ATTILA MARCEL (2013)

Sui generis French animator Sylvain Chomet (THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE/’03; THE ILLUSIONIST/’10) has just released his first animated feature in 15 years, A MAGNIFICENT LIFE, a bio-pic on French writer/filmmaker Marcel Pagnol  (not seen here).  Which begs the question; what’s he been up to between his hand-drawn projects?  Here’s part of the answer, this wondrous live-action fable that to a remarkable degree carries the same sensibility as his animated fare, giving off the sort of personalized charm, delight, darkness & touching whimsy you can’t fake without seeming coy & saccharine.  (It’s what Tim Burton and Wes Anderson so often miss achieving.)  Chomet also unafraid of bold color, bad taste & sentiment when that's what's called for.  Guillaume Gouix is the wide-eyed Paul Marcel, orphaned son of Attila & Anita, ‘Apache’ dancers who died in front of the toddler.  Since then, he’s not spoken, and been raised by his two spinster aunts, dance teachers whose classes he accompanies.  But his piano skills go to virtuoso level.  If only he could breakthru before hitting the competition cut off age of 33.  He’s got a wide local rooting section, but is most indebted to his secret sessions with Mme Proust, a neighbor who serves madeleines and hallucinatory tea so he can dream back to toddler POV memories of his parents.  The best ones appearing in his mind as full blown musical ‘Numbos’ with catchy tunes and gorgeous looks (settings & performers).  Special stuff here.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Make your own olde time movie show by starting with an early Chomet animated short, THE OLD LADY AND THE PIGEONS/’97.   Looking a bit like George Booth New Yorker drawings, this free link has French subtitles for the opening (and closing) ‘Ugly’ American tourists.  Elsewise it’s all but dialogue free and best experienced without explanation.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0PioYGdLI4

OPERAZIONE SAN GENNARO / THE TREASURE OF SAN GENNARO (1966)

When on form, Italian director Dino Risi and Hollywood’s Blake Edwards show remarkably similar filmmaking gifts & styles.  (When bad, they're bad in their own way.)  Here, with Risi pulling off a Napoli-set comic crime caper, just two years after Edwards’ THE PINK PANTHER*, they’re at their most alike; Romulus & Remus sharing a wolf teat in a perfectly composed shot.  American gangster Harry Guardino, with deadly moll Senta Berger (excellent!), has a plan to rob the Jewels of San Gennaro, but needs local help and approval from various mob fiefdoms.  The area in question run by Nino Manfredi, but he needs various approvals, too, including one from elderly, just released Totò (hilarious).  Naturally, lots of Neapolitan flavor (real locations/'looped' dialogue; mid-‘60s Italian production standards).  Most of the character support dead accurate, often very funny.  Watch for Manfredi’s bull-like assistant.  With a devious plot of close calls, suspenseful delays you can follow, a religious code-of-honor to find loopholes in, and a wedding feast interrupting the heist with ‘off’ shellfish.  Plenty to keep you involved before Risi pulls out his slapstick directing chops in a brilliantly staged and perfectly paced race to the airport finale far more deadly than anything Edwards could get away with in Hollywood at the time.  Now, with the film scheduled for an English-language remake, we’ll see how far they’ll go.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The explosion in gritty crime capers with meticulously detailed heists that blew into international cinema on the back-draft of Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI/’55 was shortly followed by burlesques like BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET/’58.  Peaking in 1964, with PANTHER and when Dassin got in on the joke with TOPKAPI.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/topkapi-1964.html

F1: THE MOVIE (2025)

Gotta give producer Jerry Bruckheimer (or one of this film’s thirty-three producers!) credit for truth in advertising with that title.  Not for the Formula One car; for the Formula One script.  It’s as formulaic as it gets.  Hokey, too, with Brad Pitt’s aging gadfly race car driver (with a past) signing on to help Javier Bardem’s struggling F1 team by playing rival, mentor & Zen Master to cocky star on the rise kid.  Kudos for the clean soundtrack (for once you can understand dialogue during the vroom-vroomy race sequences), everything else hash.  And must it feel so generic?  Even Brad Pitt looks generic handsome.  Brad Pitt!  Like others who might have played the part at some appropriate age.  Val Kilmer; the Bridges Brothers in their FABULOUS BAKER’S BOYS/’89 days.  Paul Newman at any time.  (Great messed-up short-shag hair, though.)  Plus, at 2.5 hours, sure feels like they’re stretching this one out to get in another day at the track.  Worst of all, they’ve wasted a favorite plotline; the one about an also-ran finally getting his shot at the big time, unaware he’s been hired not because someone thinks he can win, but because they’re sure he’ll lose; only to then turn the tables to show he’s had the right stuff all along.  (Think Jason Sudeikis in TED LASSO; Paul Newman in THE VERDICT.)  Here, it’s Pitt getting resurrected.  Or is it?  What with director Joseph Kosinski from TOP GUN: MAVERICK/’22 calling the shots (too many shots BTW), more likely the object of resurrection is the late Tony Scott, or at least his overly fussy directing style.  A tip of the hat toward the director of the original TOP GUN/’89.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Pitt gets a showy soliloquy, the one studio development types refer to as the Oscar® moment, with a needlessly long/over-articulate speech on being in ‘the zone,’ unnaturally calm in the middle of track chaos.  Yet, has any car racing film tried to put that meditative/slo-mo feel in the midst of a race on screen?  Common in other sports pics (sprinters, jockeys, batters, pitchers, goalies, oarsmen, even boxers), but car drivers?  Let us know of any examples in the COMMENT box.

THE MIRACLE RIDER (1935)

In the last decade of the silents, Tom Mix was, by some distance, the biggest of all cowboy stars.  Hardly remembered now, Talkies (and age) slowed him down, though still releasing multiple features each year before taking a two year break, returning in 1935, now 55, for one last roundup, this seriously successful/seriously fun serial from little Mascot Pictures.  At 15 ‘chapters’ (the first is double-length), the whole shebang runs just over five hours.  And worth every minute.  (Okay, every other minute.)  Well produced as these things go, co-directed by B. Reeves Eason and Armand Schaefer.  If Eason’s name rings a bell, he was largely responsible for the 1925 chariot race in BEN-HUR.  (Plus B-pic whiz Joseph H. Lewis (see GUN CRAZY/’50) as supervising editor.)  Mix and his amazing horse Tony Jr., still do all the stunts and those leaping mounts look painful, as do a few mountain tumbles for man & beast.  The horse wouldn’t be allowed to do them today.  The story ain’t bad, either.  Ranger Mix, protector of the local Indian tribe against a pair of White capitalist villains.  One running the general store wants to chase the Indians off their land and have the government buy his spare property for resettlement.  The other runs an oil distributor as cover, but wants the Natives off the reservation so he has exclusive access to a powerful explosive he hopes to mine.  Typically, the best episodes come early, look out for the mechanical radio controlled Firebird!  And Mix outnumbered by the villains, minions and a (coatless) turncoat Indian.  Chapters ending with the traditional cliffhanger (Is Tom Dead?) before doubling back Next Week to show how Mix jumped off the exploding bomb/derailed train/pilotless glider just in the nick of time.  The later episodes are in better physical shape.  Not exactly great, even as serial trash, but addictive.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The film yet another example of how often Indians weren’t treated just as marauding savages, but often shown with sympathy.  Patronized & infantilized by their Great White Hollywood Fathers.  Which portrayal is worse?  Discuss.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  During his peak years, Mix took a swing at expanding his range with something more serious, an excellent, if not well received 1925 adaptation of Zane Grey’s RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE/1925.  It makes a fine introduction for modern audiences to get to know Mix.  But hard-wired Mixologists find it a bit ‘high hat,’ and Mix-Nixers won’t give it a try. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  SUNSET/’88.  Blake Edwards’ Hollywood-set modern Western has Bruce Willis as Tom Mix and James Garners’ Wyatt Earp join forces to solve a showbiz murder.  Sounds promising, but it's all downhill (period inaccurate, pointlessly coarse and lazy plotting in Edwards’ late manner) after its neat action set-piece opening.

LUXURY LINER (1948)

Coasting thru the war years when just about anything made money, Hollywood peaked commercially in the afterglow year of 1946, then watched helplessly as the old studio system started to collapse.  A slow drip contraction of some twenty-years.  And while M-G-M didn’t fare much worse than other ‘majors,’ they had farther to fall.  (Note this handwriting on the wall a year before the Supreme Court vertical-integration ruling against the studios and even longer before television was having a serious financial effect.  What you do see are the old formulas curdling before your eyes, as in this idiotic showcase film, a typical Joe Pasternak family-friendly production, for Jane Powell.  More irritating brat than adorable baby coloratura, she’s a stowaway on Captain Daddy’s ocean liner so she can finally get some quality time with her single dad George Brent (looking quite stout in uniform) and play mismatching matchmaker to half the passengers onboard.  Lots of second-tier musical interludes (legendary, if aging Wagnerian heldentenor Lauritz Melchoir never did get film-friendly) though Xavier Cugat (plus band and chihuahua) show how to do this kind of silliness.   But Pasternak, here with kid actor turned mediocre director Richard Whorf, seems to have forgotten the rules for the distribution of laughs, tears and reconciliations, he once could pull off in his sleep.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  As we’ve mentioned before, 100 MEN AND A GIRL/’37, Pasternak’s best, also uses baby coloratura and single-father/daughter strained relationship as narrative engine.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/100-men-and-girl-1937.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  M-G-M’s tech crew gave the big ship some unusually clever process/model combo shots.  Very cool looking.  With a repeated shot from the side where the visual integration and grain match is stunning.

LYING LIPS (1939)

Oscar Micheaux, the go-to guy for film text-books needing an example on early independent Black cinema: the first Black to produce a silent feature; first to produce a Talkie; first to tackle race issues.  (He also takes it on the chin for using light-skinned Blacks as romantic leads and darker ones for laborers and villains.*)  Lots of cultural/political/social issues tied to this one-stop source.  Less discussed is whether Micheaux was any good as a filmmaker.  Of course, between lost titles and subfusc surviving film elements, it can be hard to tell.  But even a tight budget needn’t mean stiff, formal dialogue.  Letting characters come to dumb conclusions.  Or choosing bad camera placements.  Often, the best things on film are free.  Edna Mae Harris stars as a nightclub singer who refuses to play after-hours good-time-gal to fat-cat friends of the owners, instead going home to find her Aunt  murdered and herself set up for arrest.  Yikes!  It’s really an insurance scam and Edna, in spite of her protective lawyer/fiancé and top inner-city detective Robert Earl Jones (best thing in the film/father to you know who) stick to her side and eventually clear up the mystery.  Odd how the after-hours plot disappears.  But structure not Micheaux’s long suit.  Instead, piece by piece, the story lands and you can just make out what gave Micheaux a long career and made him, at least historically, important.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *It’s supposedly what got restauranteur Paula Dean in trouble with The Food Network execs: Light-skinned Blacks assigned to work ‘front of the house’; darker-skinned assigned to kitchen duty.

INFERNO (1953)

Weeks before 20th/Fox introduced CinemaScope (‘the miracle you see without glasses!’) to the public with THE ROBE, helping to speed an end to the brief early ‘50s 3-D craze, they released one of the better films made in the process.  Doubly ironic, since, like so many 3-D pics at the time, INFERNO largely distributed ‘flat,’ in 2-D.  Another POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE infidelity/murder story (though with different outcomes), the film’s mostly a three-hander, and good even in 2-D, with the guilty pleasure bonus of watching the action-packed last reel (actually two separate reels running in synch) hoarding most of the objects thrown directly at the camera.  Fun spotting even in 2-D.  (Make it a drinking game!). Journeyman director Roy Ward Baker runs a cool, clean narrative as lethal lovers Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan try to get away with the murder of Robert Ryan, Fleming’s rich, older, selfish husband, abandoning him in the desert with a broken leg before carefully setting the scene to make it look like his own doing.  Only wily Ryan proves too stubborn, too ornery, and too self-reliant to die.  And the longer he can keep going, the more chance he’ll be rescued.  There’s a good cast in support (Carl Betz, Henry Hull, Larry Keating), with cleverly worked out falling objects for those 3-D effect shots, and the great Lucien Ballard to shoot them.  Along with LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN/’45, one of the rare TechniColor & sunshine noirs, even rarer with 3-D.

CONTEST:  Explain why these early ‘50s 3-D films always ran about 80 minutes (with half-point intermissions) to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streaming film of your choice.  (NOTE: Professional film projectionists ineligible.)

FIRE WILL COME / O QUE ARDE (2019)

Paris-born, but with a Spanish heritage, director Oliver Laxe currently breaking beyond the film fest circuit and gaining attention on SIRAT/’25, his fourth film (not seen here).  It follows a father & son thru North African ‘rave’ sites as they search for the man’s missing daughter.  This, his previous effort, follows a paroled arsonist (he started a mountain forest fire that threatened his own Northern Spain village) as he tries to restart a life after two years in prison.  Unsurprisingly, no one wants much to do with him.  But, as Robert Frost put it, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’  So, holed up with his aging mother, he halfheartedly looks for work, but seems reluctant to try to connect with anyone, even new people in town.  Guilt/innocence/actions never discussed, all settled by small town gossip  & misery.  Even the incessant rain working against hope or redemption. Inevitably, another blaze will look like his doing.  And here, Laxe’s treatment breaks down, unwilling to speculate on the situation other than one physical altercation with a suspicious neighbor.  Laxe entirely focused on fate, a traumatic tone and the physical atmosphere.  But perhaps avoiding the elephant in the room, adds to the mesmerizng atmosphere.  Filming and the non-pro cast (particularly Benedicta Sánchez as the mother) impeccable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Obviously, SIRAT, which sounds fascinating.

SISU (2022)

The Finnish title may be untranslatable (think ‘Back-against-the-wall indomitable courage’), but the action, ultra-violence and gore easily cross international borders since director Jalmari Helander makes this WWII chase-and-shoot thriller neatly balanced between mirth, mayhem & absurdity.  The look seemingly realistic and stylized; not so much the expected Asian Martial Arts, more like a Chuck Jones Road Runner cartoon.  Finland tundra in for South West canyons.  Plus a twist: Wile E. Coyote is our heroic alter-ego.  With apologies to Ernest Hemingway, it’s THE OLD MAN AND THE NAZIS.  Finnish sniper Jorma Tommila (a one-man killing unit) had been taking out hundreds of Russians like a scythe running thru a wheat field early in the war before walking away from battle to mine for gold.  But the changing landscape of war in 1944 sees retreating Nazi forces after him and his stash.  So now it’s the Nazis’ turn to die in the hunt.  A crash landing, a hanging, a drowning, nothing seems able to stop this guy.  More than tough, he’s downright immortal.  Held to a brisk 91" (any longer and it would collapse from CGI fatigue which it almost does in a flying sequence), but taken on its own terms, it’s effective and weirdly fun.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A Finnish production, but made in English.