BARDEJOV (2024)

From the personal memories of its producer, Emil A. Fish, seven when he witnessed the events shown (now in his 80s, this his sole involvement with film), a modestly-scaled Holocaust story from Bardejov, Slovakia that plays like a local folk tale of cunning and hope.  It might be a superior After School Special about a roundup within the relatively well-to-do Jews of Bardejov in the early 1940s, trying to survive under the constantly growing restrictions put on them as local officials & the Slovakian military follow Nazi orders passed along by their own government.  But in a small town where ethnic/religious lines are often crossed between friendly neighbors, so too are lines of command and loyalties.  An attitude that makes a daring life or death rescue just possible.  Robert Davi plays successful businessman Rafuel Lowy  head of the what’s left of the Jewish Committees within the Town Council, his authority now little more than a front he maintains thru force of personality.  And when the latest edict comes down to send most of the young Jewish girls to work in a shoe factory hundreds of miles away he’s naturally suspicious.  Powerless, but with a few connections he can still call on, he learns their true destination, along with Jewish girls from all over the country is the Death Camps of Auschwitz.  The theme and storyline by now overly familiar, but there’s something to be said about a straightforward, uncomplicated telling.  And director Danny A. Abeckaser, shooting mostly in Israel, puts up a convincing Slovakian environment.  Or does once you adjust to accented English-language dialogue and filming technique/production values out of the 1950s.  Survivor Emil Fish was determined to get his story on film, not to chase humanitarian awards.  And that he does.  Just remember to set expectations at a reasonable level.  And to have a tolerance for a score that goes heavy on klezmer-like clarinet stylings.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The go-to orchestral tinta on Jewish stories used to be ‘cello heavy, now, it’s all swooping/squealing klezmer clarinet.

SISTERS (1972)

Perhaps we’ll hold off on revisiting early Brian De Palma for a bit.  Not doing him (or me) any favors.*  This jokey horror number about a paranoid serial killer, loaded with obvious talent and snarky overreach, not improving with age.  And with his signature reflexive nods at Alfred Hitchcock looking more than ever like product placement.  (Or is it some drinking game De Palma plays with himself?  PSYCHO, SPELLBOUND, REAR WINDOW, many more if you listen as well as look; plus a self-quoting Bernard Herrmann score.  You can all but hear De Palma laughing up his sleeve when he puts Charles Durning in as Grace Kelly.)  The story, a creepy little thriller with Margot Kidder as the serial killer half of separated Siamese twins . . . or is it the sister?  (Watch for a brief news docu on the subject, the film’s comic highlight.)  With sick gags that grow wearisome faster than Kidder’s French accent, misdirection and gore galore.  And that worst of all ‘70s tropes, the early slaughter of a disposable Black character.  Eventfully, De Palma gets to his twist ending, but not before showing off with unnecessary split-screen parallel action.  Later, he’d improve on his model, but you only have to compare early De Palma to early David Cronenberg, a near contemporary, to see how some vintages age into complexity while others simple sour.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Same-O on De Palma’s much-admired BLOW OUT/’81.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/fiercely-admired-fiercely-reviled-brian.html

STREET OF CHANCE (1930)

Debonaire & ironic, perfect in any mode, mood or genre (comedy, period drama, romance, even villainy in his early silents), William Powell is now mostly remembered for the 13 films he made at M-G-M with Myrna Loy (‘34 - ‘47), nearly half of those Nick & Nora/THIN MAN pics.  Less celebrated are the six with his other major screen partner, Kay Francis at Paramount & then Warners.  The two sets actually have similar batting averages (and best of the lot team Francis*), but crucially, the first four with Francis are Early Talkies, which can be slow, stiff, technically challenged, something of an acquired taste.  Well, here’s a chance to acquire it.  A superior example of its kind, reasonably lively direction from John Cromwell, plenty of Pre-Code Paramount sophistication, in a milieu familiar from Damon Runyon’s GUYS AND DOLLS with Powell as a combo Nathan Detroit/Sky Masterson.  But no Musical Comedy, this one leaning toward dead serious underworld melodrama.  Powell’s ‘Natural’ Davis, real name James Marsden, a bond trader whose wife (Kay Francis) is done waiting for him to quit the gambling racket.  And he would, but finds he’s stuck for one more epic match when cocky kid brother Regis Toomey comes to town (with new wife Jean Arthur), eager to take on this ‘Natural’ Davis character, unaware it’s his very own big brother.  Yikes!  Can Powell take him to the cleaners and get the gambling bug permanently out of his system?  Even if someone has to die trying?  The final game, after thousands of variations, still damn suspenseful.  And the film not afraid to let the ‘wrong’ people lose.  Watch Cromwell on a wild tracking shot that moves all around Francis’s apartment; so pleased at pulling off this technically tricky shot he repeats it near the end.   A properly restored edition would make this an even easier sell.

DOUBLE/LINK:  *That’d be the heavenly romance of ONE WAY PASSAGE/’32.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/02/one-way-passage-1932.html

DEPARTMENT Q THE ABSENT ONE / FASANDRÆBERNE (2016)

Currently streaming on NetFlix as DEPT. Q, the Scots-set/English-language redo of this series has a glamorously distressed Matthew Goode leading a motley squad thru Cold Case files; this is the second of the four Danish films it came out of.  (First one covered here:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/03/department-q-keeper-of-lost-causes.html.)  Mikkel Nørgaard again directs Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the intense, self-destructive lead detective and Fares Fares is his relatively cool-headed second second.  This case pulls up a twenty year old double murder involving a cover-up by rich & powerful types, a posh private school for the entitled where everyone met & mingled, sexual blackmail, a fallen woman with secrets to hide (if she can just stay alive), and of course that school days double murder.  A nasty piece of business compared to the first case, but effective in its darker manner.  It does lay things on pretty thick; the bad guys don’t exactly kick a dog, but they do bring a zebra to their sporting club for the annual hunt.  Not seen here, but apparently 3 and 4 are stronger entries in the series.  Still, this will do in a pinch.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Elsewhere on the internet, this time from Sweden,  DET SOM GÖMS I SNÖ  /  THE TRUTH WILL OUT/’18; ‘21 might be another version of the same Cold Case set-up.  Pretty good, though without the glam lead.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Just once, it’d be nice to see one of these over-obsessive types keep a promise to show for a family event: a school recital, Mom’s birthday dinner, Grandpa’s operation, a child’s hockey game, church choir practice!  In spite of beeps, buzzers & texts invading our screens, they can't set an alarm on their smart phone?

DERSU UZALA (1975)

After a career threatening triple blow (latest film on Tokyo have-nots, DODES'KA-DEN/’70, not just rejected, but killing his new Directors’ Commune with their first release, then an apparent suicide attempt), Akira Kurosawa returned to active filmmaking with this Russian-Japanese production.  A straightforward, intensely moving tale of Man, Nature & Friendship, epic and intimate, more importantly, beautifully realized.  Dersu Uzala (Maksim Munzuk), a solitary hunter in the uncharted Russian East (his family lost years ago to smallpox), he’s both aging & ageless, when he comes across a military surveying unit, led by Captain Vladimir Arsenev* (Yuriy Solomin).  With cunning awareness and superior knowledge of the ways, whys & wheres of the forest, Uzala soon becomes invaluable guide & guru, ready for almost any situation, even as the men tease him for his honesty & innocence.  But it’s the fast-developing bond with the Captain that leads the film thru a series of adventures and close calls.  Captured in immaculate scenes that have the rapture of early silent cinema, of something caught in the moment.  (We might be watching Lumière Brothers' ‘actualités’ from 1895 or an early D.W. Griffith California short made near the time of this story.)  The film structured in two halves and an epilogue, matching the two expeditions Captain Arsenev had with Uzala as guide, and the failed attempt to bring the now truly aging woodsman into the comfort of city civilization.  Fitted with one life-scaled, yet majestic set piece after another, though nothing (perhaps in all film) tops the storm sequence in the first half when last year’s stiff stalks of grass, are gathered at a frenzied pace by the two exhausted men to create a sort of grass igloo as overnight protection from a fast-coming blizzard and certain death.  The sort of patient excitement thrillingly realized thru-out the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Kurosawa’s return to form lasted thru his next film, KAGEMUSHA/’80.  After that, overreach and a great man’s scrappings.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kagemusha-1980.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *The story adapted from Arsenev’s memoirs about his expeditions, including his time with Uzala, while military surveyor to the Czar.  Editions in English available online.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention to the frame ratio.  Shot on 70mm (though mostly seen in 35mm anamorphic transfers), some video sources stretch the image wider than the than the 2.2 (or 2.35) : 1 Kurosawa uses.  (This problem not always apparent in the opening credits,)

FIRST TO FIGHT (1967)

Useful in showing just how cluelessly out-of-touch major studios had become by the 1960s (especially on mid-list releases), not good for much else.  This formulaic WWII tale (very loosely fact-based) was made for an audience that no longer existed.  It follows a Guadalcanal survivor, now a Medal of Honor Marine, sent home after battle on a bond-selling/morale-boosting tour across American where he finds love & marriage before returning on active duty to discover he’s lost his nerve.  Chad Everett, one of the last old-school studio contract players, blows any shot at movie stardom (he’d settle comfortably into series tv*) proving charmless in love & war as he aggressively courts chilly tour organizer Marilyn Devin, a ‘Tippi’ Hedren type who’s sex-wary after losing her husband at Pearl Harbor.  Directed with zero flair by Howard Hawks protégé Christian Nyby, this Warner Bros. release apes the bright, cheap-looking ‘60s Universal house style (underdressed interior sets, flat lighting, soundstage exteriors that look like Revell scale-models).  The film briefly livens up when sixth-billed Gene Hackman comes on in the third act to witness Everett’s battlefield collapse.  Lots of noisy ordinance exploded, but you can still hear old Hollywood dying not with a bang, but with a whimper.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Chad Everett hit big on tv with MEDICAL CENTER, but he’s mostly remembered for a testy appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, guest #2 after Lily Tomlin.  Women’s Rights in the air at the time (1972) and Everett, talking about all the animals he owns on his farm, includes the wife.  Yikes!  She’s the most important one he owns!  Ha ha.  Tomlin jumps up; walks out; big media the next day.  (See many clips on youtube.)  Few remember there’s even worse to come.  Post Tomlin, the show goes on with guest #3: World Famous poet, Mr. Age of Anxiety W.H. Auden, who hasn’t the slightest idea who any of these people are.  Or that Everett has just read a poem about his wife he had in a magazine.  Instead, Auden goes into benign entertainment mode, delighting all with a few of the short ditties he wrote for fun. ‘John Milton; Never stayed at a Hilton; Hotel; Which is just as well.’  At which point, Everett leans in to mention his literary output, saying  ‘We poets’ as he gestures toward Auden.  This is why people miss the ‘Seventies.  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That ‘whimper’ would include the film’s soundtrack, loaded with replays of ‘As Time Goes By’ from CASABLANCA/’42, seen in an extended clip in the wrong frame ratio.

REMEMBER (2015)

Effective, gimmicky, clever (too clever?), Atom Egoyan’s Holocaust-haunted movie, from an original screenplay by Benjamin August, plays like the Auschwitz revenge mystery Agatha Christie never got around to.*  And if that idea offends, perhaps not a film for you.  (Maybe even if you’re not offended.)  But on its own terms, with an ending O. Henry might have worked up for THE TWILIGHT ZONE, not without interest and a unique point-of-view.  In a modern Jewish assisted-living/Old Age home, Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau are the only survivors from the Auschwitz death camps, last to remember the block warden who murdered their families.  A man both have sworn to kill in revenge if they ever find him.  Landau now too frail to take on the mission/Plummer still physically able, but with his wife recently dead, rapidly sinking into dementia.  But with four possible matches scattered out West, his mission is also a race against time.  The best parts of the film come in simply watching Plummer navigate travel obstacles and his own cognitive decline.  (A great ironic bit reveals he’s crossed the border back from Canada when a security guard finds his gun, but its no big deal since this is America, where any feeble confused gentleman can carry a ‘glock.’  Here, the film’s grand lack of subtlety works like a charm, elsewhere, as he keeps finding the ‘’wrong’ fellow with the right name on his hunt, the basic gag wears thin.  Then there’s the big triple lutz twist ending (it’s a ‘Luke, I am your father’ moment) too neatly explains inconsistencies in Plummer’s character, and lands us in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS denouement territory.  I don’t mind that it’s cheap dramatics, I mind that Egoyan & August think they’re being profound.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Plummer, Landau and Bruno Ganz have all died since this came out.  But not before giving us another 27 credits.  Add on the still active Jürgen Prochnow and that number jumps to an impressive 39.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Or perhaps HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY.

SMART GIRLS DON’T TALK (1948)

Other than Virginia Mayo (and lenser Ted McCord), everyone in this tough little crime film were standard B-pic Hollywood journeymen.  Director Richard Bare largely did shorts before moving to tv series; scripter William Sackheim penned Bs before his decades as tv-movie producer; plus a cast of also-rans.  Happily, a lot of these folks underappreciated journeymen.  Particularly leading man  Bruce Bennett, consistently interesting as an expendable third-wheel, here getting a showcase assignment as the operator of a classy Manhattan boité with a posh gambling room in the back.  Seeing his place robbed in the opening scene, he can hardly go to the  police (they’d shut him down), instead, swallowing his loses, and paying off his guests, he’s the cool head in the room, sending his gang out to get even.  Enter Mayo, overstating her losses, she's a society type in decline.  These two quickly ‘see each other plain’ and immediately hit it off.  And what makes the film work is that Bennett is far from the nice ‘bad guy’ he seems to be, he’s a BAD bad guy.  And when Mayo’s kid brother, doctor-in-training Robert Hutton, shows up in town and becomes involved in a revenge murder, everyone’s true colors spill out in deadly fashion.  The film’s biggest problem is that Sackheim’s structure needs a strong fourth lead and the film only comes up with three.  It makes the ending pretty unsatisfying.  Pity.  Still worth a look.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Next year, M-G-M producer Arthur Freed made one of his rare non-musicals, an A-list example of this sort of thing with very big stars and an all too tidy Richard Brooks script in ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY/’49.

THE BLACK PHONE (2021)

Call it ABDUCTION OF A WIMPY KID: Paranormal Edition.  Designed for a new generation of DONNIE DARKO/’01 fans*, it probably works for them; elsewise, not so much.  Talented teen actor Mason Thames, currently training a dragon on screen, is the best thing about this indifferently played serial killer number about a man wearing a Hallowe’en fright mask and tempting boys off the street with black balloons.  Nothing peculiar or suspicious there for neighbors to notice, right?.  But the ruse works on Thames, led astray when he’s already in trouble at home: drunk, violent single-dad; tough customer little sister; and Thames the family wuss in spite of his talent as a baseball pitcher.  That’s how he met an earlier victim, a star batter he almost struck out.  Fortunately, li’l sister’s nightmares detail fresh leads for the police, and his creepy holding cell has a working phone with a direct line to dead previous victims.  But can this Hansel ‘grow a pair’ and trick Ethan Hawke’s Wicked Witch?  More moody than scary; with a 1978 setting that looks right, but feels wrong.  Something director Scott Derrickson, who would have been 12 at the time, ought to know.

ATTENTION MUST BE PATD/LINK:  *Bear in mind, this site is DARKO agnostic.  Underwhelmed at first sight, just as that film, a sizable flop on initial release, was building a formidable cult following.  A trajectory PHONE seems likely to reverse.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/donnie-darko-2001.html