ROSEBUD (1975)

With few exceptions, producer/director Otto Preminger’s technically distinctive film-making, call it ‘Imperial Style,’ had a remarkable run for a decade starting in the mid-‘50s.  But luck deserted him with HURRY SUNDOWN/’67, and he never really recovered (Zeitgeist or talent).  So it may just be low expectations that make his penultimate film look better than its miserable rep suggests.  Indeed, its extensive prologue, a reel & a half detailing a kidnapping at sea by a PLO terrorist splinter group, is essential viewing , echt Preminger.  A last bloom of that Imperial Style, with signature long sweeping, mobile takes, calm but steady activity unfolding at its own pace via WideScreen coverage to capture a real event in real time.  Otto at his breathtakingly efficient best.  He doesn’t keep it up, not with son Erik’s patchwork script (his sole attempt), but this rather ordinary three act political thriller, with awkward close action and standard 1975 terrorists vs political stooges vs ultra-competent British & Israeli spies, is reasonably entertaining.  Or is if you’re cool with Richard Attenborough as a terrorist leader in a secret Lebanese cave condo; five fleshly teen hostages (including Isabelle Huppert & Kim Cattrall; an impressive supporting cast; and most of all Peter O’Toole (stepping in when Robert Mitchum ankled) playing Britain’s top expert Middle-East spy as if he were doing Henry Higgins in a revival of PYGMALION.  (He’s even pinched Rex Harrison’s flippant demeanor and hat(!) from MY FAIR LADY.*   And all Premingerians need to see the first couple reels.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Preminger’s next, his last, THE HUMAN FACTOR/79, also more interesting than its dire rep.  Not really a surprise given its Graham Greene source novel and screenplay by Tom Stoppard.  But on a very tight budget, no more Imperial Style.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *A dream role for O’Toole, he spent three years as Higgins (1983 to 1985) via tv film, West End run, then B’way.

LE MONDE TREMBLERA / THE WORLD WILL SHAKE (1939)

Dandy conception, but script development & execution leave a lot on the table in this French fantasy about a scientist who invents a different kind of ‘time machine,’ one that tells you how long you’ll live.  With gears & gauges, bells & whistles, this analogue contraption takes up an entire wall, as electric bolts jump from vacuum tube to spherical receptor, plus head-set with contact points for the ‘subject.’  Final tally in years, months, days & minutes displayed on a machine fashioned like an old cash register.  Obsessed inventor Claude Dauphin, first seen escorting a chatterbox tart to play guinea pig only to see the girl duck out with nary a franc once he turns the thing on.  Confident all the same, he tells investor Erich von Stroheim not to worry, his gamble will soon pay off.  It better, as Stroheim’s gone deep into debt with loan sharks.  He’s hoping millionaires will pay thru the nose to see how long they’ve got.  And think of the insurance scams!  Meanwhile, his daughter, all but engaged to Dauphin, is getting tired of waiting and falling for Dauphin’s best pal, a handsome young doctor.  Meantime, the machine is proving uncannily accurate; with global consequences as dying millionaires shut down factories to go on one last vacation.  Yikes!  And Dauphin starts playing God by switching longevity charts.  Are his life forecasts predicting or causing suicides?  Loads of personal complications & moral dilemmas to follow.  Yet even with Henri-Georges Clouzot co-scripting, director Richard Pottier is left playing thru a thin set of events, especially after Stroheim leaves the scene.*  Plenty interesting all the same, especially recalling the European political situation when this came out.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Stroheim had been acting in French films for a couple of years now.  But he still sounds fresh out of a Berlitz crash course.  Which makes his non-idiomatic French far easier to understand than those rattling native-born cast members.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Lots of lousy subfusc dupes out on this title.  Perfect prints with excellent subtitles can be found under its original name.  So sample first if possible.    

NUREMBERG (2025)

Rubbish.  Stepping away from his day-job (producing & occasionally writing schlock comic-horror film series (SCREAM; MURDER MYSTERY; READY OR NOT), James Vanderbilt triple threats*, hanging up a directing shingle (his sophomore effort) with a new angle on the post-WWII Nazi Nuremberg trials that put top surviving Third Reich officers in the docket to answer for the Holocaust.  Well cast and well received (critically & commercially), it opens with a G.I. peeing on a Swastika decal pasted on a rock at war’s end, and Field Marshall Hermann Göring surrendering.  With dumb comeback dialogue covering exposition before moving on to standard-issue pre-trial moves & courtroom melodrama (Vanderbilt also betraying an unfortunate addiction to matched transition edits), the main gimmick concerns Rami Malek, an army psychiatrist brought in to work up quick profiles of the Nazi defendants in hope of giving the prosecution a leg up during proceedings.  With Rami taking a special interest in Göring’s personality (Russell Crowe with just a bit of unnecessary padding), the relationship starts looking too chummy for comfort to the military (especially Colonel John Slattery).  How else to discover what makes such evil tic?  But will it lead prosecutor Michael Shannon to take his advise or will that wily Kraut slip out of yet another noose?  Apparently, there’s a certain amount of truth behind all this.  But Vanderbilt’s cheap melodramatic touch and reflexive handling of character motive make any chance at belief irrelevant.  Something none of the film’s 52 (!)  producers noticed under the weight of Brian Tyler’s misguided, suspense-heavy score.  One more film that hangs its importance on the importance of its subject matter; and leaves a bad taste in your mouth.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Much the same could be said about another shot at the same subject, producer/director Stanley Kramer’s JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG/’61.  Or of an early writing credit for Vanderbilt, ZODIAC/’07, also well received critically if not commercially, but which points the way to what’s wrong here.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/zodiac-2007.html

THE BIRDS, THE BEES AND THE ITALIANS / SIGNORE & SIGNORI* (1966)

Commedia all'italiana master Pietro Germi, best known for DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE/’61, goes to Treviso for a triptych of one-act sex farces within an unchanging cast of middle-aged middle-class Lotharios.  Story #1 centers on a socially connected doctor whose long-time pal is struggling with a bout of impotence.  The weakest and most stereotypical of the three  stories, the guy who can’t keep his pants on also can’t get it up!  But what if the cure turned out to be a quickie with the Doc’s wife?  The betrayal cure.  Tired stuff.  But improvement is just around the corner in story two.  Here, when a long-standing extramarital affair is exposed, the husband’s not ashamed, but relieved, even shaving off his goatee to celebrate his new freedom.  But since family ties can’t be clipped off quite as easily as a goatee, the story’s not over till the fashionably thin wife sings.  Spot on perfs all ‘round, and unexpected real emotion between comic playing.  Nice use of the confused son & daughter, too.  Then the last story blows them all away as a willing young beauty uses her allure & availability like a credit card.  (Germi brutally frank as needed.)  But when the girl’s peasant father shows up to collect, threatening the five men who’ve been partaking, he has a trump card to play.  His girl is still a minor.  Regrets, scandal, incompetent lawyer, outraged judge, real trouble in Treviso.  Germi not fooling around.  Enter one of the wives.  She knows the score.  She’s known the score; and not just the sexual score.  Plus faith that the rich have their ways (they write the rules), while the poor, especially the undeserving poor (the girl’s father thrilled at the cash he thinks is coming) always end up with the short end of the stick.  As if the poor man forgot: in Italian; commedia all'italiana doesn’t only mean comedy.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Try a Germi outlier, ALFREDO, ALFREDO/’72 with Dustin Hoffman going all Italian on us.  (Dubbed on the Italian track, he does his own talking in the English language dub.)   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/alfredo-alfredo-1972.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *For once, the Stateside title improves on the generic original.

PAVANE / PABANNEU (2026)

Everything feels secondhand sourced in Korean writer/director Lee Jong-pil’s sudsy romance for regular guy Moon Sang-min and regular gal Ko Ah-sung who meet and incrementally fall for each other at the department store they work at.  He’s new there, a tall shy type starting part-time in the parking garage where, many floors above, Plain Jane Ko already works.   Plus Byun Yo-han ile hanging around as third-wheel to offer tips & world-weary advice as philosopher, musician & comic cut-up.  Writer Lee’s best idea shows how the large department store functions like an extension of high school with cliques and strict pecking orders, a place where uniformed glam girls rule the roost selling designer goods on upper floors, and parking attendants work, appropriately enough, in the basement.  Plenty of gossip on who’s seeing whom, too.  The staff watching live on video chat.  Most of the film script worked out in a fog of predetermined fatalism, noble renunciation of desire and life-changing miscues.  With a colorful look that tries to hide its condescending view on the also-rans of this world.   As if director Lee had put in an order of MARTY/’55 and AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER/’57 smothered with Wong Kar-Wai secret sauce.

EXTREME MEASURES (1996)

Everybody’s slumming in this paranoid medical thriller . . . and that’s a good thing.  Taken any more seriously, the whole movie would collapse.  Basically yet another ‘doctor plays God’ number, with the old Dr. Frankenstein & Monster horror model replaced by a newer suspense template taken largely from Robin Cook & Michael Crichton’s COMA/’78.  Here, Manhattan Emergency doc Hugh Grant, still floppy of hair, but stutter-free with medical jargon, inexplicably loses a patient and can’t figure out why since the hospital morgue has inexplicably lost the body.  Seems they never had it.  Is he being gaslighted?  What’s going on.  Who’s behind this?  Pressured to drop it, Grant investigates all the more and soon finds himself framed (with stolen/planted drugs) to shut him up and drum him out of work.  But, as in any good Hitchcockian innocent on the run pic, there’s a blonde to help, Sarah Jessica Parker.  Digging up a name in the files for Grant, he now can follow a series of clues leading to an empty wheat field . . . er, a subway underworld of homeless who knew the missing dead man.  But Grant, in turn, is also being followed.  Followed by two hitmen, the guys who planted drugs and trashed his apartment.  Enter moving subway train and a fight on the tracks.  Yikes!  Finally, he reaches fanatical research neurologist Gene Hackman.  (Co-star billing and a fat paycheck for 15 minutes of screen time.  You go, Gene!)  Scripter Tony Gilroy revels rather than hides some of the sillier plot holes.  (No one in New York has heard of a neurological clinic located in its own dedicated billion-dollar building, even printing the company name on plastic gift bags?)  And if director Michael Apted’s action chops are stronger with street traffic than in fights, he compensates by letting cinematographer John Bailey hit us with crazy sharp hospital interiors (no smoke or filters to soften the 1970s style image), holding back dark atmospherics to depict Grant’s slide toward danger.  Those who can shut off the right side of the brain may find this good dopey fun.  Plausibility sticklers, may like it even better.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Unusually good NYC location spotting all thru the film.  Even some of the interiors are real.  Grant’s trashed apartment no doubt a studio set, but his switchback stairway is the real deal.

SATURDAY’S CHILDREN (1940)

Considerably adapted by twin writers Julius & Philip Epstein from a now forgotten Pulitzer Prize winning 1927 Maxwell Anderson play, this B+ feature uses A-list creatives for what is essentially a test-run to see if new tough-guy phenom John Garfield could play rom-com (he can!); and if maturing ingenue Anne Shirley could fill in for troublesome Olivia de Havilland* (nope).  And if the film doesn’t quite come off, it does avoid the forced tone of too many Warners comedies, intelligently touching on current economic & office workplace issues.  Shirley, in a role the young Ruth Gordon originated, meets-cute on the job with Garfield, whose dream of making a fortune abroad is shot down when Shirley follows her older sister’s advice to make him jealous so he’ll propose.  Act Two shows him having second thoughts when, once again, big sis has a suggestion for Shirley: tell him you’re pregnant and he’ll have to stay.*  This all comes from the play, but they’ve added some melodrama for eccentric Pop Claude Rains, and tamed the newlyweds’ relationship by dropping a separation and her move into a rooming house.  Even so, all her role playing at home and at work offer plenty to chew on.  Note who gets laid off from work when there’s a downturn in foreign sales.  Director Vincent Sherman*, still young & hungry in the early ‘40s, lets, rather than makes things happen.  While strict mores at home & office do the rest.  Too bad they puff up the melodrama with a dash to the rescue.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Post GONE WITH THE WIND/’39, de Havilland demanded better vehicles, hence troublesome; at least in the eyes of Jack Warner.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Later on, Sherman often assigned to handle stars on the wane.  But try him at his best in 1943's THE HARD WAY.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-hard-way-1943.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Warning!  The following is pure speculation.  The Epstein brothers add a scene at the doctor’s office to show Shirley really is pregnant, not tricking Garfield.  But in the play, she’s not pregnant, but adopting her sister’s suggestion to say she is to keep her husband from that overseas job.  The play would then end with the truth coming out but a face-saving plan to have a kid ASAP.  An ending ‘borrowed’ by Tennessee Williams in his CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF third act rewrite, made under orders from original stage director Elia Kazan.  (Okay, make that complete speculation.)

HOUDINI (2014)

Of the half-dozen film, cable and tv-movies on Harry Houdini, early 20th century magician, escape artist, amateur spy and spiritualist debunker (a man whose name, a hundred years after his death, can still sell a bio-pic), only two seem to matter.  From producer George Pal, fanciful in 1953 for M-G-M*; and, from writer Nicholas Meyer in 2014, rather less fanciful for The History Channel in a three-hour two-part mini-series.  And while there’s residual affection for the earlier film (near newlyweds Tony Curtis & Janet Leigh star), this modern version with Adrien Brody, beats it in nearly every category.  (‘Nearly’ because Curtis is the better physical match.)  Director Uli Edel, if occasionally held back by his budget on dead studio exteriors, generally does better with suspenseful stage acts than with personalities.  Anything with a ticking clock comes to life; Mom Houdini and Mrs. Houdini fare less well.  But it’s a kick to see Brody (in stupendous shape) having fun in front of the lens for a change.  And if savvy modern audiences are a step or two ahead of any camera tricks selling the magic, credit Edel for getting so much to work.  So, stop raising that eyebrow at some of the less likely events (Houdini given such familiarity with the Tsar’s family?) and give Meyer’s fabulist take on the legend a shot.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *See for yourself.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/houdini-1953.html

AQUARIUS (2016)

Last year’s international must-see, THE SECRET AGENT/’25 (not seen here), was a breakthru for Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho, in spite of nearly twenty years’ work.  But this earlier high-profile film probably not the best place to start.*   Sonia Braga, best remembered Stateside for KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN/’85 and the popular, if vaguely appalling DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS/’76, stars in this lumpy saga as a hold out tenant who refuses to leave her handsome, if frozen-in-time beachfront apartment, stopping a big development project by stubbornly refusing even good offers family and ex-tenants pressure her to accept so they can get their payouts.  We’ve seen this one before, though with a lot less sex.  Everyone seems to be getting it on.  Even those pushy developers rent the deserted apartment directly above Sonia for a noisy orgy.  It doesn’t drive Braga away; instead, a peek at the action makes her horny enough to call up a handsome sex worker and have a go at her place.  (Okay, we’ve not seen that one before.)  There’s something ‘off’ (performative) about her encounters with middle-aged gal-pals and worried family members; as if we were watching The Real Widows of Recife.  Things get only weirder as Mendonça Filho strips gears to shift into a third act of skullduggery & property rights in a dastardly plot to degrade the building and force her out with a termite-riddled coup de théâtre.  Well, something’s termite ridden.

WATCH THIS, NpOT THAT/LINK:  *Instead, try Mendonça Filho’s intriguing first feature NEIGHBORING SOUNDS/’14.  (THE SECRET AGENT is in our cue.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/o-som-ao-reder-neighboring-sounds.html