THE INNER CIRCLE (1991)

Pushing 90 and still active, few filmmakers of Andrei Konchalovsky’s stature have a C.V. as uneven as this Russian exile.  Showing good form in pulpy Stateside action/suspense like RUNAWAY TRAIN/’85, brilliantly sharp as recently as 2020 in his bureaucratic ‘Party Line’ takedown DEAR COMRADES!* (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/dear-comrades-dorogie-tovarishchi-2020.html), then serving up five embarrassments for each winner.  But he’s rarely been so evenly divided between his best & worst instincts within a single film as in this fascinating, fact-based life of Ivan Sanshin, personal projectionist to movie fan (and deadly critic) Comrade Josef Stalin.  Tom Hulce does a great job as the star-struck projectionist (watch him load film without looking) who can’t believe his luck, or notice how his good fortune is ruining his life with fragile wife Lolita Davidovich.  He becomes entangled with Stalin’s Inner Circle; she becomes emotionally entangled with the child of arrested neighbors.  Konchalovsky oversells everything in typical Russian fashion (the heartier the acting the better), whether scooping out caviar or baring your soul.  But while Hulce has the acting chops to cope with extremes, Davidovich is all at sea, unable to regulate.  Her tragedy seems less preordained fate than poor life choices.  And Konchalovsky never noticing the wheels are coming off his conception.  Still, fine scene setting (Moscow 1939 - 1953) and great supporting players almost get the project back on track.  Coarse & powerful/banal & thought-provoking; it’s the Konchalovsky dilemma.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Konchalovsky was at his very best in early collaborations with Andrei Tarkovsky on two stunning masterpieces, IVAN’S CHILDHOOD/’62 and ANDREI RUBLEV/’66.  A stabilizing influence who kept Tarkovsky grounded in narrative soil.  (And there are rumors of a third film: planned, shot, never released.  MosFilm!, please check your archive!)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   Armando Iannucci’s mordant/alarming THE DEATH OF STALIN/’17.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-death-of-stalin-2017.html

THUNDERBIRDS (1965 - ‘66)

Irresistible.  Of the fantasy/adventure puppet shows created by Sylvia & Gerry Anderson in the mid-‘60s for British tv (filmed in SuperMarionation!; still syndicated ‘round the globe), this 32 episode series about a top-secret/family-run/last-resort rescue outfit is the best-remembered.  Not that it's so superior to similar Anderson shows of the ‘60s.  It’s more that where the others made do with half-hour time slots, THUNDERBIRDS got a full-hour.  Subtracting commercials and credits means a bit over 20" vs. a bit over 40"; the latter proving a perfect length for set-up, characterizations, unfolding disaster; late plot twist and dangerous mission hitch before saving  things from catastrophe in the nick of time!  Set a century in the future (2065) our heroes a family of five grown-up boys, The Tracys, commanded by their widowed dad, and living on a secret island with Grandma and a few non-family assistants (technical genius 'Brains' like a nerdy sixth sibling) while underground silos store fabulous jets & space rocket rescue vehicles.  Stories mostly the same: futuristic technology goes haywire and the family is contacted to save the day.  (A ‘clip’ show ends season one and a Christmas Special ends the series.)  What makes it so charming & fun is watching them solve all the technical tricks in scale within the limitations of marionette puppetry.*  (Occasional cheats come via close-ups of real hands and real scenery.)  Spot the modest improvements in detail work: immovable mouths loosen up; eyes start to blink, hair is restyled, but keeping extravagant eyebrows on all the villains.  A ‘Cool Britain’ vibe lasts for the first ten episodes (very SECRET AGENT MAN; THE AVENGERS) with Barry Gray’s pulse-pounding score (bongos to the fore, then refraining till the penultimate episode).  And note how Dad Tracy favors eldest son Scott (the only one with dimples!); and constant changes to London agent Lady Penelope’s coifs and couture.  Plus sexual tension on the isle; so much testosterone and only one eligible gal.  (Son Virgil Tracy mentions a wife and kids, but we never see them.)  But if there’s no sex, we do get plenty of suggestive space docking and surface drilling.  Yikes!  That rubber cement glue used for all those scale-model space ships and hovering jet planes must have lingered in the air on set.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The Tracys always end ship to ship or ship to base messages saying ‘F.A.B.’  Apparently, it’s no anagram, simply a phrase like A. O. K. or Roger & Out acknowledging reception.  F.A.B.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One thing Andersons & crew can do little about is getting water and fire to match scale.  A problem only solved (if that’s the word) once CGI came on the movie scene.

HIGHEST 2 LOWEST (2025)

Spike Lee has made better films (a few) and worse (quite a few), but never one more unnecessary.  A glossy, but empty remake of Akira Kurosawa’s stunning realization of Ed McBain’s KING’S RANSOM, reconfigured as a suspense-filled experiment in film structure for HIGH AND LOW/’62.  The basic set up remains: cash-strapped mogul holding the line on quality & integrity in his product (Lee swaps out shoes for music) has the rug pulled out from him in the middle of a risky business gamble when his son is kidnapped.  Suddenly his financial maneuvers all meaningless.  Dropping company deal-making for family business, he bites the bullet on bail bargaining to save his son only to discover the kidnappers took the wrong kid; they grabbed the chauffeur’s boy.  Yikes!  Will he still go thru with the payout?  It’s a pulpy plot (hey, Ed McBain/87th PRECINCT - see post directly below!), but what Kurosawa did with it was genre genius.  A long still-life Act One, set entirely inside the family’s apartment.  Short Act Two leaping into movement on the street/in the subway for the cash drop-off.  Act Three a brief presto of a chase, then a quick cadenza of a coda.  (Kurosawa not a Western classical music buff for nothing.)  Lee sticking to usual hostage genre tropes & tripe (second & third act all nonsense - that ultra-coordinated  bail drop!), lets his aging star, Denzel Washington, take the glory where Kurosawa all but pushes Toshiro Mifune out of the pic.  Mifune 42 at the time; Washington older and thicker than you remember, is 71.  Worse, he works too hard to show he’s still got what it takes when he ought to be paring back.  (Call it Kirk Douglas syndrome.)  Over-produced/under-characterized, with a weirdly ineffective ‘cool jazz’ score by Howard Drossin and would-be chart-busting hits to show Washington’s still got ‘the best ears in the biz.’  Where’s Quincy Jones when Spike needs him?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Go with the obvious choice, HIGH AND LOW.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/07/tengoku-to-jigoku-high-and-low-1962.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Look sharp when Washington & chauffeur Jeffrey Wright investigate a lead at a crummy apartment building.  The apartment number?  A-24.  Get it?  Lame-O, Spike.

COP HATER (1958)

First try filming 87th PRECINCT, the popular paperback police procedurals by Ed McBain, is both pulpy and priceless.  Pulpy because this cheaply made/down & dirty NYC indie looks a good half-step below episodic tv of the time (unintentionally perfect for what hack director William Berke is going for); priceless because it preserves bits of NYC back-alley ‘nabs’ from back in the day.  Even rarer, real interiors: ‘dive bars,’ tenement halls & kitchens, plus aging institutional buildings filmed check-by-jowl with whatever faceless underdressed sets they could afford.  And doubly priceless as it also preserves a rising new style of urban Method Acting (the post-Elia Kazan model) that John Cassavetes codified starting with FACES/’64.  The big difference that whereas Cassavetes & Co. never seemed to have met a person who wasn’t a struggling Method Actor, this team act as if they’ve stayed in touch with paid-by-the-piece laborers.  The lack of self-referential mannerism, even when the acting’s awkward, keeps them relatable and believable.  With debuts (or nearly so) for Jerry Orbach, Vincent Gardenia, a lithe/sexy Robert Loggia, et al.*  Story and execution nothing special, but it’ll do as a series of cops from the 87th get randomly shot.  Some psycho?  A gang of trouble-making toughs who failed the audition for the original cast of WEST SIDE STORY?  A gun humper hot for his latest 45 caliber?  Well, it works for the 1'15" running time; and the books would go on to be a tv series, tv movies and various international iterations, while McBain would also go on.  You know him better under his real name, Evan Hunter.  The one he used writing THE BIRDS/’63 for Alfred Hitchcock.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Check out Glenn Cannon, co-starring with Orbach at the time in THE THREE-PENNY OPERA at the Theater de Lys, the longrun Brecht/Weill/Blitzstein revival that established Off-Broadway as a commercial enterprise.  Cannon’s great as a punk kid being interviewed by a slick newspaper reporter.  The whole thing looking like a Chelsea pick-up.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Loggia’s fiancée is written as ‘deaf and dumb,’ actress Ellen Parker who plays her is neither.  Still, kudos (to novelist McBain?) for making her condition largely incidental, not the focus of the story.  Very unusual at the time.

THE LAST SUNSET (1961)

After officially emerging from the ‘50s Hollywood Blacklist of Card-Carrying-Communists (and those who may simply have rubbed shoulders with one) in 1960 with the one-two-punch of SPARTACUS and EXODUS, longtime top-tier screenwriter Dalton Trumbo* solidified his renewed standing with this solid Western for Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas who also produced.  Based on a novel by Howard Rigsby*, it’s a neat piece of plotting that can’t nail the ending, but still worthy under Robert Aldrich's firm control; stately, but flaring up whenever Joseph Cotten’s ex-Confederate officer hits the bottle and in some imaginative action under clouds of dust, courtesy of cinematographer Ernest Laszlo.  The main story has Sheriff Rock Hudson following Kirk Douglas into Mexico with a warrant for his arrest on a murder charge.  Douglas, not only escaping the law, but trying to rekindle an old relationship with Cotten’s wife Dorothy Malone, stuck on their cattle ranch with pretty young daughter Carol Lynley.  Hudson & Douglas make unlikely hires to get the herd back to the States for sale . . . and Douglas to trial.  Trumbo can’t quite finesse this major plot point, but, hey, there’s a movie to be made.  Hudson near his best here, much helped by having to play with an actor as naturally theatrical as Douglas, the ball coming back harder than he throws it.  (Benefits also work in the opposite direction.)  And the cattle drive sees shifting allegiances as Malone leans in to Rock while daughter Lynley falls for Douglas.  With a good twist up ahead to drive the finale after having survived rough terrain, a trio of mutinous cow hands (Jack Elam, Neville Brand, James Westmoreland) and a Capitalist tribe of Indians.  Trumbo no doubt delighted by these smart Native traders.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Check out the three-inch heels on Kirk’s boots.  There’s a clear shot near the end on a wharf.  Kirk usually touchy on the subject even allows 6'4" Rock to describe him as a short guy.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *TRUMBO/'15.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/trumbo-2015.html

CONTEST:  *Either Rigsby or Trumbo must have had Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES in mind when they were figuring out two major plot points.  Figure out the connection and put it in Comments to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choosing.

O AGENTE SECRETO / THE SECRET AGENT (2025)

Extrapolating from the four films I’ve been able to see, Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho has been turning out well-made, enigmatic, politically-minded shorts, tv & features for two decades.*  (Not much distribution Stateside.)  Now, he's upped his game from solid to great.  This film awarded everywhere but the Oscars®.  (Four noms/zero wins: you can always count on Mr. O.)  The film a portrait of Brazil in 1977 (there’s also a 2025 epilogue) less focused on military rule and atrocities than the wide, often banal effects (deadly in their own way) of a corrupt government: venal cops threatening to ’plant’ evidence on shakedown targets; eagerly cooperating bureaucrats in State offices; highly organized Southern gangs using Quotidian Horrors and Mob Murder to control the obsequious North of the country.  Actor Wagner Moura (probably new to most viewers*) in protean form, is Marcelo/Ambrose, a man trying to leave the country, along with his young son after the mother’s death from cancer, finds he's being blocked by past politics.  Going North for possible escape, he travels under an assumed name and pays the expected bribes & fees to get his papers & passport in order, waiting it out in a house of similarly desperate people.  Filho handles the large cast. sweeping action & events with the dexterity of a Disney artist with a multiplane camera, everything clear (character & narrative) with lines of action indirectly indicated rather than being pointed out.  The elliptical style giving a timeless/universal quality to events.  With the sort of thrillingly choreographed suspense and compound street chases Francis Coppola was a master of when he still regularly made movies.  Filho’s film immensely satisfying on multiple levels.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Now 50, if looking about 35, Moura is suddenly a hot property with upcoming co-stars like Colin Farrell, Ralph Fiennes & Kristin Stewart.  You may already know his voice as he was ‘Wolf’ in the superb PUSS IN BOOTS sequel, THE LAST WISH/’22.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/01/puss-in-boots-last-wish-2022.html

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Try Filho’s hauntingly enigmatic NEIGHBORING SOUNDS/’14, a film that blows up inside your head months after watching it.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/o-som-ao-reder-neighboring-sounds.html

THE JAZZ SINGER (1952)

No BlackFace in this remake of the 1927 Al Jolson original.  So, progress?*  Alas, not much else improved.  No doubt someone at Warner Bros. thought popular nightclub entertainer Danny Thomas could carry a film.  After this, Thomas never tried again.  Now best known for his charity hospital (daughter Marlo still fronting donations), Thomas was a pleasant rather than riveting presence, just the thing for tv.  (Even more successful as a producer.)  Monologist rather than jokester, his strength as a performer something the film fails to get across.  So, we’re left with the old story of a Jewish Cantor Father assuming his son will carry on the family tradition at Sinai Temple rather than go into showbiz.  Tempting songster Peggy Lee’s around to encourage his ambitions, but Danny backtracks when he doesn’t make a quick breakthru.  Not much director Michael Curtiz can do with this one; Thomas changing his direction with the wind, Peggy Lee disconnected from the main action (not a peep about religious differences, and backstage insider stuff completely outgunned by next year’s THE BANDWAGON/’53), while attempts to make the plot less melodramatic only thins out the atmosphere & texture, the two main things going for the 1927 original.  That and Jolson’s raw, almost disturbing, force.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In a parallel Father/Son story, the 1927 original (considered Hollywood’s first Talkie) was directed by Alan  Crosland, father of this film’s editor, Alan Crosland Jr.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *BlackFace is back, baby!  For all you masochists, BlackFace returned (less black than fleshly gray & clownish) when Jerry Lewis remade JAZZ SINGER for a 1959 live tv production ‘in Living Color.’  Real deal Yiddish theater star Molly Picon brings verisimilitude as Momma and Eduard Franz repeats from here as ‘Poppa.’   And if you think Jerry doesn’t take over shabbos services while still wearing traces of that clown-face makeup, you’ve got another think coming.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBe0qy5k8vk

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Nothing we’d call ‘jazz’ found in any version of this story.  The term has narrowed over the decades; but who’d go to see THE SYNCOPATED ‘POP’ SINGER?   (A perfect title for the Neil Diamond/Laurence Olivier iteration of 1980.)  ALSO:  A real Jazz Singer story might be found in the loving relationship between American Songbook composer Harold Arlen and his father, longtime Cantor at Temple Adath Yeshurun in Syracuse, NY, who used to sneak his son’s tunes into services.  Imagine hearing bits of ‘Blues In The Night’ in the midst of his cantorial melismas.

CUT BANK (2014)

Passable attempt at reviving a revival by writer Roberto Patino and director Matt Shakman, each with recent top-tier streaming credits (GAME OF THRONES, WESTWORLD,  WANDAVISION, THE GREAT), here showing more affection than aptitude for the 1980s Neo-Noir revival they’re trying to hollanderize.  Specific target, as usual, J. & E. Coen’s BLOOD SIMPLE/’84; but less a reasonable facsimile thereof than stylistic homage, like a finals project at UCLA Film School.  Starting with that mysterious title, actually the name of an actual town in Montana where Liam Hemsworth (distracting tall & handsome) is part of a convoluted plot to fake a mail carrier’s murder and split town with the reward & his girl.  But too many cogs spoil the loot and soon real bodies start to pile up.  Some of this is faintly amusing, some just dumb (especially the women's largely reactive roles, with misogyny displacing misanthropy).  Console yourself with the clever casting choices: Billy Bob Thornton now playing out-of-the-loop Dad instead of creepy town weirdo, that’s taxidermist Michael Stuhlbarg.  And if John Malkovich is a bit dried out as the only law in town, it’s sweet to see Bruce Dern, the foul-tempered, deceitful mailman who plays fake victim in the plan, nail the same role he’d have taken in 1984.  Dern no mere character-actor legend, he’s fucking immortal.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Seen BLOOD SIMPLE?  A couple of years later, John Frankenheimer pulled off a Neo-Noir no one thinks of any more: 52 PICKUP/’86.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/52-pickup-1986.html

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS / SENNEN JOYÛ (2001)

The early death of ‘millennial’ anime-tor Satoshi Kon (at just 46 in 2010) seems an even greater tragedy (an artistic tragedy) after seeing this remarkable film; possibly his finest.  Its story, advanced in an unusual narrative form, vibrantly visualized and ‘meta’ to the max, using a particularly fluid technique & superior characterization (as drawn & written, with nothing prefabricated) a perfect fit for telling the life and career of studio actress Chiyoko Fujiwarara just as her old studio is being torn down.  A young cameraman and an older interviewer are out to get a rare one-on-one chat and surprised to find the reclusive actress (older, but still beautiful) so open & welcoming.  And here’s where Satoshi Kon (who also co-wrote) shows his special qualities as the contemporary reporters come along inside her memories.  At times, watching from the side, other times participating in the action.  The older reporter having been a besotted intern/assistant on her post-war projects, he’s either working on-set or playing a part in front of the camera (sometimes as he appears now, sometimes as he was then)  Underneath the reporters’ hunt for her personality, Chiyoko also on the hunt for a man she helped cheat death when he was being hunted by the military.  The two promising to meet again after the war; a promise symbolized by a key that comes & goes throughout the course of her working life.  Told without definite lines of division between what she’s living and what’s she’s shooting on film.  Often stepping in and out of the narrative continuity in a fashion that puts the SpiderVerse (and its constant confusion) to shame.  Wonderfully uplifting as pure anime (Satoshi had the best color palette in the biz), the film’s also not afraid to be wonderfully sad in the telling.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Young anme master Makoto Shinkai picked up the gauntlet from Satoshi Kon, see YOUR NAME/’16.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kimi-no-na-wa-your-name-2016.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Satoshi Kon loved to quote from classic Japanese cinema, here Akira Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD/’57 shows; and isn’t that Kenji Mizoguchi’s  THE LIFE OF OHARU/’52?