HIGH ROAD TO CHINA (1983)

How pissed off was Tom Selleck when ‘the powers that be’ at CBS and MAGNUM, P.I. contractually kept him from making RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK in1981?  First-choice for Indiana Jones, he was enough pissed off for someone (those same powers that be?) to palm off this copycat INDIANA JONES on him two years later.  A similar ‘30s period adventure in serial-style with Selleck as a trouble-prone free-lance pilot stuck with a rich, irritating heiress on a hunt to find missing Dad Wilford Brimley somewhere in the Near-East, before thieving business partner Robert Morley inherits his fortune.  Directed with occasional flair by the unprolific Brian G. Hutton (only nine features in spite of two snappy Clint Eastwood WWII adventures - WHERE EAGLES DARE/’68; KELLY’S HEROES/’70 - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/where-eagles-dare-1970.html ; https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kellys-heroes-1970.html).  Bouncing from one set piece to the next, all depends on chemistry between the bickering romantic leads, with Bess Armstrong’s strong-arm tactics simply too irritating for Selleck to respond to.  He sulks when he should smoulder.  Dwarfed by RAIDERS’ success and leaving unresolved plot lines at every turn of the tale, the film barely gets by; less debacle than forgettable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  An enormous star on tv, Selleck’s film career never got into high gear.  Ironically, ending with THE LOVE LETTER/’99 which was also a last feature (and something of a vanity project) for co-star Kate Capshaw.  Married to Steven Spielberg whom she met when playing the irritating gal pal role against Harrison Ford in INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM/’84, a part that might well have been Selleck’s.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Listen out for John Barry’s fine score.  ONE - because it’s the best thing in here, and TWO - because figuring a grand tune was going to waste, Barry all but reused the Airborne Love Theme in here for OUT OF AFRICA two years later.

POLICE STORY / GING CHAAT GOO SI (1985)

Though a star in comic-leaning Hong Kong actioners for a decade (directing for five years), to the international audience, this film was Jackie Chan’s ‘calling card.’  (A previous self-directed ChopSocky period piece, PROJECT A/’83, likely primed the pump.)  STORY still one of Chan’s best, well-balanced between thrills, impossible stunts done ‘for real,’ slapsticky Martial Arts, a game gal adversary who flips, turning from reluctant to enthusiastic helpmate, a Mr. Big & gang out to silence or frame Jackie, his own police force hunting him, and chases via car and foot thru tight corners on streets and inside public spaces.*  Yet still human-scaled so you can just believe what you’re watching could happen.  (Nothing like ‘practical’ effects to sell a scene thru punches that land with consequence via camera angles, timing and editing rather than vapid CGI.  Why there’s even a plot you can follow.  Mostly about Chan peeling off mob secretary Maggie Cheung to testify against her boss in court.  A partnership with Chan that’s starting to look fishy to fiancée Brigitte Lin.  (Her evolving relationship with Cheung an unexpected treat.)  Jackie Chan’s film idols were Bruce Lee and Buster Keaton, and while he hasn’t the line or grace of either (more young Douglas Fairbanks, even in build), STORY let’s you see the connection and makes a great introduction.

DOUBLE-BILL:  This is probably Chan’s Goldilocks of a film, not too big, not too small, the size just right.  STORY 2 not seen here, nor 3 (and there’s a NEW POLICE STORY in the works for the 72 year-old veteran star), but as mentioned above, PROJECT A would pair well.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A tricky solo comic bit for Chan and a bunch of landline telephones needs a one-shot/one-take approach to work properly.  Here, it’s funnier in concept than in execution.  Chan not quite having the physical chops to pull it off.

THE HEAVENLY BODY (1944)

Why bother using top M-G-M producer Arthur Hornblow Jr, and director Alexander Hall, on loan-out from Columbia, still hot from HERE COMES MR. JORDAN/’41, for such a throwaway comedy?  (Plus the great Al Hirschfield on this trade poster!)  Granted, just about anything made money during the war years, but this is some kind of lame.  Our main gag: World-famous astronomer William Powell, in the headlines for discovering a comet on track to crash the moon, is exasperated when wife Hedy Lamarr keeps mixing up ASTRONOMY and ASTROLOGY.*  And now, thanks to busybody neighbor Spring Byington, in thrall to a new horoscope reading from Fay Bainter predicting a warm-blooded man (Clark Gable fill-in for the duration James Craig) is coming to sweep her off her feet.  Not a lot to get out of this set-up, yet the film is all but essential viewing just to see William Powell lose his comic mojo for the only time in his long career.  Largely in the first act, when he has most of his solo scenes against Lamarr.  Always gorgeous, always dramatically inert, her line readings flat enough to discombobulate the usually unflappable Powell technique.  She’s like a tennis ball that won’t bounce back.  Mind you, Powell’s timing plus-perfect with everyone else; even with Lamarr when there’s a third-party involved; or working on his own in reaction shots while taste-testing flavored vodkas with some new Russian pals.  (1944 - a very Hands Across the River Neva year.)  But Powell’s face plants with Hedy are unique, like watching the Statue of Liberty sit down to rest her torch.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Kinda ironic when Lamarr may have been the smartest actor in Hollywood.  Her experiments with avant-garde composer George Atheil in electronics & physics picked up by the Army Air Force for use in bombing runs, and currently part of that ‘smartphone’ you may be reading this on!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Powell’s next had him running for cover with another THIN MAN pic, THE THIN MAN GOES HOME/’44.  And if it hardly covers him (or anyone else) in glory, at least he’s back to form in what elsewise is the weakest of the beloved series,    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/thin-man-goes-home-1944.html

FRANZ (2025)

Polish-born/Prague-trained director Agnieszka Holland, still making smart, provocative, accessible films 55 years into her career/35 years after hitting the international circuit with EUROPA EUROPA/’90, finds new angles on Franz Kafka less in content than in execution.  It freshens the conversation on this over-analyzed modernist to good effect.  Hopscotching around his short life (40 years), Holland’s Kafka (Idan Weiss) grows less neurotic, if more fragile (TB did him in) as the years pass, and with more public success in his lifetime than you may recall.  Decently, if unhappily employed; published, even a major literary prize; public readings; no unknown recluse.  Plus quite a bit of sex.  (What a lot of male nudity in the film.)  At home, a sympathetic family with the notable exception of his loud, large, dominating businessman father, always on the edge of financial failure at work or an explosion at the dining table.*  All beautifully caught in the film’s physical production.  And all relatively standard readings.  But Holland’s not only making a bio-pic, but also an Essay Film.  So we not only jump around his life span (1883 - 1924), but also into the present day with tour groups & guides talking us thru his work and workplaces.  Objects and physical spaces Holland has Franz enter as well, as if he were one of the tourists out to see where the great man lived and worked.  It sounds gimmicky, but doesn’t play that way.  More like a living tribute.  The film isn’t meant to be definitive.  It just wants to restart a conversation we thought was no longer going anywhere.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For all his literary influence over the past 100 years, Kafka’s film record is mostly misses.  A bit of THE TRIAL at a reading in here with lots of laughs would have been pleased Orson Welles whose film adaptation always made him laugh . . . if no one else.  Instead, the most successful Kafka on film is merely ‘Kafkaesque.’  Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES/’00 and Roman Polansky’s THE TENANT/’75 about as close as anyone gets.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-tenant-1976.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/04/werckmeister-harmonies-2000.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That’s Peter Kurth as the Father, a dead ringer in voice & face for classic Hollywood supporting actor Sig Ruman, a favorite of Ernst Lubitsch & Billy Wilder.  (On purpose?)

THE JAZZ AMBASSADORS (2018)

Originally on PBS, Hugo Berkeley’s Peabody Award-winning documentary does a solid, if unimaginative job on a fascinating sidebar to Cold War history as USA & USSR fought to influence hearts, minds and political philosophies in a post-WWII world.  And solving the permanent stain of Stateside racism (where one picture of police brutality was worth a thousand Party Line editorials) was a real problem for Yankee Influencers.  Enter the United States Information Agency, an unlikely sponsor for what became an eight-year run of Jazz Band Diplomacy as Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman & Duke Ellington led their respective groups to global hot spots, paths paved by the Voice of America.*  Some of the choices (band/countries) look arbitrary, others carefully thought out.  For example, the more traditional Big Band Jazz of Goodman sent to ultra-conservative Russia where not so long before listening to jazz on a shortwave radio could have serious consequences.  This just the type of info the film skates past.  And, other than Armstrong’s  personal reception in Africa*, and Ellington’s ill-timed tour (the Birmingham. AL church bombing; JFK’s assassination), we don’t get much sense of events at home and abroad as they were happening.  But enough gets across via archival footage and smart new interviews to do fresh justice to this adventure in Statecraft.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Very ‘hotspot’ in the case of Armstrong who’d never been to Africa, had no idea he was so popular there, even causing one country to put their deadly Civil War on pause so he could give a concert.  Talk about the power of music.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *In our current environment, maybe we should send a few integrated Jazz Bands Over Here.

TORRENT (1926)

The Great Swede, Greta Garbo, opened her Hollywood career playing two Latin louches from Vicente Blasco Ibáñez potboilers.  (M-G-M had a thing for the novelist, see FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE/’21 and MARE NOSTRUM/’26.)  Garbo would go on to more appropriate fare but the Spanish-set TORRENT and the even more enjoyable Argentinean TEMPTRESS* make for an irresistible, if trashy, introduction.  Here, Garbo’s penniless small-town gal with a natural gift for song, is all but affianced to Ricardo Cortez, the richest young man in town.  Then Mama Cortez forbids the relationship, sets her son up with a proper senorita, and forecloses on the Garbo family home.  Vowing to elope and marry in Madrid where Garbo hopes to become an operatic Prima Donna, the pledged pair split as Cortez breaks his promise and concedes to Mama’s reality.  Decades later, Garbo (looking not a day older) discovers great divas can only go home temporarily while Cortez (looking worn and bored from years with a loyal wife and gaggle of kids) falls hard all over again.  And what of the torrent?  More symbolic than real, as the ex-lovers ride waves of emotion while the actual floods promise more destruction than they deliver.  (Kinda like the movie.)  Garbo’s cinematographer for nearly all her work, William Daniels, is already on board, while journeyman director Monta Bell, often called on for sub-Lubitsch sex comedy, does well enough once he gets past the first act countryside pastorale.  Much happier in big city theatrical life and playing with model effects during the torrential rains.  Surviving print in reasonable condition.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Garbo’s dresser brings a regular menagerie with her wherever they go.  And Garbo gets a nice scene with ‘Jocko’ the monkey when she goes home to visit.  And that’s not just any Hollywood capuchin, but Harold Lloyd’s co-star in THE KID BROTHER/’27 and Buster Keaton’s adversary in THE SCARECROW/’20.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Garbo’s other Latina minx in THE TEMPTRESS.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/temptress-1926.html

MAN’S FAVORITE SPORT? (1964)

Howard Hawks got close to catching a break on his last comedy.  Too bad ‘close’ only counts in horseshoes and drama.  At first, Hawks works the phony expert angle, think Barbara Stanwyck’s clueless cookery columnist in CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT/’45, forced to prove she’s a regular Ina Garten over the holidays.  Here, it’s fishing, competitive fishing at that, with fishing manual author and salesman-of-the-year Rock Hudson having never cast a line in his life.  But Hawks upends expectations, giving away the big incompetence secret before Act One ends to shift into emasculated male territory.  More in the spirit of BRINGING UP BABY/’38 or I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE/’49 where Cary Grant suffers one indignity after another before he can marry Katharine Hepburn or Ann Sheridan.  More opportunities to reel in comic befuddlement than Hawks can get from rods, bait & hooks.  Even favored scripter Leigh Brackett (credits ranging from Hawks’ RIO BRAVO thru early STAR WARS) doing an uncredited rewrite.  So much for breaks.  Elsewise, Cary Grant chose to go with Stanley Donen & Audrey Hepburn on CHARADE; Hawks moved his unit from classy Paramount to Lew Wasserman’s production-line Universal (their ‘house style’ stuck cinematographer Russell Harlan on airless studio lots and processed everything bright enough for the early Drive-In show), a ludicrous 2.5' running time trimmed to a still unhelpful 2'; turgid comic support; and poor hard-working Rock Hudson, game, but no Cary Grant.*  One bright spot: costumer Edith Head’s form-fitting full-body rubberized scuba suits for Paula Prentiss’s* likeable pain-in-the-ass love-interest and for gal pal Maria Perschy.  (Nickname, Easy.  Yep, it's the '60s.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Henry Mancini’s score loaded with the same Hammond Organ he used last year in Hawks’ HATARI/’63.  It worked a lot better there.  ALSO:  *Before casting Prentiss, Hawks saw a pre-release screening of DR. NO/’62 and tried to get Ursala Andress for the part.  Damned if he doesn’t steal that film’s ending for this film!  Hawks usually stole from himself.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Gregory Peck joined the ‘He’s No Cary Grant Club’ in 1966 when Donen followed up CHARADE with ARABESQUE/’66.   ‘Peck confessed he was not always up to meeting the rigorous demands of the picture, be they stunts or comedic delivery.  His ongoing excuse off-camera, ‘But Stanley, their’s only one Cary Grant.’

I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! (1945)

No doubt, the signature film of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, the ‘written, produced and directed by’ team known as The Archers, remains THE RED SHOES/’48, their hit ballet backstager.  Though with 15 features (1941 - ‘57), P&P fantasists may look to A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH/’46 as ‘best,’ while those who lean exotica choose BLACK NARCISSUS/’47.  But all must agree the pair’s most perfect is this windblown enchantment.  A romance (no rom-com, more in the vein of late Shakespeare, think THE TEMPEST), at first view lighter than some of their major achievements, but growing in heart and mind over time.*  Their last WWII production, its distinctive stars, Wendy Hiller & Roger Livesey, meet cute (make that meet surrealistic, what a dream Hiller has!) on separate paths to an island in the Scottish Hebrides.  Indeed, his island as Livesey is ‘Laird’ and using his eight-day military leave to visit.  Hiller’s joining the wealthy, older industrialist who’s rented the entire island for their wedding.  Problem #1: a gale is rising at sea, making passage too dangerous.  Problem #2: Livesey & Hiller are falling in love.  Complications, characters and traditional Scottish customs bridge the personal divide (purposefully awkward) until their protective lies are finally cleared in a storm at sea that pushes the relationship as well as the technical limits of 1945 special effects.  (So much more convincing at the time in b&w than color.)  All leading to what must be the most satisfying finish of any P&P movie.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The special handcrafted look & sound of so many Archers’ films on full display in this most British/Scottish of their films.  How ironic that nearly all the major creatives, other than Powell, were German/Hungarian Jewish exiles from the Nazis: Pressburger, composer Allan Gray, cinematographer Erwin Hillier, and production designer Alfred Junge.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That delayed capitulation would include Powell.  In love with Deborah Kerr when he co-wrote the script with her in mind, it was decades before he realized he’d made a masterpiece with Hiller.  Hiller’s specialty being wonderful in every role she touched.

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

One of the great progressive muckraking films of the mid-‘50s, this B-pic by master of the form Phil Karlson (ironically, best known for his reactionary small town/vigilante-sheriff ‘70s hit WALKING TALL/’73*) looks better than ever.  Not only for how it captures period details of the customs & inbred corruption in small-town segregated South, but because so much of the social/civic culture it uncovers continues today in more sophisticated/less brazen style.  Shot to a considerable extent on the actual locations around Phenix City, AL, the true(ish) story is structured as a rabble-rousing thriller (note film noir scripter Daniel Mainwaring) as returning Army vet Richard Kiley (and family) goes to work in Dad’s law office.  That’s John McIntire as the flinty former State D.A., keeping his nose out of non-legal affairs as the town succumbs to the vice mob in booze, gambling & prostitution.  The whole city run as a Protection Racket by a small, vicious rabble.  But once the old man is drawn back into the fight after his son stands up to them, and a little Black girl is murdered as a warning, the town’s good governance committee of honest businessmen needs a winning candidate to run for D.A.  Far more violent than you imagine for a film of the period, Karlson gets the real flavor of the South (the Slow-Walk response by local police as infuriating as those missed calls by professional wrestling refs on tv), while the blanket racism of the town all the more effective for its casual acceptance on the side of the vice issues. Under Karlson, the film ain’t subtle, but neither is the story.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Even more ironic now after TALL’s ‘heroic’ Sheriff Buford Pusser was posthumously tagged with his wife’s ‘unsolved’ murder, the incident that started his violent clean-up.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Famously a big fan of PHENIX, what a pity Martin Scorsese didn’t re-watch it before starting KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON/’24.  It might have helped.  The films less dissimilar than you’d think.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2026/04/killers-of-flower-moon-2024.html