KONG SHAN LING YU / RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN (1979)

Revered by Hong Kong/Taiwanese Martial Arts film mavens, if little known in the West, King Hu, was a master in peak form when he edited, wrote & directed this hugely enjoyable period actioner.  Loaded with pageantry, comedy & memorable characters, it makes an ideal Hu entry point .  (Especially in the luster reviving 2018 restoration.)  Set in a sacred monastery awash with secular greed & personal rivalries at fever pitch as the head abbot prepares to retire, the large complex buzzing with scores of lowly monks and special guests there to advise on the succession when not furtively searching the campus for a priceless sacred scroll hidden in the Temple library.  Amid the dignitaries, thieves & assistants, one true penitent, admitted to avoid army service on a crime he didn’t commit, this tall, strong, stoic type (think Steve McQueen/Charles Bronson) bears a natural noble humility to match his cunning & strength.  Talents spotted immediately by the old abbot who places him in charge of the Temple library, the venn diagram vector meeting place for all the conspirators.  With wit in plotting and brio in execution, Hu works this out with a preternatural eye for composition, motion & camera placement, along with editing instincts worthy of a classic silent-era slapstick comedian.  (The film’s standout set piece a hide-and-seek/cat-and-mouse attempt at stealing that precious scroll from the library stacks, designed and executed with the precision of Buster Keaton and ‘the girl’ blindly chasing each other around an otherwise deserted ocean liner in THE NAVIGATOR/'24.  Tremendous stuff, easy to follow, too.  Not always the case with these films.

DOUBLE-BILL: More King Hu (1931 - 1997), please.  But hard to find good copies (especially with English subtitles), and much is dauntingly long (three+ hours).  Watch this space for updates.

THE ROCK (1996)

Generally considered the Michael Bay film for Michael Bay-ophobes, this semi-risible action caper (on some level, all Bay films action capers, even PEARL HARBOR/’01) is at least good fun.  Mostly stemming from Sean Connery’s undiminished star power as a wronged prisoner who escaped from Alcatraz decades ago, now needed by an old enemy to stealth-guide a U.S. military rescue unit in to the mothballed prison during a hostage crisis.  Ed Harris is a self-justifying Vietnam vet gone rogue, threatening the hostages & all of San Francisco with chemical warfare (supported by a posse of loyal marine acolytes); and Nicolas Cage the combat-virgin chemical warfare expert attached to Connery.  A big success, it was the last film (with partner Jerry Bruckheimer) for producer Don Simpson, dead at 53.  (Heart attack/various addiction rumors.)  Simpson was known for an odd sartorial quirk, wearing a new pair of blue jeans every day, missing the whole point of denim, the way it only starts working for you after much wear, tear & washing.  Nearly the same mistake Michael Bay makes in his films.  Coming out of music videos, his big action scenes always freshly unpacked, immaculately constructed, but missing the wear & tear that signifies mass, gravity & something at stake.  They haven’t been lived in.  (Now worse with overused CGI techniques.)  Capable of staging a real event when he wants, here Bay loosens his grip to capture a simple little scene with Connery ingeniously using a rope trick to spring Cage & himself out of their prison cells while letting you see how the joints work.  It’s the best thing in the pic.  Just don’t get your hopes up for more of the same.

DOUBLE-BILL: Don Siegel & Clint Eastwood churn up more suspense with less fuss (and a tenth the budget) in ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ/’79.

FORBIDDEN CARGO (1954)

Decent enough British crime procedural wastes a clever prologue to go conventional on an undercover assignment to nab a gang of fashion conscious drug smugglers.  Too bad, that opening reel is a pip, as if Ealing Studios (home to Alec Guinness and eccentric little British comedies) made a film noir policier with an inspector from the Customs and Excise office rather than Scotland Yard.  Pleasantly wry Nigel Patrick’s the agent sent to look into a complaint about naval amphibious landing vehicles running over a protected beach designated as an endangered bird sanctuary.  Helped by local bird protector Joyce Grenfell, a buck-toothed Ealing regular, Patrick spots the interlopers (and their 80 proof contraband) thru Grenfell’s bird blind observation pit and . . . well, the rest of this putative film could just about write itself: local bird-watching territorialists against those sea-faring gin smugglers.  But after the battle is won, what to do with the alcoholic loot?  Drink, sell or dump?  Mild hilarity ensues.  Alas, my putative suggestion for the plot a road not taken; instead Inspector Patrick follows a lead from this small operation to a much larger one happening in Cannes where he comes across a yacht full of chic drug smugglers, falling for one of them too (Elizabeth Sellars).  Standard doings from then on, though a car chase finale is neatly handled by journeyman megger Harold French and there’s fine nighttime lensing from C.M. Pennington-Richards, known from the Alastair Sim CHRISTMAS CAROL/’51.  There's also an eccentric touch from bad guy Theodore Bikel, strumming out  a tune about the various fates of his criminal forebears.  More oddities like that might have perked things up.  But all we get is a tag ending for bird lady Grenfell, off screen since the prologue, reminding us of the film this might have been.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Ealing Studios did make a comic smuggling pic.  One of their best, THE LAVENDER HILL MOB/’51 with Guinness & Stanley Holloway.

WHEN TOMORROW COMES (1939)

Released just months after Leo McCarey’s LOVE AFFAIR, this tempest-tossed romantic melodrama was ‘the other’ Irene Dunne/Charles Boyer film of 1939.  Adapted from a James M. Cain story, it repeats the earlier film’s dramatic pivot, evolving from playful banter to serious, even tragic events, here with a personal revelation in the wake of a hurricane both literal & spiritual, paradoxically upending and strengthening the budding relationship.  And what a surprisingly sophisticated relationship it is for a 1939 movie, with Dunne’s stuck-in-a-rut waitress meeting--cute with Boyer shortly before she inspires her timid co-workers to go out on strike.*  Boyer turns out to be a union man as well, just not the same union.  He’s a world class classical pianist falling hopelessly in love (who wouldn’t?), but also hopelessly stuck in a marriage-of-inconvenience with mentally unstable wife Barbara O’Neil.  Sticky stuff in most hands, but director John M. Stahl, who somehow kept the religious goo down to acceptable levels with Dunne in MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION/’35, had an uncanny feel for how far he could push these things.  And the speed and simplicity of production at no-frills Universal Pictures also helps.

DOUBLE-BILL: Boyer & O’Neil would play a similar mind-game of marital misery next year in ALL THIS AND HEAVEN TOO/’40.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Sophisticated musical selections too, with Boyer challenging the storm raging outside his Long Island mansion with Rachmaninoff’s piano transcription of Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin; a Schubert song for Dunne (handled in a simple mastershot); and a little Mozart played on the church organ when they take shelter from the hurricane.

CONTEST: *This ‘meet-cute’ starts when another waitress can’t accommodate Boyer’s special request.  A precursor to an iconic film moment of the ‘70s, name the film and the moment to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up on a film of your choosing.

RAIN OR SHINE (1930)

This rare early Frank Capra film, transferred (minus its score*) from a hit B’way musical with star and some original cast intact*, isn’t much admired now, but it’s a key film in Capra’s rise at Columbia Pictures.  A big step up in scale & technique, it also hits some of the same social-strata/populist depression-era targets that would largely define Capra, even though the show opened in pre-Depression 1928.  On stage, an excuse for jack-of-all-clown-trades Joe Cook to show his stuff, he saves the day when a financially struggling circus goes on strike, forcing him to do all the acts.  (No skill beyond him, Cook’s particularly striking on the slack-wire, yet never got another top feature role; like many a stage star on film, lots of talent, but the wrong temperature.)  The setup involves the late-owner’s daughter now running the circus into the ground.  She likes Cook, but loves a well-to-do city boy, managing to lose the circus twice: first to swindlers; then to fire.  The ensuing panic and riot, stunningly realized by Capra & regular lenser Joseph Walker, a tryout for future achievements like the opening reel of LOST HORIZON/’37.  (Elsewhere, Walker’s gorgeous atmospheric lensing and how’d-he-do-that fluid tracking thru carny crowds Gold Medal stuff for the period.)  Even with comic set pieces that don’t know when to stop, there’s something satisfying in how the story sidesteps expectations, it’s absurdist end-of-the-world nihilism something Capra wouldn't dare attempt in the future.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Of that original cast, the guy doing a lousy Harpo Marx imitation is Dave Chasen, soon to ditch showbiz for food-biz with his eponymous Hollywood hangout/eatery.  Liz Taylor had their shockingly bland chili sent to her sets all over the world.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The score that went missing by Milton Ager & Jack Yellen, best known for ‘Happy Days Are Here Again,’ added into the show a year after it opened and heard here played on the calliope by Clarence Muse.

THE BAD SLEEP WELL / WARUI YATSU HODO YOKU NEMURU (1960)

Prime Akira Kurosawa, but for Stateside audiences, inevitably in the shadow of THE HIDDEN FORTRESS/’58, made right before it, later poached by Gary Lucas for STAR WARS/’77; and YOJIMBO/’61 right after, refitted by Sergio Leone as A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS/’64.* So it’s ironic that this hugely enjoyable, slightly batty contemporary thriller is itself similarly lifted, not from a another film, but from Shakespeare’s HAMLET.  And Kurosawa ain’t shy about his source, keeping every major character other than Gertrude in some equivalent role.  Relations are altered (Ophelia & Laertes now kids of Claudius), and the politics are corporate rather than kingly, but we do get a ghost (insane rather than dead), even a Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern as hitmen.  The film opens with a variation on the dumb-show that precedes the play-within-a-play in HAMLET.  It's set at a formal wedding of convenience with Kurosawa laying on Western cultural influences as a sign of corruption between a public & a private company, using English terms that have no Japanese equivalent and playing Wagner & Mendelssohn for the processions.  Cops & reporters swarm in, taking pics & making arrests of corrupt execs between courses.  Toshiro Mifune is the groom, son of a dead exec who’s marrying the crippled daughter of the company head as part of a long-planned revenge that’s compromised when he starts to fall in love with her.  What a rogue & peasant slave is he!  Brilliantly designed, plotted and arranged to critique contemporary Japanese corporate culture, it could well stand losing twenty minutes.  And there’s an odd decision to tell, rather than show, much of the climax.  But an excellent Kurosawa gateway film compared to the late period epics which get so much attention.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Yet it’s this film, rather than YOJIMBO (or its less-acclaimed, if superior sequel, SANJURO/’62) that feels like a Sergio Leone film.  Even a catchy theme for our whistling hero.

DOUBLE-BILL: His next contemporary thriller, HIGH AND LOW/’63, a Rich Man/Poor Man child ransom story, finds Kurosawa reversing method to even better results on a film that brings formal design and structure to a pulp novel.  OR: For a regulation HAMLET, Laurence Olivier’s effectively trimmed 1948 unit-set film noir version.

KING CREOLE (1958)

Barely outrunning a looming Army Draft deadline, producer Hal Wallis rushed this Elvis Presley film along on a hack script from Herbert Baker & Michael Gazzo loaded with enough tough luck story beats to fill a season’s-worth of kitchen sink tv dramas.  But its up-from-the-gutter account of an accidental singing sensation (adapted to the music clubs of New Orleans from Harold Robbins’ NYC boxing novel) moves along nicely under Michael Curtiz’s muscular helming.  Occasionally lovely in spare location shooting, and with striking action stuff for Elvis, it offers a priceless final look (and hear) at ‘the King’ before he came back groomed from military service with the rough edges polished off.  The slightly amateurish lad with a month’s pomade in his hair and the natural jangle in his voice & hormones never quite the same again.*  With all-round excellent support (Carolyn Jones’s ‘used’ girl with a good heart especially fine, so too Walter Matthau’s power boss once he decides on an accent), Wallis thought it the best of his eight with Presley.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Something also went missing when Elvis was upped from b&w to color for those anodyne travelogue-themed pics, suddenly aware of his acting/performing effects.

ACCENT ON YOUTH (1935) MR. MUSIC (1950)

Paramount certainly tried to get their money’s worth out of this Samson Raphaelson play; three shots at the material, missing every time.  Naturally, they never asked Raphaelson, one of the all-time great screenwriters, to do an adaption, but enough of his idea survives to make them all watchable.  In a tone much like Ferenc Molnár, it charts a bumpy romance between an older, blocked playwright and his much younger secretary when his stillborn play springs to life once he notices how it mirrors their unspoken relationship.  But in real life, unlike his play, the younger person speaks up first.  A little change that makes a big difference.

The show’s a hit.  But then, again just as in the play, the young leading man confesses his love, complicating things in the real world.  When well played, like a recent B’way revival with David Spade, the writing still makes its effect, but the first film version (released only a month after the B’way closing; Herbert Marshall; Sylvia Sidney; dir. Wesley Ruggles) might be one of those lightly trimmed Early Talkie stage transfers.  Pretty stiff for 1935.  Fifteen years on, Paramount loosely remade it as a Bing Crosby musical, with an unresponsive Nancy Olson as secretary and athletic Robert Stack as the age-appropriate rival.*  The gimmick in Arthur Sheekman’s lousy script has Bing too lazy/too afraid of failure to compose, and Olson there to crack the whip.  With equally lousy tunes from Jimmy Van Heusen & Johnny Burke, not even guest shots from Marge & Gower Champion, Peggy Lee & Groucho Marx help.  Third time round was better, if not the charm (script revamped by John Michael Hayes as BUT NOT FOR ME/’59, with Clark Gable, Carroll Baker, Lilli Palmer.  Maybe they taped the Spades revival.  LINK:   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/12/but-not-for-me-1959.html).

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *In real life, Nancy Olson had just married a songwriter, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner.

MIRACOLO A MILANO / MIRACLE IN MILAN (1951)

Vittorio De Sica once said there were two kinds of film directors, the static shot editors (Team Eisenstein) and the camera movers (Team Murnau).  But then suggested a third: Chaplin, a school of one.  And this Populist Fantasy, lost between perennial classics BICYCLE THIEVES/’49 and UMBERTO D./’52, with regular scripter Cesare Zavattini working up a sort of Magical Neo-Realism, is De Sica’s Chaplin film.*  Francesca Golisano stars as the 'everyman' Chaplin figure*, a literal cabbage patch kid, found & raised by a dotty old lady, now fresh out of the orphanage.  A grown up Holy Fool, this trusting naïf believes the best of people even when he’s being taken.  Landing in a storm-tossed tramp city, he unites the undeserving poor to rebuild as a communal shantytown where most everyone gets along until oil is discovered.  Suddenly, the banker who owns the property wants it back to develop.  It’s paradise lost.  The simplistic politics and general goodness might easily curdle, but De Sica keeps enough bad behavior, greed, feuds & stupidity going on amongst the sharing & caring to cut the sentimentality; ending with a miracle that can be read many ways.  It’s really the same tragic lesson Albert Lamorisse sold as uplift in THE RED BALLOON/’56 and WHITE MANE/’53: No place on earth fit for innocence and goodness.  Exactly what Chaplin was trying for when The Tramp dreams of heaven in THE KID/’21.  De Sica gets us there.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *De Sica mostly Team Murnau, even more so after acting for tracking shot titan Max Ophüls in THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE . . ./’53 whose influence is all over the film he made immediately after, GOLD OF NAPLES/’54.  (Less noticeable in the original Stateside cut which dropped a child’s funeral segment done in a series of fluid crane shots.)  OR: For a stingingly scabrous view of a big city Italian shantytown, Ettore Scola’s appalling/hilarious BRUTTI, SPORCHI E CATTIVI/’76.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *De Sica finds Chaplin touches in Golisano’s baggy, patched pants and slightly splayed running stance, a stockier Chaplin, but with the same short stature & low center of gravity.  Even a water in the face meet-cute a la CITY LIGHTS/’31.  And that police force at the climax?  Pure Keystone Kops.

VENETIAN BIRD (aka THE ASSASSIN) (1952)

With visions of THIRD MAN/'49 box-office dancing in its head, this derivative thriller ships Richard Todd’s private investigator off to Venice in search of a missing man who's soon reported dead.  But following the usual leads (work, girlfriend, relatives, police), Todd thinks otherwise and keeps to the hunt, hitting many scenic Grand Canal sites along the way while uncovering a secret cabal inside a palazzo of art restorers who are really busy plotting a political assassination during a canal regatta.  Yikes!  And that would include the woman he’s falling in love with, ‘widow’ to that missing dead man who's not only alive & well, but triggerman for the plot.  Director Ralph Thomas does a neat job moving in & around slippery Venetian corners, steeply cantered tile rooftops & narrow waterways of the city, less so with the vague Italian accents of his largely London-based supporting actors or in parsing some of the confusing plot turns.  (Victor Canning adapting his own novel.*)   Some awfully good suspense set pieces though: a trip to a Murano glass factory; priestly interruption; Venetian rooftop chase finale.  With a very nice supporting turn from George Coulouris as an overly trusting police chief.  Fun.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Author Victor Canning’s THE RAINBIRD PATTERN, which also uses a swapped identity name change, was the source for Alfred Hitchcock’s much underrated last film FAMILY PLOT.  OR: Check out THE THIRD MAN cast parallels: Todd, Coulouris, Eva Bartok, John Gregson in for Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Alida Valli, Orson Welles.

CONTEST: Speaking of Welles, this film’s final chase much like Welles not in THE THIRD MAN, but from a different Welles thriller.  Name it to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streaming film of your choice!

UN REVENANT (1946)

Best known for the color & zest of Gérard Philipe’s irresistible period romp FAN FAN LA TULIPE/’52, this rather bitter comic revenge story may be writer/director Christian-Jaque’s best work.*   (Though with so many titles unavailable Stateside, how to judge?)  Louis Jouvet is magnificent (and perfectly cast) as a ballet impresario bringing his company to the town he left twenty years ago after a romantic scandal left him disappointed and shot.  Not to gloat over his success, but to punish the once wealthy/now fading family who done him wrong: the lover who spurned him for comfort & social standing, the husband and brother (one of whom probably took the shot), even the artistic leaning family scion, a twenty yr-old now being set up to save the family fortune thru a loveless, arranged marriage (irrepressible work from François Perier).  With the enticement of his ballet company, Jouvet has the lifestyle, the romance of travel & the sexual promise of prima ballerina Ludmilla Tchérina to tempt all.  Christian-Jaque hits his points a little hard at first, detailing family squabbles & finances in a fusty manner, but once Jouvet & Co. show up, everything snaps into place, with a slightly mocking, yet almost sentimental tone.  But not for long.  Halfway in, a privileged moment lets us see (or rather hear) exactly what Jouvet is truly up to, playing the long game against respectability in the most cynical fashion.  Not simple social comeuppance, something more savage, more lasting, thrilling to watch.  Shot & edited with a master’s touch, the film is also unusually precise in its tailoring (of all things), the way clothes reveal class & character, especially on Jouvet (that overcoat, those creaseless suits with matte finish).  Costume design credited to ‘Karinsky’ of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, soon to be poached by Hollywood.  But whomever responsible, give that nameless suit-maker a prize.  The film deserves one, too.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The modern ballet music not only written by Arthur Honegger, but with Honegger conducting on screen.  And check out that surrealistic stage set, Ionic column & giant forearm.  Presumably the work of production designer Pierre Marquet.

DOUBLE-BILL: *That bitterness, a leftover from Nazi Occupation only a year in the past and still alive in the shadows of UN REVENANT, an on-going reality in the small town backstabbing atmosphere of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s LE  CORBEAU/’43.

ROCKABYE (1932)

After a breakthru earlier this year with Constance Bennett & producer/R.K.O. head-of-production David O. Selznick on WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? (an embryonic version of A STAR IS BORN*), director George Cukor was just the man to take over this troubled production, reshooting all of leading man Phillips Holmes’ scenes with Joel McCrea stepping in.  (Original director George Fitzmaurice retains production credit.)  The joins show in a few awkward edits, but the finished film now a respectable weepie, a glammed up, modernized CAMILLE with Bennett getting the big renunciation act sending her lover off to protect family values.  Playing a gossip-worthy B’way star, Constance is forced to give up her adopted girl after testifying in court on her affair with former fiancé Walter Pidgeon.  Now back in town after Paul Lukas, her lovestruck manager, sent her off to recover in Europe, she’s found a new play and a new love in hunky playwright Joel McCrea, married but suing for divorce.  Enter Mrs. McCrea, not the wife, but the mother, who convinces Connie to ‘do the right thing’ since the younger Mrs. McCrea (the wife) is having a baby.  In CAMILLE, it’s the father who does this pleading, and a sister rather that a wife who needs the sacrifice, but the same noble template.  They even toss in a big party to make the renunciation scene a spectacle.  Fortunately, no TB; but a reasonably happy ending.  No great find, but not without interest.  Between decor, clothes and Bennett, definitely worth a look.

CONTEST: *Bennett’s pre-STAR IS BORN pic, WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?/’32, exceptional in its own way, has the romantic lead split in two: doomed alcoholic/Hollywood-phobic businessman.  Cukor would go on to make the Judy Garland/James Mason musical version in 1954 as well as a real, period version of CAMILLE with Garbo in ‘37.  And there's yet another future Cukor film referenced here.  Name it to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choice.

DOUBLE-BILL: Cukor’s next, his last with Bennett, adapted from Somerset Maugham’s OUR BETTERS, doesn’t come off.  But the Maugham play, very Oscar Wilde-like, not without interest.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Our poster is no exaggeration. Constance Bennett really looked like that in 1932.  No wonder sister Joan switched from blonde to brunette to avoid competition.

QUEEN OF KATWE (2016)

At her most distinctive in subjects drawn from her native India (SALAAM BOMBAY!/’88; MONSOON WEDDING/’01), director Mira Nair has been understandably eager, if not always successful, to take on projects off the subcontinent.  Here, she more than gets away with it, handling a very traditional ‘underdog triumphs’ sports story that never feels ‘standard issue’ thanks to an unusual subject & location: Ugandan chess club in the slums.  (Though it is fairly standard in how it puffs up the facts.)  What makes it work is the lively feel toward visual display in color, texture & terrain Nair sees in the clothes, skin tones & even the ‘lean-to’ slum-housing in the neighborhood where young Phiona comes under the tutelage/influence of David Oyelowo, a local preacher & youth organizer who teaches chess to street kids.  And it’s Oyelowo who steals whatever is left beyond the film’s look, terrific as a mentor/father-figure motivating his gang toward championships against seemingly immovable obstacles (food, clothing, cleanliness, family breakdowns, housing, snob prejudice) to meet tough uniformed, prep school types head-on.  You can feel Nair & her writers skirting around a lot of unanswered issues and (perhaps?) less than spectacular tournament results, but the non-pro kid actors, warm lensing and David-and-Goliath situations mostly carry you along.  And when not, Oyelowo is there to put it back on track.  The sympathetic/empathetic teacher of anyone’s dreams.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Chess, math, violin, track-and-field, swimming: there's a triumph-over-adversity fable on film for just about any subject your teen might be into.  This one, as uplifting & likable as they come, got lost in the commercial shuffle.  Chess too a hard sell?  Or was it that unhelpful title?

ATENTION MUST BE PAID: Stick around for the end credits to see the actors meet the real people they played.

BLOOD ON THE MOON (1948)

It’s free-range cattlemen vs homestead farmers (but with a twist) in this solid Western from fast-rising helmer Robert Wise.  (BORN TO KILL the year before; THE SET-UP out next year.)  With Robert Mitchum, also on an early career roll, as a drifting cowhand who lands in the middle of the conflict with honest, indie cattleman Tom Tully (dad to fetching daughters Phyllis Thaxter &  Barbara Bel Geddes) on one side, and longtime pal Robert Preston on the other.  Preston supposedly fronting for the land tillers, but secretly calling in Mitchum as strongman on a cattle swindle he’s worked up with local Indian Agent Frank Faylen.  Under glistening dark clouds from Nicholas Musuraca’s lensing (lots of red-filter), Lillie Hayward’s canny script finds grey areas in plot & characterizations, especially Mitchum as he works his way toward Bel Geddes.  Good action (a standout fight between Preston & Mitchum) and sharp psychological posturing (Thaxter gets an unusually compromised profile), the film’s a significant step forward in modern/post-war Westerns.

DOUBLE-BILL: In spite of leads under directors Anatol Litvak, George Stevens, Robert Wise, Max Ophüls & Elia Kazan on her first five films, Bel Geddes, whose dad was B’way producer/designer Norman Bel Geddes, didn’t quite break thru in Hollywood, spending most of the ‘50s and early ‘60s in hits on the New York stage.  Then tv & occasional film work (VERTIGO/’57) only to become forever known as Miss Ellie, mother to all those dastardly DALLAS men when she really ought to be remembered for Steven’s I REMEMBER MAMA/’48 and Ophül’s CAUGHT/’49.  (And her immortal ‘little piece of time’ moment, banging her fists against her head in VERTIGO: ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!’

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Almost all the international posters on this one feature Mitchum in a scene that has almost nothing to do with the film (as here).  By the time it played overseas, he’d become bigger than just about anything he was in.

FOUR HOURS TO KILL! (1935)

Prolific B’way & Hollywood scribe Norman Krasna uses a light touch on this melodrama, adapting what amounts to a low-rent GRAND HOTEL as if reimagined by GUYS & DOLLS author Damon Runyon.  Set largely in the lounge of a theater while a dopey musical comedy goes thru the motions upstairs, the area becomes a hangout and hide-out for handcuffed convicted murderer Richard Barthelmess, killing a few hours with his cop handler before catching a train to his hanging, but hoping for one last shot (literally) at the guy who ratted on him.   (What a perfect moment to take in a mindless show!)  Meanwhile, box-office manager Henry Travers is on the hunt for a missing piece of jewelry; coat checker Joe Morrison knows where it is, but won’t tell; girlfriend Helen Mack may ‘give-in’ to raise 200 bucks; Gertrude Michael goes behind her husband’s back with venal lover Ray Milland (each hoping to get that jewelry back); a sweet retired couple are caught ‘upgrading’ their seats; while various cops in ascending order of position & mental logic try to figure it all out; and a non-functioning pay phone booth stands empty to help plot machinations.  A big comedown for Barthelmess from the prestige social issue pics he’d been making at Warners, but this little Paramount toss-off is fun.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *After a decade at First National/Warner Bros., Barthelmess was doing a fast fade.  After this one off at Paramount, he made a film in England before heading to France and a botched facelift that kept him off the screen for three years, finally coming back in 1939 at Howard Hawks’ urging for ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.  Forty when he made this film, he looks perfectly fine, a bit like Jimmy Fallon.

DOUBLE-BILL: Mitchell Leisen, still new to directing, got this gig after his confident, pacey work on MURDER AT THE VANITIES/’34, an even better backstage murder story.

THE COVERED WAGON (1923)

Granddaddy of the big-budget Wagons West pics, one of the great silent era hits between top-grossers BIRTH OF A NATION/’15 and THE BIG PARADE/’25, James Cruze’s stolid/solid style feels just right for this epic, a pioneers' pageant that holds up surprisingly well.  Especially where the surviving picture elements do full justice to Karl Brown’s Matthew Brady inspired cinematography.  Long dismissed when it was only available in various butchered editions, Kino Lorber’s restoration easily raises its profile with a more or less complete cut.  And while the adventures of its ‘Conestoga’ wagon travelers over the long, arduous trek to the West Coast have by now been done to death: rivers to ford; mountains to pass; scrub terrain to get thru; attacks by Native American tribes fearing the plow as much as the settlers; buffalo hunts; birth & death on the move; banjo tunes & nighttime socials; a romantic triangle between wagon train leaders for the prettiest gal on the drive (J. Warren Kerrigan; Alan Hale; Lois Wilson); Cruze captures even the dustiest trail with the fresh eye of first discovery.  Leading man Kerrigan, off the screen for three years, gets a star’s late entrance, a delayed appearance which only accentuates his over-groomed, pampered look (like an insult to the rest of the men), though by midpoint someone has washed off the pancake makeup, dirtied his outfit and mussed his hair so he’ll fit in better.  Everyone else very believable, even by modern standards, with outstanding (if corny) comic relief from Tully Marshall & Ernest Torrence, both ornery enough to have lived the life.  Hardly a faked shot to be seen in the whole pic (excluding some tricks to make a score of buffalo look like herds), and a documentary texture from having to solve the same logistical problems the pioneers faced in figuring out how to get past, around or thru all that splendid scenery.  For some, a tough act to follow.  Cruze never did live up to its promise; Kerrigan’s comeback proved brief. 

DOUBLE-BILL: Cruze returned to form with OLD IRONSIDES/’26, a grandly entertaining post-Revolutionary War seafaring epic, but a major flop when it came out at the height of the ‘roaring ‘twenties’, wrong pic at the wrong time.  OR: The first Talkie try at a big-budget Way West story, Raoul Walsh’s epic 70mm flop THE BIG TRAIL/’30 with young John Wayne killing his A-list career for a decade.

OSCAR WILDE (1960)

Gay martyr or vanity’s victim?  Immoral saint or willful society masochist?  Every generation finds the Oscar Wilde it wants.  On screen, 1960 brought two: PLAIN - b&w/small budget, with epicene Robert Morley; and FANCY - TechniColor/WideScreen, dashing Peter Finch.  Yet both men playing the 1960-approved version, paradigmatic playwright of paradox, hoist on his own petard after a case of libel backfires on him (and the unworthy object of his affection) when he treats the courtroom as a stage.  Here, it’s advantage Morley, in spite of a cramped look and a stumbling start next to its more polished rival, Finch in THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE.  Once it sets up the family & professional situation, and once Wilde’s relationship with young shit Lord Alfred takes on a scandalous tinge, Gregory Ratoff’s mere competence as director comes into its own on the crucial trial scenes where his laissez-faire approach allows legal argument & questioning by Alexander Knox, Robert Morley and especially Sir Ralph Richardson to play out with electrifying directness & simplicity.  An acting tour de force trio surpassing anything else done on Wilde, and making the film’s inadequacies all but irrelevant.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Having Jude Law (circa 1997) as Lord Alfred in Stephen Frye’s well-received WILDE makes sense of the infatuation . . . which misses the point.  While Frye’s avuncular Uncle Oscar scrubs off too many sharp edges.  Perhaps Wilde was best captured as fictional self-portrait by George Sanders in the old M-G-M version of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY/’45.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: In a paradox that would have delighted Wilde, the best film adaptation of his work is a silent movie, Ernst Lubitsch’s LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN/’25.  Close second, Alexander’s Korda’s perfectly cast version of AN IDEAL HUSBAND/’47.  (As this is being written, four Wilde projects currently in development.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/lady-windermeres-fan-1925.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/an-ideal-husband-1947.html

CURE (1997)

Stunningly accomplished police procedural, steeped in horror genre tropes by writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a serial killer story without a serial killer.  In his place, an unsettling young man auto-suggesting murder to strangers he comes in contact with.  Speaking in a circuitous manner to throw back any question with a question of his own, he’s interlocutor as devil, inspired by 18th century hypnotist Franz Mesmer.  Shot in a manner that mimics his maddening calm, Kurosawa (no relation to you-know-who) thankfully only gets metaphorically under your skin, his steady cinematic gaze seconding the vague replies of Masato Hagiwara as the mesmerizing murder coach and accentuating the frustration of police dick Kenichi Takabe, struggling with personal problems from his wife’s deteriorating mental health.  And with everyone auto-susceptible to suggestions of unspeakable acts (beware puddling liquids), whom to trust?; how to move the case forward?; how many places to watch at the same time?; protect yourself or your loved ones?  Even when the plot doesn’t quite cohere (some paranormal transfers-of-intent unconvincing or perhaps lost in translation), Kurosawa’s immaculate technique gets you there another way.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Bong Joon Ho, a big fan of this film, reached full maturity with his daringly buoyant serial killer film MEMORIES OF MURDER/’03.  OR: Orson Welles as a former protegee of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer in the entertaining twaddle BLACK MAGIC/’49.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/07/black-magic-1949.html

DÉMANTY NOCI / DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (1964)

Unlike fellow Czech New Wavers Ivan Passer & Milos Forman, writer/director Jan Nemec left no Stateside footprint, but this short debut feature is as good a place as any to start watching.  A haunting, near dialogue-free WWII Holocaust story, closely following a couple of late teen boys after they escape from a Death Camp train.  Their attempted flight to freedom going over the river and thru the woods, but missing a Grandmother’s house to go to.  Lost from first to last frame.  Shot in rough, contrasty b&w, often with handheld camera (lenser Jaroslav Kucera) and a non-pro cast, Nemec never lets up the pace as the pair stick together and stay on the run, stealing food at an isolated farm, hunted like wild animals by a local home guard of armed seniors.  At times, editing & non-linear storytelling technique turns fussy & obfuscating, Nemec following French Nouveau Vague principles as doggedly as any Soviet official toeing the Party Line.  (The very type who’d keep Nemec’s next feature unreleased for decades.)  But this remains a significant achievement that sticks with you.

DOUBLE-BILL: Agnieszka Holland, Polish not Czech, much influenced by this film, also broke thru with a WWII Jewish teen on the run story (sans New Wave trimmings) in EUROPA EUROPA/’90.

STAIRCASE (1969)

Largely reviled, sparsely attended adaptation (slightly opened up by Charles Dyer from his ‘two-hander’ play) about a bickering, ‘swishy’ middle-aged gay couple, emotionally tethered in a miserable relationship, played by infamous heterosexuals Richard Burton & Rex Harrison.  A major success on the London stage (especially for Paul Scofield who declined the film), it’s one of those groundbreaking vehicles that lost its Zeitgeist between stage & screen.*  (It also missed on B’way with a brief 2 month run.)  Something similar happened with THE BOYS IN THE BAND by the time it reached the screen in 1970.  Reevaluated, it’s become an early ‘Pride Moment,’ revived for B’way & newly filmed.  Unlikely here, as the play, a sort of Strindbergian gay character study with a weak pair of crises subbing for plot (one chronic: Burton’s invalid mother; one acute: Harrison’s low-level summons on a morals charge), struggles to maintain interest.  To their credit, Burton & Harrison stay above the camp ad campaign (‘Whoops!,’ see poster), but never quite connect, either.  Director  Stanley Donen felt the project doomed with big budget expectations (both stars getting 1.25 mill) and loss of verisimilitude having to film in Paris for tax purposes.  (Liz Taylor shooting THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN one set over with co-star Warren Beatty driving Burton to distraction.)  Fascinating in a time-capsule kind of way, and an obvious inspiration for Ian McKellen & Derek Jacobi’s popular (if perfectly dreadful) sit-com VICIOUS, the film probably plays better now than it did at the time.  Just not better enough.

DOUBLE-BILL: A year later, a proper, dignified gay character, a credit to his sexual orientation and very well played by ‘flaming’ heterosexual Peter Finch, found critical and commercial acceptance in SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY/'70.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Pity the progressive idea, always slipping behind a sliding scale of modernity while dated period attitudes accepted as just part of their time.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: From Alan Jay Lerner’s memoir ON THE STREET WHERE I LIVE: (While in rehearsals for MY FAIR LADY, Lerner & Rex Harrison on their way to dinner.)  ‘Strolling down Fifth Avenue reviewing our past marital and emotional difficulties and his present one.’  (All told, fourteen marriages between them!)  ‘Suddenly Rex stopped and said in a loud voice that attracted a good bit of attention: “Alan!  Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we were homosexuals?!”’  A remark that gave Lerner the key to Harrison’s great second act number ‘A Hymn to Him/Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’   Harrison’s work in STAIRCASE took a lot of heat, but I think this is exactly the spirit he was going for.

VIRTUE (1932)

Columbia programmer for Carole Lombard (away from top-drawer home studio Paramount), a sweet ‘Pre-Code’  find even with a missing picture element for the first minute & a half.  (Tossed out to comply with stricter Production Code enforcement on a later re-release?)  Director Edward Buzzell, best known for some of the worst Marx Bros. pics, taking advantage of fine work from Frank Capra regulars writer Robert Riskin & lenser Joseph Walker.  Some clever twists get us thru a melodramatically stuffed 68 minutes as Lombard ignores a get-out-of-town decree on a solicitation charge (that’s the missing piece at the start), returning to take Pat O’Brien’s cabby for quite the ride.  A guy who doesn’t trust dames, he falls hard, gets hitched, then thinks he sees Lombard back at her old ways.  Truth is, she’s doing it all for him!  But when a gal pal weasels on an emergency loan and is killed by her lowlife lover, circumstantial evidence pins the murder on Lombard.  Yikes!  Lombard, looking fabu & aces in the acting department, brings out the best in O’Brien (he’s less oafish than usual, as close to Cagney as he ever got*); with standout perfs by girlfriends Shirley Grey and especially Mayo Methot (Mrs. Humphrey Bogart).  Buzzell stiffs his editor with missing angles here & there, but this is still a swell pic.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Sure enough, this follows James Cagney’s hack driver in TAXI/’31 by a year.  It's mostly remembered for Cagney in a fluent bit of Yiddish, but just this once, O’Brien got the better film.

LA SIGNORA SENZA CAMELIE / THE LADY WITHOUT CAMELIAS (1953)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s second feature, a merciless/mirthless look at mid-level commercial moviemaking in the early post-WWII Italian ‘Boom’ years, made before he found his signature ‘Every Man An Island’ theme.  But, much like Roberto Rossellini in DOV'È LA LIBERTÀ...?/’54, satire proves a tough nut to crack when you've got no humor in your DNA.  Frame-worthy compositions in architecture & interior design make their points, but only get you so far in this context, leaving no mark.  And mile-a-minute gabble at party scenes give off no more comic edge then undercranked/speeded-up action scenes.  Lucia Bosé plays the shopgirl-turned-movie-ingenue, hoping to move past her specialty in surface glamor & sex to please a producer she’s married in haste.  No more rolls in the hay when she could be starring as Joan of Arc!  Naturally, everyone loses their shirt (except for Lucia which is why the film bombs), but she licks her wounds in a brief, unsatisfying affair before learning a lesson from older, wised-up co-star Alain Cuny, stealing the pic.  So, back to that provocative, unfinished romantic drivel her husband objected to, just the thing to get everyone out of hock.  Then on to new projects: upscale stuff for him/trash for our quickly aging heroine.  Now, sadder, wiser, lonelier.  Seeing Antonioni take this seriously is a bit odd.  Or is he sending it up with an edge so fine we miss it?  (It might be a prime Lana Turner vehicle like last year’s THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL.)   Shot for shot, very watchable (Antonioni a natural fashionista in the image department), but you'll see why the film gets overlooked.

DOUBLE-BILL: Luchino Visconti, working from a Cesare Zavattini story, brings bitter humor & humanity to his behind-the-scenes at Cinecitta in BELLISSIMA/’51.  OR: For Antonioni before he was fully formed, intriguingly balanced between traditional narrative and permanent existential crisis, LE AMICHE/’55.

OUTWARD BOUND (1930) BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (1944)

Six years after it opened on B’way (with Alfred Lunt; Leslie Howard; Dudley Digges), Sutton Vane’s poetic drama about passengers on a mysterious boat heading toward the afterlife came to the screen with half the original cast.  (Howard upped to Lunt’s role; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in his.)  Six years after a revival on B’way (Laurette Taylor, Vincent Price, Otto Preminger directing & Helen Chandler from the 1930 film), it came to the screen again, refitted for WWII as BETWEEN TWO WORLDS.

Both films have their charms: 1930 with its illustrated storybook treatment and cinematographer Hal Mohr’s ghostly visuals, best in the first half; 1944 with sturdier dramatic construction, peak Hollywood polish, less stage-bound acting and Erich Wolfgang Korngold score*, but also a bumpy, needlessly literal prologue to tidy up the irrational fantasy element before it comes together midway along, gaining ground in the last act when Sydney Greenstreet shows up for Final Judgement as the Examiner, doling out just desserts as simplistic & corny as any Wizard of Oz, yet surprisingly touching & satisfying.  And while characterizations are generally better in the later film (John Garfield’s tough guy, Sara Allgood’s charlady, Paul Henreid’s suicidal composer, all standouts, with Faye Emerson making good on a rare dramatic opportunity), both films remain touching in their naivety; rather special, like a lost YA morality play from James M. Barrie.

DOUBLE-BILL: Oops!, this already is a Double-Bill.  But for a modern variant even less subtle, Bruce Jay Friedman’s STEAMBATH/’73.

LINK: *With a supernatural element redolent of his best known operas (DIE TOTE STADT; DAS WUNDER DER HELIANE), this was Korngold’s personal film score favorite.  This fine modern recording is from John Mauceri, but only the original soundtrack has Korngold dubbing Henreid’s piano solos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXxnNTG3JXQ

PAID (1930)

Wasted opportunity.  Taken from an old play by Bayard Veiller, whose TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN gave Norma Shearer her Talkie debut in ‘29, here Joan Crawford stars since Norma was on maternity leave.*   And compared to later Joan, she’s an untrained revelation; her look a bit unsettled and all the better for it.  That hard Crawford mask not yet in place in makeup or acting.

 If only the film stayed on course.  Lively for an M-G-M Talkie of the period, director Sam Wood drops the ball after an Act One which sees Joan serving three-years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit; vowing revenge on the wealthy business exec who put her there.  Continuing with a series of sharp scenes in prison to show Crawford, purged of any makeup, waiting with dozens for the communal shower (unsegregated, that’s Louise Beavers at her side), in nothing but small towels.  This ‘lost’ Crawford something to see.  And once out, joining old pal Marie Prevost (a delight) and new pal Robert Armstrong to put together a sweet little scam golddiging rich old guys thru compromising letters & gifts.  Now, with legal payoffs, Joan sets her eye on the man who sent her up the river.  And he’s got just the naive son to make it all happen.  If only Crawford didn’t fall for the kid . . . for real.  And things turn even soggier when platonic pal Armstrong gets involved with lowlife burglars to steal a copy of the Mona Lisa at the kid's home.  Shots are fired; lights go out; a man is dead; Armstrong goes on the lam; Joan takes the blame; then the kid takes the blame; cops relentlessly (and endlessly) interrogate; the film stops dead in its tracks.  Puerile stuff, M-G-M story-editing micro-management at its worst.  Remade as a 1939 programmer under the play’s original title, WITHIN THE LAW/’39, maybe they fixed some of the problems.  Too bad, that first act’s a beauty.

DOUBLE-BILL: Crawford hits her early peak under director Clarence Brown in next year’s POSSESSED/’31 against Clark Gable.  Here, Douglas (Kent) Montgomery is just too goony to match up with Joan.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Shearer was married to M-G-M ‘boy wonder’ Production Head Irving Thalberg, giving rise to Crawford’s famous lament about being unable to compete for roles against a main rival who was sleeping with the boss.

THE SCORE (2001)

Perfectly adequate/largely unnecessary, an All-Pro caper pic that never seems to matter or build up much suspense, yet demands attention as Marlon Brando’s last film.  Apparently enjoying the kind of ‘old smoothie’ role reserved for aging lions with a past, he’s surprisingly mobile under the girth, radiating bonhomie (hey, we’re in Montreal) setting up a 'Mission Impossible' Art Theft (priceless 17th Century French scepter) under high-tech ultra-lock in basement storage at the Montreal Customs House.  Young upstart thief Edward Norton’s been casing the joint for months, hiding in plain sight as a handicapped maintenance worker and Robert De Niro is the world class second-story man, a safe-cracker reluctantly taking his first job below ground level . . . also his last.  He’s getting out of the game to please Angela Bassett, a regular singer at his jazz club, tired of waiting for him to go straight.  None of this even faintly believable, which would be fine if more was going on with caper or characters; the twists mostly mild, until the final two which are (one) entirely guessable and (two) hard to swallow.  Ending with the fastest coda on record, as if everyone cashed the last paycheck and cleared out.  On a tightly scheduled/well-paid project like this, the real caper is the film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: After LAST TANGO IN PARIS/’72, Brando packed on the pounds and became largely unwilling (unable?) to take acting seriously anymore; amusing himself on set (and off) with impossible demands & behavior, perhaps just to see what he could get away with.  How to value something that came so easily to him?  Here, refusing to take direction from Frank Oz, and generally referring to him by his famous alter ego, Miss Piggy.

HELL'S FIVE HOURS (1958)

Short, but tiresome.  Jack L. Copeland’s solo shot at film (he wrote, directed, produced) is shopworn hostage drama: revenge seeking employee straps on a ‘human bomb’ vest and threatens to detonate it at the jet fuel factory he was fired from, while holding a police detective’s wife.  (Pretty stale stuff even then.)  Coleen Gray & Stephen McNally keep their self-respect as the married couple under pressure, but inevitably become backdrops to Vic Morrow’s ‘white trash’ bomber who's located the Method Acting sweet spot between James Dean angst & Rod Steiger constipation.  (With a blustery score to underline every motivational tic.)  At least he’s something to watch!  So too fine crepuscular lensing from Ernest Haller, a top Warners cameraman in the ‘30 & ‘40s (Bette Davis’s fave), who turns the nighttime location shooting into compelling abstract compositions: round holding tanks, encircling stairways, geometric shadows & metal pipeworks as obstacles at this complex complex.  As to the drama, you’ve seen it before . . . and will again.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Blowing up yourself and a gas plant?  Stick with James Cagney in WHITE HEAT/’49.

THE RISE AND RISE OF MICHAEL RIMMER (1970)

With John Cleese & Graham Chapman part of the writing team (and in small roles), there’s a whiff of the just aborning Monty Python in this satire of class, business and politics . . . just not enough.  Something of a write-off when released, it’s slowly built a niche, mixing period crudities (woman are objectified to death) and prescient ideas on a dumbed down future of broadcast press, publicity & politics.  And if Kevin Billington’s directing is no more than functional (Richard Lester unavailable?), an outstanding cast of off-center scene-stealers (Cleese, Chapman, Dennis Price, Denholm Elliot, Roland Culver) are targets for dry, droll Peter Cook (sly of mind/lank of limb), hiding ambition in plain sight as he effortlessly climbs the ladder from Junior Exec to Company Head; Backbencher MP to Prime Minister.  As if Peter Sellers’ character in BEING THERE merged with Uriah Heep to star in HOW TO SUCCEED IN POLITICS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING.  More consistently amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, the film improves toward the end when it darkens into a cautionary tale of fascism & fickle masses; even if ultimately better suited for post-viewing conversations than as the rosy-posy knife-edged parody it wants to be.

DOUBLE-BILL: With IN THE LOOP and VEEP, Armando Iannucci got further with this sort of thing; so too Jonathan Lynn on tv with YES MINISTER and YES, PRIME MINISTER.

BRIEF ECSTASY / DANGEROUS SECRETS (1937)

Unheralded romantic triangle from journeyman French director Edmond T. Gréville, here working in Britain, hits the ground running with a meet-cute for university student Linden Travers and businessman Hugh Williams (he spills tea on her at a café), followed by an all-night date and a promise to rush back after his overseas trip.  But when an ill wind blows his telegraphed proposal away, she settles, rather happily, for older professor Paul Lukas.  FIVE YEARS LATER: Williams returns to visit the professor, unaware that his young wife is . . .  Yikes!  Basic as it is, this Quota Quickie is a real treat to watch as someone, writer Basil Mason?, cinematographer (later big time producer/director) Ronald Neame?, surely not Gréville, has loaded all sorts of stylish visual tricks from the late silent film era vocabulary and made an unusually good job of it.  Cantered angles, extreme close-ups, associative editing, ‘rhymed’ matching dissolves between scenes, split screens & subliminal montages with moving mattes, the works.  And only a few coming off as arbitrary showoff to keep our minds off the time worn plot.  Good perfs, too, not only from the three leads, but also by nosy, jealous housekeeper Marie Ney, willing to take even her beloved professor down with her.  As long as you don’t expect too much, this is quite the find.  And there are good prints of the British cut, which runs a full reel longer (about 70") than the Stateside release, worth every minute.

DOUBLE-BILL: Next year, Lukas & Travers would play baddies in Hitchcock’s THE LADY VANISHES/’38.