THE BIRDS, THE BEES AND THE ITALIANS / SIGNORE & SIGNORI* (1966)

Commedia all'italiana master Pietro Germi, best known for DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE/’61, goes to Treviso for a triptych of one-act sex farces within an unchanging cast of middle-aged middle-class Lotharios.  Story #1 centers on a socially connected doctor whose long-time pal is struggling with a bout of impotence.  The weakest and most stereotypical of the three  stories, the guy who can’t keep his pants on also can’t get it up!  But what if the cure turned out to be a quickie with the Doc’s wife?  The betrayal cure.  Tired stuff.  But improvement is just around the corner in story two.  Here, when a long-standing extramarital affair is exposed, the husband’s not ashamed, but relieved, even shaving off his goatee to celebrate his new freedom.  But since family ties can’t be clipped off quite as easily as a goatee, the story’s not over till the fashionably thin wife sings.  Spot on perfs all ‘round, and unexpected real emotion between comic playing.  Nice use of the confused son & daughter, too.  Then the last story blows them all away as a willing young beauty uses her allure & availability like a credit card.  (Germi brutally frank as needed.)  But when the girl’s peasant father shows up to collect, threatening the five men who’ve been partaking, he has a trump card to play.  His girl is still a minor.  Regrets, scandal, incompetent lawyer, outraged judge, real trouble in Treviso.  Germi not fooling around.  Enter one of the wives.  She knows the score.  She’s known the score; and not just the sexual score.  Plus faith that the rich have their ways (they write the rules), while the poor, especially the undeserving poor (the girl’s father thrilled at the cash he thinks is coming) always end up with the short end of the stick.  As if the poor man forgot: in Italian; commedia all'italiana doesn’t only mean comedy.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Try a Germi outlier, ALFREDO, ALFREDO/’72 with Dustin Hoffman going all Italian on us.  (Dubbed on the Italian track, he does his own talking in the English language dub.)   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/alfredo-alfredo-1972.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *For once, the Stateside title improves on the generic original.

PAVANE / PABANNEU (2026)

Everything feels secondhand sourced in Korean writer/director Lee Jong-pil’s sudsy romance for regular guy Moon Sang-min and regular gal Ko Ah-sung who meet and incrementally fall for each other at the department store they work at.  He’s new there, a tall shy type starting part-time in the parking garage where, many floors above, Plain Jane Ko already works.   Plus Byun Yo-han ile hanging around as third-wheel to offer tips & world-weary advice as philosopher, musician & comic cut-up.  Writer Lee’s best idea shows how the large department store functions like an extension of high school with cliques and strict pecking orders, a place where uniformed glam girls rule the roost selling designer goods on upper floors, and parking attendants work, appropriately enough, in the basement.  Plenty of gossip on who’s seeing whom, too.  The staff watching live on video chat.  Most of the film script worked out in a fog of predetermined fatalism, noble renunciation of desire and life-changing miscues.  With a colorful look that tries to hide its condescending view on the also-rans of this world.   As if director Lee had put in an order of MARTY/’55 and AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER/’57 smothered with Wong Kar-Wai secret sauce.

EXTREME MEASURES (1996)

Everybody’s slumming in this paranoid medical thriller . . . and that’s a good thing.  Taken any more seriously, the whole movie would collapse.  Basically yet another ‘doctor plays God’ number, with the old Dr. Frankenstein & Monster horror model replaced by a newer suspense template taken largely from Robin Cook & Michael Crichton’s COMA/’78.  Here, Manhattan Emergency doc Hugh Grant, still floppy of hair, but stutter-free with medical jargon, inexplicably loses a patient and can’t figure out why since the hospital morgue has inexplicably lost the body.  Seems they never had it.  Is he being gaslighted?  What’s going on.  Who’s behind this?  Pressured to drop it, Grant investigates all the more and soon finds himself framed (with stolen/planted drugs) to shut him up and drum him out of work.  But, as in any good Hitchcockian innocent on the run pic, there’s a blonde to help, Sarah Jessica Parker.  Digging up a name in the files for Grant, he now can follow a series of clues leading to an empty wheat field . . . er, a subway underworld of homeless who knew the missing dead man.  But Grant, in turn, is also being followed.  Followed by two hitmen, the guys who planted drugs and trashed his apartment.  Enter moving subway train and a fight on the tracks.  Yikes!  Finally, he reaches fanatical research neurologist Gene Hackman.  (Co-star billing and a fat paycheck for 15 minutes of screen time.  You go, Gene!)  Scripter Tony Gilroy revels rather than hides some of the sillier plot holes.  (No one in New York has heard of a neurological clinic located in its own dedicated billion-dollar building, even printing the company name on plastic gift bags?)  And if director Michael Apted’s action chops are stronger with street traffic than in fights, he compensates by letting cinematographer John Bailey hit us with crazy sharp hospital interiors (no smoke or filters to soften the 1970s style image), holding back dark atmospherics to depict Grant’s slide toward danger.  Those who can shut off the right side of the brain may find this good dopey fun.  Plausibility sticklers, may like it even better.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Unusually good NYC location spotting all thru the film.  Even some of the interiors are real.  Grant’s trashed apartment no doubt a studio set, but his switchback stairway is the real deal.

SATURDAY’S CHILDREN (1940)

Considerably adapted by twin writers Julius & Philip Epstein from a now forgotten Pulitzer Prize winning 1927 Maxwell Anderson play, this B+ feature uses A-list creatives for what is essentially a test-run to see if new tough-guy phenom John Garfield could play rom-com (he can!); and if maturing ingenue Anne Shirley could fill in for troublesome Olivia de Havilland* (nope).  And if the film doesn’t quite come off, it does avoid the forced tone of too many Warners comedies, intelligently touching on current economic & office workplace issues.  Shirley, in a role the young Ruth Gordon originated, meets-cute on the job with Garfield, whose dream of making a fortune abroad is shot down when Shirley follows her older sister’s advice to make him jealous so he’ll propose.  Act Two shows him having second thoughts when, once again, big sis has a suggestion for Shirley: tell him you’re pregnant and he’ll have to stay.*  This all comes from the play, but they’ve added some melodrama for eccentric Pop Claude Rains, and tamed the newlyweds’ relationship by dropping a separation and her move into a rooming house.  Even so, all her role playing at home and at work offer plenty to chew on.  Note who gets laid off from work when there’s a downturn in foreign sales.  Director Vincent Sherman*, still young & hungry in the early ‘40s, lets, rather than makes things happen.  While strict mores at home & office do the rest.  Too bad they puff up the melodrama with a dash to the rescue.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Post GONE WITH THE WIND/’39, de Havilland demanded better vehicles, hence troublesome; at least in the eyes of Jack Warner.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Later on, Sherman often assigned to handle stars on the wane.  But try him at his best in 1943's THE HARD WAY.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-hard-way-1943.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Warning!  The following is pure speculation.  The Epstein brothers add a scene at the doctor’s office to show Shirley really is pregnant, not tricking Garfield.  But in the play, she’s not pregnant, but adopting her sister’s suggestion to say she is to keep her husband from that overseas job.  The play would then end with the truth coming out but a face-saving plan to have a kid ASAP.  An ending ‘borrowed’ by Tennessee Williams in his CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF third act rewrite, made under orders from original stage director Elia Kazan.  (Okay, make that complete speculation.)

HOUDINI (2014)

Of the half-dozen film, cable and tv-movies on Harry Houdini, early 20th century magician, escape artist, amateur spy and spiritualist debunker (a man whose name, a hundred years after his death, can still sell a bio-pic), only two seem to matter.  From producer George Pal, fanciful in 1953 for M-G-M*; and, from writer Nicholas Meyer in 2014, rather less fanciful for The History Channel in a three-hour two-part mini-series.  And while there’s residual affection for the earlier film (near newlyweds Tony Curtis & Janet Leigh star), this modern version with Adrien Brody, beats it in nearly every category.  (‘Nearly’ because Curtis is the better physical match.)  Director Uli Edel, if occasionally held back by his budget on dead studio exteriors, generally does better with suspenseful stage acts than with personalities.  Anything with a ticking clock comes to life; Mom Houdini and Mrs. Houdini fare less well.  But it’s a kick to see Brody (in stupendous shape) having fun in front of the lens for a change.  And if savvy modern audiences are a step or two ahead of any camera tricks selling the magic, credit Edel for getting so much to work.  So, stop raising that eyebrow at some of the less likely events (Houdini given such familiarity with the Tsar’s family?) and give Meyer’s fabulist take on the legend a shot.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *See for yourself.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/houdini-1953.html

AQUARIUS (2016)

Last year’s international must-see, THE SECRET AGENT/’25 (not seen here), was a breakthru for Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho, in spite of nearly twenty years’ work.  But this earlier high-profile film probably not the best place to start.*   Sonia Braga, best remembered Stateside for KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN/’85 and the popular, if vaguely appalling DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS/’76, stars in this lumpy saga as a hold out tenant who refuses to leave her handsome, if frozen-in-time beachfront apartment, stopping a big development project by stubbornly refusing even good offers family and ex-tenants pressure her to accept so they can get their payouts.  We’ve seen this one before, though with a lot less sex.  Everyone seems to be getting it on.  Even those pushy developers rent the deserted apartment directly above Sonia for a noisy orgy.  It doesn’t drive Braga away; instead, a peek at the action makes her horny enough to call up a handsome sex worker and have a go at her place.  (Okay, we’ve not seen that one before.)  There’s something ‘off’ (performative) about her encounters with middle-aged gal-pals and worried family members; as if we were watching The Real Widows of Recife.  Things get only weirder as Mendonça Filho strips gears to shift into a third act of skullduggery & property rights in a dastardly plot to degrade the building and force her out with a termite-riddled coup de théâtre.  Well, something’s termite ridden.

WATCH THIS, NpOT THAT/LINK:  *Instead, try Mendonça Filho’s intriguing first feature NEIGHBORING SOUNDS/’14.  (THE SECRET AGENT is in our cue.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/o-som-ao-reder-neighboring-sounds.html

TWO PROSECUTORS / ZWEI STAATSANWÄLTE (2025)

Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was (if possible) even more paranoid than usual in the mid-‘30s, before his ill-fated Nazi Pact and the ‘Great Patriotic War’ split his attention . . . for a while.  But it’s 1937 when this steely paced/inexorable miscarriage-of-Soviet-justice story plays out.  Alerted by a letter written in blood from within a fortress-like prison far from Moscow’s center of power, a local, idealistic State prosecutor (Alexander Kuznetsov, whose boxing past has given him an addictively photogenic face - half boyish/half smashed) follows up on the complaint by honoring the prisoner’s right to an interview.  Evidence of NKVD torture on ths longtime committed Communist not only confirming the man’s story, but giving support to tales of similar treatment thru-out the province prisons.  Much of it stemming from his refusal to certify official Death Warrants of innocent men; himself included.  Taking up the old man’s case against prison guards & the NKVD (the future KGB), the new State Prosecutor, a tru-believer in the Soviet system as outlined in its constitution, may be idealistic, but not so naive to think he’d have a chance to do anything locally.  So, without appointment, he’s off to Moscow in hope of seeing the USSR Attorney General.  No surprise where this is heading, but co-writer/director Sergey Loznitsa’s meticulous physical realization (the film shot in Latvia), and formal structural design (basically two long interviews: tortured prisoner and young prosecutor; young prosecutor and plainspeaking Attorney General); followed by a quickstep coda showing the NKVD trap awaiting him, no anomaly, but Kremlin-approved policy.  Played for suspense or shock this would fall flat as a blini, but comes alive when played as Greek Tragedy, predetermined ‘ot A do Ya’ (from A to Zed).  Why generations of Russians, a country all but synonymous with Revolution, put up with these conditions, probably unanswerable by anyone not part of the system.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Armando Iannucci’s bleakly hilarious THE DEATH OF STALIN comes within shouting distance of understanding/explaining the Russian attitude, if not the Russian soul.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-death-of-stalin-2017.html

SYNCHRONIC (2019)

ALL SPOILERS!  Skip this if you don’t want to know everything in advance.  Better yet, skip the film.  Anthony Mackie & Jamie Dornan, joined-at-the-hip New Orleans EMT paramedics, currently inundated with ODs from a new, potent designer drug marketed as ‘Synchronic,’ find this powerful hallucinogenic leaving a wake of dead or disappeared users.  Something almost sentient about this pill: its favorite book would have to be A WRINKLE IN TIME; favorite movie BACK TO THE FUTURE.  So when Dornan’s teenage girl goes missing from using the stuff (a runaway from home or lost in a time continuum?), perhaps there’s an explanation.  Going thru a bad personal patch, Mackie & Dornan may be fighting like an old couple, but hey!, family’s family, and a recent diagnosis of brain cancer emboldens Mackie to test the waters on Synchronic’s metaphysical properties and bring the girl back.  Co-directors Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (Benson also scripted) play blind man’s bluff with the audience (a spare one, the film tanked) with spooky lighting, creepy score, inexplicably precise time leaps.  Really nothing you wouldn’t expect here, dumb genre logic, but cross the line with ‘progressive’ racial tropes long past their sell-by date.  From the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, the sacrificial Black Man giving his life to save his White pal* (here the pal's daughter) and, far worse, a revival of the ‘80s/‘90s Magical Negro character.  Benson doubling down by setting the climax at some Civil War battle with Mackie mistaken for a runaway slave.  Yikes!  Pretty good reviews and award action on this one.  Go figure.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT (not that you could find it!):  *On a DANNY THOMAS HOUR anthology show from 1967 (‘The Enemy’), Sammy Davis Jr, who got stuck with a lot of sacrificial Black friend to White ‘brother’ roles, outdoes them all in a little WWII drama when he discovers who the Nazi infiltrator is in his army unit after the undercover German agent mispronounces the ‘N’ word as ‘Neigher.’  Sammy risking all to save the unit yelling back ‘It’s Nigger, you Nazi rat!  Nigger!.’  (Or something like that; it’s been a while!)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One happy surprise is a neat bit of support (about a scene & a half) from Ramiz Monsef as Synchronic’s remorseful developer, now trying to undo some of the damage.

SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS (1955)

Inadequate, even risible assignments under contract to Universal didn’t stop Tony Curtiz from breaking out in the 1950s.  But things suddenly improved, likely in the nick of time, on loan-out for his next film after this, co-starring with Burt Lancaster in TRAPEZE/’56.   (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/trapeze-1956.html)   After that, even Universal had to step up with better scripts.  Before then, this fact-inspired pic probably best of a bad lot.  Curtis is a juvenile delinquent in Boston (or rather debuting Sal Mineo as his younger self is) who likes the easy cash too much to ever straighten up.  Hit by a bullet as he runs from arresting beat-cop George Nader, the two develop a wary relationship with Curtis stooling for Nader, and Nader’s cop always giving the kid one more chance to make good.  Eventually, this pattern will backfire on Nader’s rep, when, after two decades and a World War, Curtis becomes suspect #1 in the infamous 2.5 mill armored truck robbery THE BRINK’S JOB.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-brinks-job-1978.html)  With Joseph Pevney’s solid if unimaginative direction much helped by lenser William Daniels’ deglamorized æsthetic.  (Real Boston exteriors and interiors; note the varying acoustics.)  And while there’s not a lot of surprises in how things turn out or how punishment is dealt, some blunt disdain toward Fed authority blundering into a local crime isn’t something you expect to see in a 1955 film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The following year, M-G-M’s SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME/’56 took on similar tough 'truthy' tenement tones: Brooklyn in for Boston; boxing in for robbery; Paul Newman* (born 1925 - half Jewish) in for Tony Curtis (born 1925 - all Jewish); catchy title track sung by Perry Como in for less catchy title track sung by Sammy Davis Jr,; Upbeat vs Downbeat ending; studio recreations in for real locations; master craftsman Robert Wise directing instead of journeyman Pevney.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/07/somebody-up-there-likes-me-1956.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Newman himself a last-minute replacement for the late James Dean.