FORD v FERRARI (2019)

Not merely set in the ‘60s, but with a filmmaking mind-set from the ‘60s, director James Mangold goes all John Frankenheimer in this tru-ish if-you-can’t-buy-‘em/beat ‘em tale of how Henry Ford II took revenge on Italian racing giant Ferrari by gearing up to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans.  Lee Iacocca’s the good-guy exec with the idea; Leo Beebe’s the bad-guy exec in charge; retired racer/good old boy Carroll Shelby designs & builds the car; Brit bad-boy Ken Miles drives.  Decidedly old-school in dialogue & construction, the script might be the work of Hollywood pro Sterling Silliphant, but given up-to-date tech & music cues.  The first an improvement (no mismatched/grainy process shots); the latter not (repetitive rhythmic suspense beats).  With acres of George Peppards & Rod Taylors playing all those Ford Company VPs (real Ford VPs at the time all looked like Don DeFore, college jocks gone tubby); while Matt Damon’s Shelby essentially has the peacemaking/honorable James Garner part and Christian Bale in for Steve McQueen (who would have refused to try the Birmingham accent*) as the hotheaded driver.  And, just like those ‘60s racing pics, this one could have lost a half hour.  But perhaps that’s part of the film’s comfort factor and why it was a bit overrated and taken seriously.  Zero surprises, but enjoyable on its own terms.  Best nostalgic moment?  A brief Tower of Babel moment when international broadcasters all yell in their various tongues at the same time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Back in the day, most U.S. car models were equipped with an extra little vent (shaped like a triangle) that would pivot out in front windows.  Great for breezeless ventilation & smoke elimination.  But as A.C. become ubiquitous, they were progressively phased out with but one exception: the Lincoln Continental Mark IV which retained the little vent window, now sliding down rather than out, kept solely for the purpose of handling smoke and ash for cigar addict Henry Ford II.  This film goes to the bother of sourcing & prominently showing those old little 6½ oz. glass Coke bottles, but not a cigar in sight.  Frankenheimer would have spotted it.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The switch from celluloid film stock to the digital capture used here has many technical advantages, but does seem to make the cars feel less weighty/less tactile.  See the diff in John Frankenheimer’s GRAND PRIX/’66, with James Garner in the Steve McQueen spot.  Something McQueen tried to correct when he cobbled together LE MANS/’71.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/grand-prix-1966.html

MOSS ROSE (1947)

With actor Laird Cregar dead and director John Brahm off to R.K.O., 20th/Fox swapped in Victor Mature and Gregory Ratoff to follow their claustrophobic London-set/fog-bound turn-of-the-last-century thrillers THE LODGER/’44 and HANGOVER SQUARE/’45.  And it’s nearly as good.  Ratoff often doing little more than staying on schedule as director, here manages some nifty studio-artifice faux London atmosphere (probably on the same sets Brahm used) in a story that sees Cockney chorus gal Peggy Cummings using a murderer as her ticket to class respectability when upper-cruster Victor Mature dashes out of the bedroom of a fellow rooming-house chorine, freshly dead in bed.  Yikes!  She protects him from the police and blackmails him, not for cash, but for lessons in Lady-like deportment, playing Eliza Doolittle to his Henry Higgins up at his country manse.  An arrangement wealthy fiancé Patricia Medina naturally objects to, yet oddly welcomed by free-spirit mom Ethel Barrymore.  With nice twists along the way, like tag-team detectives Vincent Price & Rhys Williams, on to Mature, but unable to prove anything.*  And if Mature makes an unlikely choice as London society coach and Cummings lays on the Cockney trimmings with a trowel, they each improve over time while Barrymore, often used sparingly as a prestige prop, really gets something to chew on.  Such power!  Such range!  Very frightening when she needs to be, reminding us of her position as top stage star of two continents back in the ‘teens & ‘twenties.  (She also gets a chance to act again with Rhys Williams who played in her legendary 1940 B’way comeback, THE CORN IS GREEN.  Then, when they made the film version, he kept his part while Ethel was replaced with the far too young Bette Davis.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Watch Price steal focus from Mature with an old actor’s trick where he lights Mature’s cigarette than holds (and holds and holds) the lit match so we can look at nothing else.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above, THE LODGER and HANGOVER SQUARE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lodger-1944.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/04/hangover-square-1945.html

KENEDI SE ZENI / KENEDI IS GETTING MARRIED (2007)

Serbian director Zelimir Zilnik with a second look at the Romany life of incorrigible Kenedi Hasani (first & third entries not seen here), currently squatting in Germany, but about to be deported back to whatever might pass for a homeland.   Filmed in near documentary style, and usually mislabeled as such, it charts the fascinating, if unknowable mind-set of this hard-wired Roma (or Gypsy as they were once called*) as he figures out how to reach his next immediate goal.  At the moment, that would be paying off an enormous debt to loan sharks on a house meant for his family.  With as much patience & foresight as an exotic fish in a bowl, Kenedi still knows the €10/day he makes tearing down dilapidated buildings is getting him nowhere.  On the other hand, sex work yields two to four times that amount in a few pleasantly spent hours.  And with changing mores and societal liberalizations opening up new markets as he’s no longer restricted to middle-aged widows, but now sees opportunity in wealthy gays in need of studly company.  Even marriage now possible!  Kenedi offering a full five year plan to bait interest.  (Four years & eleven months longer than Kenedi has ever planned ahead.)  A job of work, a scam, a relationship of convenience; all the same to him.  But time may be running out, and not just from imminent deportation.  He’s also on the wrong side of 30.  Some teeth missing, no longer able to perform all night long and be ‘up’ for morning duty.  (Note explicit, if non-erotic sex scenes.)  And at a farewell dinner, before heading to Turkey, male & female marks collide.  Pretty amazing stuff in here, with Kenedi Hasani as unselfconscious/uninhibited a screen presence for Zilnik as Joe Dallesandro was for Warhol/Morrissey in FLESH/’68, though active rather than passive; and Zelnik pulling a real narrative structure out of captured shards of film & unplanned events.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *The collection UP IN THE OLD HOTEL by The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell’s has his unmatched series on how ‘Gypsy’ society played the system with scams & schemes in the ‘40s.  You won’t find Roma enclaves re-tinning copper pans any more (more's the pity), but much hasn’t changed at all.  Still as insular as some religious sect.

DOUBLE-BILL: Hollywood tried to sell KING OF THE GYPSIES/’78, from a Peter Maas book, as a sort of GODFATHER story.  Now mostly of interest for not making Eric Roberts a big star.

LEAN ON PETE (2017)

At its best, writer/director Andrew Haigh makes this boy-and-his-horse coming-of-age tale strong & affecting, an indie period piece* that elides sentimentality or unearned nobility.  The problem is that it’s not always at its best.  In a strong cast that feels non-professional but isn’t, soft-spoken, deceivingly fragile-looking teen Charlie Plummer is a standout as the boy who grows too fond of fading racehorse Lean-On-Pete, doomed to be cut from a small stable of thoroughbreds owned by gruff trainer Steve Buscemi who hired the kid on a whim.  (Buscemi sticks out in a bad way from the rest of the cast, unable to adjust his focus down to the required unaffected naturalism.)  But what starts as a sweet summer job, with the added bonus of a work-related friendship with practical jockey Chloë Sevigny, turns progressively dark with loss.  Plummer ends up taking off without a plan from the NorthWest on an epic solo journey to save Lean On Pete and find an Aunt, his only living relative, living somewhere in Wisconsin.  Haigh withholds info whenever possible, probably because it’s the only way to keep this near Homeric tale from collapsing in the face of logistics & reality.*  And it largely comes off, making something intensely moving and near mythical in a second half that feels free from story beats, yet is anything but, loaded with its own mysteries, surprises and betrayals.  Pretty rough stuff along the way (in spite of our Family Friendly Label, you are forewarned), before pulling out a tentatively hopeful ending that doesn’t feel like a cheat.

DOUBLE-BILL: This one flew under the radar in the face of another fine boy-and-his-horse film out at the same time, Chloé Zhao’s THE RIDER/’17, her superior predecessor to NOMADLAND/’20.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-rider-2017.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *But exactly what period is it?  In keeping with the film’s general attitude toward specifics, hard to pin it down.  Best guess, late ‘80s/early ‘90s?  Perhaps a song on the radio in this largely scoreless/musically diegetic film nails it down.

LOS TALLOS AMARGOS / THE BITTER STEMS (1956)

Prime Argentinean film noir from director Fernando Ayala lands somewhere between a well-made plan gone wrong like DOUBLE INDEMNITY/’44, and the no-way-out living nightmare of DETOUR/’45.  Pulsating with dream-like expressionistic touches in pools of black, Ayala moves seamlessly between past & present, much helped by an Astor Piazzolla score not without a few tango riffs to showcase his signature bandoneon stylings.  Carlos Cores stars as a disaffected scandal-sheet reporter in early mid-life crisis who throws his lot in with fast-talking bartender Vassili Lambrinos on a phony start-up correspondence journalism course.  The whole thing is a scam, but once the cash starts coming in, Carlos can’t be sure who’s being conned.  He’s giving the lion’s share to his new BFF/partner who needs money to bring his family over from Europe.  But what if there is no family?  What if it’s all talk?  Who’s the con man and who’s being conned?  Murder seems the logical solution to all the lies, and easy when your victim is a man with no papers, no personal trail, no family, only a pesky mistress.  Maybe she needs to go too.  The perfect moment for an overseas telegram from Europe to come in under your office door.  Yikes!  Neatly plotted, neatly styled, neatly handled, and extremely well cast.  Just beware of unrestored prints.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: From Mexico, more classic Latino noir in the even better LA NOCHE AVANZA/’52.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/04/la-noche-avanza-night-falls-1952.html

WHITE CARGO (1942)

It's back to the plantation, one of those British rubber-tree operations somewhere in Africa, where a handful of quinine-popping/malaria-wary Whites oversee a large Black labor force.  Barely adapted from a once ‘daring’ ‘20s B’way play, this decidedly stagebound film has to drop its big scandalous selling point since the Hollywood Production Code would never allow a White man to marry a Black woman in ‘42.  So, suitably Max Factor’d, Hedy Lamaar (tan & terrific as seen in this Euro-poster, lily-white in all U.S. artwork) gets Egyptian/Arab parentage as Tondelayo*, amoral/avaricious local siren provocatively strutting between Walter Pidgeon’s jungle-hardened foreman and Richard Carlson’s fast-fading, idealistic assistant.  While Dipsomaniac Doc Frank Morgan & Practical Pastor Henry O’Neill make up the rest of the film’s ‘Four White Men in 100 Square Miles’ and cheer from the sidelines.  This claptrap actually something of a step up for workhorse B-pic director Richard Thorpe.  Maybe that’s why he lets his cast chew the scenery and play to the back of the house.  Pidgeon really off-leash, perhaps in protest for the assignment after starring in last year’s and this year’s Best Pics: HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY/’41; MRS. MINIVER/’42.  On the other hand, Lamaar, realizing she was suddenly out of favor @ M-G-M, at least has a bit of fun under the makeup; expressing marital disappointment with lines like, ‘Married five months and you not beat me once!’

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  With Ben Hecht protégé John Lee Mahin on script, M-G-M once knew how to pull off Rubber Plantation tropes: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Mary Astor in RED DUST/’32 under director Victor Fleming.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/red-dust-1932.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Playwright/drag artist Charles Busch, who specializes in heightening this sort of diva drama for comic effect on stage (brilliantly) and screen (less brilliantly), would have to tone this one down.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *‘Tondelaya’ on this poster; ‘Tondelayo’ in the film; ‘Tondeleyo’ in the original play.  Who gets paid to make these calls?

CHASE A CROOKED SHADOW (1958)

Second-tier, but fun triple-twist suspenser apes WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION/’57 with a post-credit request not to reveal its surprise ending, and anticipates PSYCHO/’60 in asking you to see it from the beginning!*  Director Michael Anderson, back to earth after saving Mike Todd’s AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS/’56 from a tippling director, is more in his element here, taking everything at face value to hoodwink us into what first seems a ‘Gaslighting’ tale as Richard Todd (with accomplice Faith Brook) convinces everyone except Anne Baxter he’s her ‘dead’ brother.  Yes, she identified the body, but Todd knows everything: about his false identity, about her, about the family & its dicey finances!  So what could he possibly want?  Cash reserves largely gone since Dad died.  If only she could prove it to sympathetic local police captain Herbert Lom.  Then the story starts to crack.  Not his . . . hers!  More so when Uncle Alexander Knox identifies the imposter as . . . her brother.  Yikes!  Maybe she is going insane . . . or maybe the family’s financial ace-in-the-hole, a secret stash of diamonds isn't so secret . . . maybe it involves her brother’s unsolved death.  Yikes!  And every time you think you’ve got the story figured out, the script pulls the rug out from under you again.  Neat, if missing the gloss & pace to hit its potential.  (Or perhaps the muddy transfer of Erwin Haillier’s b&w lensing holds it down.)  No mind, generally a nice little surprise.

DOUBLE-BILL: Anderson’s next film also something of a find; an effective Irish terrorist drama, SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL/’59, with James Cagney in good late form.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The old movie-goer’s phrase, ‘This is where I came in,’ meaningless to streamers.

(THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF) DAVID COPPERFIELD (2019)

While ‘Color-Blind’ casting has long been common on stage (half a century or so), it still can create a useful stir (and commercial buzz) when seen thru film’s de facto realism.  Ergo BRIDGERTON.  So why not Dickens?  No problem at all in writer/director Armando Iannucci’s adaptation, though perhaps less ‘Color-Blind’ than ‘Pro-Diversity,’ a slightly different policy.  And yet this ‘meta’-Dickens COPPERFIELD is almost as dead-on-arrival as Roman Polanski’s ultra-traditional OLIVER TWIST was in 2005.  Opening as a stage reading by the grown Copperfield, an act the real Dickens thrived at, we jump back into the story.  ‘Jump’ the operative word as Iannucci’s hand-held camera never stops nervously thrusting, infecting his cast with a bad case of St. Vitus dance, and leaving the marvelously ‘rhymed’ plot to tumble out in hit-and-miss fashion, indecipherable to those not already familiar with it.*  It represents a serious step back from the narrative advancements & confident technical display of Iannucci’s last, THE DEATH OF STALIN/’17.  We’re left with a few good (hammy) turns (emboldened Tilda Swinton; dapper Dev Patel; curse-coifed Ben Whishaw) that still pale beside the miraculous cast of the old George Cukor/David O Selznick 1935 beauty.  (Comic geniuses W.C. Fields & Edna May Oliver only the start, with Basil Rathbone, Freddie Bartholomew, Roland Young, and the astoundingly odd Lennox Pawle among many others.)  Anyway, how to trust any version that drops ‘Barkis is willing.’?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Next to OLIVER TWIST, COPPERFIELD may be Dickens’ most adapted novel.  Besides the 1935 film (with a very generous running time for the period of 2'10", also the only one to make Dora’s appeal understandable), the 1999 BBC mini-series with Daniel Radcliffe, Maggie Smith & Bob Hoskins holds up nicely.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/david-copperfield-1935.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *And it’s belatedly occurred to me that this WriteUp, just like the film, assumes a more-or-less complete knowledge of the book to make sense of!

THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE (2000)

With just three features over 25 years (#4 prepping), this likable, if slightly relentless, late hand-drawn Disney effort, a modest commercial success, is probably writer/director Mark Dindal’s high-water mark.  The simplest of tales (young, arrogant ruler finds humanity after living as a llama) supports acres of gags played in a more ‘cartoony’ style than was typical for the period.  With sharp ultra-articulated body joints & wild physical exaggeration, it reps a departure in ‘90s style much as 101 DALMATIANS did less kinetically ‘61.  Here, with some surprising links in pacing & craziness to the great Tex Avery (his post-Looney Tunes/M-G-M period), and not only SCREWY SQUIRREL shorts.*  Snarky David Spade, better suited for supporting roles, works to diminishing returns as a one-note/one-joke emperor fighting usurpers Eartha Kitt & Patrick Warburton (this funny pair echoing Anita Morris & Bill Pullman in RUTHLESS PEOPLE/’86) after drinking that llama potion.  Learning thru comic adventures & close calls on the road how the other half lives, thanks to a friendship-of-convenience with John Goodman’s larger-than-life man-of-the-people.  Goodman the sole character in the film drawn to suggest indigenous South American features.  How different this all would look - and sound - now!  Still, winning modest fun.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Tex Avery’s SCREWY SQUIRREL only fitfully available online.  (He can be very Politically Incorrect.)  But search under ‘SCREWY SQUIRREL Stream’ and you’ll find some shining examples @ Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc.

URANIUM BOOM (1956)

With a Colorado Uranium Rush on, field expert Rock Hudson & science engineer Van Heflin are literally fighting to claim the last room in town.  But when a double opens up, respective expertise makes them a formidable team.  If only they weren’t being followed by gun-toting claim jumpers.  No problem, wily half-blood In’jun Walter Brennan hired to direct & protect, improvises a bit of enemy sabotage and they get the claim in.  That’s when Rock meets-cute with purty lady Lauren Bacall, Eastern gal pal to Heflin, though not as serious as he is about it.  In fact, sparks fly and the new duo is married by the time they get back to Heflin at the mine site.  Now, Heflin only wants revenge on his partner; Hudson turns into a cold-hearted uranium empire-builder; Bacall pines for attention at the beautiful new home Rock avoids; and a new face, Gloria Grahame steps into the picture to vamp Hudson so he’ll fall into the trap Heflin has set up to break him.  In the end, everyone loses/everyone wins.  Tag end as their jeep drives off with Rock, Lauren & Van starting over as a happy ménage à trois.  Yikes!  But where to find this melodramatic/capitalist indictment/gay subtextual TechniColor opus?  Alas, this Douglas Sirk manqué film doesn’t exist.*  The cast at hand is Dennis Morgan (in a final feature); pre-PERRY MASON William Talman; Patricia Medina (curvy & clueless); Tina Carver (pretty good as the conniving blonde); all going thru the motions for dull, dull, dull director William Castle (in his pre-exploitation days, but already shooting in flatly lit tv-anthology ready b&w).  Longtime B-producer Sam Katzman made 239 pictures, all on a dime . . . this is one of them.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *To see all the possibilities triumphantly realized, Douglas Sirk’s WRITTEN ON THE WIND/’56, released only months later with Rock, Robert Stack, Bacall & Dorothy Malone in the top spots.   OR: Story Beat for Story Beat, even closer to M-G-M’s glossy BOOM TOWN/’40, with Gable, Colbert, Tracy & Lamaar hitting similar marks.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/boom-town-1940.html

DIDI MTSVANE WELI / BIG GREEN VALLEY (1967)

From Georgia in USSR days, Merab Kokochashvili’s best known work.  A People’s Artist of the Republic (a mere six features in sixty years; now filming #7), this severe b&w beauty charts the downward trajectory of a burly cattle-raising farmer as land, family & custom drift away.  Proud of the generations who worked the valley before him, he’s now being forced out by government decree, off land that’s being repurposed.  Mining and the oil seeping into the soil under hoof & feet forcing him out.  A phenomenon he’s known about since he was a boy, showing his own son in a haunting scene a secret underground cave filled with mysterious drawings revealed by lighting natural gas leaks that burn near the symbolic etchings.  Things equally unsettled at home, with both his wife and his fortune-telling mistress threatening to leave just as his elderly farmhand left.  And now his cows are dying, calving stillborn & not producing milk.  Depressing as this all sounds, Kokochashvili holds the narrative detail so tightly, you need to pick it apart for yourself while admiring a monumental sense of man & nature in the film’s rhythm & the dense monochrome grain of its striking images.  You might not always know exactly what’s going on (is this the mistress or the wife?), but it certainly holds your attention.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Bela Tarr’s final narrative film, THE TURIN HORSE/’11, is like this on steroids.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-torinoi-lo-turin-horse-2011.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Farmer Dodo Abashidze is built & looks a lot like Topol as Tevye in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF/’71.

TERESA (1951)

After three WWII-themed pics from Fred Zinnemann (THE SEARCH; ACT OF VIOLENCE; THE MEN), and FROM HERE TO ETERNITY still to come, this runt of the liter gets overlooked.   A ‘Problem Pic’ like THE MEN, it pivots from the damaged body of returning vet Marlon Brando in the earlier film, to the damaged mind (today’s PTSD) of ex-GI John Ericson.  And that’s a problem of its own, since the film was supposed to be about War Brides, initiated by the dilemmas of young wives fresh off the boat, trying to adjust to America after months of separation from a husband (and new family) they hardly know.  Timely stuff, and nearly everything targeting this part of the story, especially Pier Angeli, a real charmer in her film debut, fully up to the usual Zinnemann standard.  Trying on a near Neo-Realistic film style for the flashback war scenes (note Angeli’s cousin in her small Italian town, it’s Franco Interlenghi from De Sica’s SHOESHINE), Zinnemann sets up the relationship while letting us see Ericson in panic mode under combat.  (That’s Ralph Meeker in a memorable bit as his superior.)  But once home, the drama tilts toward controlling, passive/aggressive Mom Patricia Collinge.*  It makes tall/handsome Ericson look weak when he’s supposed to look troubled.  Zinnemann knew it, too.  Unhappy with this part of the script, he failed to convince his contented producer to let him do a bit more work on the film after a preview went too well.  (No doubt, Zinnemann equally unhappy about that fulsome music score.)  And wasting a strong supporting cast: Peggy Ann Garner, Rod Steiger, Bill Mauldin.  Still, worth a look to self-edit the better film hiding in plain sight.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *For classic passive/aggressive Mother-Love horror, Irene Dunn, Joel McCrea & Laura Hope Crews in Sidney Howard’s THE SILVER CORD/’33.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-silver-cord-1933.html   OR: The newlywed adjustment story Zinnemann probably had in mind, King Vidor’s late-silent THE CROWD/’28.

AND THEN WE DANCED (2019)

Swedish writer/director Levan Akin went to Tbilisi Georgia for a cast of film newbies to play a tight group of young dancers slaving away at the National Georgian Ensemble, unpaid trainees in this traditional dance form, all hoping to make the leap to paid professional.  Already wildly competitive under an over-controlling dance master, their interpersonal dynamic quickly upended when a talented new dancer (Bachi Valishvili) of natural command & technique arrives unheralded from another town.  Manly handsome, too; upsetting various partnerships & balances.  The main storyline focuses on initial main rival Levan Gelbakhiani, boyfriend to fellow dancer Ana Javakishvili, son & brother to past & present soloists; and his change from enemy to frenemy, from best pal to surprised (if brief) consensual sex-mate in spite of the strenuously homophobic official Georgian Party Line & environment.  Akin’s nervous filming technique doesn’t always make the most of traditional Georgian classical folk dance (closer to Greek or Spanish flamenco than ballet), but what we do see (and hear) is pretty fascinating.  So too the family situations & customs.  So much so, that the sexual coming-of-age tropes, well done as they are, can feel like interruption, an unnecessary intrusion hoping to give relevancy and extra meaning to an old story.  Only now, it’s the gay angle that feels de rigueur, and more than a bit conventional.  Even though, as Georgian society goes, it must certainly isn’t!  In any event, well played, and not just well meant.

DOUBLE-BILL: Gold standard on this theme remains André Téchiné’s WILD REEDS/’94.  Now, amazingly, almost three decades old.

UNDERWATER! (1955)

As R.K.O. imploded, increasingly erratic owner Howard Hughes went out not with a Bang, not with a Whimper, but with one of each.  The ‘Bang’ was THE CONQUEROR, a fiasco with John Wayne as Genghis Khan  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-conqueror-1956.html); the ‘Whimper,’ this seriously uneventful ocean treasure hunt.  Even the sharks refuse to menace.  And that two-piece bathing suit is seen only in the poster.  John Sturges, just off his breakthru on BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK/'55 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/bad-day-at-black-rock-1955.html) has his hands full not with drama but in trying to match real ocean locations to studio mock-ups, tinted cycloramas* and a model shipwreck from the 1600s while Jane Russell (sporting a one-piece suit), Richard Egan (sporting blonde highlights), Gilbert Roland (fighting ‘the bends’), and Robert Keith (bringing in Catholic expertise) dive in to beat salvaging seaman Joseph Calleia and bring up an ancient gold Madonna before her waterlogged wreck sinks out of reach.  As usual, the demands of underwater photography slowing things down considerably.  Meanwhile, Hughes, with other irons in the fire, pulled the plug on R.K.O. after JET PILOT (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/jet-pilot-1957.html), shot 1950/released 1957, selling out to Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz’s ‘Desilu.’

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Like many a Hughes’ film, lots of exposition & explanatory narration between pushup bra shots.  It evens things out between talkative Richard Egan & cushiony Jane Russell.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Sturges had an even tougher time of it on THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA/’58 where studio water-tank fakery & color-timed cyclorama vistas are far more important to the story and take up far more footage.  Counter-intuitively, the effect, under great cinematographer James Wong Howe works far better seen on the big screen (where you’d imagine every dodge would be painfully revealed) than it does on a small home screen.

MIRAI (2018)

Oscar-nominated disappointment from Japan, this domestic anime (with fantasy element) only comes to life in a swaggering climax where our insufferable protagonist, a 4-yr old runaway, upset when his infant sister steals center-of-attention status, imagines he’s lost in the dizzy extravagance of a kaleidoscopic Tokyo train station.  But before that ‘no place like home’ epiphany, he’s merely a young brat, clobbering baby with metal toys or acting out if he doesn’t get his way.  Sent to the yard on ‘time outs,’ he enters a dream world where he meets various family members from times past, present & future.  That annoying infant sister?  A teen from the future.  His dog?  A warning witch.  His mom?  From when she was a kid.  Even the great-grandfather he buried two years back.  Here in the yard, an engine mechanic in youthful prime.  Each with a lesson to impart if only he were open to it.  All remarkably unmagical, visually blah, an entire cast of unlikable characters.  Writer/director Mamoru Hosoda once more showing a taste for time shifts and off-putting characters.*  Even a can’t miss episode where the kid teaches himself how to ride a bike (Dad busy with little sis), falls flat.  (Note to Hosoda: you don’t stay up on a slow moving bike when you’re just starting.  You’ve go to be up to speed for a sense of balance to kick in.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *That earlier Hosoda time-travel tale, THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME/’06, also problematic, but visually far more assured.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/toki-o-kakeru-shojo-girl-who-leapt.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The boy actually throws a temper tantrum when he realizes he’s no longer the cutest member of the family.  Yikes!  Only in Japan, where a ‘Hello Kitty’ cult of cute thrives.

PIRANHAS / LA PARANZA DEI BAMBINI (2019)

Another angle on the Neapolitan Mob from GOMORRAH author Roberto Saviano, with tight, on-the-run direction in narrow Naples streets from Claudio Giovannesi who also did a pair of episodes for the GOMORRAH tv series.*  It’s the old, old story of a fast rising go-getter, making himself available to the head of his neighborhood protection racket.  Maybe he can get a regular gig out of it, maybe get them to drop the weekly dues his mom pays at her small dry cleaners.  But raw ambition meets opportunity when his bosses are arrested and there’s a sudden power vacuum to fill.  Perfect for him & a new friend whose family once ran the neighborhood to take advantage of.  But when turf borders stop being honored, its not just the scooters that start to spin out of control.  With too much money, drugs & guns coming in, even partners find reasons to fight amongst themselves.  And soon another administration or gang war threaten to take over everything.  The old story, yet still new when you put the ‘selfie’ generation in the mix, and the enforcers are 15-yr-old high school drop outs.  The scene, superbly caught in parts of Naples that only look tourist-friendly; the young men, full of bravado & barely suppressed sexual charge.  Aces at homophobic trash-talk, with girls or whores on call, they also can’t stop pawing & kissing each other.  (Debuting lead Francesco Di Napoli’s fashion-model bone structure & androgyny pretty enough for him to pass in drag on a killing.)  Saviano leaves much unsaid, are there no alternatives in work or school at this age?, but what we get is riveting stuff that never turns celebratory.  The ending may be ambiguous but their future ain’t.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *As mentioned above, GOMORRAH/’08, the original film.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/07/gomorrah-2008.html

UNTAMED (1955)

If anything, it’s this Australia poster that’s ‘Not Suitable for Children,’ not the movie.  Just what’s going on here?  An attack?  A warning?  A threesome?  Yikes!  You can figure out what the studio thought they were getting into: a South African Western with Irish grandee Susan Hayward leaving the potato famine behind for a new start on a new continent. (AFRICOLOSSAL! in CINEMASCOPE as the ad copy had it.)  But when Dutch Settlement nation builder Tyrone Power rebuffs her, she weds fellow Irishman John Justin and takes a wagon train North, mere prologue to a series of deaths & adventures (widowhood; bastard child; Zulu warriors to slaughter in lieu of Native Americans; lovestruck rival Richard Egan; symbolic tree of tru-love split by a thunderbolt; ruined harvest redeemed by a literal diamond-in-the-rough; even young Rita Moreno to play a local slut).  A good two seasons worth of slightly bonkers story beats.  Plus a script that regularly sends Powers drifting out of the picture to build that start up country.  Director Henry King couldn’t get a break in his last working decade.  A fine craftsman, especially of Americana, his sole worthy gig in this late period a tough Gregory Peck Western (THE BRAVADOS/’58  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-bravados-1958.html ).  A few good things stand out: WideScreen views on the big Zulu attack, Franz Waxman’s bustling score; but no one kept their eye on the ball.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Not strictly comparable, but Fred Zinnemann’s THE SUNDOWNERS/’60 gauges the possibilities for a new territory epic.  Loaded with well-developed characters, colorful incident & tart Australian flavor.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/sundowners-1960.html

ZATHURA: A SPACE ADVENTURE (2005)

Chris Van Allsburg’s novel, more kissin’-cousin followup than sequel to his JUMANJI/’95, made for this less well-received/less commercially successful film that now seems the better work; a fun-for-the-whole-family adventure you needn’t apologize for.  With a Steven Spielberg '80s vibe to it (note regular Spielberg scripter David Koepp), Jon Favreau’s direction lays back just enough in pace & CGI overload (lots of analogue effects options taken) to let you join in the spirit of things as roughhousing pre-teen sibling rivals Jonah Bobo & Josh Hutcherson become Kids-In-Space when a dusty old board game lifts them into the galaxy, house and all, leaving older sister Kristen Stewart frozen solid in the upstairs bathroom.  With off-kilter details helping to build suspense, an exceptional twist involving free-floating astronaut Dax Shepard, even a moral (‘there’s no place like home’) reminiscent of another airborne house story.  And while no classic, missing Spielberg’s precise setups & timing, it's more like a film he produced in the ‘80s, still nothing to sneeze at.   (Fans of Favreau’s recent work on THE MANDALORIAN should take a look.)  Though composer John Debney probably burrows a bit too deeply into John Williams mode than he should.  (Especially during the opening credits.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Another Spielberg touchstone finds the kids doing split weeks between households of divorced Mom (never seen) and Dad (underused Tim Robbins).  That’s fine, but hard to believe they don’t prefer Dad’s clunky fixer-upper to Mom’s modern place.  With its haunted basement, sneaky dumbwaiters, and a surprise waiting behind every French door & secret panel, the place is like a Member's Only clubhouse.

TOP SECRET (1984)

After writing hit & miss comedy skits for KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE/’77, Jim Abrahams, David & Jerry Zucker hyphenated up to director on AIRPLANE!/’80 & tv’s POLICE SQUAD/’82 (a very funny flop forerunner to their NAKED GUN movies*), before showing slightly less inspiration & significantly less structural cohesion taking on Cold War Spies & Elvis pics.  Still darn funny, but with less to pull you along during the inevitable comic misfires.  Debuting Val Kilmer, pouty of lip, skinny of leg, makes a solid, willing & winning Elvis.  He’d never be less self-conscious again.  Perhaps playing against bland ingenue Lucy Gutteridge relaxed his killer instinct.  He also doesn’t cross paths with guest star Omar Sharif, beaming with pleasure and getting the film’s best costume (he wears a crushed car), too bad he disappears halfway in.  Cinematography great Christopher Challis, nearing retirement,  goes along with the over-lit look all comedy directors other than Blake Edwards were putting out at the time, and the staging of action stuff and the big rock & roll dance numbers are casual, to put it nicely.  (Okay, lazy/unimaginative.)  Does it matter on these things?  An æsthetic that goes no further than sharp focus & bright lighting to ‘sell’ the gag.  Fine when the gag is funny, though it can make even a 90-minute running time feel over-extended.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: In retrospect, the ‘70s & ‘80s were something of a Golden Age for Spoofs with AZZ trashing Air Travel, Cold War spying, Elvis & Cop shows while Mel Brooks did much the same (with even brighter lighting!) to Westerns, Horror, Silent Comedy, Hitchcock, Historical Epics & Outer Space.  Now, other than slasher spoofs, the form seems to have disappeared.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Any of which would make fine double-bills, but with today’s internet, POLICE SQUAD may be ripe for discovery.

LA DOULEUR / MEMOIR OF WAR (2017)

Taken from a presumably autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, best known Stateside from Alain Resnais’ HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR/’59, here’s a fascinating story of Paris near the end of Nazi Occupation, complicated by romantic collisions among the Communist French resistance.  But under irregular feature film writer/director Emmanuel Finkiel, you’ve got to dig that story out for yourself.  Was he trying to ape the groundbreaking non-linear design & intellectual wanderings of HIROSHIMA, or does it simply reflect the Duras novel?  Whatever the intention, results disappoint in spite of a beautifully realized physical production and, especially, in its superb cast.  Mélanie Thierry, a fit subject for a Vermeer painting, is the politically active wife whose husband has been arrested and is due for German deportation.  Caught between the resistance group, with romantic tension developing from one of them (an intensely, almost comically cliché Frenchman, Benjamin Biolay) & the mixed messages they give on whether she should continue contact with French liaison Gestapo agent Benoît Magimel (is he truly trying to help her; using her to get at her underground friends; or merely hoping to bed her?), the film reaches a brief remarkable climax as German influence suddenly loses its grip; shown indirectly at a crowded bistro frequented by Nazi officers and their French mistresses.  A case of subdued panic, brilliantly sketched, as a change in power suddenly becomes obvious between courses.  If only the rest of the film worked on this level.  Unfortunately, Finkiel plays his film very close, very dark, very obscurely, often filming with a shallow depth of focus which keeps us from getting a feel of how things are connected, physically or emotionally.  Self-sabotage the French Resistance knew all too well.

DOUBLE-BILL: Jean-Pierre Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS/’69, which only got Stateside distribution in 2006, remains the clear-eyed French Resistance story to see first.

GIDEON'S TRUMPET (1980)

Straight-forward & first-rate, this fact-based tv-movie on a consequential moment in legal history stemming from a small-timer’s court experience gets a lot of things right.  Clarence Earl Gideon, denied representation on a breaking & entering charge, forced to act as his own lawyer, winds up sentenced to five years for chump change because of his prior convictions.  From prison, he petitions the U.S. Supreme Court where his hand-written letter is pulled from the slush pile, voted on & assigned to future Associate Justice Abe Fortas for argument.  This could all have been dry as toast on screen, but David Rintels, who wrote the one-man Clarence Darrow play Henry Fonda performed on B’way (and around the country; his Tony winner) and John Houseman, who’d produced it, reunited to make this as a modest tv movie.  (Houseman also acts as Chief Justice; that’d be Earl Warren, not that Houseman does an impersonation.  Same for the line-up of famous old-codgers playing the Associate  Justices: Sam Jaffe, Dean Jaggar, William Prince, et al.)  The limited budget shows here & there, but much of the plainness built into the production works toward verisimilitude unusual for a 1980 tv pic.  With only a couple of grandiose uplift music cues to spoil the rough-hewn quality director Robert Collins is trying for.  Even José Ferrer, no shrinking violet when it comes to grabbing attention, makes an exemplary, fiercely intelligent Abe Fortas.  Though in looks & vocal cadence, he’s more a ringer for popular author Gerald Green (HOLOCAUST; LAST ANGRY MAN) then for Fortas.  No real surprises here, well none other than a final chance to see Fay Wray in a neat little part as Gideon’s landlady, but a remarkably good tv movie, something of an oxymoron at the time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: If you wondered what the hell Southern accent Daniel Craig was shooting for in KNIVES OUT/’19, just listen to Lane Smith as the lawyer Gideon hires for his retrial.  Pure Tennessee Rotary Club from Lane, and just about perfect.  Somebody get Craig a tape before shooting on KNIVES II starts up.

DOUBLE-BILL: The last time Fonda had an ultra-realistic prison gig was in Alfred Hitchcock’s habitually underrated, masterfully sober-sided THE WRONG MAN/’56.

IN DEN GÄNGEN / IN THE AISLES (2018)

Superior workplace dramedy (minimalist Euro-Art House Division) that morphs into something considerably deeper, perhaps too deep, as a crew of overnight shelf stockers in a ‘Big Box’ warehouse grocery & dry goods store tend to their corner of the acreage before heading off after a long night of work to lives of quiet desperation.  A reunified post-East Germany where every man pretty much is an island, an archipelago of lonely souls.  Sounds like a downer, and much is, yet the film doesn’t play out that way.  Instead, writer/director Thomas Stuber locates the same vein of wry, nimble wit found in prime Aki Kaurismäki, sans AK’s distinctive use of color & composition if not without its own playful touches: forklifts dancing thru the aisles to a Strauss waltz, Pop-Up parties & rule breaking dares.  A working life held in place by the sort of low expectations you see in Ermanno Olmi (IL POSTO//’61).  Franz Rogowski is exceptional  as the new hire trying to straighten out his life with the regular routine of a regular job.  Pleasant in his uncommunicative way, he slowly warms to older partner (and forklift mentor) Peter Kurth while managing unexpectedly deft social flirtation with unhappily married Sandra Hüller.  Stuber eking out personal info thru surprisingly fast/reliable employee gossip and keeping things just odd enough to keep us off balance as he builds rooting interest.  With a great physical look as a hook, it’s awfully easy to get caught up in this small drama.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Take a brief lesson in the difference between Hollywood 101 screenwriting and small indie Euro-Art Films by noting what happens when a box-cutter, used to slice a little cake between Rogowski & Hüller, gets left behind after an awkward moment.  In Hollywood, the forgotten blade would have been a pivotal moment leading to a career or romantic crisis.  Here, it’s simply dropped.

THE RAID (1954)

Exceptional fact-inspired Civil War historical about an ad hoc unit of escaped Rebel POWs, hiding out in Canada while Major Van Heflin does advance work in Vermont, planning an attack to rob banks for the cash-starved South, steal horses, and cause enough death & destruction to force the Union Army into sending divisions up North.  Phenomenally well shot by Lucien Ballard in TechniColor (the restored print, please), it’s another fine Hollywood effort for Argentine director Hugo Fregonese, perplexingly released (or was it being buried?) under 20th/Fox’s ultra-budget Panoramic banner.  With Anne Bancroft & an exceptional Tommy Rettig as war widow & son, townies whose instant rapport with Heflin make his assignment unbearably tough to honor.  (THE MUSIC MAN/’62, of all things, follows the same score sheet.)  A rare good role from Bancroft’s unhappy first try at the movies, and very strong support from Lee Marvin (a particularly vicious Reb), Peter Graves, Claude Akins and a fascinating out-of-character Richard Boone as a one-armed Yankee coward.  And if the personal relationships & story arc are unusually complex in design & execution, the big set pieces are even more remarkable in color & logistical clarity, especially considering the film’s modest budget.  Depressing to think that Hollywood had nothing else to offer Fregonese after the mediocre BLACK TUESDAY later this year.

DOUBLE-BILL: Coming off a career high in SHANE/’53, somebody was finding great, undervalued directors with dark sensibilities & strong action chops for Van Heflin with Budd Boetticher’s WINGS OF THE HAWK/’53 and André De Toth’s TANGANYIKA/’54 immediately preceding.  (Neither seen here.)

JOURNEY TOGETHER (1945)

1945 was pretty late in the day for a wartime recruitment film.  But as an official offering from the Royal Air Force, made almost entirely with legit RAF talent, no doubt everyone had to jump thru bureaucratic hoops & circumnavigate red tape to have their superior’s superior sign off on the project.  That said, a decent enough exercise, the first joint effort from Boulting Brothers John & Roy, from a story idea by Terence Rattigan, not that you’d notice.  It’s the usual setup, three strangers at military camp becoming pals & rivals as they go thru pilot training under dashing instructor John Justin.  Jack Watling the toff everything comes easily to; middle-class David Tomlinson quietly washing out; Richard Attenborough the working-class striver who has to work harder just to stay in contention.  Fun to see them all looking like teenagers in early credits, with Attenborough taking the lead as he weathers a crisis when he has to switch from his dream position as a glam pilot and learn navigator skills at the tough, caring fatherly suggestion of (wait for it) Edward G. Robinson*, showing up for two reels as a Stateside instructor at a U.S. pilot finishing school.  (And that's silent/early Talkie star Bessie Love making a rare appearance as the wife.)  The Boultings make a pretty good show of it, within a limited budget & modest effects, getting good suspense out of Attenborough’s struggles in his new position.  But the film, though nicely showing the importance of all the plane positions, is expendable.

DOUBLE-BILL: Finding a twist on the Basic Training pic, Ruth Gordon followed screenwriter/husband Garson Kanin thru the process, writing a better late entry in the form, OVER 21, starring on B’way in ‘44, then with Irene Dunne taking over for the 1945 film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *For less than 20 minutes screen-time, nice going by Eddie G. on this French poster.

LUCA (2021)

Enrico Casarosa, after two decades storyboard artist, now director on the sweet-natured short LA LUNA/’11 (look for it on-line) and just out with his first feature, an Italian Riviera fable about an adolescent fishboy testing the waters (er . . . out-of-waters) of a land-based life as a fully human kid in a small coastal town.  And just about the most sheerly charming, least pushy delight PIXAR has offered us in ages.  Wonderfully designed in look, characters & story, with a ‘60s commedia all'italiana throb to it, the initial goal for Luca and his slightly senior fishboy pal a shiny new Vespa (what could be more tempting?), but bumps along the way: a pretty girl needing partners for a local triathlon; a surrogate son finding a surrogate father; under-the-sea parents coming ashore to mutual embarrassment; a town tough who needs to be brought down.  Who runs a narrative with this much confidence (and competence) on their first feature?  Even a background with RATATOUILLE/’07; UP/'09 and COCO’17 can’t fully explain it.  Especially Casarosa’s openhanded approach to the usual PIXAR story beats & life-lessons tropes that elsewhere can often come off like orders (you WILL laugh; you WILL be scared; you WILL weep; you WILL learn tolerance), here allowed to sneak up on us.  The only downside that so few will experience this in Big Screen Joy Magnification.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The fishboys’ first ecstatic encounter with proper home-cooked Italian cuisine no exaggeration.  Ask any first-timer.  (Or just check out 'Pasta Grannies' on youtube.)

CONTEST: An early test run for the boys' copycat Vespa shows what great Italian actor in what great Italian comedy on a b&w still stuck in the handlebar?  A correct answer, placed in COMMENTS or sent via e-mail, wins a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up on the film of your choice.

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG (2009)

Coming up short in the memorability department, this much-anticipated hand-drawn Disney musical never finds much reason to sing beyond the distinction of being the first animated film from the Mouse House to crown a Black Princess.  Much misplaced fanfare on this variation of the old Frog Prince (or in this case Princess) story, set in 1920s New Orleans to spice up a tepid romance with jazz, voodoo & eccentric characters.  Hard-working Tiana, hoping to honor her late father’s wish by opening her own restaurant, is waylaid by a laid-back visiting Prince who stumbles into her life as a frog.  Yikes!  Desperate for a kiss of redemption after Voodoo Man tricked him out of his body; only problem . . . Tiani ain’t no Princess!  And her kiss has unfortunate consequences.  Writer/directors Ron Clements & John Musker seem to know something’s missing, over-compensating with too much of everything else: color, gags, speed, production numbers, rhymed plot reversals, much very good indeed, but too often merely hectic, camouflage for a thin storyline.*  And missing the natural theatricality of regular composer Alan Menken on the score, they’re unable to make Randy Newman’s swinging tunes generate plot momentum.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL:  *Feeling like hand-me-down plotting as well, with a lot of ‘song spotting’ from their own bettered paced/more freshly felt THE LITTLE MERMAID/’89.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *On the other hand, nice to see Disney willing to kill off a likable character when called for.  Something Disney’s fought shy of since THE FOX AND THE HOUND/‘81.

THREE SONGS ABOUT LENIN / TRI PESNI O LENINE (1934)

KINO-Eye documentarian Dziga Vertov’s tenth-year commemoration on the death of Bolshevik Revolution leader Vladimir (call me Ilyich) Lenin remains historically important, just not in the way intended.  Meant to celebrate cultural, industrial, agricultural & territorial advances inside the Soviet Republic (and out), Vertov uses three ‘anonymous’ odes to the man as a loose organizing principle.  (Not that you’d notice.)  But undoubtedly, the main purpose was to conflate the reputations of Lenin and current General Secretary Joseph Stalin.  It’s why this largely silent-with-added-sound film saves the lion’s share of its synch-sound footage for Stalin himself, letting us know Lenin’s preparatory work would be implemented by Stalin.  All previous actuality footage (much of it staged), as so often with Vertov, pulled together with little continuity, catch-as-catch-can montage bolstered by inter-titles giving whatever political slant approved by the current Party Line.*  Ergo the film’s true historical interest, as the original 1934 release needed to be re-edited in 1938 to remove any disgraced non-persons (goodbye Trotsky!) standing too close to Ilyich or Uncle Joe for (political) comfort.  Then, by the 1970s, a re-re-edit to downplay, if not totally eliminate the great eliminator himself, Stalin, now officially out of favor.  Finally, more recent glanost protocol necessitating a re-re-re-edit to put everything back in.  Watching all the various edits a priceless lesson in Soviet Realpolitik.   If anyone could only get thru it.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Without the magical last two reels of Vertov’s MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA/’29, where his usual agitation/propaganda on the New Workers’ Paradise gives way to pixilated filmmaking equipment coming alive on its own to make movies, his reputation might not even stand up in Academic Circles.  The real talent in the family was Dziga’s (real name Denis Abramovich Kaufman) kid brother, Boris Kaufman, regular cinematographer to Vigo, Kazan & Lumet among many others.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: For a surprisingly accurate, grimly hilarious look at Stalin & his gang of lethal incompetents, Armando Iannucci’s lauded/under-seen DEATH OF STALIN/’17 is hard to beat.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-death-of-stalin-2017.html

BITTER HARVEST (2017)

In a rare feature assignment, tv writer/director George Mendeluk (off the big screen since MEATBALLS III/’86) films a perversely misconceived romantic epic about young Ukrainian love surviving against all odds in the face of forced farm collectivization and weaponized famine ordered by General Secretary Joseph Stalin and his rubber-stamp Politburo.  Going for a David Lean/DOCTOR ZHIVAGO vibe (right down to naming the lead ‘Yuri’), the film too insanely out of touch with events to work on any level.  Appalling, more on the order of something like ESCAPE/’40, with Robert Taylor rescuing Norma Shearer from a German Concentration Camp.  And you know what you’re in for right from the start, once you get past the Ukrainian Happy Valley prologue (colorful customs, costumes, bounty & family pride), all destroyed when Iconoclastic Soviet Cossacks ride in to kill Kulaks & reorder society for the common good.  Mendeluk tipping his directorial hand from the very first funeral where he includes a corpse’s P.O.V. shot from inside a closed coffin.  (With ‘Golden Hour’ lighting!)  And things only gets worse from there.  A great tragic story lost in here*; if 10 million dead doesn’t count as some sort of genocide, what could?  But this ham-fisted atrocity on atrocities definitely isn’t it.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT /LINK: *Probably unwatchable from any but the greatest of story-oriented filmmakers.  Not truly comparable, but Kon Ichikawa’s BIRUMA NO TATEGOTO / THE BURMESE HARP/’56 shows one possible way in to the subject.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/biruma-no-tategoto-burmese-harp-1956.html

CONTEST: It seems beyond the pale to even mention, but Mendeluk steals a story beat from (of all places) the old caper pic, GAMBIT/’66.  E-mail us or use Comments Box to name the steal and win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

THE BINGO LONG TRAVELING ALL-STARS AND MOTOR KINGS (1976)

Before making SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER/’77, director John Badham debuted on this look back in fondness at a breakaway team from the old Negro Baseball League.  Played more broadly than needed, with over-curated 1939 period detail (very Henry Ford/Greenfield Village), it’s irresistible all the same.  Billy Dee Williams, with star power to spare & a real spin on the ball, is the pitching ace grown tired of chump change from the league’s stingy Black owners who puts together a team of rivals to set off barnstorming town-to-town with little more than two fine automobiles, moxie & showmanship.  With James Earl Jones as the aging slugger (nicely toned down from his usual theatrical manner) and an inspired Richard Pryor as a outfield striver brushing up his Spanish in hopes of breaking into the White League as a Cuban.  And since the main antagonists are all wealthy Blacks, ball club owners trying to shut down renegades, the film never feels overloaded with importance & allegory.  Instead, race issues come on the side, neatly judged doses of civil injustice thru hostile white crowds, shut down with comic routines the Harlem Globetrotters might recognize; or from a white prostitute too tempting for Pryor to refuse.  Dry-eyed, too.  No crying in this baseball pic.  But lots of fun . . . and a smidgen of history.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Cinematographer Bill Butler at first uses a hazy, over-filtered look to emphasize the period setting, but quickly drops it for something much sharper in every way.  (Did they shoot in continuity, changing their minds for the better?)  And reveling in the chance to shoot an all-Black cast without lighting compromises typically seen in a multi-racial cast.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: An original song in here sounds like a discard from Kander & Ebb’s CHICAGO, one year old on B’way.  It’s even called RAZZLE DAZZLE, but credited to William Goldstein & Ronald Miller.  ALSO: Take a look at the size of those 1939 Baby Ruth candy bars!  Williams stuffs some in gas tanks to wreck a few cars.  Probably cost a nickel.