THE MIRACLE RIDER (1935)

In the last decade of the silents, Tom Mix was, by some distance, the biggest of all cowboy stars.  Hardly remembered now, Talkies (and age) slowed him down, though still releasing multiple features each year before taking a two year break, returning in 1935, now 55, for one last roundup, this seriously successful/seriously fun serial from little Mascot Pictures.  At 15 ‘chapters’ (the first is double-length), the whole shebang runs just over five hours.  And worth every minute.  (Okay, every other minute.)  Well produced as these things go, co-directed by B. Reeves Eason and Armand Schaefer.  If Eason’s name rings a bell, he was largely responsible for the 1925 chariot race in BEN-HUR.  (Plus B-pic whiz Joseph H. Lewis (see GUN CRAZY/’50) as supervising editor.)  Mix and his amazing horse Tony Jr., still do all the stunts and those leaping mounts look painful, as do a few mountain tumbles for man & beast.  The horse wouldn’t be allowed to do them today.  The story ain’t bad, either.  Ranger Mix, protector of the local Indian tribe against a pair of White capitalist villains.  One running the general store wants to chase the Indians off their land and have the government buy his spare property for resettlement.  The other runs an oil distributor as cover, but wants the Natives off the reservation so he has exclusive access to a powerful explosive he hopes to mine.  Typically, the best episodes come early, look out for the mechanical radio controlled Firebird!  And Mix outnumbered by the villains, minions and a (coatless) turncoat Indian.  Chapters ending with the traditional cliffhanger (Is Tom Dead?) before doubling back Next Week to show how Mix jumped off the exploding bomb/derailed train/pilotless glider just in the nick of time.  The later episodes are in better physical shape.  Not exactly great, even as serial trash, but addictive.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The film yet another example of how often Indians weren’t treated just as marauding savages, but often shown with sympathy.  Patronized & infantilized by their Great White Hollywood Fathers.  Which portrayal is worse?  Discuss.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  During his peak years, Mix took a swing at expanding his range with something more serious, an excellent, if not well received 1925 adaptation of Zane Grey’s RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE/1925.  It makes a fine introduction for modern audiences to get to know Mix.  But hard-wired Mixologists find it a bit ‘high hat,’ and Mix-Nixers won’t give it a try. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  SUNSET/’88.  Blake Edwards’ Hollywood-set modern Western has Bruce Willis as Tom Mix and James Garners’ Wyatt Earp join forces to solve a showbiz murder.  Sounds promising, but it's all downhill (period inaccurate, pointlessly coarse and lazy plotting in Edwards’ late manner) after its neat action set-piece opening.

LUXURY LINER (1948)

Coasting thru the war years when just about anything made money, Hollywood peaked commercially in the afterglow year of 1946, then watched helplessly as the old studio system started to collapse.  A slow drip contraction of some twenty-years.  And while M-G-M didn’t fare much worse than other ‘majors,’ they had farther to fall.  (Note this handwriting on the wall a year before the Supreme Court vertical-integration ruling against the studios and even longer before television was having a serious financial effect.  What you do see are the old formulas curdling before your eyes, as in this idiotic showcase film, a typical Joe Pasternak family-friendly production, for Jane Powell.  More irritating brat than adorable baby coloratura, she’s a stowaway on Captain Daddy’s ocean liner so she can finally get some quality time with her single dad George Brent (looking quite stout in uniform) and play mismatching matchmaker to half the passengers onboard.  Lots of second-tier musical interludes (legendary, if aging Wagnerian heldentenor Lauritz Melchoir never did get film-friendly) though Xavier Cugat (plus band and chihuahua) show how to do this kind of silliness.   But Pasternak, here with kid actor turned mediocre director Richard Whorf, seems to have forgotten the rules for the distribution of laughs, tears and reconciliations, he once could pull off in his sleep.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  As we’ve mentioned before, 100 MEN AND A GIRL/’37, Pasternak’s best, also uses baby coloratura and single-father/daughter strained relationship as narrative engine.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/100-men-and-girl-1937.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  M-G-M’s tech crew gave the big ship some unusually clever process/model combo shots.  Very cool looking.  With a repeated shot from the side where the visual integration and grain match is stunning.

LYING LIPS (1939)

Oscar Micheaux, the go-to guy for film text-books needing an example on early independent Black cinema: the first Black to produce a silent feature; first to produce a Talkie; first to tackle race issues.  (He also takes it on the chin for using light-skinned Blacks as romantic leads and darker ones for laborers and villains.*)  Lots of cultural/political/social issues tied to this one-stop source.  Less discussed is whether Micheaux was any good as a filmmaker.  Of course, between lost titles and subfusc surviving film elements, it can be hard to tell.  But even a tight budget needn’t mean stiff, formal dialogue.  Letting characters come to dumb conclusions.  Or choosing bad camera placements.  Often, the best things on film are free.  Edna Mae Harris stars as a nightclub singer who refuses to play after-hours good-time-gal to fat-cat friends of the owners, instead going home to find her Aunt  murdered and herself set up for arrest.  Yikes!  It’s really an insurance scam and Edna, in spite of her protective lawyer/fiancé and top inner-city detective Robert Earl Jones (best thing in the film/father to you know who) stick to her side and eventually clear up the mystery.  Odd how the after-hours plot disappears.  But structure not Micheaux’s long suit.  Instead, piece by piece, the story lands and you can just make out what gave Micheaux a long career and made him, at least historically, important.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *It’s supposedly what got restauranteur Paula Dean in trouble with The Food Network execs: Light-skinned Blacks assigned to work ‘front of the house’; darker-skinned assigned to kitchen duty.

INFERNO (1953)

Weeks before 20th/Fox introduced CinemaScope (‘the miracle you see without glasses!’) to the public with THE ROBE, helping to speed an end to the brief early ‘50s 3-D craze, they released one of the better films made in the process.  Doubly ironic, since, like so many 3-D pics at the time, INFERNO largely distributed ‘flat,’ in 2-D.  Another POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE infidelity/murder story (though with different outcomes), the film’s mostly a three-hander, and good even in 2-D, with the guilty pleasure bonus of watching the action-packed last reel (actually two separate reels running in synch) hoarding most of the objects thrown directly at the camera.  Fun spotting even in 2-D.  (Make it a drinking game!). Journeyman director Roy Ward Baker runs a cool, clean narrative as lethal lovers Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan try to get away with the murder of Robert Ryan, Fleming’s rich, older, selfish husband, abandoning him in the desert with a broken leg before carefully setting the scene to make it look like his own doing.  Only wily Ryan proves too stubborn, too ornery, and too self-reliant to die.  And the longer he can keep going, the more chance he’ll be rescued.  There’s a good cast in support (Carl Betz, Henry Hull, Larry Keating), with cleverly worked out falling objects for those 3-D effect shots, and the great Lucien Ballard to shoot them.  Along with LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN/’45, one of the rare TechniColor & sunshine noirs, even rarer with 3-D.

CONTEST:  Explain why these early ‘50s 3-D films always ran about 80 minutes (with half-point intermissions) to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streaming film of your choice.  (NOTE: Professional film projectionists ineligible.)

FIRE WILL COME / O QUE ARDE (2019)

Paris-born, but with a Spanish heritage, director Oliver Laxe currently breaking beyond the film fest circuit and gaining attention on SIRAT/’25, his fourth film (not seen here).  It follows a father & son thru North African ‘rave’ sites as they search for the man’s missing daughter.  This, his previous effort, follows a paroled arsonist (he started a mountain forest fire that threatened his own Northern Spain village) as he tries to restart a life after two years in prison.  Unsurprisingly, no one wants much to do with him.  But, as Robert Frost put it, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’  So, holed up with his aging mother, he halfheartedly looks for work, but seems reluctant to try to connect with anyone, even new people in town.  Guilt/innocence/actions never discussed, all settled by small town gossip  & misery.  Even the incessant rain working against hope or redemption. Inevitably, another blaze will look like his doing.  And here, Laxe’s treatment breaks down, unwilling to speculate on the situation other than one physical altercation with a suspicious neighbor.  Laxe entirely focused on fate, a traumatic tone and the physical atmosphere.  But perhaps avoiding the elephant in the room, adds to the mesmerizng atmosphere.  Filming and the non-pro cast (particularly Benedicta Sánchez as the mother) impeccable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Obviously, SIRAT, which sounds fascinating.

SISU (2022)

The Finnish title may be untranslatable (think ‘Back-against-the-wall indomitable courage’), but the action, ultra-violence and gore easily cross international borders since director Jalmari Helander makes this WWII chase-and-shoot thriller neatly balanced between mirth, mayhem & absurdity.  The look seemingly realistic and stylized; not so much the expected Asian Martial Arts, more like a Chuck Jones Road Runner cartoon.  Finland tundra in for South West canyons.  Plus a twist: Wile E. Coyote is our heroic alter-ego.  With apologies to Ernest Hemingway, it’s THE OLD MAN AND THE NAZIS.  Finnish sniper Jorma Tommila (a one-man killing unit) had been taking out hundreds of Russians like a scythe running thru a wheat field early in the war before walking away from battle to mine for gold.  But the changing landscape of war in 1944 sees retreating Nazi forces after him and his stash.  So now it’s the Nazis’ turn to die in the hunt.  A crash landing, a hanging, a drowning, nothing seems able to stop this guy.  More than tough, he’s downright immortal.  Held to a brisk 91" (any longer and it would collapse from CGI fatigue which it almost does in a flying sequence), but taken on its own terms, it’s effective and weirdly fun.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A Finnish production, but made in English.

RED WING (2013)

A Hallmark cable movie from deep-think autuer Terrence Malick?  This landscape besotted adaptation of an 1840s George Sand novel (FRANÇOIS LE CHAMPI/FRANK THE FOUNDLING) feels like it might be.  Actually, Malick only exec produced, Will Wallace takes credit (if that’s the word) for directing.  With a Book of Saints æsthetic to exploit the visual harmony of man, nature and Texas in the 1970s, young Glen Powell (25 at the time) plays a naïve & sentimental foundling (a regular Billy Budd), honest, handsome, hardworking, friend to man & beast, earning his keep in the field thru his adolescence (and beyond) on a small farm where surrogate Mom (Breann Johnson) watches over him and mean, lazy surrogate Dad (Luke Perry) takes umbrage with a beer chaser.  Shying off the town ladies who hit on him, he starts rumors by not screwing indiscriminately.  No surprise, jealousy gets him kicked out of the house.  But a few days on the road finds a new farm and a chance to begin making the same personal choices & mistakes.  For some reason, the women in the film are terrible actors (laughably transparent), the men somewhat better.  Bill Paxton fine as farm owner #2, and there’s instant actor/audience rapport from kid ‘brother’ Lucas Adams.   But Wallace’s presentation so hackneyed, they might have done better setting this in the 1870s rather than the 1970s.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *To judge by the movie marque in town (they seem to be showing Robert Altman’s THE WEDDING) it’s 1978, the same year Terence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN came out.  Nice try guys.  But this little Texas bijou would never have booked that Altman flop.  Though it’s  a sure bet anything they would have shown would have had just as many embarrassingly crappy music videos in it.

TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE (1945)

Comic films noir, a sub-genre generally best avoided, tend to have less laughs than straight noir; and no discernable suspense.  But here’s a happy exception from early in noir master director Anthony Mann’s career.  Not much known for comedy, perhaps that’s his secret.  Rather than going for laughs, he plays the game straight; making sure his plot holds water.  Pleasingly cockeyed rather than dumb.  It also has the striking advantage of debuting noir icon Jane Greer, already showing cool heat in support.  Elsewise, lead couple, top cop, crime reporter, all pull together on a script that rarely sinks for a laugh.  (From a Gelett Burgess novel previously filmed as TWO IN THE DARK/’36 - not seen here.)  Tom Conway (the non-caddish kid brother of George Sanders) is nearly hit by cute cabbie Ann Rutherford.  Already conked on the head, he’s got temporary amnesia and a likely murder rap chasing him.  Who is he?  Figure that out to find the real murderer among a bunch of B’way writers, producers & actors before the cops move in for an arrest.  Less innocent man on the run than innocent man running in society and theatrical circles.  Neatly played and written, with quick answers and solutions, the film doesn’t overplay for easy laughs, but leads us toward believable motives and solutions.  But all bets are off when Greer shows up as a B’way sharpie who knows what’s going on.  Poor Ann Rutherford, pleasant enough as a sympathetic cabbie sidekick to Conway’s confused suspect, hasn’t a chance once this Always-Gets-What-She-Wants femme fatale shows up.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Jane Greer’s main claim to noir immortality stems from OUT OF THE PAST/’47, but for lighthearted noir stylings, try THE BIG STEAL/’49.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/07/big-steal-1949.html

JUVENILE COURT (1973)

From late/great documentarian Frederick Wiseman (dead last month at 96, his most recent film out in 2023), this early masterpiece in his favored fly-on-the-wall manner remains one of his best; certainly one of his most influential, inspiring thousands of syndicated hours of copycat courtroom tv drama.  Most of them spoiled by textbook melodrama; literally so thru underscored speech & action.  These offshoots quite a contrast to Wiseman’s slow-burn purity & effectiveness in his approach on a handful of cases, gray areas left intact.  Everyone given as much sympathy as Wiseman is able to generate.  With far more comfort & care, and a lack of jaded behavior from this Memphis, TN courthouse staff, than you’d expect.  More staff Blacks than you expect, too.   How different this might have looked ten years earlier.  Wiseman holds back the most complex case for the end (the film running about two and a half hours without a wasted minute).  Deeply empathetic with a thoughtful even-handed judge and an uncomprehending sacrifice to the system bringing the most emotional moments in the film.  But you’ll find your own case of special interest.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Some of the cases don’t finish, but are sent to continue in another court giving no closure after we’ve invested ourselves in some kind of outcome.  A commission from the Wiseman Estate on a Project Update to run as a coda to the film would be just the thing.