PUSHER (1996)

Hard-boiled Danish writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn was at Cannes this year with his first feature film in a decade.  Easy to see how he could have burnt himself out watching this debut.  In his mid-twenties at the time, he looks fresh out of the THIS IS SPINAL TAP ‘Crank it to 11' School du Cinema.*  A character study on a week in the life of drug supplier Frank (Kim Bodnia) and his inconstant mates (including a feral Mads Mikkelsen),as Frank rapidly sinks into dangerous levels of debt to various drug dealers a mere step or two above him, but far deadlier.  Shot entirely with jumpy hand-held camera (Morten Søborg), it has the opposite effect of Refn’s intention (a rookie gaffe), constantly calling attention to itself (especially in fast back & forth pans between actors) pulling you out of the action when it wants to pull you in.  With actors playing to Refn rather than to each other . . . or to us.  Guru cinéma vérité something of an oxymoron.  Worse, when Frank finds his back against the wall on the seventh day, Refn starts pulling melodrama out of his hat (character & plot reversals via guns, romance, power balances, cash & friendship) that might work in a more stylized film, but here look like cheating.  On the other hand . . . two sequels.  It made Refn’s rep.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *We much prefer Refn’s poorly received ONLY GOD FORGIVES/’13.  Perhaps because rather than crank it to 11, he aims for 12.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/08/only-god-forgives-2013.html

LUCKY JORDAN (1942)

Fourth-billed, but breaking thru as a major star on THIS GUN FOR HIRE/’42, Alan Ladd got solo above-the-title billing for the first time on this slapdash wartime comedy later the same year.*  Paramount Pictures rushing to get Ladd back on screen before the Draft Board grabbed him for the Army.  And, wouldn’t you know, that’s pretty much the plot of the pic; just that Ladd’s a big-time racketeer with the draft board on his tail rather than a big-time movie star with the draft board on his tail.  But treating superior officers like mob underlings doesn’t fly when your boss is Uncle Sam.  On the other hand, when a cache of secret documents goes missing, and foreign agents are hot on the trail, some of those underworld talents come in mighty handy, especially if you’re on the run, AWOL with the film’s antagonist WAC (debuting Helen Walker) who’s beginning to see possibilities in this arrogant soldier boy.  Sounds kinda fun, no?  Especially with the lousy news from the front in the early days of the way.  For a time, it brought out the silly side in Hollywood war movies.  Alas, nothing in here plays to its comic potential.  (Other than a running bit between Ladd and the drunken old ‘biddy’ (Mabel Paige) who pretends to be his mother.)  And while cinematographer John F. Seitz was proving transformative to Paramount literary writer/directors Preston Sturges & Billy Wilder at the time, there’s little he can do to give payoffs to disappearing characters & plot lines, or fix director Frank Tuttle’s lackluster comic timing.  (Note how elements snap into place whenever the script drops the comedy and goes for straight suspense.)  The film’s not unpleasant, just a mess.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See what all the fuss was about in THIS GUN FOR HIRE/’42.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/this-gun-for-hire-1942.html

FLICKERING LIGHTS / BLINKENDE LYGTER (2000)

Small-time crooks/big-time psychopaths (with comic edge to their violence) had become something of a genre unto itself by the time this Danish iteration, from writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen, came out.  Two & a half decades on, there’s not much surprise or kick left to it.  What it does offer is a chance to watch a young, lean Mads Mikkelsen as one of the four thuggish grifters making small change smuggling in contraband goods, like tax-free cigarettes.  ‘Menthol!,’ Mikkelsen grouses before laying out the confused Polish driver.  But it’s the next job that launches the main action when the four guys pick up a locked suitcase that contains too much dough to deliver without taking a 100% cut, hatching a plan to enjoy their profits by running off to Barcelona.  Naturally the intended party for the cash-filled suitcase is none too happy with things and the hunt is on as one small mob goes after another.  And this is where Jensen doubles down from quirky to absurd as our gang of thieves (plus an on & off girlfriend of little intuition) find a dilapidated house, formerly a country restaurant, now abandoned, they plan to restore.  Too bad no one knows how to cook.  But under the informal protection of a couple of equally oddball locals, the project starts coming together.  Tricked out with short daytrips, a slow-healing gunshot wound, walks on the beach, hunting down farm animals and flashbacks to character-defining crises from childhood, the film devolves into a fable.  Not without its shocks, laughs and nifty resolutions, the problem less that so much is absurd as that so much is secondhand absurd.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *You can get a good sense of Mikkelsen’s exceptional range, pretty much right from the start, comparing his young Robert De Niro act here (even in build) to his equally convincing Gregory Peck solid physicality in the WWII spy drama FLAME & CITRON/’06.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/flammen-og-citronen-flame-and-citron.html

WYATT EARP (1994)

Kevin Costner is seriously underrated.  Not as an actor, fine in the right role (underdog striver/ornery father-figure).  No, he’s underrated as a Hollywood survivor.  Few movie stars could slip past career-ending debacles like WATERWORLD/95*, THE POSTMAN/’97, the on-going HORIZON/’24 and EARP with nary a nick to their commercial standing.  In EARP’s case, big losses on writer/director Lawrence Kasdan’s dead serious/reasonably factual bio-pic on the legendary lawman were chalked up to the recent release of George P. Cosmatos’s more light-hearted lob at the same subject, TOMBSTONE/’93, sucking all the air out of the market.  (Ironically, using the rowdy tone of SILVERADO/’83, Kasdan’s previous Western epic.)  No doubt that’s part of the story, but EARP didn’t need help to fail; a 3+ hours length and grim predetermination turned possible audiences off all on their own.  (One thing that does make both films a must-see are the two enormous all-star casts, offering the chance to sample half of Hollywood's best late-twenties/early-thirties actors at the time.)  Kasdan’s main take on the saga is decidedly Freudian: Earp’s Old Testament revenge against GOD for taking away his young bride (and unborn son) before he’s redeemed (after murdering towns-full of gun-toting strangers*) by a beautiful Jewish prostitute.  Yikes!  But the film is a drag (if not for Gene Hackman with but ten minutes on-screen); at times (particularly in James Newton Howard’s windswept overblown score) even a disgrace.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  John Ford’s MY DARLING CLEMENTINE/’48 remains tops in EARP mythology (very ‘print the legend’) though low on accuracy.  Even though Ford, in his early Hollywood years, knew Earp.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/my-darling-clementine-1946.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *In spite of critical ridicule, WATERWORLD, in a variety of ‘improved’ re-cuts, eventually recouped.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Hard not to wonder at The Wild West’s ‘liberal’ gun policies that ordered NO GUNS in town.  Pick ‘em up again on your way out.  It’d never happen today.

REMEMBERING GENE WILDER (2023)

Once past the generic title (fit for a local memorial service) and the generic structure (movie clips & fresh or archival interviews set between self-narration from Gene Wilder’s audio version of his autobiography), and not withstanding occasional non-linear jumps to pre-fame days, this Ron Frank/Glenn Kirschbaum documentary on the iconic/unorthodox comic movie star is mainly unusual for its sheer niceness.  As was its subject.  (No given with great comic actors!)  But what it does best of all is getting you to reconsider films you’d either overlooked (SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL/’89) or actively avoided (THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES' SMARTER BROTHER/’75 with wife Gilda Radner).  And simply by listing THE PRODUCERS, BLAZING SADDLES, and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN showing how indebted Mel Brooks’ film career batting average was to Wilder.  Behind the movie roles, more personal heartbreak than you recall.  Touching stuff.  It also serves well as a Wilder starter pack without giving away too many highlights or spoilers.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Our regular suggestion for the funniest/lesser-known Gene Wilder pic remains START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT ME/’70.  OR: Type Gene Wilder into our Search Box (Upper Left corner on the Main Site (e-phoners scroll below to the link) for a pot-pourri listing of various Wilder films & mentions.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/02/start-revolution-without-me-1970.html

LA FEMME INFIDÈLE / THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE (1969)

Often beginning his films with little inflection and just-the-facts directness, gourmet gagster Claude Chabrol could come off as the Jack Webb of the French Nouvelle Vague.  Often as not, this tactic was a fake-out meant to leave you off-balance, uncertain where you were being led till you’d digested the first act.  By then, you’d know if you were watching good or bad Chabrol.  This one of the good ones.  Stéphane Audran (then married to Chabrol) is the beautiful, blank wife of well-heeled businessman Michel Bouquet; working in Paris/living with their 10-yr-old boy in Versailles.  Right now, Bouquet’s visiting mother is about to head home, but not without first telling her son to lose a little weight.  Seems rude, but Maman has picked up on the ‘off’ vibe between the couple.  And a stealth phone call by Audran cues us in to some sort of relationship troubles before the pair share a joyless night out with friends, highlighting a couple at cross purposes.  Soon after, Bouquet hires a P.I.; Audran disappears every other afternoon; an affair of no great passion is confirmed; and civilized confrontation turns on a dix sous piece into violence.  The mix of family comfort and discomfort; smiling lies & unpleasant truths; married & unmarried beds of iniquity.  Like the jigsaw puzzle the young son is trying to complete, there’s a piece missing in this relationship.  Then two detectives knock at the door after dinner.  Death and domesticity.  Chabrol couldn’t always be bothered, but when he could, he knew how to tighten the screws.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  And dig how Pierre Jansen’s atonal score keeps you off-balance.

CONTEST:  Along with fellow Nouvelle Vague-er Éric Rohmer, Chabrol co-authored one of the first books to make the case for Alfred Hitchcock as more than ‘mere’ entertainer. (As if that alone weren’t enough!  Ah, the French.  See: HITCHCOCK; THE FIRST FORTY-FOUR FILMS.)  So, no surprise to see Chabrol lift a major scene from a major Hitchcock film here.  Use the Comment Box to name the film and the scene to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choice.

LENIN IN OCTOBER / LENIN V OKTYABRE (1937)

Straightforward and easy to follow, Mikhail Romm’s film on Vladimir Lenin and The October Revolution of 1917 is less ‘agit-prop’ than YA bio-pic.  Made to celebrate twenty years that shook the world, it takes bolshoi liberties with the facts, most notably by raising Joseph Stalin’s involvement in events, largely by giving him now exiled Leon Trotsky’s part.*  And damned if the simplified storyline & politics don’t work in entertaining fashion.  Romm might be telling a modern Robin Hood story, with short, stocky, balding Lenin taking from the establishment and giving to the proletariat.  There’s even a big, benign protector/bodyguard called Vasily in the Little John spot.  Structured for near constant suspense, we begin with Lenin’s train ride from Finland Station to Petrograd, hunted all the way by agents.  Met by comrades in the city, he goes into immediate hiding, his every move an opportunity for various parties and groups of activists across the political spectrum to grab him.  (From Sergei Eisenstein’s OCTOBER/‘28 to Warren Beatty’s REDS/’81, party confusion is where they lose us.*)  Boris Shchukin makes a downright bouncy Lenin, a charmer (recent bios paint him as only slightly less ruthless than Stalin) while loyal aide Nikolai Okhlopkov isn’t so different than Alan Hale was in Little John in next year’s THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD.  Both leads repeated in Romm’s follow up, LENIN IN 1918/’39, but that film a good deal more daunting to watch.  With impressive sets and set pieces, sweeping, screen-filling action, self-serving political villains and a noticeable absence of Eisenstein’s artistic trappings, this was THE representation of ‘Volodya’ for at least a couple of generations in Russia.  And note the final shot at the victory rally: Lenin with his characteristic out-thrust arm; Stalin standing behind him waiting for the next act to begin.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Trotsky had his post-mortem revenge after Stalin’s death when Khrushchev’s cultural ‘thaw’ clipped Stalin out of all circulating prints.  Restored to full length, here’s an excellent print available free:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lenin_in_October_(film)_1937.webm  

DOUBLE-BILL:  *As mentioned above, Eisenstein’s OCTOBER: TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, which, as Stalin pointed out, is too ‘formalistic.’  (The guy was also a film critic.)  And Beatty’s REDS, which has its own problems though Jack Nicholson makes a fantastic Eugene O’Neill, if not nearly as tragically handsome.

LA SYMPHONIE PASTORALE / PASTORAL SYMPHONY (1946)

Best film @ Cannes in 1946!  . . . along with ten other winners.  Starting up after WWII ended, the re-inaugural edition of the hardly begun Film Festival spread the wealth among participating countries.  The committee was out to make friends and influence tastemakers.  (Hollywood took their prize home for THE LOST WEEKEND/’45.)  Alas, this ‘winner,’ a significantly tamed version of André Gide’s novel on religious and social hypocrisy at a small town in the Alps, probably serves best as an example of the sort of infuriating work and positive critical reaction directors like Jean Delannoy regularly received by hitching a ride on some classic piece of literature.*  Not that it’s bad, it’s adequate, and nicely shot when they stick to real Alpine wintry locations.  Michèle Morgan is blonde & beautiful, affectingly ‘off’ (if a decade too old) as a blind orphan ‘adopted’ by town minister Pierre Blanchar who either doesn’t realize or can’t admit his love for the girl is anything but pure.  (Per Gide it ain’t, which is the whole point; per Delannoy it technically is, which loses the point.)  The girl morally innocent, yet not unaware of the destabilizing effect she has on everything she touches: the minister, his suddenly ignored wife, his handsome/talented organist son just back in town (Jean Desailly, best thing in the pic), etc.  And when she discovers her sight can easily be corrected with simple cataract surgery (Delannoy’s modern setting making this belated realization hard to swallow), Morgan instinctively knows her physical handicap was the only thing protecting her (and the family) frm a complete meltdown.  This is pretty interesting stuff, but as presented here, little more than sudsy romantic misalliance.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Similarly, Michèle Morgan’s best English-language film, THE FALLEN IDOL/’48, a superb Carol Reed/Graham Greene collaboration, also softens its story.  But with two major differences: it’s Greene’s own story, and the change is an improvement.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/fallen-idol-1948.html

ROMANCE (1930)

Greta Garbo’s second Talkie was another adaptation from ‘a play of quality.’  So too her third, all three directed as if walking on egg shells by otherwise talented/underrated Clarence Brown.*  The big difference is that the first, Eugene O’Neill’s ANNA CHRISTIE, really is quality goods; not so Edward ‘Ned’ Sheldon’s ROMANCE; cut-rate CAMILLE at best.  Though it still made a mark on B’way (three runs, the last musicalized by Sigmund Romberg).  Garbo, who made a CAMILLE for the ages (the real one) with George Cukor in ‘36, might as well be part of the demimonde here, too.  No courtesan, but opera soprano; nearly as bad in 1880.  And once more she’s torn between a wealthy old lover (Lewis Stone), burnt out at 51 he tells us, and virgin-pure Rector Gavin Gordon (well out of his league) who comes to reform, only to be aroused into a passion he’s never known.  Flaccid moviemaking, with Garbo’s accent at its most impenetrable and the men acting to the back row.  Dull as it is, Sheldon really does seem to be on to something (‘love’s truth and the horny heart’) he doesn’t quite know how to handle as drama.  At the least, it’s better than the third in the series INSPIRATION/’31, if still mainly for Garbo completists.  Everyone else feel free to jump ahead to GRAND HOTEL/’32.  Garbo swapping opera for ballet with M-G-M, at last, figuring out how best to use the legend in The Talkies.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Brown did far better by Garbo in silents and in ANNA KARENINA/’35.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/anna-karenina-1935.html