SYMPHONY OF SIX MILLION (1932)

David O. Selznick, for better or worse the epitome of a Golden Age Hollywood producer, only made two films that deeply resonated with his personal life.  The WWII homefront drama SINCE YOU WENT AWAY/’44 (like a tribute to wife Irene Mayer Selznick whom he’d soon leave for that film’s Jennifer Jones - as we said, for better or worse), and this, his first at R.K.O. as Executive Producer after leaving Paramount, showing striking elements from his own family: NYC setting with Yiddisher Mama; overworked/cash-strapped Papa (Selznick’s ill father dying within months); materialistic older brother; et al.  Adapted from a Fannie Hurst short story, we’re considerably below the real Selznick’s finances, specifically Lower East Side Jewish Ghetto (‘ghetto’ the term used thru-out the film), it might be a trial run for a previous Hurst movie, Frank Capra’s Part-Talkie THE YOUNGER GENERATION/’29.*  Both films featuring Ricardo Cortez as a gifted doctor to the needy who moves uptown (first 89th/West End; then Park Ave.) and regrets it, losing his soul to become a rich society doctor.*  In the earlier film, Cortez even pretends not to recognize his unrefined tenement parents, while here losing confidence in his ‘miracle’ surgical hands when he can’t save his father on the operating table.  (It’s the film’s best scene, with striking direction, lighting and daring agogic editing from Gregory La Cava, Leo Tover & Archie Marshek.  It also points up Max Steiner’s pioneering underscoring, ironically by having it suddenly drop off the soundtrack.  Generally, the cast plays broadly as possible, Papa Gregory Ratoff in his film debut straight from Second Avenue Yiddish theater.  Only Irene Dunne, as Cortez’s limping childhood pal, now teaching blind students near his old free medical clinic, holding down the emoting to Episcopalian levels.  It’s all a bit much, but also just right.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Ricardo Cortez, né Jacob Krantz, got his movie name during the Valentino craze.  Brother Samuel Krantz, great cinematographer of MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, followed suit, becoming Stanley Cortez.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, superior Hurst in Capra’s THE YOUNGER GENERATION, as well as hands-on producer Selznick’s sole original screenplay credit in SINCE YOU WENT AWAY.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-younger-generation-1929.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/since-you-went-away-1944.html

FAST CHARLIE (2023)

Director Philip Noyce and actor Pierce Brosnan were at their professional peaks about thirty years ago.  Safe, dependable bets to handle medium to big projects and keep anxious studio heads calm, but missing anything distinctive in their work.  Occasionally, Noyce went out on a limb (see RABBIT-PROOF FENCE/’02), but by-the-numbers Tom Clancy adaptations and dud sex thrillers more common.  And Brosnan?  Think of his career this way: while certainly not the worst James Bond, he certainly was the least memorable.  Their past likely making this diminutive revenge actioner (from Victor Gischler’s novel, an Elmore Leonard manqué of a book) seem more satisfying than it might otherwise be.  Still crud, but likeable crud.  Brosnan (sporing a come-and-go North Florida accent), is hitman & fixer to physically & mentally failing mob boss James Caan (his final role).  Caught in the middle of a gang war after a new partner blows a rubout; the partner’s ex (sadder-but-wiser Morena Baccarin, super!) wants the $50 thou he owed her; one of Caan’s deputies about to take over Caan’s territory; and bodies dropping like flies shot thru the head.  The film surprisingly gory.  Just the moment for Cupid to show up for 70-something Brosnan and 40-something Baccarin.  Noyce gets a lot out of basics (car chases, coastal roads & glaring sunlight; action meeting immovable object; logistical complications; Brosnan’s tarnished looks.  All told, I’d pick this over  peak Noyce or Brosnan for something with some distinctive, if borrowed, flavor.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Noyce’s lack of distinctness landing only one other write-up on this site, THE QUIET AMERICAN/’02.  And that post largely leaning toward another version of the story.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-quiet-american-1958-2002.html    

THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941)

Just before starting as contract player at Warners (and all his best remembered Hollywood films), Peter Lorre was ‘jobbing’ at various studios, M-G-M, Republic, and here Columbia on this modest Horror programmer.  As an enthusiastic naïf, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, his plans are literally burned to hell when a fire at his residential hotel leaves him with a face so ghastly no one will employ him in spite of his abilities with anything mechanical.  Stopped from suicide by passing bum George E. Stone (excellent*), he finds a use for his talents in robbery, stealthily moving in & out of shops, vaults, warehouses, anything.  Lorre’s once strict moral code crumbling in the face of rejection by decent society, only the underworld having any use for him.  One exception: Evelyn Keyes, a blind costume jewelry maker who can’t see the hideous face or how Lorre gets around unnoticed by hiding himself (and his tortured soul) under a latex mask.  But then the possibility of recovery with new plastic surgery techniques raise hopes and he tries to go ‘straight’ with disastrous results.  The rest surprisingly bleak.  Director Robert Florey must have talked a good game, his films never quite matching his ambitions after making his name on the experimental LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413, A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA/’28.  His films don’t ‘swing.*  But he holds this to just over an hour and gets a boost from cinematographer Franz Planer, still fairly new in town, but soon a regular for greats like Wyler, Zinnemann and Ophüls.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *More horror for Florey & Lorre over at Warners in THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS/’46.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-beast-with-five-fingers-1946.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Stone very much part of the criminal gang, yet not only does he receive no punishment, he’s rewarded!  The Hollywood Production Code ‘raped in its sleep,’ as James Agee would soon put it (though for a different film).

THE BALLAD of GREGORIO CORTEZ (1982)

Actor/producer Edward James Olmos was the driving force behind this groundbreaking ‘Chicano’ Western, based (pretty accurately) on a simple verbal misunderstanding during an arrest-gone-wrong that snowballs into a manhunt and scores of innocent dead.  A real life ‘failure to communicate’ tragedy from 1901 Texas.  Olmos is Gregorio Cortez, a man on the run after killing that local arresting officer, a sheriff who drew a gun on Cortez, murdered his brother and put Cortez on the run, but doomed to be caught.  The non-linear presentation, along with actions repeated from alternate POVs, lifting this beyond simple suspense.  All while a unit of Texas Rangers blunder into indiscriminate murder of uncomprehending local Mexicans they take for Cortez confederates.  The purposeless killings only stopping when a legit sheriff takes charge, informing the Rangers there’s no gang involved, it’s been a one man job . . . and possibly self-defense.  Once arrested, Cortez is soon being mythologized by the Mexican community in Texas (as he is to this day) though the situation remains complicated.  Something Olmos doesn’t shy away from, hiring Robert M. Young, a superb technician too often pigeon-holed as a one-trick socially-conscious director, who rewrote an overly hagiographic script to admit nuance without softening the basic injustice.  Even more important, making a one million dollar ‘Super 16' budget look fully realized.  (Superb natural-light lensing from Reynaldo Villalobos.)  Only a few bad actors and a synthesizer score giving away the cost factor here and there.  The film doubly important for offering a rare Mex/Tex tilt historically (1901) and currently (1982) in presentation & attitude.  (It plays in English and Spanish without subtitles to emphasize language barriers.)  The film briefly heralding a road across a cultural  border still not taken.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Instead of another film with Chicano orientation, watch the excellent Extras on the Criterion edition, especially Olmos’s talk on how it all came about and, especially, how its distribution was purposefully fucked up by the head of Embassy Pictures.

STALLION ROAD (1947)

This modest feature is mainly interesting for figuring out why its three stars teetered just below the A-list*, and for an unusual lack of dramatic incident in its first half.  It’s like everyone’s on holiday in SoCal horse country.  Rather pleasant.  It’s midway in before life & death melodrama, along with romantic tangles kick in.  Pity journeyman director James V. Kern, out of his depth in both halves.  But for as long as nothing much is happening (other than a scare for Alexis Smith’s kid sister at the beach), horse rancher/veterinarian Ronald Reagan, visiting novelist pal Zachary Scott and pants-wearing/horse breeder neighbor Alexis Smith play a friendly game of catch and release visits to figure out which two parties make the natural couple.  Stephen Longstreet, scripting from his own novel, happy just to observe.  Then anthrax comes to cattle country, and melodrama breaks out.  Stupidity, too; one of those plots where you’re not allowed to make a simple explanation if you want to keep the plot going.  So Doc Reagan may be saving the entire livestock population of the area and working on an experimental serum, but Smith isn’t told of his heroics.  All she knows is he didn’t show up for her sick show horse.  It gives Scott an opportunity to move in, leaving Reagan with a clinging married gal he once dabbled with.  It’ll take a (near) fatal diagnosis to sort this one out.  A shame, that directionless first half was something singular for ‘40s Warner Brothers.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Watch how the film gets around the Hollywood Production Code during an unethical medical procedure.  People say editing can save a film, it also can save a hero’s life.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Why didn’t these three hit the A-list?  Best guess: Reagan only able to play one note at a time.  Smith too tall for three-quarters of Hollywood’s leading men.  Scott . . . well, that’s a tough one.  Too good for his own good?  See what he does under Jean Renoir in THE SOUTHERNER    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-southerner-1945.html

DISCLOSURE DAY (2026)

Steven Spielberg had a ‘New Coke’ moment in 1980, re-releasing his 1977 blockbuster CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND in a Special Edition that slightly trimmed the original cut, then added a final sequence taking us along with Richard Dreyfuss inside the Alien Mothership.  Pretty much everyone hated it.  At best a mistake in intention; at worst something leftover from a  World’s Fair exhibit.commissioned from Disney.  Spielberg took the hint and axed the sequence from subsequent editions.  But he’s a stubborn guy, and, 46 years later, he’s still trying to get it right, now as the climax of this new Aliens Are Real/Aliens Are Here thriller.*  The film and the man treated with kid gloves by critics as something of a last hurrah (print puff pieces downright painful), not that he doesn’t deserve the attention, and not that the film is a dud, but something’s definitely off.  The basic story, and raise your hand when you recognize the idea, is that documented evidence of alien visitors long suppressed by a special military unit led by Colin Firth is heading toward international exposure by a break-off group led by Colman Domingo.  Platonic couple Josh O’Connor (math whiz) and Emily Blunt (inexplicably speaking in Alien tongue) are earthly messengers on the run.  Naturally, the film is well accomplished, perfectly judged pacing and plenty of close calls staged to a technical fare-thee-well.  But about two reels in, it’s hard to miss that everybody involved thinks they’re making a suspense comedy . . . except Spielberg.  Most noticeable when miscast Blunt goes into her speaking-in-alien-tongue routine.  (She does international languages, too.)  You keep expecting to hear a giggle of self-surprise burble out of her at her own unexplained ability after these exchanges.  And not just any giggle.  But the rumbling joyful snort and laugh that were a Goldie Hawn specialty.  (Spielberg’s first leading film lady in THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS/’74 when she would have been just the right age for this.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-sugarland-express-1956.html)  And it wouldn’t have altered the general tone of legit suspense, either.  Think of all the big laughs Spielberg put over as part of the mix in JAWS, RAIDERS, JURASSIC, etc.  Spielberg, always something of a square; it's a large part of his charm.  Now pushing 80, has he become too square to get the joke that over half a century of Alien footage showing hundreds of witnesses hasn’t leaked from any lips in seven decades?  (At 94, composer John Williams seems in on the joke when needed.)  Perhaps Spielberg simply can’t go home again; or can’t without Goldie Hawn’s giggle.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *How stubborn?  Counting GOONIES as a junior-league Indy pic and TINTIN as Indy français, Spielberg went to the Indy well seven times, only bringing up water twice.  Then watched from the sidelines as the recent PADDINGTON BEAR in Peru pic filled the bucket.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note Spielberg pointlessly circling his subject like some kid just out of Film School.  Then turning uselessly old-school Hollywood with fussy matching edits.  Trying too hard?

DOUBLE-BILL:  DISCLOSURE ends with a tease, a message to the world from an interplanetary friend that’s  cut off before we get the translation.  Odds are it’s the same speech Michael Rennie’s Alien gives at the end of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL/’51.

THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER (1975)

After a Zeitgeist-grabbing two-fer for Paul Newman & Robert Redford (BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID/’69; THE STING/’73), director George Roy Hill soloed with each: this for Redford; SLAP SHOT/’77 with Newman.*  All four hits, the budget-conscious Hill bringing each in for about 5 or 6 mill, but only the first two smashes, earning five times the gross of the last two.  Nowadays, SLAP SHOT holds first critical position (rightfully so - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/slap-shot-1977.html), and it’d be a stretch to say BUTCH or STING has grown in esteem, but odd-man-out WALDO looks considerably better than once thought.  Some of this has to do with a lighthearted ad campaign misrepresenting the film in hopes of STING-like grosses.  Or perhaps the film just looks more interesting than it did in ‘75.  (Original story by Hill/script by BUTCH’s William Goldman.)  Redford, perfectly cast, is an intensely likeable scapegrace, a narcissist who always came on the scene a bit too late to live up to his potential.  A pilot in early aviation days, he missed action in  WWI then ran out the clock on barnstorming and big-time Air Circus shows.  Perpetually in trouble with cash, he’s soon skirting the new laws taming old-school flyboys as aviation matures from daredevil freak-show to big business.  Hill manages to segue from fun adventure to doomed lives in an instant (you can’t miss it), charting a diminishing trajectory from midpoint down, all the way to Hollywood stunt flyer, old scores to settle and no turning away from implications.  Certainly not from Redford who locks onto that now empty heroic grin; and Hill never showing his hand.  No wonder the film sputtered in comparison.  Technically superb, lenser Robert Surtees ditching THE STING’s glossy look of the same time period.  Loaded with real planes, real flying, real pilots offering plenty of pre-CGI thrills.

DOUBLE-BILL:  More daredevil pilots in Douglas Sirk’s too little known THE TARNISHED ANGELS/’57, from William Faulkner’s PYLON, with Rock Hudson, Robert Stack & Dorothy Malone.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Technically, it’s another Redford/Newman pic, not Paul, but with ill-fated son Scott Newman in a small role.

OUR TOWN (1940)

Hitting the screen only two years after its B’way opening in 1938, this film adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic was initially well received.  Later, objections to the revised ending and floods of subfusc home editions (plus maybe a few too many High School  productions) knocked the film’s rep down a peg or two.  Nothing can be done about that :happy' ending (less than a minute long, it’s easy to mentally block), and now, much that might have been done to improve picture quality has, at long last, been done, thanks mostly to The Library of Congress.  (Look for their 2023 restoration.)  And the film’s come up a treat.  Cleverly retrofitted for film by Wilder and actor Frank Craven, who repeats his ‘Stage Manager’ role from B’way, the revolutionary bare/prop-free stage production gets a rethink from legendary Hollywood Art Director William Cameron Menzies, given his head by director Sam Wood to use a stylized realism that heightens every scene.*  The quasi-simplicity of Wilder’s turn-of-the-last-century portrait of a ‘good’ small New England town leaps off the soundstage: daily routine, pleasures & tragedies of home-life: births, young love, weddings, death; laid out by Wilder like a prose poem of details & duties.  Craven is still a welcome surprise as tour guide, brisk, sec, blunt, without nonsense or sentimentality.  The other major holdover from the original production, Martha Scott as young Emily, who marries the boy next door, less successful.  Twenty-eight at the time, a lack of freshness less from being a decade too old than from having already figured out her line readings.*  And playing against a 22-yr-old William Holden only points out the difference.  Holden holds the screen effortlessly, breaking your heart with minimal effort.  A scene where Father Thomas Mitchell takes him to task almost unbearably moving.  With all the Hollywood supporting players at the very top of their game.  So too lenser Bert Glennon, just off John Ford’s STAGE COACH/’39; deftly jumping from Monument Valley to Menzies' carefully worked out stage set perspectives.  All of them memorably cosseted  by Aaron Copland’s perfectly judged score.  (Long a concert piece that’s never gone out of favor.)  The restored film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58O76SinOrQ&t=1027s) now easily besting the many tv versions hanging out online.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Another Wood/Menzies collaboration, KINGS ROW/’42, something of an anti-OUR TOWN.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/kings-row-1940.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Martha Scott’s B’way understudy, Teresa Wright, would have been perfect.

HOPPERS (2026)

The sound you heard coming from PIXAR hometown Emeryville, CA last March was likely a collective sigh of relief.  They’d just released their first original (non-franchise) hit in some time.  (Since the pandemic?*)  No mega-smash, but a solid stand-up double.  In many ways it’s an odd film (a good thing after so much formula PIXAR), HOPPERS' story a variation on the old ‘pave paradise/put up a parking lot’ trope, with nods toward Cinderella’s time-limited transformation, as unlikeable characters & unattractive design choices seem to hint at self-criticism & acknowledged course correction.  This being PIXAR, reset comes with a $150 mill price tag.  (But who stuck those scary sharp teeth in a duck’s bill?  Yikes!)  Our nominal heroine, a self-righteous pain, is 19-yr-old squeaky-wheel Mabel, determined to save her spoiled childhood pond (and the critters who once lived there) in the face of highway development.  Her antagonist a self-infatuated mayor (Jon Hamm, very good) who can’t compromise without losing face.  The gimmick a science project that ‘hops’ personalities from one species to another.  Mabel zapped into a beaver bod.  The script, trying too hard to be fair to all sides, winds up celebrating false equivalency as if it were compromise.  Not quite the same thing.  But that’s politics; we’re here for art, yes?  Good to see PIXAR questioning so much about itself.  Even if it’s yet to find answers.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Dear PIXAR character animation team.  The ‘cartooniness’ of the character animation design is worth pursuing, but this in-between stage is uncomfortable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  They miss an opportunity when the various animals play call-and-response with their distinctive vocalizations.  It plays like a song cue (‘I Bought Me A Cow’ from Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs?), but nothing comes of it.  Pity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *A sure theatrical hit lost to PIXAR when LUCA/’21 turned streamer in early pandemic days.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html