SILENT NIGHT (2023)

After resetting the bar on violent Hong Kong action fare in the ‘80s, director John Woo had brief success in Hollywood before diminishing returns brought him back to Asian markets.*  Two decades on he’s working in English again (sort of) on a standard revenge thriller loaded with OTT gore & grue.  Not especially well received, it sunk in early post-pandemic days.  A pity because of its type, it’s exceptionally well made (you can actually ‘read’ the action set pieces), has a conceptually rich character twist that gives purpose to style, and old-school star-power from a seriously jacked-up Joel Kinnaman*, grieving father to an innocent 7-yr-old boy, collateral damage in out-of-control L.A. gang warfare.  Opening in medias res, Kinnaman is chasing gunmen on both sides only to wind up shot in the throat; alive but voiceless.  Initially falling into catatonic depression before rousing himself to wellness thru deadly revenge. Cue Woo to turn this into a Silent Film, a LOUD Silent Film.  Unlike other Martial Arts films who drop dialogue during those major balletic fight scenes, but don’t try to figure out how Silent Film differs, Woo does.  'Silents' had their own rules, cutting rhythms & could support a different kind of continuity.  So too scene length (happy to just hang around) and editing technique (agogic).  Things Woo does instinctively, starting by muddying up all dialogue to a point where it no longer matters.  His technique mirroring what Jacques Tati developed for his highly stylized, largely non-verbal French comedies.  Tati’s pastoral yin to Woo’s urban yang.  By the finale, the multiple killings grow a bit too JOHN WICK (the films share a producer), Kinnaman downing dozens of gang members from both sides.  But if any physical presence/human force could pull it off, Kinnaman could.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Losing speech here, Kinnaman’s next, THE SILENT HOUR/’24 takes away his hearing!  Had it done any biz, his next might have stripped off his sense of smell.  SILENT SCHNOZ?   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-silent-hour-2024.html

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Woo came back to China with a two-fer bang in RED CLIFF.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/chi-bi-red-cliff-2008.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/chi-bi-xia-jue-zhan-tian-xia-red-cliff.html

COUNTDOWN (1967)

James Caan, Robert Duvall, Michael Murphy, Ted Knight and Robert Altman.  With that cast and that director, you’d imagine a higher profile for this Mission-to-the-Moon story.  Likely a dog all parties hoped to forget, yes?  Well, it is pretty conventional.  But as pre-2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY sci-fi goes, it’s solid mid-list fare with the added benefit of seeing Altman, at 42, making his belated move from tv to features.  A ‘job of work’ rather than something distinctively Altmanesque?  Sure, only hearing his cast talk over each other more than usual for the period feels like a personalized element.  The story more character study than space opera, those characters being astronauts Duvall, military man, and Caan’s civilian scientist.  Duvall, originally slotted to solo as first man on the moon, forced out by an expedited Russian launch that causes NASA to panic and move up the mission, with Duvall replaced by an untested Caan,, proving to the world NASA isn’t part of the military, they’re purely scientific.  But with only a few weeks to liftoff, a pissed/jealous Duvall the one guy who can teach Caan the fine technical points.  Will Duvall help or sabotage?  Hardly the genre game-changer 2001 would be next year, but neither is it a Boy’s Own Adventure.  Instead, a fairly serious study of then timely possibilities.  (Armstrong touched down only two years later.)  And the best moment in here purely visual, a silent reveal of the fate of those moon-bound Soviets.  Altman would start finding his own screen voice on his next two films: THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK/’69 and M*A*S*H*/’70.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Not much for the women to do in this 1967 film.  Astronaut wives only fit to watch, wait and worry . . . when not tending the kids.  Oddly, Duvall’s ramrod straight army man the sole unattached male.

THAT FORSYTHE WOMAN (1949)

A typical star-clogged loss-leader from a directionless post-WWII M-G-M, this ‘prestige pic’ proved unable to recapture past studio glory.  On the plus side, there’s a cleverly trimmed script from Book One of the John Galsworthy novel about a wealthy, but ruthless British family dynasty (just a couple of generations old), but only so much can be done with such a disagreeable lot.  (Not that this has stopped multiple dramatizations.)  Even the good eggs a chilly bunch.  And while the 1880s setting calls for overstuffed period detail, pudding-rich late-‘40s TechniColor makes you long for the outdoors only to discover you’re now stuck on an M-G-M backlot, even in the country.  The story, a roundelay of mismatched pairings & misaligned fortunes, suffers from missing backstory, but could still work if the cast hit the mark.  As it is, only underrated Errol Flynn (underrated as an actor, that is), convinces as Soames Forsythe, superb as a man whose pride can’t take no for an answer.  As the penniless beauty he desires, Greer Garson would have been fine twenty years ago; as would Walter Pidgeon, appropriately enough sporting a bad dye job as a painter who’s the family Black Sheep.   (Don’t believe the studio publicity about him & Flynn swapping parts to play against type.*)  A very young Janet Leigh and placid Robert Young both hopelessly MidWest American as the naive ingenue cast aside when her lower-class artistic lover falls for another.  (Guess who.)  Director Compton Bennett would show more moxie figuring out how to integrate docu-wildlife footage, a mystery treasure hunt and romantic melodrama in next year’s KING SOLOMON’S MINES/’50.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *This film could have profitably used the two stars of KING SOLOMON’S MINES!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/king-solomons-mines-1950.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While the story calls for Soames to basically rape his wife (not a crime in Victorian England), the thought of the gentlemanly Pidgeon forcing himself on Garson . . . well, the very idea!  In any event, the Production Code reduced rape to a quick slap on the Garson jaw by a sexually frustrated Flynn.

DANS LA COUR / IN THE COURTYARD (2014)

Though recently tapped for Cannes’ 2026 Opening Night with LA VÉNUS ÉLECTRIQUE/THE ELECTRIC KISS, French writer/director Pierre Salvadori has a low profile in the States.  Too French?  Too light?  Too mid-list?  But if COUR is anything to go by, we’ve been missing a trick.  From desciptions, this seems considerably darker than his other work, though it doesn’t start that way.  Gustave Kervern stars as a shambling, disheveled 40-something, a severely depressed substance abuser who walks out of a concert gig (he’s a rock guitarist) and into a job as live-in janitor at a slightly worn apartment house.  Hired on the spot by an unconcerned/disinterested Catherine Deneuve who’s going thru her own mental crisis, sloughing off longtime volunteer commitments to obsess over minor building issues.  And it seems every tenant in the building on the cusp of a nervous breakdown.  Yet without qualification for either building maintenance or mental counsel, Kervern’s calm manner of letting time take care of problems satisfies the co-owners and all turns out well.  But wait!  That’s a likely Stateside version of the film had it gone thru Hollywood Development Hell.  Salvadori having none of it.  Instead, at nearly every turn, the story takes the darker path with ingrates using Kervern for their own purposes, tenants over-loading him with tasks, and mental fantasy taking hold of Deneuve’s increasingly fragile state of mind.  A spontaneous visit to her childhood home with a by now poignantly chummy Kervern a particular (and dramatically brave) horror.  There’s resolution, of a sort, but this is hardly Handyman Mary Poppins by the time Kervern checks out.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Deneuve, quite rightly, nominated for a Best Actress César.  No grandstanding, no begging for sympathy, nothing taken for granted.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Salvadori’s best received film (at least his most nominated) is EN LIBERTÉ! (THE TROUBLE WITH YOU) which followed this in 2018.  (not seen here)

CLIFFORD (1994)

A polarizing film.  Everyone hates it for a different reason.*  Back when Hollywood was struggling over how to make use of Martin Short’s obvious talents, they tried off-beat leading man (leading clown?) to see if he could ‘open’ a film.  He couldn’t.  Splitting the lead in thirds helped*, but he only found his niche when they incorporated the law of diminishing comic returns and cast him in support.  But he’s still the whole show in CLIFFORD, forty-four at the time, 'realistically' playing a tantrumy ten-yr-old.  (Think ELOISE away from The Plaza.)  Turning progressively creepy (exponentially irritating) as we go along, he’s left in the care of child-hating Uncle Charles Grodin trying to impress child-loving girlfriend Mary Steenburgen and going slightly mad in the process.  (Or with his comic twitches is he auditioning to replace Herbert Lom as Chief Inspector Drefuss in a new PINK PANTHER pic?)  The one great bit in the film (likely unintentional), comes in what might be called ‘the battle of the bad hairpieces’ as boss Dabney Coleman is called out for a lousy toupé, but no one says a word about Grodin’s equally bad rug.  Elsewise, the series of comedy situations don’t so much develop as repeat under Paul Flaherty’s laisser-faire direction; and the film’s flashback structure (an older Short lectures a new bad boy on his misspent youth) is needless padding.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Okay, not strictly true.  The film has its fans, and something of a cult following.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See THE THREE AMIGOS/’86. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-three-amigos-1986.html

CAIRO CONSPIRACY / WALAD MIN AL-JANNA (2022)

This, the second of exiled Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh’s Cairo Trilogy, is the masterpiece of the three.*  A slow-burn political thriller in religious garb during the run-up to elect a new Grand Imam at Al Azhar University, the apex for Islamic Studies for over a millennium,  We follow events thru the wide eyes of Adam, a new Al Azhar student on scholarship from his small fishing village, just arrived on the historic Cairo campus to find his bunk and bearings.  (Now officially ‘a sardine.’)  Adam also starts to find new friends, unaware the primitive yet beautiful site is a hotbed of political activity, covered by spy networks.  But he learns fast.  Especially after a wised-up classmate, a likely informer for State authorities, is murdered on campus, and the hunt to discover the murderer(s) leads to Adam being recruited as his replacement.  First assignment?  Become a trusted member of the radical anti-State (terrorist?) organization planning election interference.   After this, without seeming to alter tempo in the Hollywood manner, Saleh tightens the screws on all sides as everyone suddenly stops trusting Adam (with the possible exception of State recruiter Fares Fares).  Salem getting this across not with the usual tropes of chases, guns and close calls, but with rigorous intellectual/philosophical debate that can also put lives at stake as secrets about religious candidates are uncovered.  Fascinating, and deadly in intent; the film ending with a twisty sort of religious grace based on Islamic studies and principles.  Our moral?  Adam’s lesson?  Well, not that ‘the tragedy of this world is that everyone has their reasons’ (as Jean Renoir put it in RULES OF THE GAME/’39), but that everyone has their agenda.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Fares Fares, who stars in all three films, lets student co-star Tawfeek Barhom take focus, but is just as good as conflicted State intelligence gatherer.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The first and third (THE NILE HILTON/’17; EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC’25) not far behind.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-nile-hilton-incident-2017.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2026/04/eagles-of-republic-2025.html

SERIAL MOM (1994)

Dialing down the danger factor of his early films, campy curator John Waters was coming off two mainstream hits (HAIRSPRAY/’88; CRY-BABY/‘90), when he went for the triple, but got thrown out at the box-office plate.  Not that this suburban satire doesn’t get its laughs (a gory comic gloss on CRAIG’S WIFE*, the stage classic about an obsessively meticulous homemaker who drives everyone away with her mania for neat perfection; ORDINARY PEOPLE/’80 one of its many offspring), but here Waters’ targets are too easy; as social satire, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.  With ultra-bright colors and broader than broad playing, Kathleen Turner uses a killer smile (make that a killer's smile) to play the Happy Homemaker to her exemplary nuclear family: loving husband, two great kids, colonial home, glazed meatloaf.  But guests must abide by her rules of etiquette or else.  (Hard to believe Waters missed having a pet to die early and set things in motion.)  And everyone seems to be winking at the camera to let us know they’re only fooling.  A touch of Waters' audacity surfaces here and there: a grieving brother pivots from revenge to profit participation, a murdered teen lover loses his liver when skewered.  But even a super cynical ending all too tame.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *George Kelly’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1925 play was filmed thrice: a silent in 1928 for Irene Rich; as CRAIG’S WIFE/’36 (with Roz Russell); as HARRIET CRAIG/’50 (with Joan Crawford).    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/12/craigs-wife-1936.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/harriet-craig-1950.html

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 now makes this 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.