ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)

Public demand for low-down comedy wih a high silly factor during WWII helped journeymen comedy team Bud Abbott (straight-man) and Lou Costello (butt) over-perform at the box-office, especially in the early 1940s.  Limited talents, they caught a second wind in the late ‘40s, when someone at their home studio thought to combine them with Universal’s signature monsters.  (Five MEETs in total, the fourth over at Warners.*)  FRANKENSTEIN, first & best of the lot, churning out pots of money, even with few good notions on what to do with this can’t-miss set-up.  Raspy-voiced Abbott keeps the pace up (always his strong suit) while Costello holds to his usual too-scared-to-get-the-words-out shtick, but played against the Frankenstein monster, Dracula and Wolfman, he generates pretty decent laughs.  But that’s about it for comic ideas; the rest boilerplate A&C.  For some amusement, note that Wolfman (still Lon Chaney Jr.) grows fur under four full moons over five or six days.  A Full Moon record!  (And does so in unusually smooth Man-to-Wolf dissolve transitions.  That Bela Lugosi is Dracula for only the second time.  It’s also his last major studio pic.  And that  Bud Westmore’s simplified monster makeups (based on masks), aren’t a patch on Jack P. Pierce’s built-from-scratch every day originals.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Least if not last, it was . . . MEETS CAPTAIN KIDD/’53.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/abbott-and-costello-meet-captain-kidd.html

PILLION (2025)

With nebbishy demeanor, wilted physique and close-set eyes, Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley in the HARRY POTTER films) comes on screen singing high tenor in a Barbershop Quartet, then wandering thru the pub, collecting tips in a straw hat.  Think you couldn’t get more masochist than that?  Think again!  Melling’s about to be picked up (well, picked out) for special service by leather-clad biker Alexander Skarsgård (even at 50, the guy Adonis was modeled after).  Naturally, it’s an arrangement, with Melling chosen as submissive (sexually & domestically), to Skarsgård’s laconic dominator.  An instant kinky cult item (rating-wise, a hard ‘R’), co-writer/director Harry Lighton’s film quickly lost whatever buzz-worthy qualities it seemed to possess.  Pop Psychology contents settling down to half-full in packaging & delivery.  Third-act reverses particularly obvious, not to say dog-eared, leaving us with way too much time to think about the relationship’s far-fetched gestation.  Lighton not helping his case by filming & lighting Melling as if he were screen testing to play Renfield in a new Dracula film.  One of those films where you had to have been there in the opening weekend for the buzz to trick you.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Not strictly comparable (to put it mildly), but Harold Pinter’s THE SERVANT/’63 (Joseph Losey’s 1963 film with Dirk Bogarde and James Fox) works its way thru some similar, creepy ideas on submissive/dominate bad behavior.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In our never-ending quest to find cooking faux pas in film, check out Melling at a party with many of  Skarsgård’s biker pals, scouring a ridged cast-iron pan with dish soap.  The one thing he deserves to be punished for, and no one says ‘boo.’

MADAME X (1929; 1937)

Alexandre Bisson was a turn-of-the-last-century French playwright best known for Madame X/’29, Madame X/’37 and Madame X/’66.  And that’s just in Hollywood.  Another dozen or so international iterations 1916 to 1981.  (From our writeup of Lana Turner’s remake: ‘Unfairly tagged for her lover’s accidental death, a rich young wife & mother disappears to protect her family from social disgrace, hiding for twenty years as Madame X, sinking into absinthe & despair until being spotted by a lowlife blackmailer she does kill.  Now, on trial for murder, she’s unaware that the young defense lawyer working his first case is . . . (gasp) the son she abandoned as a child!’  Oft filmed, and you’ll see why, it’s prime hokum for bravura acting, no less than Sarah Bernhardt brought excerpts of this irresistible trash to B’way when she was pushing 70.*’  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/madame-x-1966.html)    The only major plot alteration is that the lover’s death ain’t ‘accidental’ in the two earlier, infinitely preferable Hollywood versions: Lionel Barrymore’s primitive Early Talkie from 1929 and Sam Wood’s polished example of 1937 Golden Age Hollywood.  No question, 1937's the best as film.  Gladys George’s whiskey bruised voice a perfect match for Mme., especially on the lam, combined with John Meehan’s streamlined script (two reels trimmed), plus John F. Sietz’s lighting (as the wronged husband, William Warren never looked this good).  The problem is, in sensibly taming the old stage chestnut, the emotional craziness no longer runs the drama.  Barrymore, who tried directing for a few years before returning to acting, doesn’t seem to have much feel for the job (even factoring in Early Talkie technical limitations), but he does have a feel for ‘the theatre.’  So, if you can get thru the first two unbearably stiff acts, the third act's trial scenes, with their big arioso speeches for Ruth Chatterton’s Mother and Raymond Hackett’s son, gain cumulative power from the buildup, detonating just as they must have when this first was staged.  For anyone who’s wondered what acting was like at the time, and what all the bother was about, this is essential stuff.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *And for reigning stage divas, not only a plum role of indeterminate age with a twenty-year time span, but also offering the chance to play off-stage as well as on with their much younger lover playing the son.  So, the big climax where Mme. X gives the boy a ‘mother’s’ kiss’ is loaded with kink & suspense.  (On the cheek in ‘37; cheeks and mouth in ‘29.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  *But genius acting it ain’t.  For that sort of window into theatre of the past, look to Somerset Maugham’s THE LETTER/’29, with doomed Jeanne Eagels in the lead.

LIFE OF CRIME (2013)

As to feature films, Elmore Leonard, master of the cockeyed contemporary crime novel, went out at the age of 83, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a ‘Lite.’  Specifically, as one of twenty-nine (!) producers on this modest, but appealing adaptation of his 1978 novel THE SWITCH.  (Leonard’s RUM PUNCH, which became JACKIE BROWN/’97 on screen, kept the pair of low-life criminals Ordell Robbie & Louis Gara, casually played here by yasiin bey & John Hawkes; less casually played in JACKIE BROWN by Samuel L. Jackson & Robert De Niro.)  Yet another riff on O’Henry’s THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF, here unredeemed hostage Jennifer Aniston, as straying suburban housewife whose straying developer husband, Tim Robbins won’t put up the million bucks ransom.  The well worn tropes can be greeted either with a yawn or as a welcome friend, depending on your mood, but writer/director  Daniel Schechter, along with his cast, wisely lay back and don’t push.  Only Will Forte’s wardrobe: too tight suits with long pointy shirt collars, shriek late-1980s fashion to forced comic effect.  (And the Maryland locations don’t look anything like suburban Detroit or Woodward Ave.)  But think of the film as a good common-denominator group choice.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   As mentioned above, JACKIE BROWN, by general consensus the best of all Elmore Leonard adaptations.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/jackie-brown-1997.html

LE DERNIER MILLIARDAIRE* (1934)

French writer/director René Clair had something of a charmed career from his first silents to his early sound features (late ‘20s thru 1933).  Everyone has their own favorite.  (SOUS LES TOITS DE PARIS/’30, anyone? https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/04/sous-les-tois-de-paris-under-roofs-of.html)  But his luck ran out (or was it his talent?; he never quite regained his standing) on this mega-flop satire on money & international finance.  Playing like an aria-free operetta, it’s a reverse-image MERRY WIDOW; here THE MERRY BACHELOR.  That’s middle-aged Max Dearly, the richest man in the world, called to return (with checkbook) to his country of birth as financial savior and proposed spouse of the country’s much younger princess.  Only this Native Son has stipulations: citizens must become a productive labor force, not the casino freeloaders they’d been before recent bankruptcies at the country’s gambling palaces shut off the easy money spigot.  Meanwhile, the Princess already has a young lover, a secret baby, too.  Over-dressed funny sets & funny costumes combined with over-eager funny playing hardly help.  Most painfully unfunny.  Clair imagining that everything is even funnier when repeated a dozen times.  Yikes!  Film scholars tell us that the film failed from Political Party Line critical response: for the LEFT a betrayal; for the RIGHT, a false prediction.  But even centrists bailed on this one.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  The year before, The Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP/’33, took on WAR instead of ECONOMICS, and hit all the marks Clair missed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *MILLIARDAIRE = BILLIONAIRE.

EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC (2025)

Another unmissable collaboration from exiled-Egyptian writer/director Tarik Saleh and frequent lead Fares Fares.  Third of his Egyptian Trilogy*, this one an Actor’s Tale in three parts: Comic Vanity, Ironic Seduction, Horrified Political Pawn.  It begins when iconic film star Fares gets an offer he can’t refuse to portray (in the best possible light) the rise to power of dictatorial Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.  Totally wrong physically (tall, lean, hawk-like face), but he’s not in a career position to say no.  He’s also too proud of his reputation to phone it in, especially when being coddled with encouragement & favors by El-Sisi’s military yes-men hovering about.  Inducement or threat?  Soon, he’s taking advantage of perks, asking favors for friends, family and assorted lovers old & new.  A discreet phone-call from these strangely obsequious uniformed men all that’s needed to ‘fix’ all sorts of things.  A living get out of jail free card.  Seductive indeed.  And if this section feels a bit less original, you’ve likely fallen for Saleh’s setup; a fake-out for a leading man who doesn’t know he’s in way over his head on a three-sided political power struggle.  Or which side he’s on, or supposed to be on, to help his rebellious son, resentful ex-wife, recent lover or reckless current lover all in possible danger of arrest or worse.  Saleh juggling characters & narrative lines of action without confusion for us or easy choices, let alone answers, for our likeable protagonist.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *THE HILTON INCIDENT/’17 followed by THE CAIRO CONSPIRACY/’19 (not yet seen here).  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-nile-hilton-incident-2017.html

GIVE US THIS NIGHT (1936)

This slight & silly operetta from Paramount, made to introduce popular Polish tenor Jan Kiepura, along with Metropolitan mezzo Gladys Swarthout, didn’t come off.  (Kiepura’s glamorous soprano wife Mártha Eggerth had much better luck stealing Gene Kelly away from Judy Garland in FOR ME AND MY GAL/’42.)  Yet, forgotten and hard-to-find, it holds a lot of interest in the career of iconic Golden Age Hollywood composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, to say nothing of five original numbers written for the film with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein.  Korngold, brought from Austria to Warner Bros. to handle the mishmosh of Mendelssohn used in scoring Max Reinhardt’s version of Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM/’35 (an enormous hit at the Hollywood Bowl/a money pit on film), Korngold then pit-stopped at Paramount to write & record NIGHT just as Warners desperately needed a score for the pricey CAPTAIN BLOOD/’35, first of the Errol Flynn/Michael Curtiz swashbucklers.  So, while finishing ‘post’ on his film operetta, Korngold had exactly three weeks to compose BLOOD.  As things turned out, NIGHT came out after BLOOD hit big (very big), and Korngold never had another chance on a full blown Hollywood operetta.*  This one, under Alexander Hall’s direction is okay (though what a voice Kiepura had, perfect for Korngold’s operatic triumph DIE TOTE START),  but feels awfully truncated at 1'17", including 40 minutes for song with quite a lot of plot to get thru.  Kiepura’s a happy Italian fisherman (yes, with a Polish accent) who sings to his catch (heck, the whole village sings).  Heard by an opera composer who wants to replace ageing tenor Alan Mowbray (very funny) he’s offered a job.  Only Momma; Momma she wants him to stay at-a home.  While fetching soprano Swarthout sees a new stage partner (maybe more).  Little does she know that her composer wants to propose with a just written love song sung to her by Kiepura!  Well, it’s that sort of thing.  But as a Hollywood road not taken, there’s considerable ‘what-if’ musical interest.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While never doing full-fledged lyric theater on film, Korngold was able to put plenty of vocal elements in his scores.  Check out the sailors bursting into song as they finally head for home in the middle of THE SEA HAWK/’40.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *M-G-M’s delirious operetta THE GREAT WALTZ/’38 doesn’t credit Korngold for putting all the Johann Strauss, Jr. music together which he did for the original B’way run in 1935.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-great-waltz-1938.html

INSIDE MAN (2006)

Spike Lee dropped issue-oriented auteur aspiration for hired-hand director in producer Brian Grazer’s tricked out bank robbery caper.*  (Did Grazer partner Ron Howard pass?)  No big themes in this one, just big movie stars jostling for attention (Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor) in Russell Gewirtz’s original screenplay.  Heist leader Owen clues us in via soliloquy right from the start, as does Lee who slips in one of those Zoom-In/Track-Out shots* famous from Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and Spielberg’s JAWS, a technique he’ll return to two or three times later when he’s not dancing his camera around the action.  Look for a real humdinger of a shot when chief hostage negotiator Washington glides toward us on some sort of tightly framed 'dolly' wagon while everyone else is running on foot.  Just how bored was Spike?  These technically showy things can be fun in the right situations, but here they’re just camouflage for a robbery/hostage drama that turns out to be a Shaggy Dog story.  Even treading water, all those stars were enough to make this a modest hit, but, for once, Hollywood didn’t fall for good grosses, and Gewirtz has had little to show over the next twenty years after this debut feature.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Best guess, Lee thought he could make a sort of TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE/DOG DAY AFTERNOON combo out of this.  Ironically, Denzel Washington remade PELHAM three years later.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Or is it Zoom-Out/Track-In?

NO NAME ON THE BULLET (1959)

Still short, but no longer young enough to play ‘The Kid,’ war-hero turned actor Audie Murphy caught a break playing a Bad Guy under Jack Arnold’s laconic direction* on this unusual chamber Western.  Not much in the way of action, romance, horsemanship or vistas, but branching off the ‘50s trend toward psychological Oaters toward, of all things, philosophy and semantics.  (Philosophy & semantics 101, but still . . . )  Structurally, a traditional Stranger-Comes-To-Town piece, Murphy’s a traveling hitman, a hired gun who stays technically not-quite-guilty by goading his assigned target into drawing first.  Feared and so well known, his name enough to trigger panic for half the men in town, causing unprovoked suicide, stress severed partnerships, fire sales.  Yet no one as yet even knows whom he’s come to kill.  Waiting till that effect fully settles in, Murphy strikes up an unlikely friendship with town Doc Charles Drake (excellent).  Playing chess and discussing which of the two helps humanity more; the professional killer who removes evil men standing beyond the law; or the principled physician who heals indiscriminately?  The dialogue ain’t G.B. Shaw, but it’s not bad.  With Arnold knowing just how much we can handle before the next threat, including a disrupted attempt at ‘premature justice’ from the town’s fair citizens against Murphy’s Angel of Death, our vastly outnumbered/out-gunned seasoned assassin.  The film even pulls off an unexpected victim to reveal at the climax, along with a clever way out of this philosophical pickle that avoids being a cop-out by inches.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Before Murphy went with Universal and (mostly) Westerns, he showed another kind of range in an early role working under John Huston on Stephen Crane’s THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE/’51.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/05/red-badge-of-courage-1951.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jack Arnold best known for iconic ‘50s Sci-Fi: CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON/’53; IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE/’53; THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN/’57.