WINDS OF CHANCE (1925)

The Alaskan Gold Rushes at the turn-of-the-last-century (four or five major runs) held more space in America’s collective conscious than we can imagine.  Two major silents in 1925: Charles Chaplin’s ever popular THE GOLD RUSH (though only a few establishing shots made on location) and this sprawling adventure with exteriors largely shot in the Canadian Yukon, even at Dawson City where much of the story is set.  A genial mix of drama, romance, thrills and comedy from a Rex Beach novel, more Henry Hathaway/John Wayne NORTH TO ALASKA/’60 than a truly great & terrifying look at  the scene as found in Clarence Brown’s astonishing TRAIL OF ‘98.*   The two leads: strong/stately adventurer Ben Lyons, honestly working up a stake to make a claim, and slightly used Dawson City hall owner Anna Q. Nilsson.  (Yep, the same Nilsson who’s one of the bridge-playing ‘Waxworks’ in SUNSET BOULEVARD/’50.)  These two pair up on the way to Dawson City*, but their dalliance ends when her cheatin’ husband shows up.  Also on the journey, fragile Dana Viola, left alone after her father falls off the wagon and gets shot.  She’s taken under the wing of hearty, river hauler Victor McLaglen playing a Frenchman!  No matter, these two easily steal the pic.  (And our poster knew it, too.)  As does the thrill-sequence down the rapids with all their belongings.  (The real deal, no tricks.  Note Buster Keaton’s ‘props’ genius Fred Gabourie, just off THE NAVIGATOR/’24, in the credits.)  Plus cunning villainess Dorothy Sebastian (later Buster Keaton’s co-star on and off-camera), along with a pair of bickering old-timers for comic relief.  It’s all a little pokey, a little corny, but looser than director Frank Lloyd was in his prestigious sound films.  Available for free on TUBI (one reel missing, but elsewise, other than faint ‘blasting,’ in good shape.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Dawson City history, along with some preserved films from their end-of-the-line film exchange (a found land pile), on view in DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME.  Also a link to THE TRAIL OF ‘98.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-trail-of-98-1928.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/dawson-city-frozen-time.html

ORPHÉE / ORPHEUS (1950)

Jack-of-all Arts Jean Cocteau (gadfly dabbler to agnostics) made just a handful of feature films.  BEAUTY AND THE BEAST/’46 the most popular while this update of the Orpheus myth usually considered his best.  That’s debatable.  Better to claim it as the most ‘Cocteau-ean, a Greatest Hits compilation.  You know the basics: Lyric poet Orpheus/Orphée (Jean Marais) loses beloved wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) to Death (here Princess of Death Maria Casares), but wiles his way across the River Styx to bring her back to the living IF he can keep from looking at her till they’ve safely returned.  Usually things don’t end well.  (Here, more have your cake and eat it, too.)  Cocteau has devilish fun updating visual aspects; those motorcyclist Death Aides a leather fetishistic delight.  But too often he settles for vamping before plunging into his simple signature, clear-eyed F/X (mirrors of water to step into; Upside-Down Anti-Gravity tricks, reverse motion to wake the dead) and not one but two of his lovers in the same film.*  The good stuff (those effects) are tight & tidy as ever (even tv’s BATMAN picked up on one), while important themes in ethics, decor, æsthetics, poetry & eternal love sound hollow when tapped.  Philosophical metaphysics 101.  Head- scratching surrealism and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST's sturdy emotionalism were more satisfying as film.  Even George Auric’s score falls back on Gluck’s operatic masterpiece for something memorable.  (The built-in distancing of opera or ballet a better match for this story.)  Still essential, but time has taken its toll.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *In his mid-30s, Jean Marais’s big, square, noble head certainly fit for The Classics, but Roman rather than Greek.   At 25, Edouard Dermithe’s Cégeste is the one to model for a Greek bust.  Cocteau covering all bases.

THE MAN WHO SHOT THE GREAT WAR (2014)

Belfast volunteer George Hackney, Royal Irish Rifles, 14th Division, took his camera along to France in the Great War.  (A ‘pocket’ camera that needed a very large pocket.)  Unusual for the time, especially at the front where he served from 1915 to '16 (Hackney about 30 at the time) as amateur photography was strictly banned.  (There’s not an amateur composition in his work.)  He got around detection largely by shooting on plates rather than film. It allowed him to process in the field, each plate holding multiple images.  Unsurprisingly, he came back a changed man, many friends lost, his religious beliefs in question, though he long remained an elder in the Presbyterian Church.  Carefully made into prints for albums, the collection went largely unseen before albums, prints, negatives, accompanying diaries were donated to an Ulster Museum.  Rediscovered in time for the WWI centenary, this BBC documentary gave them new circulation.  This film, though filled with too much supposition and not enough detail on his process (dir. Brian Henry Martin/script Ian McElhinney), brings some remarkable images, sharp in clarity and in Hackney’s choice in subject matter, to light.  Probably at its most revealing in the visible changes that appear before-and-after the 1916 Battle of the Somme.  And it’s thru these casual portraits of men, including many who were lost, and their grave sites, that Hackney  best captured his temporary world.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The film uses a technique that pans, scans and lifts certain elements to create a 3D effect.  Peter Jackson did something different with restoration and color on his digital revamp of WWI archival motion pictures in THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD/’18.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/03/they-shall-not-grow-old-2018.html

THE MAN WITH A CLOAK (1951)

Don’t be fooled by a few ‘name’ stars and some top-line tech, this is basically an M-G-M programmer with a bit more polish than usual.  It’s mid-1800s New York (actually M-G-M’s backlot Londontown) and young French gal Leslie Caron (in her second film) is new in town, lost in the big city till friendly stranger Joseph Cotten points out the creepy mansion she’d passed by as too unsavory a place for the rich grandfather of her fiancé, currently in Paris fighting for the Republic.  Naturally, Grandpa Louis Calhern is a Monarchist with no intention of helping out his sole living relative.  Chances are he couldn’t anyway as respectable houseguest Barbara Stanwyck (who runs his life and debaucheries) along with venal butler Joe De Santis are planning on inheriting everything . . . and soon.  Only diff?  Babs willing to wait for the apoplectic old man to die naturally while De Santis wants to speed things along.  No doubt some studio exec thought this could be worked up as a period suspenser along the lines of GASLIGHT/’44.  (This guy couldn’t even come up with a decent title.)  Cotten the dead giveaway as he plays nearly the same character and has the exact same structural function as he did in the earlier classic.*  (They did give him a meaningless identity twist which you’ll guess easily.)  In ways large & small, the film feels like an expanded episode from some high quality tv anthology show; all pedestal and no statue.  Just where director  Fletcher Markle would soon be headed.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *As mentioned, GASLIGHT/’44.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Impeccable dubbing by Harriet Lee for Stanwyck's throaty vocal.

VILLA RIDES! (1968)

In the late ‘60s, a desperate Hollywood tried to join the youth rebellion bandwagon, but couldn’t drop old habits.  Hence, this bio-pic on Mexican Peasant Revolutionary Pancho Villa stars Yul Brynner as Pancho.  A stretch even with a full head of hair.  (On the other hand, the new generation is repped by Robert Towne and Sam Peckinpah on script.)  Brynner led to Omar Sharif in next year’s CHE!, and the year after that to Stanley Kramer stumbling thru college campus riots in R.P.M. (Get it?, Revolutions Per Minute.)  All three films D.O.A.  You’d think the studio execs were permanently out to lunch.  A bigger surprise on this Buzz Kulik film is what a lavish production it is.  (Were they thinking David Lean epic?  Great lensing by Jack Hildyard; lousy score from Maurice Jarre, both Lean regulars.)  For commercial insurance, Robert Mitchum sticks out his considerable gut as a high-flying weapons dealer (sympathies moving from Federales to revolutionaries) while Charles Bronson always shoots first as Pancho’s top aide.  The story, not without interest, has Pancho loyal to new President Madero (Alexander Knox), but unable to get on with the other Generals he outshines in the field.  (Including a wily rival played by Herbert Lom amusing himself as a sort of Mexican Inspector Dreyfus.)  The whole film simply too odd to hate.  But you do wonder who took the blame.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Pancho Villa really was a interesting case, and not the illiterate peasant stooge as usually portrayed.  Try a print-the-legend version as seen thru an American reporter’s eyes in Hollywood’s VIVA VILLA!/’34 or from a Mexican POV in VAMONOS CON PANCHO VILLA/’36.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/08/viva-villa-1934.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/vamonos-con-pancho-villa-lets-go-with.html

THE WRECKING CREW! (2008)

Not the 2026 WRECKING CREW, Dave Bautista/Jason Momoa's action-comedy; not the 1968 spy spoof for Dean Martin’s Matt Helm; not even the 2000 Black Actioner with Ice-T & Ernie Hudson Jr.  This WRECKING CREW! (note exclamation point), is a homey documentary charting the ‘60s heyday of a tight group of about 20 or so West Coast studio session musicians whose careers peaked just as the center of Pop music influence shifted from New York to L.A., from the Brill Building to that stack of 45s known as the Capitol Building.  Sinatra & Co. to the Beach Boys; and everything in-between.  The ‘crew’ played for/with everyone.  (Boomers should stick around for the end credits to hear clips from fifty to sixty hits they’ll recall not included in the main film.)  There’s a bias in the film since it was put together by Denny Tedesco, son of main guitar player Tommy Tedesco (there’s a better film somewhere inside the clips & fresh interviews), but these nostalgic touchstones offer a lot.  Especially if you don’t mind a bit too much of interviewee Dick Clark’s idea of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  You might even be surprised to find out the Wrecking Crew played all the music not only for The Monkees, but also for The Byrds, The Association, even a lot of Beach Boys stuff under Brain Wilson.  Good vibrations, indeed.  On the other hand, imagine the thousand of schlock ‘pop’ they were paid to polish.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Gary Lewis without ‘the Playboys’ a typical interview, speaking on how his band was swapped out for Wrecking Crew musicians at recording sessions.  The Playboys’ names on the album, but not a note.  BTW Gary’s dad, Jerry Lewis set the bar for passive/aggressive parenting naming his first-born not Jerry Jr., but the near sound-alike Gary.  (Later raising the bar by disinheriting him.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Their slow ‘70s decline came two ways.  From new bands who wrote & played their own stuff; and (as told by Plas Johnson, the crew’s saxophonist famous for laying down The Pink Panther solo in two takes, thru the rise of twenty-four track technology which had them record in sections rather than together with the singer as a band.

DOUBLE-BILL:  20 FEET FROM STARDOM/’13, has a somewhat similar take on the great girl backup singers for some of the best known Black Pop vocalists of roughly the same period.

MINAMATA (2020)

With a new version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL in the can (EBENEZER/’26), much press on how Johnny Depp has beaten ‘Cancel Culture’ after nearly a decade without a mainstream Hollywood release.  (A domestic ‘He said/She said’ dispute Depp legally, if not in all hearts, won.)  But being ‘cancelled’ not the only crisis Depp has faced, already in career decline from being ‘enabled’ to death, done in by success.  Specifically the one-two commercial punch of the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN series and ALICE IN WONDERLAND.  Depp taking all the wrong lessons from these mega-hits, doubling down on OTT eccentricity to steadily diminishing results, less interested in character development than in seeing how much he could get away with before someone called his bluff.  Enablers never do.  (Depp hadn’t co-starred with late-stage Marlon Brando for nothing.)  But then a can’t-miss’ ALICE sequel missed, THE LONE RANGER failed and he was axed from FANTASTIC BEASTS.  (The last something of a blessing in disguise.)  Could Depp still play a normal human-scaled character?  This true story (and it’s truer than most) involving a difficult character in a tragic situation ought to be right up Depp’s alley.  An American  photo-journalist approached by a group of Japanese admirers with a terrifying job, W. Eugene Smith (Depp), an on-and-off LIFE magazine regular, pitches their project to expose mercury poisoning by the Japanese factory that controls the town of Minamata.  But he’ll not only have to break thru all sorts of local protocol, a local police force working for the owners, bribes from the factory to lay off, refusals from families unwilling to allow victims to be photographed (the heart of any LIFE Magazine article), Smith must also confront personal demons that have kept him off the camera and on the bottle for too long.  (We're not so far from Depp’s own situation.)  Excellent characterizations on all sides (in Japan and back in NYC), and truly lovely interactions between Depp and a young victim learning to take photos.  Yet, the film barely makes its mark.  Some of the problem stems from Depp’s old-age makeup (was he going for elderly Groucho Marx or Billy Crystal?), but more from the inexperience of co-writer/director Andrew Levitas on just his second film.  He misses a lot and explains less, with flat staging even in a riot.  Then, when he does try for action, it’s overdone.  Still, except for an awkwardly handled romance with his interpreter, Depp is able to show what he can do given the chance.  If only his comeback project didn’t call for a return to OTT eccentricity in a story that’s been done to death.  (As well as to a T.*)

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Lots of CHRISTMAS CAROL coverage on this site.  Type Scrooge or Christmas Carol in the Search Box (Upper Left corner on the Main Site - Link below if needed) to find heaps of previous Ebenezers.

THE STALKING MOON (1968)

After seven films from 1957 to ‘68 (including TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and FEAR STRIKES OUT), producer Alan J. Pakula and director Robert Mulligan* went out with a bang.  But only because their final project was a violent Chamber Western with lots of shooting.  Elsewise, it’s something of a whimper.  Gregory Peck (only 52, but looking at the downside of his career) is a retiring Cavalry man who gets stuck escorting Eva Marie Saint’s abducted White woman, and her unwilling half-Indian eight-yr-old son, East after a decade of life on the range with her Tribe.  Two problems: ONE - she hasn’t got a home to go to (or any place for that matter); TWO - the boy’s father, a full-blooded Native American warrior, our Stalking Moon, is already on the Trail, killing anyone who comes between him and the boy.  It’s not bad, though the film takes its time getting a move on thru all the desert dust, but it sure could use a bit of surprise.  Something easier to get from an unpretentious B-list Western without so many big names in front & behind the camera on what is a pretty straightforward Avenging Father/Isolated Cabin Under Siege story.  Note that A-list scribes Alvin Sargent & Wendell Mayes let third-wheel ‘good’ Indian Robert Forster break thru the troubled Indian boy’s defenses rather than giving Peck a warm fatherly moment.  Kudos to Peck, not that many big-time movie stars would let that scene go to someone else.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *After this, Mulligan continued directing with various producers to reasonable effect, but Pakula’s switch to producer/director went into award-winning overdrive.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Pakula post Mulligan doesn’t need a push, but Mulligan post Pakula less celebrated.  Try clever/creepy THE OTHER/’72.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/02/other-1972.html

MILLE MILLIARDS DE DOLLARS / A THOUSAND BILLION DOLLARS (1982)

Patrick Dewaere’s penultimate film; sadly unworthy of his great talent.*  It sounds okay, a French take on ‘70s conspiracy thrillers, not political/military conflict & subterfuge, but focusing on International Business practices and near-sighted Investigative Journalism.  Dewaere’s steady/determined reporter unaware his latest exposé of a major figure in French business, culture & politics used him (and his publication) as part of a plan to make the man's murder look like suicide.  But once Dewaere starts investigating the suicide, he puts himself and his family in jeopardy.  If only we weren’t under the dependably mediocre hand of writer/director Henri Verneuil, here surpassing himself with some of the dullest exposition of his career.  And the film’s all exposition, the dramatic underpinnings facile/suspense-free.  Talk,, Talk,Talk: all in medium shot.  Four short, carelessly staged bits of action in a two hour film while Mel Ferrer’s conglomerate mogul squeezes competitive companies into his orbit and secretly sends out agents to keep Dewaere from finding a folder of evidence proving his story before attempting to kill him.  There's even a trick populist ending that's pure Frank Capracorn.  Jeanne Moreau shows up briefly as the suicide's widow to claim she got married in 1941 (she’d have been 13), while Verneuil calls in other big names for near cameos to bulk up his cast and make the film seem important.  And Philippe Sarde's four piano score?  A Verneuil stunt.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  What was lost in Dewaere’s early death at 35 can be well judged by watching the raucous soccer comedy of COUP DE TÊTE/’79 and the family drama UN MAUVAIS FILS/’80.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/03/coup-de-tete-hothead-1979.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/11/un-mauvais-fils-bad-son-1980.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Stateside, Dewaere still best known by two early films teaming him with Gérard Depardieu, acclaimed in their day, they’ve aged as poorly as M. Depardieu.