MOONRISE (1948)

Though he directed two final films after a decade off, this uncommonly dark story of murder & redemption, something of a backwoods CRIME & PUNISHMENT, was Frank Borzage’s real swansong. (He was only 54.) Reaching back to the romantic visual stylist of his late silent prime at FOX (where F. W. Murnau’s work had infected everyone), Borzage revives much of his old form with a miasma of romantic fatalism he rarely showed in even his best sound films. You don’t expect ravishing studio artifice out of Republic Pictures, yet here it is. From a brutal walk-to-the-gallows opening, straight into two rhymed scenes showing the effect it’s had on the dead man’s son, now grown into a haunted Dane Clark, still defined by a stained past. He’ll kill a man over it, then go thru a series of denials & admissions, nearly losing his two best friends thru more violence (a backwoods Negro dog-handler wonderfully played by Rex Ingram and Harry Morgan’s trusting simpleton), as well as the woman he’s long loved, Gail Russell with her strange corrupted beauty. Sheriff Allyn Joslyn follows behind, holding off arrest in hopes of a volunteered confession. (He’s a small-town Inspector Porfiry straight out of Dostoevsky, and not the film’s best conception.) Loaded with painterly flair and studied compositions that don’t worry about calling attention to themself, you have to wonder if Borzage knew this film would effectively be his last.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: As Dane’s independent-minded/off-the-grid Grandmother, Ethel Barrymore gets the biggest billing for the smallest screen time in Hollywood history.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: With his compact frame, short fuse & low center-of-gravity stance, Dane Clark got about as close to the Jean Gabin romantic thugs of ‘30s French Poetic Realism as any Hollywood actor. At least, in this film.

THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

An enchanted fable from Guillermo del Toro, a scary fairy tale (or ‘scaly’ fairy tale) about a captive man-like sea creature held at a top-secret research facility who finds an unlikely soul-mate in mute female staff janitor Sally Hawkins. Made with wit, delicacy & phenomenal attention to period detail (late ‘50s/early ‘60s), del Toro defaults into typical overloading* with overwrought sets & fussy camera work; thematically, too, piling his plate with commie conspiracies, a gay angle, a dollop of racial prejudice (and what monster pic isn’t already a race allegory?), even absurd Double-Features (THE STORY OF RUTH/’60 and MARDI GRAS/’59?). But he mostly gets away with it, likely 'helped' by a very tight budget. (What the man does with 20 mill!) The cast, from Sally Hawkins’ sympathetic maintenance worker & Doug Jones’ ultra-lean amphibian-man to Michael Stuhlbarg’s conflicted scientist/spy & Michael Shannon’s sadistic keeper could hardly be bettered. And del Toro paces the drama & lays out action scenes with a master's touch. Perhaps he shies too much from traditional suspense, preferring to lay on emotion & some unexpectedly frank romance. But at its best, which is most of the time, this is a sui generis wonder.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: A FOX SearchLight release, so lots of Betty Grable & Alice Faye from old FOX movies inserted as musical clips. (They own the rights.) Weird to hear Faye’s signature tune, ‘You’ll Never Know,’ sung & danced on a knock-off RKO/Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers Art Deco ‘Big White Set,’ the one originally used for Irving Berlin’s ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance.’

DOUBLE-BILL: *Del Toro without the excess can be found in THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE/’01.

THE EMPEROR'S CANDLSTICKS (1937)

Hoping to save a Patriot from execution, Polish Baron William Powell sneaks into Russia with a letter for the Tsar cleverly hidden in an ornate silver candlestick, one of a pair, unaware that its match, being brought to the secret police by Countess Luise Rainer, hides a letter denouncing him as a spy. Naturally, the candlesticks get mixed-up; there’s a candlestick robbery; an international candlestick treasure hunt; a candlestick auction; and finally a couple of candlestick-carrying spies falling in love. Pay no attention to the real countries mentioned, it’s the usual Ruritanian romantic nonsense popular at the time, with plotting & absurd coincidences even more idiotic than usual. Yet it might have worked if only someone had found (and held onto) a consistent tone, or had nimbler moves than director George Fitzmaurice. Rainer, coming off back-to-back Oscars® for THE GREAT ZIEGFELD/’36 and THE GOOD EARTH/’37, seems relieved to play something light & sentimental, though she still tends to moon more than necessary. Powell, hampered by a remarkably bad dye job (was M-G-M using black shoe polish that year?), is his usual impeccable self (watch him play a scene where Rainer finds him a bit too old for her), but can’t hold things together all on his own. And what a big cast on the sidelines: Robert Young, Maureen O’Sullivan, Frank Morgan, et al., plus enormous sets, balls & costumes . . . adding little. Chances are this one got rushed into production in an attempt to beat David O. Selznick’s Ruritanian remake THE PRISONER OF ZENDA/’37; story problems be damned. Hence, some alarmingly choppy edits where M-G-M would normally have done reshoots. For Rainer, a sign of things to come as her meteoric career came to a screeching halt only a year later. Thru at 28; she lived to see 104.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As mentioned above, this beat ZENDA’s September release by a couple of months but can’t hold a candle(stick) to Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll & Doug Fairbanks Jr.’s Gold Standard Ruritanian classic.

MARINE RAIDERS (1944)

Standard-issue WWII Marine Action programmer (well, slightly subpar programmer) has Pat O’Brien & Robert Ryan fighting in the Pacific (Guadalcanal); taking R&R in Australia; training recruits Stateside; then back to the Pacific as part of a major multi-force operation. Frank McHugh (as company cook) & Barton MacLane (as top Sargent) hang around for comic relief between military forays which give journeyman helmer Harold Schuster a chance to build a little apprehensive suspense before the iffy special effects kick in (along with uncomfortably real bits of actual war footage). The main interest comes during the break period, set in Australia, where Ryan falls hard for Aussie Air Force Auxiliary gal Ruth Hussey. Wounded just before a planned quickie marriage, his hospital stay gives O’Brien a chance to swoop in and ‘rescue’ his pal from wedlock, stealthily shipping him Stateside. But O’Brien isn’t protecting him, he’s saving him for himself, suffering from jealousy, the green-eyed monster. The messaging is subliminal, but clear enough: O’Brien, a man whose only family is the Marines, is bromantically possessive; and then some. You could do something with this situation . . . but not in 1944.*

DOUBLE-BILL: *Try John Huston’s messy, unfocused, fascinating REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE to see how far things had (and hadn’t) changed by 1967.

DARKEST HOUR (2017)

British director Joe Wright, who specializes in over-praised prestige items, stays true to form in this unconvincing Winston Churchill bio-pic covering the political backstory of events just covered ‘at the front’ in Christopher Nolan’s sharp-eyed & thrillingly detailed DUNKIRK/’17. The argument, simply put, is that Churchill, grudgingly installed as new Prime Minister, finds he’s so overwhelmed by the Nazi surge on the Continent, and the possible annihilation of British forces stuck across The Channel in France, that he briefly considers entering into peace talks with Hitler, brokered by Mussolini. But, bucked up by ‘the people’s’ gung-ho spirit after taking a one-stop ride on the Underground, becomes his indomitable self once more, and leads thru the power of speech. This may all be 100% accurate, though a reading of his highly readable, memorandum-filled memoir THE GATHERING STORM suggests otherwise, but it feels awfully contrived. Especially when Wright tosses in overhead God POV pull-back shots for empty uplift at key moments. (With demerit points for bad CGI.) Gary Oldman’s award-winning Winston is no more (and perhaps a bit less) ‘spot on’ than the many Churchills seen since Albert Finney (with Vanessa Redgrave as wife Clemmie) started the current waxworks parade in THE GATHERING STORM/’02. At times, Oldman might be actor Toby Jones; or rather, actor Toby Jones as Winston. Leaving Ben Mendelsohn’s King George as the film’s best perf.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As mentioned above, THE GATHERING STORM (book & HBO movie), with DUNKIRK as chaser.

MA VIE DE COURGETTE / MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI (2016)

Touching & original, this stop-motion animation from Claude Barras (a Swiss/French production) doesn’t fit into the usual categories. Technically looser, with a playful aspect to its movement & toy-like settings, it has a tough Euro-sensibility that’s not particularly for kids. Yet it’s not NOT for kids, if you catch our drift. Zucchini (Courgette to give him his French nickname*), 9-yr-old son of an abusive/alcoholic mother, only shut the attic door to keep her out, but it was an action that caused her accidental death. Now alone, he’s sent to a little home for troubled orphans where he must fit in and deal with his situation. Luckier than some, he makes a pair of special friends: a freckled boy he mostly fights with; and a girl whose troubles include a nasty aunt who’d like to adopt her for the inheritance. Zucchini also bonds with his case worker, a lonely man who’s lost touch with a grown son of his own. Small incidents resonate loudly here, nicely caught by simple production values whose charm & ingenuity helps reveal the basic humanity of the characters. Barely an hour, but with big laughs & big emotions any kid should respond to. Even with a PG-13 rating.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Our poster lists a starry English-language vocal cast, but the film plays far better with the French kids on the original French track. And note an equal lack of care in that added article in the English-language title: MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI. Hey, he’s not a vegetable, it’s a nickname.

ONE-EYED JACKS (1961)

Marlon Brando directs himself in this handsome, lackluster VistaVision Western, hoping to add a bit of grey to the old white hat/black hat tradition. A variant on the oft-filmed Pat Garrett/Billy the Kid story, it’s hard to think of any telling that doesn’t bring some level of nuance to the bank robber pals, their partial reform and falling out. But if the real Kid was a murdering punk, ‘screen’ Billy is always either a ‘bad’ good man or (more typically) a ‘good’ bad man. Brando goes with the latter, but the film is so enervated it’s hard to care. As mentor/father-figure (subtly named ‘Dad’ here), Karl Malden does stare-down improv work against Brando that seems to add hours to a 140 minute running time. (Original cut three times that length.) While love-interest/daughter Pina Pellicer (looking much like Brando ex Pier Angeli) might be learning English & acting on the job. At least, character actors Ben Johnson & Elisha Cook Jr build a little tension in the pic’s one decent scene (a bank robbery gone wrong), but we’re soon back to numbing cogitation and a truly farcical prison escape. (Pellicer sneaks in a pearl-handled ‘lady’s’ pistol in a tamale wrapper!*) Film scholars & Hollywood heavyweights (Scorsese; Spielberg) take this seriously, the tortured production history is loaded with what-ifs (both Kubrick & Peckinpah had fingers in the pie), yet the film hasn’t even the honest decency to be a bust. It's merely mediocre.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Like Brando, Buster Keaton worked out Father/Son issues on screen in his great STEAMBOAT BILL, JR./’28. There’s even a scene with Buster trying to help Dad break out of jail with saws & hammers hidden in a loaf of bread. But Dad refuses the gift, causing Buster to complain to the jailer that ‘Father is ashamed of my baking.’

THE FLORIDA PROJECT (2017)

Writer/director Sean Baker’s warm-blooded dissection of the operators & residents of a Florida ‘Welfare Motel’ in the Orlando tourist corridor is an uplifting downer. Willem Dafoe, patient, competent, even caring as manager of the garishly colored establishment (those hideous pastels are ‘real deal’ Florida, not commentary) may be too much the saint, but so well played you go with it. Baker helps him out by ignoring much of his soul crushing job duties to concentrate on how he deals with three sprites: wildly independent, unsupervised, adorable 6-yr-old holy-terrors. Left to their own devices by single parents struggling with problems of their own (low pay; lost jobs; weekly rent; mental instability; scams & turning the occasional ‘trick’), the film is at its best following these free-spirits thru their suburban playground of adventure & delight. Indulging in a childhood wanderlust blind to their skin-of-our-teeth existence; they’re pure ‘id,’ descendants of Huck & Tom, Penrod & Nancy Drew. Exhausting just to watch. But our engagement & emotional conflict turn to disappointment when Baker lurches into misapplied melodrama to end with a bang instead of an appropriate whimper. So desperate to ape Truffaut’s adolescent classic, THE 400 BLOWS/’59, he nearly scuttles his considerable achievement. (Tough language for our Family Friendly label, but a real eye-opener worth talking over.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: In addition to Truffaut, Baker seems strongly influenced by Belgian neo-realist filmmakers Luc & Jeanne-Pierre Dardenne. L’ENFANT/’05 is a good place to start.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/lenfant-2005.html

THE UNGUARDED MOMENT (1956)

Slightly ludicrous as drama (acting, dialogue, direction all risible), but fascinating as a compendium of Eisenhower Era social & sexual repression/ regression, and a must for anyone hunting up thesis material on ‘50s culture & generation gap fissures. Leaving swimsuits & M-G-M water tanks behind after 13 years, Esther Williams tries straight drama @ Universal as a small-town high school music teacher who only wants to help the mixed-up student stalking her. Ignoring a possibility that he’s also the local perv currently on a murder spree(!), she keeps a secret rendezvous that leads to her reputation being torn to a tatter. Lucky for her, George Nader, the cop on the case, goes from sarcastic to sympathetic, taking her side against John Saxon, in his first major role as the hormone-addled high school football star. Screwed up (and possibly being screwed . . . the film only hints) by psychotic, controlling, female-phobic dad Edward Andrews, these two manage to destroy Williams' rep & career. A lovely woman living alone in a well-appointed house, unmarried, too close to her students; she's an obvious threat to civic norms. Add in wild dancing at the soda shop, a school dance that turns into a guilt-trap; the big home game; secret dates & sneaking in late at night, the works. With a story originally developed by Rosalind Russell for herself, this is one weird witch-hunt nightmare of perverted American Values. Too bad cinematographer William Daniels is the only talent up to the challenge of finding depth in all the surface gloss. And no one is going to mistake director Harry Keller for Douglas Sirk.

DOUBLE-BILL: From the same year, a classier (even odder) look at sexual coming-of-age pressures in Robert Anderson’s TEA AND SYMPATHY, with Deborah Kerr, John Kerr & Leif Erickson (even this film’s Edward Andrews) under Vincente Minnelli. But when you watch these overripe ‘50s sex-problem dramas, and you will, please be kind.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: There’s quite a plot hole when the ‘mash’ letters go missing and no one believes they ever existed. Yet Williams showed one to a pet student, imagining he’d written it. Oops!

BAI RI YAN HUO / BLACK COAL, THIN ICE (2014)

Fine, slow-burn, modern film noir from China, deliberately paced, atmospheric and a tad inscrutable. Not to worry, it all comes together by the end in a couple of devastating plot twists. Naturally, there’s a murder to solve with a gruesome afterlife that has body parts showing up in far-flung coal processing plants. A pair of suspects are found, but the arrest goes terribly wrong; four dead and a wounded surviving officer. (Cunningly staged in a static one-shot by director Yi’nan Diao with the camera positioned at some distance from the action.) Jump ahead five years, with the officer physically, if not psychologically, recovered; now working private security, and with a serious drinking problem. But a stolen motorcycle and an encounter with a detective from his days on the force will soon give him a second chance at the old case. With the widow of the murdered man and an unclaimed jacket left at the dry-cleaning shop where she works providing cryptic clues for the ex-cop to puzzle out, even as the probe takes a personal turn. (Or is he just doing whatever it takes?) An international award-winner that didn’t get a Stateside commercial release, it’s not for Hong Kong action fans. (Though you’d never know that by the previews included on the ‘WELL GO USA’ DVD.) Instead, imagine Jim Jarmusch getting a shot at the new FARGO series of slightly off-center crime stories. Great tag ending, too. A solo dance of resurrection. A real find this.

PRINCE OF THE CITY (1981)

Coming off a couple of duds (Mega-Flop THE WIZ/’78 and the fun, if little-seen JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT/’80), Sidney Lumet was ‘running for cover’ commercially with this complex NYPD docu-meller about a corrupt/ conflicted ex-Narco agent; not so far from territory he nailed in SERPICO/’73 and (in reverse angle) DOG DAY AFTERNOON/’75.* But the hard work with co-scripter Jay Presson Allen shows in a bad way as they can’t find the key (or actor) to unlock the dramatic potential. Instead, Treat Williams’ opaque features grind away, like a manual clutch stuck between gears as he goes for ill-defined personal atonement wearing a wire for the Feds on major drug stings without incriminating that ‘old gang o’ mine.’ It proves a needle too hard to thread not only for Williams, but also Allen & Lumet who can’t organize the broad canvas. The trick they try to pull off, that everyone from mob guys (Williams’ cop is a ‘black sheep’ in a mobbed-up family); to a close-knit unit of police detectives; to local & Fed D.A.s, are all compromised by loyalties; and only men-of-principle left looking like villains. But then, we’re so busy working out who’s who (Program, Program, can’t make out the cast without a Program!; an idea acknowledged by the film’s occasional insert I.D. or ‘mug’ shot) niceties fall by the wayside. And where’s Lumet’s typically galvanizing character acting company? Just Bob Balaban sticking out in the wrong way; his usual trick, working a single behavioral 'tic' to death. Only Jerry Orbach, as an unsinkable undercover cop, breaks thru, finally finding a screen groove to match the remarkable run of Musical Comedy roles he’d been doing ‘On’ and ‘Off’ B’way for decades. A great screen presence born right before your eyes. It’s the only thrill in the pic.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Pacino must have been in Lumet’s mind for the lead. Aged out of the part? Too much like what they’d done before? And when the film underperformed, Williams' career went flat.

DOUBLE-BILL: Instead of the Lumet classics mentioned above, try Pacino with a young Johnny Depp going undercover against him in DONNIE BRASCO/’97.

THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942)

Dandy film noir doesn’t have the high profile it deserves. Best known for jumpstarting Alan Ladd’s film career, it nails the form in 80 tough, tidy minutes. (Is it really from a Graham Greene novel?) Ladd, small & delicate as a porcelain, is amazingly effective as a friendless, cold-blooded hitman, with a soft spot for cats, seeking his own kind of justice after taking out a blackmailer for fat, squeamish, amoral employer Laird Cregar. Both men, for different reasons, wind up drawn to nightclub chanteuse Veronica Lake*, small & delicate as a porcelain, an innocent pawn between them and fiancé Robert Preston, a detective assigned to the case. (As usual in noir, there seem to be maybe eight or nine people in the world, all interrelated.) Cleverly worked out, clearly structured & darkly propulsive under director Frank Tuttle who usually worked on Bing Crosby vehicles, here getting a huge bump in filmmaking chops, just like fellow Paramount helmers Billy Wilder & Preston Sturges, from vet cinematographer John F. Seitz. In spite of the plot’s WWII machinations, the characters have a contemporary edge that’s hardly dated. Defined by their jobs, the drama is pure form-equals-function. Maybe that’s the Graham Greene connection.

ATTENTION MUST PAID: *Lake’s act is a showstopping hoot with real magic & superbly dubbed vocals.

SECRET AGENT (1936)

Codifying his distinctive voice & tone in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH/’34 and THE 39 STEPS/’35, Alfred Hitchcock followed with two transitional films, this and the better realized SABOTAGE/’36. Each misses the light-and-shade mix of echt Hitchcock (suspense, romance & quirky/ sinister humor), but are pretty fascinating all the same, loaded with surface detail & technical bravura. AGENT, based on Somerset Maugham’s ASHENDEN stories, with a romantic element taken from Campbell Dixon’s play adaptation, follows reluctant WWI British spy (John Gielgud) on assassination assignment in Switzerland. With fake wife in tow (Madeleine Carroll) and amoral ‘second’ (Peter Lorre in alarming form), the job is first bungled, then finished more by happenstance than by effort. Gielgud, the great Hamlet of his era, is a natural as action-challenged killer, if not yet a natural on screen.* How easy Robert Young makes it all look in comparison as his rival for Carroll’s affections. It goes to make rooting interest less clarified than usual (a fine idea, but dramatically underdeveloped). Instead, montage, trick camera effects (those miniature trains & attacking bombers) and local Swiss color take over. Or would if Carroll didn’t grow before your eyes into the ultimate present & future Hitchcock blonde. Check her out on the train under a flattering hat and you’ll see all the way ahead to ‘Tippy’ Hedren. Or rather, what Hedren was supposed to be.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Better in his previous film, THE GOOD COMPANIONS/’33 (note the three year gap), Gielgud had a fitful film career till Orson Welles located a vein in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT/’66.

LINK: Lots of subfusc DVDs on this Public Domain title. Here’s a LINK that clears things up. http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews35/hitchcock_the_british_years.htm

TAMPOPO (1985)

Jûzô Itami really struck a chord in this wildly original, deliciously funny film that combines story & essay elements on Japanese food & food culture. (Japanese culture at large, too.) The driving narrative, what Itami called his ‘Ramen Western,’ has a classic Strangers-Come-To-Town opening as a pair of commercial truckers (Tsutomu Yamazaki & Ken Watanabe) make a pit-stop at a hole-in-the-wall noodle joint run by Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto). Untrained, but not untalented, she gets the help she needs when the boys put together a motley team of rivals to perfect her broth, noodle technique, add-ons (roast pork, scallions, sesame oil), even the shop interior. (And naturally ride off when the job is done.) Interspersed (perhaps a bit too generously) with a series of foodie vignettes ranging from the obsessed to the obscene; the sketches are sacred & profane, gross, sexy & painful, and all hilarious. One scene at a fancy French-style restaurant is a particular gem slicing & dicing Japanese corporate culture while another will have you reconsidering the possibilities of oral ‘yolk’ play. The film is a triumph in showing the universality of the specific; and was rightly adored around the world.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Not only Japanese cooking gets treated with fond respect & accuracy. Check out the perfect omelet technique shown by a food obsessed hobo.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Hard to figure out just how Itami wants us to respond to his highly enlightened, but rather eccentric use of Western classical music. Wagner, Mahler & Liszt; is he cluelessly clever, poking pretensions or kidding on the square?

CASS TIMBERLANE (1947)

Lesser Sinclair Lewis novel, but loaded with dramatic goods largely glossed over in this big hit from M-G-M (a top ten pic). Directed by George Sidney, on a rare excursion from lighter fare & musicals, it’s so over-upholstered & fitted with cushy suspension, it smooths out the character bumps & personality conflicts built into Lewis’s story. Solid citizen, middle-aged judge Spencer Tracy scandalizes his own Country Club Set when he falls hard and quickly weds refreshingly spunky Lana Turner (wrong-side-of-the-tracks/half his age). Only best pal and third-wheel Zachary Scott approves, but largely because he’s carrying his own torch for Turner. But what should give things that distinctive Lewis edge, the ingrown corruption of a ‘big’ small-town with one major industry, and how it insidiously infects & blindsides even ‘good guys’ like Tracy & Scott without them quite knowing how they’ve been sucked in, gets short shrift next to the uncomfortable balancing act of three friends tied up in a romantic knot. And even there the film goes out of its way to let everyone off the hook. Donald Ogden Stewart, at his best adapting Philip Barry material like HOLIDAY/’38, hasn’t the tough hide to capture the coarser qualities of upper-crust, knee-jerk MidWest snobbery out of Lewis’s style-free writing. Or perhaps the sharp edges just got tamped down in the M-G-M mill. Still, you can see the outlines of what Lewis was getting at and the film, with Tracy offering a final romantic lead, reps a significant bump up from his previous Elia Kazan flopperoo, the all-star disaster THE SEA OF GRASS/’47.

DOUBLE-BILL: Romantic comedy from Sinclair Lewis? Try MANTRAP/’26, directed by Victor Fleming with Clara Bow (at her very best) being fought over to fine comic effect in the Canadian backwoods by Percy Marmont & Ernest Torrence.

WHIPLASH (1948)

Warners went with their ‘C’ team on this one. (A likely follow up to the Joan Crawford/John Garfield/Jean Negulesco directed HUMORESQUE/’46.) Height-challenged Dane Clark, in the Garfield spot, is a free-spirited West Coast artist who doesn’t want to sell his seascape to rich, tall & masochistically miserable Alexis Smith. But they meet and click. She runs away to NYC, he follows and, by happenstance, knocks out an up-and-coming boxer who tries to stop him. ‘This boy should be in the ring!,’ says Smith’s wheelchair-bound hubby Zachary Scott, a former boxer now running a stable of fighters. You’ll guess the rest. Eve Arden gets thrown in the mix to crack wise about lousy dates (she’s taken from MILDRED PIERCE rather than HUMORESQUE, but close enough). And if all the characters seem borrowed from recent/superior pics, that’d be less a problem if they’d only thought to bring over some motivation as well. Why does Clark have such a chip on his shoulder? Trying for dynamic, he’s just overwrought. Smith does look pretty gorgeous and Scott is always fascinating on screen, but journeyman hack megger Lewis Seiler, in the first of a half dozen pics @ Warners, can’t make heads-or-tails out of things.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: An early credit for Harriet Frank Jr. who went on to better things collaborating with husband Irving Ravetch on films like HUD, NORMA RAE, LONG HOT SUMMER, many more.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Dane Clark is said to be at his very best in Frank Borzage’s MOONRISE/’48 (not seen here, but trying!) made directly before this.

GIVE ME A SAILOR (1938)

Early Bob Hope comedy, made before Paramount landed on his braggadocio/ cowardly comic character and was trying him out in a few comic romances (with music) against the very physical Martha Raye in her brief top-billed heyday. As a twosome, they’re chalk & cheese (she works too hard; he floats), but for some reason, this one really comes off. Hope, an Ensign on the same boat as brother Jack Whiting, his superior officer, is coming into port on leave to propose to Betty Grable. And brother Jack’s got the same idea. On to Plan B: Lob off Betty’s Plain Jane sister Martha Raye as consolation prize with benefits in her excellent cooking. Thin material, for sure, but a double gimmick with national contests in cooking and ‘gams,’ Raye wins ‘em both, provides plenty of comic opportunities.* Raye, more restrained than usual, has some inspired shtick in the kitchen and a chance to stretch her significant pipes; Hope, charming & fresh. With Grable moving a career step up given a chance to show her dance form while B’way regular Jack Whiting gets a rare film outing to display his goods. (He’s the real deal; handsome, too. Wonder why he didn’t catch on?) A time waster, but a pleasant one, and probably the best of the Raye/Hope pics. Bob would find his true form next year in THE CAT AND THE CANARY/’39, with the more appropriate Paulette Goddard, and never look back.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: * Considering how iconic Grable’s legs would become over the war, having Raye win a contest for ‘Best Legs’ in a film co-staring Grable is ironic.

MIDNIGHT LACE (1960)

On his own, without the transformative talents of a Douglas Sirk directing, producer Ross Hunter reverted to tasteless, high-gloss schlock like this risible Doris Day suspenser. Trying for GASLIGHT/’44 meets DIAL ‘M’ FOR MURDER/’54* in modern-day London (brief location shots filled out with slicked-down backlot Universal exteriors & hold-your-nose chintzy interiors), it adds a whodunit element not in those films, with a mystery stalker threatening murder. So it is hubby Rex Harrison; contractor John Gavin (with an accent as phony as the sets); the servant’s wastrel son Roddy McDowall; elderly Herbert Marshall, Harrison’s office partner? I vote for Ross Hunter! Or if not him, there’s Day’s real-life creepy hubby Martin Melcher, who died suddenly in ‘68, leaving her in financial distress. (Maybe that's why she's constantly screaming here.) This one does have something of a camp/cult following, but why celebrate bad Doris when there’s so much good Doris out there. Mostly before those tin-eared sex comedies, PILLOW TALK & the like. She's ever so much better in the films she made (in Groucho Marx's phrase) ‘before she became a virgin.’*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Hunter really wants you to make the Hitchcock Suspense connection, reaching out for DIAL ‘M’ players John Williams & Anthony Dawson in similar parts.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Day is remarkable in real Hitchcock, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH/’54; while Harrison had one of his best early roles in Carol Reed’s fine Hitchcockian NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH/’40.

BRITISH AGENT (1934)

Leave it to Warner Bros. to parse & clarify the 1917 Russian Revolution in 80 minutes, and no stinting on the romance. The history, simplified, but not too shabby, far easier to follow than John Reed, your high school textbook or REDS, is based on the fictionalized memoirs of R. H. Bruce Lockhart (he’d later write the even wilder tru-adventures of REILLY: ACE OF SPIES). Leslie Howard plays him, dashing & gentlemanly as a young British Diplomat without formal credentials as Britain has yet to recognize any government in post-revolution Russia. He’s charged with keeping them in the World War, forcing Germany to maintain an Eastern Front. The film opens with the fast collapse of Kerensky’s moderate Socialists as an Embassy Ball swirls in a constant display of motion in the very impressive production: Anton Grot sets; Michael Curtiz direction. Now, with Lenin & the Bolsheviks in power, Howard’s efforts to hold Russian in the war coalition hang by a thread, a thread cut by his new lover Kay Francis. (Their diplomatic meet-cute is a classic.) She overhears his plans at a post-coital moment, and, romance or no, takes the secret info right back to her Bolshevik comrades who include Lenin & Irving Pichel as head of the secret police. It’s all frightfully easy to swallow, even when Leslie links in with counter-revolutionary ‘Whites;’ eventually wrapping on a romantic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too finale brought about by none other than Lenin! With great supporting perfs (J. Carroll Naish an amazing Trotsky & a trio of stouthearted Western Diplomats stuck in Moscow (William Gargan, Phillip Reed & Cesar Romero). Does it have its ridiculous side? Sure. But the zippy mix of Statecraft, history, love & deceit (Francis never strays from her Bolshie beliefs) is tremendously effective. Screw those stiff docu-dramas; before picking up that assigned history chapter, set the political scene with this impossible affair of the heart.

DOUBLE-BILL: See how the end came for the Royal Romanovs in the much-maligned, but handsome & fascinating RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS/’32; with all those Barrymores (John, Lionel, Ethel) & real Moscow Art Player Richard Boleslawski directing. OR: Another side of the story from the same author, as mentioned above, in REILLY: ACE OF SPIES/’83.

MADISON AVENUE (1961)

One of those film projects that feel as if it were slowly demoted in development before production got started. Too bad, too, since there’s a pretty good angle for a back-stabbing corporate executive-suite meller in here: Fast-Rising Public Relations/Ad Man Dana Andrews doesn’t know he’s been set up for a fall when he starts to get too close to taking over a key company account. Seeking revenge, he uses gal pal reporter Jeanne Crain & a struggling little advertising outfit, run by Eleanor Parker, to pump up the rep of a modest dairy biz run by happy imbecile Eddie Albert.* He’ll turn their fortunes around with his one-hand-washes-the-other gambits, and do an end run back over the guys that done him wrong. And if he loses both women and his soul in the process . . . ? Ay, there’s the rub. But, as you can tell by the date (1961) and the cast list, we’re no longer dealing with first-stringers. Dana Andrews wasn’t a fast-rising anything in ‘61. (Though, to his credit, he’s cleared up his slurry diction. On the wagon?) Same-o for tuckered out journeyman hack director H. Bruce Humberstone (in his last feature credit), and for once prestigious scripter Norman Corwin, whose style of writing still recalls his days making ‘important’ radio info-dramas for the war effort or on the duties of citizenship. Visually & dramatically, this one could have used some fresh meat and restocking.

DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Albert’s character switches from imbecile to plain-spoken-man-of-the-people in a poorly thought out characterization. (Not really his fault.) Was the film toying with political parable? Something along the lines of A FACE IN THE CROWD/’57, but then let the idea drop as the scale of the pic reduced?

MR. WONG, DETECTIVE (1938)

It’s all downhill from that juicy poster with Monogram Pictures trying for a Charlie Chan knock-off series with Boris Karloff (speaking a very proper King’s English) as Detective Wong, called in to stop a murder before it happens. By the time the mystery is unraveled, three will have died, an impossible suspect will be found guilty, and everyone watching will have nodded off. It’s one sleepy affair! William Nigh directs without getting much of the simple story across, and the dowdy print quality hardly helps. No doubt, the title & Karloff’s name recognition brought in a reasonable return, he’d go on to make a handful of WONGs, but by the time CHARLIE CHAN ended its 20th/Fox run and started up @ Monogram, it was so long Wong.

DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: You do get a chance to see the great late silent star Evelyn Brent, a pre-Dietrich favorite of Josef von Sternberg, keeping up the semblance of a working career. See her at her impassively smoldering best in his great late-silent THE LAST COMMAND/’28.

BORN YESTERDAY (1950)

PYGMALION/’38 meets MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON in Garson Kanin’s winning play about an unlikely conscience awakening in politically corrupt D.C. Add in lead couple ‘Junk’ metal tycoon Broderick Crawford & chorine Judy Holliday (lifted from Wallace Beery & Jean Harlow in DINNER AT EIGHT/’33) and a square reporter/instructor hired to wise-up the floozy . . . only to do the job too well. 3½ years on B’way, originally with Judy Holliday playing against Paul Douglas & Gary Merrill. Opened up to reasonable effect, with Frank Capra notes of patriotic pride in some city tours, director George Cukor got Kanin to come in (no fee/no credit) to fix the adaptation. It’s all well thought out; tidy; swell; and yet the film, for all its pleasures, never delivers the character frisson that bumped the play up to classic status. Holliday, looking like Harpo Marx’s sister when things start, hits her marks too strongly at first, though soon warms up with miraculously funny vocal pointing. William Holden, in the Merrill spot, the complete team-player, smoothly charming & able to tame Kanin’s occasional speechifying. The real problem is Crawford, awarded the role fresh off his ALL THE KING’S MEN Oscar®, he’s too brusque & realistic, all menacing instead of half-bluster (and ultimately sad).* It works well anyway, but could have been wonderful.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Six years on, Kanin directed a tv version to give Paul Douglas his shot at the role.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, DINNER AT EIGHT, also directed by Cukor, with Harlow & Beery, prototypes for Holliday & Crawford. A BORN remake with Melanie Griffith & John Goodman (plus Don Johnson) went nowhere in 1993. But if you went just around the corner to the next theater, you might have seen much better casting in Holly Hunter & Gary Busey doing support in THE FIRM/’93. They're perfect! Of course, you have to watch THE FIRM to see it.

THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS (1957)

A high-profile flop in its day (even Jack Warner, a mogul who never took blame for these things, conceded surprise, if not fault), the story of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 New York to Paris flight, fleshed out with bio-flashbacks during the prep & flight, was an odd assignment for writer/director Billy Wilder. Wilder, who served on a post-war DeNazification Panel and lost much of his extended family to the Holocaust, must have compartmentalized Lindbergh the Heroic Icon, remembered from his time in Berlin, against the latter-day America Firster who gave cover to pro-Nazi/Anti-Semitic sentiments in mainstream America. The non-linear story structure mostly hangs together, and features a few stellar set pieces (Takeoff from New York; Landing in Paris). But it badly misses the youth, glamour & MidWest reticence that caused such a sensation as a miscast James Stewart comes in a couple of decades older than the real article, unglam & spouting so much narration he seems anything but laconic. Fortunately, it’s also one of those films that looks and plays better on the small screen than it did in the theater. And, every now & then, when lenser Robert Burks nails lighting & camera angle for a youthful money shot of Stewart, you can see how this might have worked.

DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Wilder could be oddly insensitive on the age issue. His next, LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON/’57, uncomfortably paired a rapidly aging Gary Cooper against Audrey Hepburn (though there, the strain deepens the film); or in his all-geriatric FRONT PAGE/’74 remake. As for Stewart, five years on in John Ford's THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE/’62, he’s nearly thirty years too old for his fresh-faced lawyer. But, of course, that’s much the point with practically the whole cast decades off in that remarkable memory film.

PORCO ROSSO (1992)

Lesser-known, fabulously entertaining Hayao Miyazaki anime channels the spirit of late ‘30s Howard Hawks (especially ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS/’39) to fine effect. Porco, lone surviving pilot of a spectacular WWI dogfight, has become a famous pig-faced independent seaplane operator, tracking down pirates & rescuing hostages. Right now, he needs to sneak into Italy, where’s he’s a wanted man (er . . . pig) for a big repair job. And the crack engineer on hand is a 17-yr-old girl. No romance, though, Porco still pines for the widow of a lost flying bud who runs a café on a secluded island (where morals are duty-free). There’s unexpected emotional pull in Miyazaki’s original story (something about the pig’s solitary life, more Humphrey Bogart than Cary Grant), and the film still boasts the clean narrative lines of early Studio Ghibli while hitting new technical peaks. (What a palette!) Exciting, gorgeous, unafraid to take a breather when needed, and a big plus in its English-language cast, starting with Michael Keaton’s pitch-perfect Porco.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS; with Hawk’s TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT/’44 or Michael Curtiz’s CASABLANCA for the Bogie angle.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)

A perennial on lists of Oscar’s® ‘worst’ Best Picture; and why not with films like THE QUIET MAN, HIGH NOON, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL and MEMBER OF THE WEDDING out that year. Compared to those, this Big Top meller is pure hokum. But isn’t that the point? And it’s masterful hokum. Cecil B. DeMille had been putting on circus acts disguised as historical dramas for decades, and this one, taken on its own terms (loud, obvious, corny, vividly TechniColored), is more or less irresistible. (Plus, now doing double-duty as historical marker of a lost tradition, much of it frankly non-PC. All those elephants! At least they avoid lion-tamers.) Charlton Heston, improbably young and (perhaps, unknowingly) charming is the tough manager with sawdust in his veins; Betty Hutton a center-ring act pushed to the side when hard-to-handle trapeze artiste Cornel Wilde joins up. Add in loads of stars from Paramount and Ringling Bros., romance, jealousy, a model train disaster (they’re BIG model trains), competitor Lawrence Tierney in an alarming suit and James Stewart as a clown on the lam whose sole gag is always keeping his makeup on. Like circus shows of old, there are longueurs in musical spectacles & parades, but before long some reaction shot of various stunned, still little boys gazing in a mixture of terror, puzzlement or wonder show up to make you grin.

DOUBLE-BILL: Nothing tops Disney’s DUMBO/’41 at capturing the look of old-time circus.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Just before the hour & a half mark, during a montage of lesser acts, look quick for a young man working a ‘slack wire.’ This is nearly the same routine that was being done in Ring Three at the Detroit State Fair Coliseum just as The Flying Wallendas fell from their famous High Wire Pyramid Act, killing two, in 1962. (Picture of the new generation of Wallendas doing the stunt, but without a chair on top, and with a net.)

FLAMINGO ROAD (1949)

Five films & five years after her comeback @ Warners in MILDRED PIERCE, Joan Crawford got solo top-billing in what was effectively her last ‘A’ pic as a glamor queen . . . to decidedly mixed results. She’s an eager young thing from the wrong side of the tracks (a ‘Carny’ dancer!) who rises from waitress to society lady with help from sympathetic, but weak-willed, assistant sheriff Zachary Scott (excellent); then with political boss/shady contractor David Brian (thick & dull). It’s the very paradigm she thought she left behind @ M-G-M. Alas, the fancy life on Flamingo Road is more rocky than smooth as the entire political apparatus is controlled by fat, corrupt Sydney Greenstreet. And he’s nursing a grudge against Crawford, convinced she’s out to wreck his State Capital takeover . . . and all those kickbacks! Produced & directed by PIERCE alumni Jerry Wald & Michael Curtiz, the film has lots of momentum (too much for the shortchanged last act) and great noir atmosphere from lenser Ted McCord. But the story never recovers after Scott drinks his way out of romance and debuting David Brian takes over.* Naturally, the studio reteamed her & Brian on two more contract pics . . . to diminishing results.

DOUBLE-BILL: Just before this, Crawford was lent to 20th/Fox for the excellent, under-valued DAISY KENYON/’47, with Henry Fonda & Dana Andrews; Otto Preminger directing. OR: *To see David Brian in a more suitable role, try Clarence Brown’s Faulkner adaptation INTRUDER IN THE DUST/’49.

THE BIG SICK (2017)

Engaging romantic comedy (promising Pakistani-American comedian hides a very MidWestern girlfriend from his ultra-traditional parents) which morphs into a medical drama (with warm, fuzzy edges) when a tough to diagnose/life-threatening infection places the undeclared girlfriend in a medically-induced coma. Lots of laughs, confessional tears, many gaffes from (future) in-laws . . . the works. With Kumail Nanjiani, playing a rather refined version of himself, as the faint-hearted boyfriend who learns to speak up; standard-issue perfs from his stern parents; and more originally drawn roles for an excellent Ray Romano & Holly Hunter as the girl’s parents. Yet the film doesn’t land with the emotional charge it should have. Instead, ducking in & out of plot beats, as if constantly jostled by Post-It notes left on script pages by exec producer Judd Apatow, determined to fill his usual boy-grows-up–by-finding-partner playbook. It doesn’t spoil the film, but it does make it feel like secondhand goods. So too remarkably awful direction (at least on the technical side) by Michael Showalter, with some of the cruddiest looking cinematography & destructive editing choices seen in a commercial Hollywood film in decades.

SCREWY THOUGH OF THE DAY: Hard to believe the basic ABIE’S IRISH ROSE premise (5-yrs on B’way in the ‘20s) still pays off. Just add baby or health crisis & watch feuding ethnic clans come together.

MISS PINKERTON (1932)

Antique programmer, a ‘late’ Early Talkie, and on the stiff side for 1932, but not without its amusing angles. From mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart*, one of her once highly popular ‘Old Dark House’ comic thrillers, here with Joan Blondell’s overworked hospital nurse assigned to a murder scene to assist police detective George Brent working a young man’s suicide which may really be murder! And with a houseful of well-motivated suspects. Lloyd Bacon megs around the confusion with a little bit of style (for a change), setting up some neat angles that use natural framing devices found in the house (hall landings; doorways) to allow for all sorts of eavesdropping & ominous shadows. And someone (lenser Barney McGill?) cooked up a great farewell death shot as Elizabeth Patterson goes out for the long count, popping her eyes and then seeing Brent & Blondell do a fast fadeout into the nether region. Quite spooky! For the rest, it’s pretty silly stuff, with many a limp wisecrack. But the leads seem quite taken with each other, and it all wraps in about an hour.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Was this meant as a pilot for a Blondell series? It would explain much.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Rinehart’s best remembered title was filmed as THE BAT/’26, a late silent, and then as a very stiff Early Talkie (in 70mm) as THE BAT WHISPERS/’30. While over @ Universal, James Whale’s ‘old, dark house’ chiller came out as . . . THE OLD DARK HOUSE/’32. Best of the field, and with multiple filmings, goes to THE CAT AND THE CANARY, now out in a fine new restoration on KINO of Paul Leni’s 1927 silent version.

NOBODY LIVES FOREVER (1946)

Tough-guy specialist W. R. Burnett’s original screenplay is all over the place in this East Coast/West Coast con man redemption story. More than director Jean Negulesco can handle on only his second feature.  (His debut pic, THREE STRANGERS/’46, with its tighter focus, is far more assured.)  Even so, this one comes together by the last act for some neatly played suspense melodrama, so help yourself. Just recovered from war injuries, smooth operator John Garfield finds he’s been screwed ‘over the duration’ by erstwhile nightclub gal Faye Emerson and her new ‘manager.’ Reclaiming his ‘investment’ by force, Garfield heads to sunny California and takes over from George Coulouris on a plan to fleece millionaire widow Geraldine Fitzgerald; then falls for the dame. Structure & characterizations drift as needed to keep the plot moving, but Garfield & Fitzgerald are at their most attractive and there’s the usual excellent support from Warners’ contract crew along with Walter Brennan dropping his crotchety routine as a smart old confederate of Garfield’s. (He also proves handy as foil to get around Production Code rules at the climax.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Male stars @ Warners were more likely to be ‘Mutts’ than ‘BeefCake.’ But somebody at the studio must have been keeping tabs on the fan mail and made sure Garfield stripped down for a swim in almost every pic.