old as the young soldier, but very fine nonetheless,  Goiginger shows stunning control in giving us just the amount of information needed to intuit narrative and emotional content, allowing it to resonant by withholding step-by-step exposition.  There’s something musical in this approach; like a baroque composer who has us extrapolate chordal progressions out of a single musical line.  (Cinematic continuo.)  Nazi themes are largely kept in the background, though Goiginger drops in a deadly one perfectly.  And if you think there’s not going to be a devastating separation worthy of a ‘50s Disney boy-and-his-dog film, you’ve got another think coming.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A long scene for father & son where the boy’s curiosity & fear of death is explained thru a folk tale alone makes the film a must.

LADIES’ MAN (1931)

Now remembered almost exclusively for co-writing CITIZEN KANE/'41 with Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz was at his most productive and his most influential during the early ‘30s at Paramount, writing, producing, and most importantly setting a sophisticated/adult tone.  This rather disagreeable romantic dramedy a perfect example of his imperfect efforts.*  William Powell, still shaded with the darker characters he started out playing back in the silents, is this year’s ‘ladies’ man’ to upper-crust business ‘widows,’ their husbands alive, but always at work.  Something of an unannounced gigolo, Powell’s a Manhattan flaneur, threading a needle of romance-with-benefits to ‘baste’ together a living with the trinkets of love.  Currently working a mother/daughter act, Mom’s a 400 Society snob (Olive Tell), unaware her main rival is her own daughter (Carole Lombard).  (Off the set, Lombard & Powell just engaged.)  These two are matched by father/scion: Bank prez Dad aware of the useful ‘escort’ service; son horrified at ‘the benefits.’  But once Powell is gob-smacked by ‘the real thing,’ a just visiting Kay Francis, he suddenly sees himself plainly and wants a fresh start.  Is he in too deep to change?  This is at least the third time Mank used this light start to set up a swerve toward the depths (it worked better for him in LAUGHTER/’30), but under Lothar Mendes’s direction, there’s less Early Talkie longueurs, at least by the younger cast members.  Though Paramount, like M-G-M had yet to come up to speed.  Very watchable if viewed with a bit of patience and a yen to see Powell’s lounge lizard go all Rake’s Progress.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See David Fincher’s unconvincing case for the defense (or is it the offense?) in MANK/'20.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/01/mank-2020.html   OR: By 1939, Francis’s star had slipped to B-pics, so Lombard, who was riding high, gave her a big juicy role in her Cary Grant co-starrer, IN NAME ONLY.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/08/in-name-only-1939.html

ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023)

Effective, affective and a bit overpraised, writer/director Andrew Haigh, working from a piece by Taichi Yamada, charts a fast-evolving/erotically-charged affair between two men, apparently the only tenants in their large apartment complex.  The main interest lies in the surprising gap between what might be called Generation Gay, sadder but wiser forty-something Andrew Scott*; and Generation Queer, late twenty-something, demonstrative Paul Mescal.  A cultural shift in attitude that doesn’t put a wall between them, but moves the relationship toward bridge building.  As in a noisy club scene, where expectations of rupture instead only deepen excitement.  But Haigh proves more concerned with relations between the living and the dead; specifically the need for emotional closure for Scott.  An unfulfilled screenwriter, his current project (if it is a project) has him visiting his childhood home for conversations with the parents he lost when he was an unhappy twelve year old.  The parents, now younger than he is, appear corporal, interacting with him as he is now, the gay adult man he grew up to be.  Played self-consciously in hushed tones, the fantasy relationship tender, touching and rather sentimental.  (Asked about his life after they died, there’s a superb line for Scott, noting how he hid his true self at school to keep from being bullied: ‘I made sure I did.’)  And at the end, we discover Mescal has his own ‘Mommy issues.’  Now we’ve jumped five generations back!  Very ‘40s Freudian.*  Missteps and all, it’s well acted (Claire Foy & Jamie Bell play the parents) and involving.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Scott’s recent roles have called on him to buff up a bit, but the real change is in the contours of his face.  As if at 48, he suddenly acquired the look of a movie star.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The influence of 1940s memory piece plays very strong here.  On purpose?

WRECKING CREW (!942)

Typical bare-budget fare from the Williams, Pine & Thomas (known collectively as the Dollar Bills), this bargain-basement blockbuster pits old rivals at work & romance in competition.  One a naturally talented fuckup/braggart; the other more worker bee/butter-and-egg man.  Made at M-G-M with 10X the budget, the guys would be Clark Gable & Spencer Tracy; at 20th/Fox Tyrone Power & Don Ameche; Warners with Cagney & Pat O’Brien.  For the Dollar Bills?  You get Chester Morris (late of M-G-M) & Richard Arlen (late of Paramount).*  Credit the Bills with finding a good target for the action (a motley wrecking crew who specialize in tearing down dangerously dilapidated skyscrapers), and in finding the unknown Alex Widlicska, in his sole film credit, to work up special-effects that help director Frank McDonald give those cracking facades a reasonable sense of weight and volume.  Even real suspense in some simply accomplished trick shots.  (They’d look even better if a decent print could be found.)  Jean Parker no more than efficient as the girl with a past who must choose between the men, but kudos to someone for casting middle-aged character actress Esther Dale as ‘Mike,’ a senior woman in a man’s job (she inherited the biz from her husband) who’s both sentimental (the reckless Morris gets break after break because he reminds her of her husband) as well as tough.  And check out how they set up the corny sacrifice at the end.  Play ball!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Arlen always looked a bit glum at having fallen off the A-list, whereas Morris’s joie de vivre at just being an actor could come across as prime ham.  Arlen probably at his best in late silents like BEGGARS OF LIFE/’28.  For Morris, it’s his early M-G-M Talkies, see THE BIG HOUSE/’30.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/01/beggars-of-life-1928.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-big-house-1930.html

AWAY (2019)

Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis, whose FLOW/’24 is a well deserved global phenomenon, had only one previous feature to his credit.  And while it’s not as original an idea as FLOW’s flood (a dystopian adventure for a young survivor looking for life on earth . . . or whatever dangerous planet he’s found himself on), it’s FLOW’s near equal in visual imagination and is even more of a personal achievement because Zilbalodis apparently did the whole thing himself.  Don’t look for fifteen minutes of end credits; THE ENTIRE FILM: animated, directed, edited, scored by Zilbalodis; whom I hear also brewed the coffee.  Of course, this would be meaningless if the film weren’t as good as it is, but it’s positively loaded with interesting ideas on fate, luck, companionship, philosophy, trust, misplaced fear, opiate for the ‘people,’ hope, pluck . . . you get the idea.  Beautifully paced as a series of challenges & obstacles overcome to get to the next step on his journey against an enigmatic demon who may be as much friend as fiend.  And what character development animation for the lead and the little animals who come & go.  (Where does this talent come from?!)  Plus, for anyone who wants to know how somewhat limited CGI can blossom under the eye (and hand) of a single artist rather than a committee, here’s your chance.  Heck, he’s even managed to get a shade of GREEN on screen that doesn't slightly nauseate.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, FLOW.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/10/flow-2024.html

SHADOW OF DOUBT (1935)

Bereft of the snazzy production values & star wattage that kept M-G-M commercially atop Golden Age Hollywood, the studio’s programmers had to rely on just the sort of independent moviemaking moxie and quick-witted invention officially discouraged (even punished) on the lot.  A safe, dulled response in contrast to studios where B-pics could loosen up a bit with so little at stake.*  Ergo this sub-par M-G-M murder mystery, slackly directed by George B. Seitz, amid Society toffs and nightclub toughs where every Manhattanite is a Man-About-Town, even the gals, and all is fodder for tomorrow’s gossip columns.*  Our murder victim is Bradkey Page, a ‘handsy’ producer with too many girlfriends and too many enemies.  Beginning with an insulted Ricardo Cortez who publicly punched him at the club for leaving putative fiancée Virginia Bruce in the lurch for golddigger Betty Furness.  The usual list of shady characters, chorines and market manipulators fill in a long list of suspects and . . .  Ho-hum.  But halfway along, something unusual happens.  The script pivots almost entirely to Constance Collier, Cortez’s ultra-rich/eccentric Aunt, getting her out of the manse for the first time in decades to take the lead as amateur detective, solving the case along with antagonistic ‘help’ from detective Edward Brophy.  Collier, a near legendary stage performer in pre-’20s Britain making an unlikely Hollywood debut at 57 (she’d go on to a series of character turns as a fallen dowager in films like STAGE DOOR/’37 and ROPE/’48) walks off with the film. (Presumably, Collier and Brophy were test-running a possible series along the lines of what Edna May Oliver & James Gleason were doing over at Universal starting with THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER/’32.)  Collier proved too rich a taste for anything but the smallest of parts, but she’s certainly something to see in this, her sole lead role.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Actually, there's one nice bit of movement when a taxi getaway ride gets stuck in city traffic and becomes a foot chase.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Warners had just shown how these things are done in WONDER BAR/’34, exposing how crude & backward M-G-M’s default house style was at the time by comparison.  Just be warned, WONDER BAR may be the best of Al Jolson’s films, but racially it’s the most appalling.  (And BlackFace the least of it.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/01/wonder-bar-1933.html

GREEN BORDER / ZIELONA GRANICA (2023)

Coming Soon to an International Border near you . . .  No, not the movie, the events.  A tough watch from Polish-born, but borderless writer/director Agnieszka Holland on today’s Les Misérables: foreign refugees (legal, illegal, semi-legal migrants) leaving home & country for something better, only to find a road not paved in gold, but no road at all; merely a dirt path to hell.  In this case, a No-man’s-land between the Poland-Belarus border.  Arranged in chapters: the Border; the Guards; the Activists, etc., Holland, with but one truly horrible exception, puts the worst of it in section one, after a hopeful plane ride devolves into pure terror and venality from everyone they meet, beginning with a connecting van ride gone purposefully wrong, military terrorism, a forced border crossing where they discover they are pawns of international politics, hustled back and forth (with significant collateral damage in each direction) like a deadly game of Red Rover/Red Rover where sadistic Border Guards control the barbed-wire barrier.  (Among the many portraits of horrific behavior toward the migrants, the Belarus Border Guards stand out for general inhumanity and whimsical enjoyment of cruelty.)   Holland hardly needs to push to earn her effects, and she’s scrupulously fair, not turning starry-eyed toward the sympathetic, and occasionally effective activists, more hard-headed legal aides than saints, and not without their own assholes and entitled show-offs.  Not to say there aren’t a few rounded portraits of border guards showing their own stricken consciences, influences and peer pressures.  And if some storylines wrap in expected ways (most of them tragically), it’s impossible not to be freshly moved before the inevitable coda shows how this deadly show continues somewhere.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Shot in moody b&w, Holland reverses expectations by using professionals to get a non-pro vibe in the acting.

MURDER BY PROXY / BLACKOUT (1954)

Our unplanned BritNoir mini-fest ends with what promised most, but delivered least of three.  (See right below for the other two.)  ‘Most’ because it should be right up Hammer Films’ alley, the British studio best known for reinvigorating classic horror icons with kinetic charges of action, sex & lurid TechniColor . . . just not yet.  Instead, top contract director Terence Fisher, who made most of those fright films, is held down by a dogged whodunit plot, drab monochrome interiors and a budget that threatens to quit before the wrap.  Dane Clark, the American ‘ringer’ on board to ensure Stateside distribution, is prospectless & blind drunk at a snazzy London bar when he’s approached by a beautiful blonde with an unlikely proposition: Marry me tonight and I’ll pay you £500.  What he doesn’t know is that the gal in question is using him to stop an upcoming forced marriage; that her father will be murdered tonight; that she’ll disappear just as fast; or that Clark will be tagged with circumstantial evidence as suspect #1.  (Told you it sounded promising.)  Clark and the otherwise all-U.K. cast are fine, but the unraveling of lies & motives doesn't add up.  Nor a  necessitated warmup between Clark and Belinda Lee’s femme fatale.  Didn’t anyone on set notice the chemistry developing between Clark and spur-of-the-moment helpmate Eleanor Summerfield?  Send Lee down for the count and have Clark & Summerfield walk off into the sunrise.  If only they had enough cash for the re-takes.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  In Hollywood, Clark was typed as backup man whenever John Garfield was too busy, but could be his own guy given a chance.  See him at his best, and most distinctive, in MOONRISE/’48, the last film worthy of its great director, Frank Borzage.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/moonrise-1948.html