THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1920)

James Fenimore Cooper’s novel has been lucky in its movie adaptations; more than a half dozen so far.  (No eight-part streamer?)  Main contenders out in 1920, 1936 & 1992, all respectable.  Surprisingly, it’s this silent version, at about 75", that sticks closest to the novel, keeping its largely tragic ending and daring racial mix-and-match coupling.  It also lays out the story best: two sisters visiting from Europe, caught in a war between French & British territorial claims while Native Tribes ally with opposing sides.  Since our POV lies with the Brits, their Native allies are the ‘good’ Indians (including that Last Mohican) and Hurons the Baddies.  The main action a journey for the sisters thru a No Man’s Land Forest to reunite with their father.  The small group led by an Indian Scout they, and their British escorts, don’t fully trust.  (Great White Scout Hawkeye more a supporting character here.)  Easy to tell French and Brits apart by their uniforms, while different war paint does the same for Native Peoples.  (Good thing too since the whole cast is White.  That’s Wallace Beery as the film’s Indigenous villain.)  Co-directed by image-oriented Maurice Tourneur (mostly on interiors) and future M-G-M stalwart Clarence Brown* (mostly locations), the film’s much admired visuals hard to judge in the just acceptable available editions.  Good elements are said to exist, but have they ever come out?  Meanwhile, various meh copies on line, some of the best looking accompanied by hopelessly inappropriate canned classical music cues.  But you can still get a pretty good feel for the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Best known sound versions.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-last-of-mohicans-1936.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-last-of-mohicans-1992.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Long overdue bio by Gwenda Young in CLARENCE BROWN - Hollywood’s Forgotten Master.

THE DIRTIES (2013)

Early sighting of talented Canadian writer/director Matt Johnson (of the excellent workplace dramedy BLACKBERRY/’23* and current well-received Portrait of A Chef as a Young Man pic TONY/’26 - not seen here) is worth a look, but has aged rapidly.  Pushing thirty at the time, Johnson plays a film nerd high school senior (hyperventilating over classic film like Quentin Tarantino having a celluloid orgasm), alpha-male to a gang of two, himself and BFF Owen Williams, who’s starting to find the act a bit jejune, even creepy.  Their class project a film takedown of the school hall bullies needling them, ‘The Dirties.’  Told as a revenge fantasy, Owen worries that Matt (they both use their real names) is leaning into the scenario as if they were plotting a real shooting.  Some of this extremely well observed; unusually for these things, the girls, if less active than re-active, at least are allowed independent thought not about boys.  But after a while, you notice that the hand-held, slash & dash style of our filmmaking buds covers not only what they shoot, but also how the film shoots them.  It begs the Brechtian question, by whom?   The  basic conceit of narrative filmmaking, here pulling you out of the story..  Yet it could have worked dramatically if Johnson tied this destabilizing style to Matt’s deteriorating mental state.  A psychopathic loss of control accelerated as Owen starts turning away.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, BLACKBERRY.  (If TONY shows equal growth, it must be all the critics say.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/07/blackberry-2023.html

LOVESICK (1983)

Woody Allen was known to complain (or perhaps puzzle is the word) on why a Dudley Moore rom-com like ARTHUR/’81 commercially buried even his most successful work.  And though we (and Woody) can only guess at the reasons, we can know how Moore would fare in a Woody Allen film by looking at LOVESICK, written and directed by Allen collaborator Marshall Brickman, co-writer of ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN, SLEEPER and MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY.  Loaded with Allen tropes, characters, locations, social milieu, NYC-centric supporting actors, couplings with participants separated by decades, etc.  And, wouldn’t you know it, LOVESICK grossed about a third of next year’s Dudley Moore mid-life crisis pic MICKI + MAUDE/’84, which covered similar territory.  Brickman, who only directed a handful of films, has a great cast and crew on paper, but the comic doings of an indulgent psychiatrist for rich Upper East Side Manhattan neurotics isn’t much more interesting than one of the 45 minute sessions boring Dr. Moore to tears.  And that includes his latest couch sitter, playwright Elizabeth McGovern, whom he barely hears but instantly falls for.*  '80s attitudes & sexual politics being what they are, what once might have been considered charmingly romantic behavior by Moore now looks like stalking.  And the laugh lines that do come off only make the situation feel more uncomfortable.  The one thing that still plays is a sort of corporal ghost of Freud giving sage professional & personal advice, not of the patient but of the good doctor.  Underplayed to perfection by Alec Guinness who doesn’t miss a beat or a laugh, he seems to float above the film, coming off as the only modern (or is it timeless?) character in the movie.  While Brickman, back among the living, cheats by letting everyone off the hook with conflicts resolved by fiat.  Woody would never have let him get away with it.  He’d also have put the kibosh on the bouffant comb-out on Dudley’s hair.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *As mentioned, Blake Edward’s MICKI & MAUDE, every bit as blinkered in passé Freudian methodology and ‘80s sexual attitudes, but playing out (hilariously) as a period piece rather than dated/objectionable.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/micki-maude-1984.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Even a cinematographer as gifted as Gerry Fisher is flummoxed by the McGovern face.  Something about the square jaw and the luminescent blue eyes make her always look disconcertingly out of focus.

WINDS OF CHANCE (1925)

The Alaskan Gold Rushes at the turn-of-the-last-century (four or five major runs) held more space in America’s collective conscious than we can imagine.  Two major silents in 1925: Charles Chaplin’s ever popular THE GOLD RUSH (though only a few establishing shots made on location) and this sprawling adventure with exteriors largely shot in the Canadian Yukon, even at Dawson City where much of the story is set.  A genial mix of drama, romance, thrills and comedy from a Rex Beach novel, more Henry Hathaway/John Wayne NORTH TO ALASKA/’60 romp than a truly great & terrifying look at  the scene as found in Clarence Brown’s astonishing TRAIL OF ‘98.*   The two leads: strong/stately adventurer Ben Lyons, honestly working up a stake to make a claim, and slightly used Dawson City hall owner Anna Q. Nilsson.  (Yep, the same Nilsson who’s one of the bridge-playing ‘Waxworks’ in SUNSET BOULEVARD/’50.)  These two pair up on the way to Dawson City*, but their dalliance ends when her cheatin’ husband shows up.  Also on the journey, fragile Dana Viola, left alone after her father falls off the wagon and gets shot.  She’s taken under the wing of hearty, river hauler Victor McLaglen playing a Frenchman!  No matter, these two easily steal the pic.  (And our poster knew it.)  Also tops, the thrill-sequence down the rapids with everyone's belongings.  (The real deal, no tricks.  Note Buster Keaton’s ‘props’ genius Fred Gabourie, just off THE NAVIGATOR/’24, in the credits.)  Plus cunning villainess Dorothy Sebastian (later Buster Keaton’s co-star on and off-camera), along with a pair of bickering old-timers for comic relief.  It’s all a little pokey, a little corny, but looser than director Frank Lloyd was in his prestigious sound films.  Available for free on TUBI (one reel missing, but elsewise, other than faint ‘blasting,’ in good shape.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Dawson City history, along with some preserved films from their end-of-the-line film exchange (a landfill), on view in DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME.  Also a link to THE TRAIL OF ‘98.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-trail-of-98-1928.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/dawson-city-frozen-time.html

ORPHÉE / ORPHEUS (1950)

Jack-of-all Arts Jean Cocteau (gadfly dabbler to agnostics) made just a handful of feature films.  BEAUTY AND THE BEAST/’46 the most popular while this update of the Orpheus myth usually considered his best.  That’s debatable.  Better to claim it as the most ‘Cocteau-ean, a Greatest Hits compilation.  You know the basics: Lyric poet Orpheus/Orphée (Jean Marais) loses beloved wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) to Death (here Princess of Death Maria Casares), but wiles his way across the River Styx to bring her back to the living IF he can keep from looking at her till they’ve safely returned.  Usually things don’t end well.  (Here, more have your cake and eat it, too.)  Cocteau has devilish fun updating visual aspects; those motorcyclist Death Aides a leather fetishistic delight.  But too often he settles for vamping before plunging into his simple signature, clear-eyed F/X (mirrors of water to step into; Upside-Down Anti-Gravity tricks, reverse motion to wake the dead) and not one but two of his lovers in the same film.*  The good stuff (those effects) are tight & tidy as ever (even tv’s BATMAN picked up on one), while important themes in ethics, decor, æsthetics, poetry & eternal love sound hollow when tapped.  Philosophical metaphysics 101.  Head- scratching surrealism and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST's sturdy emotionalism were more satisfying as film.  Even George Auric’s score falls back on Gluck’s operatic masterpiece for something memorable.  (The built-in distancing of opera or ballet a better match for this story.)  Still essential, but time has taken its toll.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *In his mid-30s, Jean Marais’s big, square, noble head certainly fit for The Classics, but Roman rather than Greek.   At 25, Edouard Dermithe’s Cégeste is the one to model for a Greek bust.  Cocteau covering all bases.

THE MAN WHO SHOT THE GREAT WAR (2014)

Belfast volunteer George Hackney, Royal Irish Rifles, 14th Division, took his camera along to France in the Great War.  (A ‘pocket’ camera that needed a very large pocket.)  Unusual for the time, especially at the front where he served from 1915 to '16 (Hackney about 30 at the time) as amateur photography was strictly banned.  (There’s not an amateur composition in his work.)  He got around detection largely by shooting on plates rather than film. It allowed him to process in the field, each plate holding multiple images.  Unsurprisingly, he came back a changed man, many friends lost, his religious beliefs in question, though he long remained an elder in the Presbyterian Church.  Carefully made into prints for albums, the collection went largely unseen before albums, prints, negatives, accompanying diaries were donated to an Ulster Museum.  Rediscovered in time for the WWI centenary, this BBC documentary gave them new circulation.  This film, though filled with too much supposition and not enough detail on his process (dir. Brian Henry Martin/script Ian McElhinney), brings some remarkable images, sharp in clarity and in Hackney’s choice in subject matter, to light.  Probably at its most revealing in the visible changes that appear before-and-after the 1916 Battle of the Somme.  And it’s thru these casual portraits of men, including many who were lost, and their grave sites, that Hackney  best captured his temporary world.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The film uses a technique that pans, scans and lifts certain elements to create a 3D effect.  Peter Jackson did something different with restoration and color on his digital revamp of WWI archival motion pictures in THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD/’18.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/03/they-shall-not-grow-old-2018.html

THE MAN WITH A CLOAK (1951)

Don’t be fooled by a few ‘name’ stars and some top-line tech, this is basically an M-G-M programmer with a bit more polish than usual.  It’s mid-1800s New York (actually M-G-M’s backlot Londontown) and young French gal Leslie Caron (in her second film) is new in town, lost in the big city till friendly stranger Joseph Cotten points out the creepy mansion she’d passed by as too unsavory a place for the rich grandfather of her fiancé, currently in Paris fighting for the Republic.  Naturally, Grandpa Louis Calhern is a Monarchist with no intention of helping out his sole living relative.  Chances are he couldn’t anyway as respectable houseguest Barbara Stanwyck (who runs his life and debaucheries) along with venal butler Joe De Santis are planning on inheriting everything . . . and soon.  Only diff?  Babs willing to wait for the apoplectic old man to die naturally while De Santis wants to speed things along.  No doubt some studio exec thought this could be worked up as a period suspenser along the lines of GASLIGHT/’44.  (This guy couldn’t even come up with a decent title.)  Cotten the dead giveaway as he plays nearly the same character and has the exact same structural function as he did in the earlier classic.*  (They did give him a meaningless identity twist which you’ll guess easily.)  In ways large & small, the film feels like an expanded episode from some high quality tv anthology show; all pedestal and no statue.  Just where director  Fletcher Markle would soon be headed.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *As mentioned, GASLIGHT/’44.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Impeccable dubbing by Harriet Lee for Stanwyck's throaty vocal.

VILLA RIDES! (1968)

In the late ‘60s, a desperate Hollywood tried to join the youth rebellion bandwagon, but couldn’t drop old habits.  Hence, this bio-pic on Mexican Peasant Revolutionary Pancho Villa stars Yul Brynner as Pancho.  A stretch even with a full head of hair.  (On the other hand, the new generation is repped by Robert Towne and Sam Peckinpah on script.)  Brynner led to Omar Sharif in next year’s CHE!, and the year after that to Stanley Kramer stumbling thru college campus riots in R.P.M. (Get it?, Revolutions Per Minute.)  All three films D.O.A.  You’d think the studio execs were permanently out to lunch.  A bigger surprise on this Buzz Kulik film is what a lavish production it is.  (Were they thinking David Lean epic?  Great lensing by Jack Hildyard; lousy score from Maurice Jarre, both Lean regulars.)  For commercial insurance, Robert Mitchum sticks out his considerable gut as a high-flying weapons dealer (sympathies moving from Federales to revolutionaries) while Charles Bronson always shoots first as Pancho’s top aide.  The story, not without interest, has Pancho loyal to new President Madero (Alexander Knox), but unable to get on with the other Generals he outshines in the field.  (Including a wily rival played by Herbert Lom amusing himself as a sort of Mexican Inspector Dreyfus.)  The whole film simply too odd to hate.  But you do wonder who took the blame.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Pancho Villa really was a interesting case, and not the illiterate peasant stooge as usually portrayed.  Try a print-the-legend version as seen thru an American reporter’s eyes in Hollywood’s VIVA VILLA!/’34 or from a Mexican POV in VAMONOS CON PANCHO VILLA/’36.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/08/viva-villa-1934.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/vamonos-con-pancho-villa-lets-go-with.html

THE WRECKING CREW! (2008)

Not the 2026 WRECKING CREW, Dave Bautista/Jason Momoa's action-comedy; not the 1968 spy spoof for Dean Martin’s Matt Helm; not even the 2000 Black Actioner with Ice-T & Ernie Hudson Jr.  This WRECKING CREW! (note exclamation point), is a homey documentary charting the ‘60s heyday of a tight group of about 20 or so West Coast studio session musicians whose careers peaked just as the center of Pop music influence shifted from New York to L.A., from the Brill Building to that stack of 45s known as the Capitol Building.  Sinatra & Co. to the Beach Boys; and everything in-between.  The ‘crew’ played for/with everyone.  (Boomers should stick around for the end credits to hear clips from fifty to sixty hits they’ll recall not included in the main film.)  There’s a bias in the film since it was put together by Denny Tedesco, son of main guitar player Tommy Tedesco (there’s a better film somewhere inside the clips & fresh interviews), but these nostalgic touchstones offer a lot.  Especially if you don’t mind a bit too much of interviewee Dick Clark’s idea of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  You might even be surprised to find out the Wrecking Crew played all the music not only for The Monkees, but also for The Byrds, The Association, even a lot of Beach Boys stuff under Brain Wilson.  Good vibrations, indeed.  On the other hand, imagine the thousand of schlock ‘pop’ they were paid to polish.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Gary Lewis without ‘the Playboys’ a typical interview, speaking on how his band was swapped out for Wrecking Crew musicians at recording sessions.  The Playboys’ names on the album, but not a note.  BTW Gary’s dad, Jerry Lewis set the bar for passive/aggressive parenting naming his first-born not Jerry Jr., but the near sound-alike Gary.  (Later raising the bar by disinheriting him.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Their slow ‘70s decline came two ways.  From new bands who wrote & played their own stuff; and (as told by Plas Johnson, the crew’s saxophonist famous for laying down The Pink Panther solo in two takes, thru the rise of twenty-four track technology which had them record in sections rather than together with the singer as a band.

DOUBLE-BILL:  20 FEET FROM STARDOM/’13, has a somewhat similar take on the great girl backup singers for some of the best known Black Pop vocalists of roughly the same period.