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

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