THE NANNY (1965)

Even with five non-horror projects in-between, Bette Davis knew she had a tricky career needle to thread after reestablishing her brand with the one-two Grand Guignol punch of WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE/’62 and HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE/’64.  Here, she choose wisely, if not too well, signing on for slow-boil domestic suspense from top Hammer Film writer/producer Jimmy Sangster.  With an insufferable rise-above-your-station British middle-class accent (and very good at it!), Davis plays indispensable nanny to a broken family: little girl drowned, young son held responsible, parents, child & nanny uncomfortably reunited after a two year separation meant to tame the boy’s guilt-driven acting out; he’s still a terror.  And while the boy may be incorrigible (excellent debut by William Dix who soon left acting), that’s not to say he’s wrong about what actually happened.  In other words: It’s the nanny, stupid.  No wonder he refuses to eat anything Nanny cooks up for him; let her in the bathroom while in the tub; even take discipline from his exhausted/exasperated parents.  Better to climb up the fire escape to the neighbors’ flat where doctor’s daughter Pamela Franklin offers a more sympathetic ear.  Not that she entirely believes him.  Leaving Davis to play the martyr as her charge makes wild charges against her.  Whom are you going to trust?  An impossible wild child or a middle-aged nanny arching a pair of alarmingly thick eyebrows?*  The film works, but there’s something unnecessary about it.

DOUBLE-BILL: NANNY did well enough for Sangster & Davis to return with THE ANNIVERSARY/’68, a non-horror play adaptation (not seen here).

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *‘My Nanny, what thick eyebrows you have!’  What's with those scary things?  Yikes!  An inside reference?  Perhaps the Pre-Glam Charlotte Vale who Davis played in NOW, VOYAGER/’42.  Or a wicked take on the ill-advised makeup strategies of aging former co-star Joan Crawford.

THE PROWLER (1951)

Shuttled off to low-budget indie projects after a hit debut on R.K.O.’s THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR/’48, left-leaning Joseph Losey may have been the most accomplished ‘Grey-Listed’ director in town; four fine B-pics before self-exile in Europe.*  This exceedingly creepy film noir stars Van Heflin as a beat cop fixated on ‘radio widow’ Evelyn Keyes, home alone night after night while her husband broadcasts.  Checking in, having a beer, offering protection and consolation on her loveless marriage, Evelyn wants this sexually aggressive cop to go nearly as much as she wants him to stay.  And since Van is a man with a plan, ‘accidental’ murder is in plain sight; with a new bride who may suspect, but won’t know.  Above board; in the open; a perfect murder.  Or would be if Evelyn weren’t already four months pregnant.  Yikes!  Destroying the timeline that proved their innocence.  It all leads to a nail-biting third act much influenced by Erich von Stroheim’s never-topped desert finale in GREED/’21.  Plus an extra twist from Heflin’s patrol car partner (and wife); nice, nosy people who unknowingly put the screws on.  As scripted, Heflin’s easily readable neurotic behavior something of a narrative hurdle, but super cinematography from Arthur Miller (his last credit) helps to smooth things over.  A real find, now nicely restored from UCLA.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *The other three: THE LAWLESS/’50; an L.A. remake of Fritz Lang’s M/’51; and THE BIG NIGHT/’51.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-big-night-1951.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Evelyn Keyes was amicably divorcing John Huston who made this film something of a goodbye gesture putting top assistant Gladys Hill on staff along with his production company Horizon Pictures and producer S.P. Eagle whose next release, under his real name Sam Spiegel, was THE AFRICAN QUEEN/’51.

IMITATION OF LIFE (1934; 1959)

Made 25-years apart, you’d be hard pressed to find a more involving DOUBLE-BILL then this matched pair of Fannie Hurst adaptations; fascinating both for what has and for what hasn’t changed in society and in filmmaking.  On ‘50s melodrama, hard to fault Douglas Sirk, with his mastery of action, mise-en-scène, color & indicative acting style stronger than ever in what would prove to be his final picture.  No one could ‘orchestrate’ elements of story, style & structure better, but John M. Stahl’s more straightforward 1934 beauty has what proves to be unassailable advantages in his cast, in the Depression Era, and in a script that is, if anything, more direct in tackling a racial story far more unusual on screen before the Civil Rights movement brought up the topic, much helped by a storyline about business rather than show business, as in the remake.  Right from the opening, Sirk’s use of a Coney Island  meeting for two young, single mothers (one White/one Black) and their two little girls (one White/one Black, but White enough to ‘pass’) is composed & dramatically arranged to sell the unusual situation.  Stunningly so.  But Stahl, in 1934, is able to simply lean on Depression Era desperation to bring his foursome together in a homey kitchen, after an exceptional setup scene for Claudette Colbert’s overworked single mom bathing the remarkably natural ‘Baby Jane’ as her toddler.  And not needing to ‘sell’ the situation becomes a pattern that comes up all thru the films.  The difference only emphasized once Lana tries life upon the stage, risibly gaining success in ‘high comedy,’ as if she were Ina Claire or Gertrude Lawrence.  (A career move Claudette actually took after fazing out film work as she neared 60.*)  Meanwhile, back in 1934, Colbert expands from maple syrup saleslady into pancake baron, thanks to housekeeper Louise Beaver’s recipe.  So here too, on the racial side of the drama, Juanita Moore in the remake is only a domestic while in the earlier film, Beaver has something of value that she owns.  Not that she knows, wants or appreciates it.  She only wants to serve.  It’s this race drama, with the troubled light-skinned daughter, that really keeps both films shockingly alive, though the earlier film has two enormous advantages.  First, that the girl trying to ‘pass’ in 1934 is Fredi Washington, a light-skinned Black actor in a rare film appearance.  (In the remake, Susan Kohner is very good, and in one nightclub scene, looks remarkably like Natalie Wood in GYPSY/’62, even showing how that role should have been played!)   Second is that Louise Beaver, as the girl’s dark-skinned mother, after ‘Mammy’ types in many previous films, perhaps not as fine an actress as Juanita Moore in 1959, but because she’s more archetype, it’s as if a doll you’ve long outgrown (and now embarrassed about keeping) suddenly started to bleed.  (Before becoming a major literary voice in the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston worked as assistant to IMITATION author Fannie Hurst.  Did she influence the novel?)  And if the older film has ‘cringy’ moments that equal the later film’s ‘bad’ laughs, that ‘cringe’ is never less than honestly indigestible.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Colbert’s last B’way show, Frederick Lonsdale’s AREN’T WE ALL, had Rex Harrison, Lynn Redgrave, Jeremy Brett & George Rose in the cast.  Even at 82, odds are, she could have fit into the drop-dead outfits Paramount’s great designer Travis Banton came over to Universal to make for this film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The 1959 version is an Imitation of Life right from the opening credits with Nat King Cole ‘ringer’ Earl Grant doing the title track vocal. 

MURDER SHE SAID (1961)

Part of an unprecedented late career film blossoming for eccentric British personality actress Margaret Rutherford (capped by an Oscar® for THE V.I.P.s/’63* and a magnificent Dame Quickly to Orson Welles’ Falstaff in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT/’65), this, the first of her four Agatha Christie/Miss Marple murder mysteries, finds Rutherford in typically fussy, noisome form as amateur sleuth, a Miss Marple quite unlike the novel’s quiet, sharp-eyed/blend-in-the-background spinster.  The only one in the series taken from a Marple novel (4:50 FROM PADDINGTON), the others bring diminishing returns (MURDER AT THE GALLOP/’63; MURDER MOST FOUL/’64 both from Hercule Poirot stories) and a final mishmash in MURDER AHOY/’64.  The trick in this one sees Miss Marple taking on two extra roles from the book (murder witness & house servant) which gives Rutherford more funny outfits to play around with.  (She practices golf in this one.)  Directed with sense & pace, if little style, by George Pollock (he never lets us see her swing a club!), Christie acolytes may find even this relatively faithful offering a challenge (forget the rest).  But on its own terms, it’s pretty good fun.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For real Miss Marple, there’s Joan Hickson . . . and there’s everyone else.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/agatha-christies-miss-marple-1984-92.html   OR: *Rutherford in THE V.I.P.s, a true ‘guilty pleasure.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/vips-1963.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: John Addison’s Oscar-winning, harpsichord-happy score for TOM JONES/’63 much influenced by Ron Goodwin’s harpsichord-heavy score here.

PETE KELLY'S BLUES (1955)

With his DRAGNET/’54 feature film directing debut just behind him (eventually 400 tv episodes), Jack Webb brought his distinctive (okay, downright weird) acting & directing style to this Roaring ‘Twenties tale of a hard-driving cornet player who runs his New Orleans jazz combo; woos society floozy Janet Leigh; fights off mob manager Edmond O’Brien; suffers the fast alcoholic decline of the reluctant band singer O'Brien assigns to them (Peggy Lee); is pressed by detective Andy Devine to spill all on O’Brien’s protection racket; then head back for that last late-night set at the speakeasy where the crowd knows their jazz and the owner waters the bootleg booze.  When you consider that Webb stops the plot cold whenever he plays, Lee sings, or Ella Fitzgerald does a number at her place, that’s a lot of story & music to fit into 95 minutes.  But Webb, churning out 30 minute tv cop dramas as his day job, was nothing if not efficient.  Facility that gave him lots of time to refine his bizarre visuals: upfront/lateral staging for lenser Harold Rosson’s WideScreen super-shiny WarnerColor CinemaScope image (sets, cars, streets, costumes, Webb’s shoe-polish-black hair: like what you’d see behind a velvet rope at a museum).  And physical stunts (fights, car smash-ups, gunplay), given the herky-jerky treatment of one of those plastic boxing-ring action figures.   At this stage, Webb’s flat, staccato line delivery stands out from the rest of the cast; by the ‘60s, everyone on his shows had picked up his clipped style.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: This was Peggy Lee’s big year in film, Oscar® nom’d here*, plus songs & vocals for Disney’s LADY AND THE TRAMP/’55.   Yet, no real follow up movie-wise.  How come?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/09/lady-and-tramp-1955.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Lee not exactly good, but what a tour-de-force theatrical setting she gets for her sanatorium sendoff!

THE CAPTIVE CITY (1952)

Right after a Sci-Fi genre defining DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL/’51, Robert Wise challenged himself away from his studio comfort zone on this modestly budgeted indie, a ripped-from-the-headlines story of small town corruption shot entirely on location in Reno, NV.  Even its interiors, offices & homes, found rather than built.  Suggested by the Estes Kefauver’s organized crime investigations, ‘event tv’ of the day, John Forsythe stars as a local newspaper editor who’s been brushing off reports on civic back-dealing on gambling, the numbers racket and systemic graft between business, government & the police, but changes his tune when he sees outside mob players show up to intimidate, threaten, even murder townies & reporters who know too much about complaisant/complicit civic boosters.  A prologue with Forsythe & wife Joan Camden racing big city hoods out of town on their way to testify at the State Capital, leads to an awkward transition for Forsythe to put his story on tape.  His folksy manner underplaying the urgency of the situation.  But little else misses in a film that, as others have pointed out, plays like a realistic precursor to the paranoid tone of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS/’57, here with the Mafia instead of Pod People as an implacable virus infecting the town.  Yikes!  Wise seems to be having a tremendous time of it, pulling sharp, efficient sets, compositions & staging out of his hat from real places without strain.  Wise could often be a faceless moviemaker, but he was always  (for better or worse) a pro.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the Don Siegel original, please, as the remakes are big city affairs.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/01/invasion-of-body-snatchers-1956.html

SLANDER (1957)

Lasting in its original incarnation from 1952 to 1958, game-changing gossip magazine CONFIDENTIAL found itself belatedly under attack in 1957.  Taken on by libeled stars in court, and on-screen, as in this tepid B-pic, an M-G-M contract closer for Van Johnson, a man with just the sort of closeted gay background CONFIDENTIAL lived to hint at.  And he’s pretty good here as an also-ran puppeteer whose big, long-awaited tv break comes with the threat of public exposure on a youthful felony conviction and four-year jail sentence.  But he can save himself (and family: wife Ann Blyth; son Richard Eyer*), along with his career, if he’ll just inform on another star.  (The best idea in here, one barely pursued in Jerome Weidman’s ultra-tidy script, is that Johnson’s instant tv celebrity suddenly makes him a bigger ‘get’ for sleaze publisher Steve Cochran than the original target.)  Plenty of dramatic possibilities, but with stiff megging from Roy Rowland the film has all the visual appeal of a Poverty Row quickie.  (Below the production standards for episodic ‘50s tv.)  Ann Blyth can’t help her brittle looks (she always seems about to shatter), but Steve Cochran’s heartless magazine publisher and Marjorie Rambeau as his disapproving mother play two sizes too big to survive Rowland’s penchant for finding just the wrong camera position.  (The overlit sets from lenser Harold Marzorati, a given at this price point, also no help.)  Under the circumstances, Johnson & Eyer a pretty good father/son team, but hardly enough to make this collection of missed opportunities worth a detour.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: While better attempts were made at the time, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL/’97 pretty much sweeps the board on this subject.  OR:  *1957 was kid actor Richard Eyer’s busiest year.  See him take on a villainous Robbie the Robot (a rare appearance between his ‘56 FORBIDDEN PLANET debut and the LOST IN SPACE tv days) in THE INVISIBLE BOY/’57.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/11/invisible-boy-1957.html

HOUR OF THE WOLF / VARGTIMMEN (1968)

Ingmar Bergman’s ‘other’ film from 1968, and something of an opaque puzzle next to the universal themes of war & death in SHAME.  Using visual references & obsessions framed in what even then was becoming unfashionably Freudian, we get a cartload of hard to crack, self-indulgent dreams from inside the mind of Max von Sydow’s stalled artist (alter-ego for you know who) at his island retreat with second wife Liv Ullman.  Unable to work and intellectually cannibalized by those decadent dilettantes on the far side of the island, their  offers of dinner, entertainment & rude intimacy a mixed blessing plagued by his fantastic mental revels.  It proves too much for our inhibited protagonist, nearing a breakdown.  Yet as indeciferable as this often is (movement in and out of dreams sometimes keyed to lenser Sven Nykvist upping film contrast/sometimes undetectable), it’s also uncommonly watchable under Bergman’s confident hand.  Alas, his earlier, more Jungian viewpoint, seen in films like THE SEVENTH SEAL/’57; THE MAGICIAN/’58; THE VIRGIN SPRING/’60, now firmly overtaken by Freudian emotional eruptions & finger-pointing.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: This link leads to all things Bergmanian on this site, along with a couple of ringers where he’s tangentially mentioned.  (Do the same for any favorite by typing any name into the little SEARCH Box at the Top Left Corner on the Full Site.) https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=ingmar+bergman

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *This excludes one-off late Bergman masterworks like FANNY AND ALEXANDER/’82 and Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE/’75.

TIME LIMIT (1957)

Two films on designated mutually assured nuclear annihilation out in 1964: FAIL SAFE for ‘squares’ & the painfully earnest, and, for bleakly ironic hipsters & cineastes, the darkly hilarious DR. STRANGELOVE.  That dichotomy echoed in a pair of post-Korean War thrillers on after-effects from POW psychological manipulation where the sharp dramatic talons & comic menace of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’62 were proceeded by an adaptation of this well-meant ‘well-made’ B’way play*; producer Richard Widmark & Richard Basehart stepping into roles Arthur Kennedy & Richard Kiley had on stage.  Basehart, a confessed collaborator during his imprisonment; Col. Widmark not sure he should be charged with any crime at all, suspecting that the man is covering for other POWs all speaking & acting in suspicious lockstep as if programmed.  With convenient plot turns and coincidences forcing complicated issues into neat little stacks of expedience & conscience, the play was never going to amount to much (it's basically a courtroom drama set in a Colonel's office), but might have worked simply as an actors’ showcase with someone other than Karl Malden megging, his one & only directing gig.  One memorably bad camera angle turning a punch into a punchline for the ages.  (Our poster immortalizes the moment.)  Partial saving grace is little known Dolores Michaels, delightful & dishy  as Widmark’s assistant.  Malden’s one clever camera placement a setup for Martin Balsam to make a sexist joke on her to debuting Rip Torn, a witness so guilt-free you just know he’s hiding a guilty secret when not chewing the scenery.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The two films even share bald Korean military villain Khigh Dhiegh.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Next time Widmark self-produced, he got smart and hired Phil Karlson, one of the best budget-minded directors in the biz, for THE SECRET WAYS/'61.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-secret-ways-1961.html

TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990)

Pioneering indie Black filmmaker Charles Burnett, still active, but with a mere handful of features in a career dating back to the ‘70s, is at his most successful/most original/most sui generis in this unusual work.  Acting & co-producing, Danny Glover, with the post-LETHAL WEAPON commercial clout to make it happen, stars as a courtly force of folkloric negative energy who blows in from out of town, an unknowing (or is it knowing?) destructive catalyst to the extended family he knew back when, who let him stay for a while.  (A Mary Poppins from Hell?)  Burnett, moving in close with deadpan comic effects and slow-burn payoffs (a bit too measured by the end) proves as good at pushing emotional buttons as Glover is.  Sibling rivalries, a bad heart, forced revelations from corn liquor, conflicts between the ways of the church & folk wisdom superstitions; all happening in one middle-class suburban home.  (The usual tropes of Urban Black cinema nowhere to be seen.)  And being aware that Glover is a storm that will eventually blow itself out, in hilarious, rude, unexpected ways, doesn’t lessen the pleasing narrative shocks; Burnett not at all shy about these things.  Yet while film and cast are generally wonderful (Mary Alice particularly fine as a wise, if exasperated wife & mother), you’ll see why it didn’t jump much past the Art House market to re-jigger Burnett’s eternally stalled career arc.  You’d also be a fool to miss this piece of Magical Neo-Realism.  There’s even a moral to take home with you: Never Leave Your Marbles On the Floor.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Burnett’s first feature, KILLER OF SHEEP/’77, as pure as SLEEP is messy.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/02/killer-of-sheep-1973released-in-77.html

IF WINTER COMES (1947)

Deadly, dated & airless, this romance feels like it spent a long time in ‘development hell’ at M-G-M’s story department.  (Was it planned to follow Ronald Colman’s wildly successful RANDOM HARVEST/’42?  If so, they never did lick the ending, missing the obvious one with elderly Dame May Whitty rising from her sickbed at the climax to testify at an inquest and straighten everything out.)  As it stands, Walter Pidgeon, 50 and looking it (it's his last leading man role sans Greer Garson), plays opened-minded man in closed-minded town, emotionally re-engaging with old love Deborah Kerr years after they’ve both married others.  Not that Pidgeon’s current wife Angela Lansbury worries, she’s confident of her place in his life, but less so when he proves too sympathetic to young Janet Leigh: single, pregnant, with the expected child’s unnamed father doing WWII service.  And not only Lansbury; soon the whole town is talking gossip before real tragedy brings it all to a head at the inquest.  As presented, easily disproved innuendo between Pidgeon & Leigh little more than an open & shut case of circumstantial stupidity.  Rather than getting P.O.’d at the town’s intolerance, you may want to strangle those responsible for story construction & script.  Still, you can just see how this might have worked (see suggested casting & denouement above).  But under Victor Saville’s square megging, too tasteful for melodrama, nothing catches fire and the film offers little but a weird tone to show for its troubles.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Bland as this is, the seeds of a mutually dependent marriage of incompatibility between Lansbury & Pidgeon, as seen in the first act, has real (if missed) possibilities.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Check out Lillian Hellman/William Wyler’s THESE THREE/’36 to see how these things should play out.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/these-three-1936.html

I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE (1951)

Bracing and abrasive, a very free adaptation of Jerome Weidman’s '30s ‘rag trade’ novel with an underrated screenplay from habitually overrated Abraham Polonsky (last before he was BlackListed) working off the wholesale changes of Vera Caspary’s largely reimagined storyline.  You can get some idea just how unfaithful noting that Weidman’s own book for a 1962 B’way musicalization* had a singing Elliot Gould taking the role played in the film by Susan Hayward.  A gender swap only in this film version that advances a proto-feminist spin to everything, with Hayward’s unsympathetic/unprincipled behavior (movie-book mavens will be reminded of WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN) par-for-the-course from a young ambitious means-justifies-the-end hustling male up-and-comer, but still jarring from a glam gal.  The new plot sees designer Hayward, glad-handing salesman Dan Dailey and magic-hands dressmaker Sam Jaffe going out on their own with a new ready-to-wear discount firm.  And they’re making a go of things when luxury brand legend George Sanders shows up to woo Hayward into high priced lines thru a professional and personal partnership.  Director Michael Gordon & lenser Robert Krasner were only allowed a little bit of real NYC location shooting, but they got the feel, the pulse, the desperation of the thing; and certainly aren’t afraid to go nasty when the story points that way.  It’s no SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS/’57, but as a stop along the way, one worth taking.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above: SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, which is on another plane entirely.  OR: *Never filmed, the B’way show was a near success (300 perfs) with gold-caliber names in producer David Merrick, Harold Rome score, Arthur Laurents/Herb Ross directing, 19 yr-old Barbra Streisand’s killer debut as Miss Marmelstein, and fallen-film star Lillian Ross in a stage comeback as Elliot Gould’s mom.  Look for the Original Cast Album.  And note that Lillian Ross’s tell-all bio, I’LL CRY TOMORROW, supplied a big juicy film role for (wait for it) Susan Hayward in 1955.  OR: Very good here, Dan Dailey takes this character to the limit in the flawed, but brilliant IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER/’55.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-always-fair-weather-1955.html

HOLLYWOOD HOTEL (1937)

Considering how often this film’s ‘Hurrah for Hollywood’ opening is excerpted for Golden Age Hollywood documentaries, the film itself is little known & largely uncelebrated; a situation both understandable and regrettable.  Understandable because it’s a pretty lame comedy: saxophonist Dick Powell backs into a movie career as the secret singing voice of a tonally challenged actor; regrettable because Busby Berkeley stages a fistful of stupendous musical set pieces even without chorines, fantasy stage settings or sexual innuendo; transforming a small town parade, a spiffy Drive-In joint or a radio broadcast into something dynamic solely with movie craft: montage, angles, composition.*  Plus a bonus tour of real Hollywood locations, circa 1937, though that whiz of a Drive-In is a studio set.  And note the expanded Benny Goodman band, shockingly racially integrated (see Lionel Hampton & Ted Wilson) a full year before they’d play Carnegie Hall, tearing it up in a trial run of SING, SING, SING.  The plot, such as it is, follows a mix up between a recalcitrant film diva and substitute lookalike (Rosemary & Lola Lane); a movie premiere (parodying next year’s JEZEBEL); and a radio broadcast from gossip columnist Louella Parsons at the Hollywood Hotel.   Dreary and laugh-free in spite of the cast (watch for an early Ronald Reagan appearance), but worth wading thru for nearly an hour of choice musical highlights.  (Family Friendly label conditioned on a little talk about BlackFace before viewing.*)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Also without dance steps.  But then, Berkeley choreography hardly needs them.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *BlackFace Warning!  Brief, but appalling.  And another bump, at least at the time, when obnoxious comedian Ted Healy was shot to death just before the film’s release.

DOUBLE-BILL: Dick Powell had aged out of these male ingenue roles and knew it.   See the difference in his super debut, already kidding the type, in BLESSED EVENT/’32 with Lee Tracy.

JCVD (2008)

Writer/director Mabrouk El Mechri goes 'meta' on Jean-Claude Van Damme (more like meta²) with sharp wit & a busy camera style following the aging ‘Muscles from Brussels’ action star as he visits the homeland for a fresh new start after a series of bruising personal experiences: custody battle for his kid; inadequate cash reserves for his attorney; even losing a film role to Steven Seagal.  How much worse can it get?  Turns out, plenty when he’s held hostage at a local Postal Bank only to be identified by the police as one of the robbers.  Soon, the media shows up; his fans clog the streets; Mom & Dad plead with him to go straight; and JCVD winds up playing unlikely conduit between holstered & unholstered forces.  Lots of fun untying narrative knots & layers of misunderstanding (farce rarely works this well on screen, the threat of violence a big help), the film reaching a blissful philosophical climax in a long soliloquy (Jean-Claude & camera rising into the stage rafters) as he contemplates his place in the scheme of things (flexibility turns out to be more than a physical attribute*) and tries to figure out a plan of action to clear up the mess.  And if the tone starts to wobble once he’s winched back down to the set, El Mechri has built up enough goodwill to see us thru.  The obvious ending, Van Damme’s big adventure becomes his next smash pic, presumably not clever enough for the filmmakers, but no deal-breaker.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Mental Flexibility more Mabrouk El Mechri’s thing with excellent use of shifts in time and POV giving us second looks at some of the big turning points.  Nicely done.

DOUBLE-BILL: The opening shot, a long complicated one-take action sequence spoiled right at the end, inspired by WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT/’88?

LISA (aka THE INSPECTOR) (1962)

More than decent, if little known*, WWII-aftermath story about young Concentration Camp survivor Dolores Hart who makes a dangerous, against-the-odds underground journey to Palestine with help from an unexpected protector, Dutch Inspector Stephen Boyd.  Serially rescued from a White Slave Trafficker; Scotland Yard detectives & river-barge examiners; from Customs & International border agents; eluding Nuremberg prosecutors in need of Holocaust witnesses; Moroccan Import/Export traders and freight ships running illegal goods to Israel.  So many obstacles the lack of directorial style from Philip Dunne (a classy scripter who occasionally directed) may actually help; flat presentation keeping cascading close calls from going all Perils of Pauline.  Instead, an on-the-move picaresque, partially making up for poorly executed physical action.  (Bad background models can’t be blamed on Dunne.)  If only our two leads were better cast.  Dolores Hart too gosh darn All-American, it’s Concentration Camp Gidget Goes to Palestine.  While Stephen Boyd misses the Dutch Uncle aspect that would make the inevitable romance less a fait accompli.  (He’s also too close a match to the Brits chasing them.)  So acting honors, quite a load of them, go to support: Leo McKern’s grumpy bargeman; Donald Pleasence as Scotland Yard Fairy Godfather; Harry Andrews unexpectedly believable as an Arab gunrunner; and Robert Stephens, typically fine, here as a cunning (and conning) foreign-based British Agent.  The film also improves as it goes along which is always nice.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Next year, Hart would abandon Hollywood for the nunnery.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The ‘LISA’ film of 1962 was DAVID AND LISA, now something of a tough watch.  Though Keir Dullea’s ‘David’ shows just the kind of sensitivity missing in Hart’s perf.

STREET OF WOMEN (1932)

The title a come on.  Sounds naughty, but it refers to a ‘Street of Skyscrapers.’  And the women are those who inspire men to build them.  Aw, shucks.  Kay Francis (‘Our Lady Decolletage’), not quite severed from Paramount, stars at new studio Warners.  (Also at Goldwyn this busy year.)  But why bother with such small beer stuff, running under an hour?  Not bad, just unnecessary, megged by Archie Mayo in sleepwalking mode.  Successful at her ladies’ couture shop, Francis is platonically involved with amusing Roland Young and silent mistress to the very married Alan Dinehart, the two men partners in the world’s tallest building.  But Kay’s already complicated life turns positively dizzy when her datable brother turns up and proposes to Dinehart’s daughter.  Awkward!  Soon, everything comes out; everyone splits, everyone miserable.  Why, it would take a near fatal car accident to get them all speaking again.  (Hint, hint.)   Dinehart, master of insincerity, is asked only to be sincere*, leaving Roland Young (Roland Young!) to play the big renunciation scene.  Hardly satisfying, though Gloria Stuart makes a pretty film debut as the daughter (very touchy-feely with Daddy) and it’s nicely Pre-Code to see a film that’s PRO-divorce.  Yippee!  Note an unusual credit:  ‘Settings Supervised by W. & J. Sloane,’ presumably for the showroom furnishings, all that inlaid Art Deco wood paneling and doors.  You go out humming the furniture.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *See Dinehart properly cast and at his delicious best with James Cagney & Bette Davis in JIMMY THE GENT/’34.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/06/jimmy-gent-1934.html

TENET (2020)

While not the first ‘brand name’ star director drawn to the James Bond legacy (earnest franchise flirtation from the likes of George Lucas, Brian De Palma*, Quentin Tarantino; kidding-on-the-square projects from Michel Hazanavicius, Paul Feig, Brad Bird*), Christopher Nolan is the first to bring overwrought argumentum ad absurdum to the task, tying conceptual knots as he paints himself into narrative corners.  Hiding behind a disfiguring beard as he works to save the world from the plutonium-fueled destruction of rich Russian oligarch Kenneth Branagh, John David Washington is our Bondian ‘Protagonist,’ fighting mercenary comrades out of the past, present & future.  Nolan’s big metaphysical twist bringing on inverted time continuum attack doppelgängers.  (Don’t ask, though immaculately handled on a technical level.)  It all leads to a big action set piece designed for 3D chess players . . . and those who wish they were.  (No one dared mention to Nolan the high probability of karmic renewal sapping suspense?)  Best to sit back and admire the production design.  Robert Pattinson manages to make an impression as Washington’s sidekick, coasting on quirky charm and Montgomery Clift’s wide-set eyes until Nolan spoils even that with a shameless dialogue lift out of CASABLANCA as tag ending, tweaked to shill a possible sequel.  Anyone hoping that DUNKIRK might have led Nolan away from his belief that artistic complexity must be tied to narrative complexity is in for disappointment.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Any sequel should drop forward or inverted motion and go for palindromic narrative design.  Perfect for Nolan!  Start in the middle and super-impose tandem movement in both directions.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Brad Bird & De Palma released their inner-James Bond in respective MISSION IMPOSSIBLE pics, though Nolan only revisits Christopher McQuarrie’s MI: ROGUE NATION/’15 for its opening attack on an opera house.

ONE DESIRE (1955)

Handsome, charismatic & ambitious, 1955 Rock Hudson compartmentalized his personal life, denying his true (gay) desires to take on a loveless marriage designed to further his career, a stunt marriage that quickly flamed out.   It’s the story of his life and also the story of this film, shot the very year he’d live thru the situations.  As he says on screen, ‘Our marriage was a mistake . . . yours and mine!’  And while the film is no more than a typical ‘woman’s meller’ from producer Ross Hunter, the mediocre kind he made when Douglas Sirk wasn’t available to transform them, it has an obvious grim fascination.  Anne Baxter stars as the backup mate Rock puts aside*, the two restarting in a new town as platonic pals after bonding in an infamous gambling house: he as top dealer/she as head hostess.  But while he successfully reinvents himself as a fast-rising banker whose aspirations take him straight to the bed of the owner’s daughter (Julie Adams), Anne’s similar past catches up to her and sees her run out of town as an unfit surrogate mom.  Wised up, she returns to seek revenge against the ‘happy’ couple who’ve cast her aside and taken the foster kids (one Rock’s kid brother, the other an orphaned Natalie Wood*) she’s raised as her own.  Journeyman megger Jerry Hopper doesn’t miss all the possibilities & implications in here, but sure leaves a lot on the table.  It helps turn the film into a demonstration of just what a great stylist & director like Douglas Sirk brought to these things, subverting the generic atmosphere & hack acting producer Ross Hunter was satisfied with into a personal vision.  Here, it’s standard-issue supporting players, 'luxury' interiors from the Montgomery Ward catalog, flat/flooded lighting.  Ugh.  How did Sirk get away with making his films so distinctive & personal in look, dramatic texture, levels of acting & social condemnation?  Maybe fighting Hunter’s lack of taste was one of the reasons he retired at only 62 after IMITATION OF LIFE/’59.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *As the denied element in the love triangle, Anne Baxter’s smoky baritone does add an unintentional(?) touch of manly sub-text to things.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Sirk’s greatest achievement, WRITTEN ON THE WIND/’56, wasn’t produced by Ross Hunter, but IMITATION, which was, is a close second.   OR: *Very good here, Wood’s next film was REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE/’56.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

This OTT followup to DRIVE/’11 sees star Ryan Gosling and writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn ‘jump the shark’ past Art, past Arty (where DRIVE crashed*), even past Artsy; all the way to Artsy Fartsy.  It turns out to be a natural fit.  In a neon-lit Thailand, Private Club KickBoxing entrepreneur Gosling seeks revenge for a violent brother who’s massacred a display window’s worth of sex workers, their pimp & a street hooker, only to be taken down by a blade-bearing martial arts police detective.  Tasked by Mom Kristin Scott Thomas, is Gosling up to the challenge?  Laid out as a series of over-stylized tableaux vivants glowing in neon red, it’s fashionable, unfollowable, and oddly entertaining.  Climaxing in a big, hit your head against the wall fight (with martial arts dick playing WALL), while the actual climax comes earlier, when that nasty brother, caught by said martial arts dick, is pinned to a chair with  stabs thru his arms & thighs, before catching it thru his eyes and receiving a coup de grace thru the ear.  Yikes!  A torture session that threatens to spill off the screen before Refn shows mercy on us by muting the detective’s Karaoke celebration.  (Be warned, vocals saved for the final credits.)  Loony enough to be borderline endearing, GOD reverses DRIVE’s diminishing returns by reveling in more than enough self-referential/self-satisfied/self-indulgent rot to let Gosling display 50 shades of passivity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Refn dedicates the film to sadistic Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky, but ought to have given ‘props’ to Fred Astaire & Vincente Minnelli, specifically ‘The Girl Hunt’ Ballet that tops THE BAND WAGON/’53. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-band-wagon-1953.html  OR: *DRIVE:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/drive-2011.html

STAND BY FOR ACTION (1942)

Responding to dire news in the first months of WWII, Hollywood stuck with largely upbeat stories; recruitment-friendly uplift larded with patriotism, sentiment & comic trimmings.  (Improved war reports brought in a darker tone.)  An attitude which helps explain this Navy Saga ‘Lite’ (ad copy ‘The Mightiest Naval Drama Of All Time!’ a con), but can’t explain why it’s so perfectly dreadful.  Similar wartime pep-talks @ Warners (Bogart or Flynn); 20th/Fox (Tyrone Power); or Paramount (Fred MacMurray), also period pieces, still work to some extent*, but M-G-M hasn’t got the sensibility for caustic charm.  Especially with studio vet Robert Z. Leonard directing at something like half-speed.  Every missed joke, character turn or action set piece, dying on screen s-l-o-w-l-y.   Robert Taylor, finishing a few films before joining up for real, is the entitled junior officer chosen as 'second' by Lieut. Brian Donlevy on his WWI ‘junker’ destroyer.  With Charles Laughton getting nothing to do as Rear Admiral; Walter Brennan sentimentalizing about a lifetime on the ship; and Chill Wills to serenade a passel of tykes plucked out of a drifting lifeboat.  (That’s the comic angle.)  The old ship comes thru in the final reel, taking out a ‘Jap’ battleship and saving the fleet in sub-par Oscar nominated action footage before everyone gets a medal at the fade.  Bail out before then.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: What a miserable credit for writer Herman J. Mankiewicz a year after CITIZEN KANE.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Prove the point as MacMurray & Flynn mix it up in DIVE BOMBER/’41.  Nothing special (other than TechniColor and seeing Paramount come to Warners), yet easily beating this M-G-M dud.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/dive-bomber-1941.html

KONGA (1961)

The poster tells the tale: that pretty young thing never does get her arm out the meat-eating plant.  Left there* while we head off to terrorize London with Konga, the over-grown chimp turned over-grown-man-in-gorilla-suit carrying Professor Michael Gough away from the sexy student he was busy molesting.  It’s the climax of this Saturday Matinee Kiddie Thriller, think KING KONG meets MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, from schlock producer Herman Cohen, and still good dopey fun.  Gough, exceptional as the calmly insane research botanist, sends his fast-growing pet ape off to kill enemies & rivals, tests in simian loyalty, approved by flutey-voice secretary/accomplice Margo Jones as long as he promises to marry her.  But since he’s fallen for that blonde student vixen, all bets are off.  Made with tinker-toy model sets and process shots, yet unexpected care taken with some priceless dialogue (‘There’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets!’), and what’s with those color-matched interiors (Green for Gough’s lab & apartment; Brown for the Dean’s office & matching suits; Powder Blue suits and offices for the detectives; Purple candles to match purple dining room walls.  Fussy art direction by C. Wilfred Arnold, with credits going back to Hitchcock silents; and an Oscar nom’d lenser in Desmond Dickinson.  Everyone bringing something irresistibly silly to the table.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Filmed in a process labeled Spectamation which doesn’t seem to be anything at all other than optical enlargements & cheesy matte effects.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *We never do get back to her.  Could she still be there?  Is her arm intact?  Yikes!

BIG BAD WOLVES (2013)

With so much acclaimed product coming out of Israel these days (films, international reboots, streaming series), the attention slathered on this derivative piece of comically off-kilter torture porn is unwarranted.  Saddled with generic verbal riffs of goofball menace a la the Coen Brothers, Sam Shepard-like domestic anarchy, even glances toward the squabbling familial inter-connectivity of Harold Pinter; all useless trimming on a purposefully grotesque tale of a purported serial child murderer captured by a rogue cop and a revenge-minded parent, then held in the soundproofed basement of an isolated house to ‘get’ as he ‘gave’ till he gives up the location of his victim’s head.  But is he the right guy?  Loaded with gripping bits of bodily harm (more unpleasant than suspenseful) ‘hilariously’ interrupted by buzzing kitchen timers, unwelcome knocks at the door, melodious smart phones with messages from Mom, and an uninvited neighbor.  (NOTE: the film’s best scene brings back this horse-riding Arab neighbor, encountering a fleeing prisoner from the torture house; a brief haunting absurdity built on just the sort of original voice missing elsewhere.)  Writer/directors Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado with but one release between them since this won  heaps of awards.  Just desserts.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Amusingly, after a brief prologue, the film opens like a French policier, with what appears to be a cast of cops made entirely of Israeli Gerard Depardieus (Depardieux?), each at a different stage of his career, from trim youthful thug to current obese grotesque.  Alas, this unintentional idea soon dropped.

THE LAST TRAIN FROM MADRID (1937)

As Hollywood subject matter goes, pre-WWII Spanish Civil War is nearly as ‘forgotten’ a war as post-WWII Korea.  Perhaps because, as with the Russian Revolution, the studios couldn’t decide what side to take.  So this little film with a big cast of (mostly) Paramount contract players, shot on the lot (naturally), but during the conflict, is quite the outlier.*  And a fun one at that.  Fun, no doubt, an adjective not properly associated with the horrors of war!  But fun it is, with a carousel of a plot spinning four or five tales of love & death, loyalty & betrayal, honorable & dishonorable soldiers as our players attempt to get their papers in order and make that eponymous train out of town on time as war presses into the heart of Madrid.  Standouts include ridiculously fit/handsome Gilbert Roland, an escaped prisoner on the lam from authorities, hooking up with ex-love Dorothy Lamour (now paired with Gilbert’s BFF Anthony Quinn, excellent in a career breakout as an honorable army man) and wily gal with papers Karen Morley.   Lew Ayres a reporter using his U.S.A. privilege to help a local girl with a father on execution row; Lionel Atwill pulling strings as top Colonel; leaving only Robert Cummings, as a soft-hearted soldier branded a coward, to seriously disgrace himself in the acting department.  With strong-molded portrait-oriented lensing from Harry Fischbeck who like director James Hogan spent most his career churning out genre programmers, both trying to make something special here.  And they do, while only getting so far on a script that knows just how seriously (or not) to take things.  Only a hapless editor mistakes the level of dramatic integrity with a brief montage of actual war footage gracelessly tossed in the mix.  Elsewise, pretty good . . . er, fun.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The film opens with a title-card stressing how the film takes no sides on the political conflict.  But with the bad guys all Nationalists, it does, it does.

DOUBLE-BILL: *The Spanish Civil War exception-that-proves-the-rule another Paramount film, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS/’43, which, aside from the absurd beauty of a cropped-haired Ingrid Bergman, has dated poorly.  Something that might well have pleased unlikely director Sam Wood, a leading right-wing anti-Commie Hollywood booster.

GUILTY BYSTANDER (1950)

Per IMdB: ‘Once thought to be a lost movie, it was restored in 2019 by Nicolas Winding Refn's company, NWR, from the only known print, held at the British Film Institute.’  And you’ll see what drew Refn to this remarkable, if not entirely successful, dank film noir, with the feel of an urban DETOUR/’45, Edgar G. Ulmer’s zero-budget classic.  Acting against an alarming lineup of principals in their final feature, undervalued Zachary Scott, unlike his co-stars, only playing end-of-the-line, an ex-cop drifting toward waterfront oblivion when suddenly confronted by ex-wife Faye Emerson, panicked over their missing child.  With minimal funds advanced by forgiving landlady Mary Boland (the brilliant high-style comedienne, here miraculously cast against type, slatternly/disheveled), Scott puts on his worn-out detective hat to investigate, coming up with a gang of wise guys operating out of a warehouse; a packet of stolen diamonds; unhelpful cops from his past; a dame in a bar with the info to get him back on track (for the price of a smooch); and a surprise villain close to home, trying to keep him harmlessly liquored up.  With exceptionally textured cinematography, much of it shot on ‘stolen’ locations by Gerald Hirschfield and a Dmitri Tiomkin score (who paid for that?), the film only shows its dire budget in ways that strengthen underbelly verisimilitude.  And while script & plotting fall to talky confusion, the film is still easily worth the trip.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, DETOUR. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/09/detour-1945.html  OR: While it doesn’t match up, try Zachary Scott in Ulmer’s best shot at a conventional pic, RUTHLESS/’48.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/01/ruthless-1948.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Is that really Kay Medford playing the sexy broad-in-a-bar Scott picks up to pick her brain, then shockingly using as a human shield during a failed rub-out?  (Or is he pushing her out of harm’s way in this rare bit of action; scarifying stuff.)  Medford would make her rep playing nagging Jewish mother types, famously on-stage/on-screen against Barbra Streisand’s FUNNY GIRL/’68.

A WOMAN REBELS (1936)

Post-‘50s liberalized attitudes toward illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock motherhood: a welcome boon to women!; child empowerment!; societal mores!  But, oh, what a loss for three-hankie movies!  Exquisite suffering from Golden Age Leading Ladies never so easy again.  Best with plot twists allowing Mom to stay close without acknowledging paternity; the child, unaware of special circumstances, turning resentful toward the woman who gave up everything to let them thrive!  Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Margaret Sullavan, Bette Davis*, Olivia de Havilland, all part of an enormous sisterhood of sullied, self-sacrificing ex-maidens.  But heavens, how the devil to fit tough, modern, independent-minded Katherine Hepburn into the formula?  And just when she desperately needed a hit after the double disaster of SYLVIA SCARLET and MARY OF SCOTLAND?  Home studio R.K.O. thought they had the answer here, throwing a wet blanket of proto-feminism (woman’s rights & equality) o’er the problem.  Now looking pretty clever (great half-brother plot twist), pretty effective; but at the time sinking like a stone.  REBEL remains one of the least seen Hepburn pics of the period, yet is uncommonly interesting on many fronts.  Politically, sure, but how cleverly it sets up Hepburn with a newly widowed sister, conveniently dying with newborn child, a ready-made setup for Kate’s own secret child to enter not as daughter, but as niece.  Mark Sandrich, best known for helming Rogers & Astaire musicals, keeps things moving, stays Hepburn from turning on the tears, and finds an unexpected rapport between Kate & co-star Herbert Marshall.  She peps him up; he calms her down.  With debuting Van Heflin at 28 as the secret father, going from youthful swain to old man makeup.  The tag ending something of a cheat, but easy to overlook.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Between THE OLD MAID/’39 and THE GREAT LIE/’41, Bette Davis covered all bases.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-old-maid-1939.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-great-lie-1941.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Marshall, who lost a leg in WWI, rarely let his handicap show or get in the way.  His smooth, stately gait incorporated into equally smooth & stately acting.  Ironic that his most iconic moment in film, limping up the stairs to fetch heart medication in THE LITTLE FOXES while wife Bette Davis stoically sits in the foreground willing his death, was made without him!  Stairs tough going with the prosthetics available at the time so director William Wyler has him briefly exit ‘stage left’ and his double seamlessly enter the shot and take the stairs.  So, something of a shock in REBEL to see Marshall laboriously (if elegantly) hoisting himself into a horse-drawn carriage.  Perhaps the only time he showed any of the constant effort he must have needed to play his roles without showing discomfort.

PASSPORT TO PIMLICO (1949)

Ealing Studios, around since the ‘30s, led by producer Michael Balcon for over a decade, found their distinctive voice (and to a large extent the voice Americans think of as post-war Britain) in this lightly satiric comedy about a London nab gone topsy-turvy when an ancient treaty, found by happenstance after an unexploded German bomb is harmlessly triggered by local urchins, claims the area as Burgundian territory.  No more ration cards.  No more early pub closings.  No taxes.  No restrictions on contraband.  Yippee!  On the other hand: no police protection, no public utilities, no travel without going thru customs.  Yikes!  Prolific Ealing scripter T.E.B. Clarke worked it all up: clever story, sharp dialogue, lovable characters (not a villain in sight; even Raymond Huntley, local Pimlico killjoy, joining in, while London government ministers repped by comic-duo Basil Radford & Naunton Wayne, less bedeviling than befuddled) while debuting helmer Henry Cornelius does a bang-up job; keeping pace & narrative flowing while staging street-shop action & teeming tenement life in multiplane layers.  With Stanley Holloway’s team-leader Everyman and Margaret Rutherford’s eccentric historian perfectly cast, the film is a modest treasure.  First of a 1949 trio joined by Balcon’s next two, WHISKEY GALORE and KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (for your suggested TRIPLE-BILL), to establish the international rep of the little house of Ealing.

LÉON: THE PROFESSIONAL (1994)

French writer/director Luc Besson hit mainstream Stateside markets on his sixth film, made in English, Manhattan-set, revealing immense technical facility in spite of losing 30 minutes.  Long returned to international release length (two & a quarter hours), its influence on pulpy violence, off-beat comic tics & suspense self-evident.  Yet now playing quite differently than it did at the time.  A prologue sets up taciturn, solitary Jean Reno as hit man extraordinaire as he grudgingly grows attached to unlikely 12-yr-old survivor Natalie Portman, her family wiped out in a drug-related massacre at the apartment down the hall.  Warming to each other, he finds something of a family in the girl; she falls for this big grownup killer, it’s LE SAMOURAÏ meets THE KID.*  (Had it been made in France, intimations of LOLITA would have suggested a third film.)  With showy turns from Gary Oldman as a cold-blooded, drug-juiced mega-dealer with city connections and Danny Aiello as a back-of-the-scenes string-pulling controller playing all sides of the equation, Besson larks thru a series of jobs, largely avoiding excessive gore.  (Less Noises-Off than Violence-Off.)  What’s changed, and not for the better, is that Portman’s enthusiastic helpmate no longer a surprise, her feral act now expected and devoid of shock value.  It significantly unbalances the careful mix of carnage & comedy . . . or rather, it doesn’t unbalance the mix, leaving the film without the tang, texture & wisps of credulity it once had.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: Bravo to Besson for incorporating a clip from Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen’s underrated musical IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER/’55.  Though even in ‘90s NYC, no revival house would have played a morning show. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-always-fair-weather-1955.html

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Make it a triple bill with LE SAMOURAÏ/’67 and THE KID/’21 (that’s 1921). https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/le-samourai-1967.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-kid-1921.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Reno seems to exist on nothing but glasses of whole milk, something that surely would have indelicately interrupted a hit or two.

THE RELUCTANT SAINT (1962)

In an act of pre & post penance (for murder & intimations of lesbianism in WALK ON THE WILD SIDE/’62, and the general sleaze of Harold Robbins’ THE CARPETBAGGERS/’64, his biggest hit), director Edward Dmytryk cleansed his soul with pure uncommercial religiosity in this modest indie on the life & levitation of simpleton Saint Joseph Cupertino.  Beatified for a 17th century miracle which proves something of a metaphor for the film itself, in that it also shouldn’t levitate . . . but does.  One of those movies that works less thru quality than in being all of a piece.  And what actor could ever demur from playing a Holy Fool?  Certainly not Maximilian Schell, with that granite jaw & authoritarian bearing, he rarely got a shot at the humble-pie roles he truly longed for.*  Well shot on Italian locations by undersung cinematographer C.M. Pennington-Richards (the rest of the crew largely Italian, including composer Nino Rota), Dmytryk doesn’t push either his fine cast or the miraculous moments at us.  The scenes of levitation done as simply as possible (as if filmed in 1922), with any real miracles stemming from Akim Tamiroff pulling off an impossible role as the Vicar who sees the spirituality behind Joseph’s peasant beliefs & goodness, and from Lea Padovani’s OTT mother, always greeting her son with a slap in the face straight out of some endlessly touring vaudeville act.  It takes a reel or two to adjust to the film’s unusual wavelength (are they being serious? . . . they are!), but since the filmmakers seem to go thru the same adjustment, you & they catch on to the film’s tone of light-comic sincerity at more or less the same time.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *This and his quiet turn as a small cog in the Nazi resistance movement in Fred Zinnemann’s JULIA/’77 were Schell’s favorite roles.  He’s better, far more subtle there.  (Just watch him go thru a poached egg, a modest ‘privileged’ moment in film.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/julia-1977.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT: In IT’S A HELL OF A LIFE, BUT NOT A BAD LIVING, Dmytryk notes that while he never met anyone who didn’t like the film, no one could figure out how to get people to see it.  

THE RING (1927)

In their indispensable career conversation book HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT, Alfred Hitchcock tips this film, his sixth as director, to François Truffaut as the second ‘real’ Hitchcock movie.  (THE LODGER/’27, three films earlier, being the first.*)   Thematically unHitchcockian in most ways (it’s a love triangle with a sports background), perhaps he meant it as the second film he was happy to put his name on.  Rightfully so as it’s a fine late silent, loaded with visual wit, imaginative montage sequences, associative dissolves & transitions (made in the camera back then, presumably by regular lenser Jack Cox); much influenced by German UFA house style and show-offy in a manner he’d soon refine.  The story mirrors E.A. Dupont’s VARIETÉ/’25, with boxing rivals taking over from trapeze artistes, and Hitch, in a rare writing credit, getting things off with an Amusement Park montage/prologue that leads to character intros for Carl Brisson’s One-Round Jack (a take-all-comers boxer), his ticket taking gal, later wife, Lillian Hall-Davies and reluctant challenger Ian Hunter.  Then, when the impossible happens and the underdog’s knockout causes positions to change in & out of the ring, it leaves Brisson to fight his way back for love & championship.  (Hunter is rather overshadowed by Brisson’s striking athleticism in what was effectively his film debut.  What a physical specimen!  And darn good in the part.)  The first reel of the third act bogs down a bit, but the rest holds up remarkably well, with an unexpectedly strong supporting cast that includes a few non-stereotypical Black actors rare for the period.  

READ ALL ABOUT IT: As mentioned: HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK/DOUBLE-BILL:  *Hitchcock always seemed a bit embarrassed by DOWNHILL/’27, his Ivor Novello led follow-up to THE LODGER.  An awfully good film to be embarrassed about!  Perhaps there’s some personal explanation to his dislike.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-lodger-1927.html   OR: Also mentioned above, E.A. Dupont’s VARIETÉ.