APPOINTMENT IN BERLIN (1943)

Few Hollywood leading men were adept as George Sanders at playing Allied or Axis officers during WWII.  Not yet established/typed as a sophisticated cad*, he’s just right here, setting up a neat situation as an outspoken opponent of Prime Minister Chamberlain’s policy of escalating appeasement.  He’s soon branded a subversive, jailed for public disturbance, cashiered out of the service where he’d been Wing Commander.  But his notoriety & social pariah status also offer a chance to (secretly) save his rep and serve his country in a dangerous mission as an undercover man in Berlin playing counterfeit traitor as a Nazi broadcaster while surreptitiously sending coded info back home where he’s still considered a dastardly turncoat.  Alas, the setup and Sanders are the only things right in this one.  His romance with disillusioned Nazi Margaret Chapman striking no sparks; her bigtime Nazi brother Onslow Stevens offering little threat; his meetings with fellow Fifth Columnist Gale Sondergaard unconvincing . . . and so on.  None of this helped by a pinch-penny production @ Universal or by director Alfred E. Green’s lack of visual imagination.  Easy to see what might have been, especially during a big, climatic bombing/aerial sequence at the end.  A whole factory’s worth of delightful toy models taken out.  Like a kid playing destruction fantasies with a deluxe set of Lionel Trains that are never making it back in the box.  Maybe they should have let the Second Unit direct the whole movie.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Sanders displays his full cad credentials in REBECCA/’40 soon after the Axis sympathies of CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY/’39, not long before warring against them via FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT/’40.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/11/rebecca-1940.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/11/confessions-of-nazi-spy-1939.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/foreign-correspondent-1940.html

RIFKIN'S FESTIVAL (2020)

Eavesdropping on Euro-trash regulars offering pretentious/idiotic opinions on international film trends at the San Sebastian Film Festival briefly gives this new Woody Allen film a welcome shot of comic energy.  The good vibe lasts an entire tracking shot.  Then back to the main event, a not particularly funny, insightful or tragic look at a moribund marriage on a picturesque death spiral.  As a filmmaker, Allen more & more like a dray horse who continues to stop at some long abandoned address out of habit, unable to adjust to the fact that no one lives there anymore.  Playing the film’s surrogate Woody, and better at it than most*, Wallace Shawn’s ex-cinema prof is accompanying publicist wife Gina Gershon, at the fest to babysit some clients.  But their twenty year age gap sees them drifting apart.  Naturally, Shawn tries to take comfort with someone twenty years younger yet, a local doc.  (And, for once, Gershon also is hooking up, successfully, with twenty year younger client Louis Garrel.  Progress!)  Shawn’s other relief comes with dreaming his way into classic films he once taught.  Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro with b&w mockups of CITIZEN KANE, 8½, JULES AND JIM, A MAN AND A WOMAN, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, EXTERMINATING ANGEL, SEVENTH SEAL (Christoph Waltz’s ‘Death’ the only funny gag in the lot), plus a quick portrait a la PERSONA in a reprise montage).  Not unpleasant may be damning with the faintest of praise, but, at 85, this old dray horse could use a new set of  addresses.  Even then, Stateside theatrical unlikely.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Back in MANHATTAN days, diminutive, gnome-like Shawn was a gag shot as Diane Keaton’s unexpected ‘ex.’  Now, after 40 years, he’s playing Woody.

THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952)

Fitting that having begun in Hollywood with CITIZEN KANE, helping Orson Welles on a film that used William Randolph Hearst, America’s best known, if declining, newspaper mogul as inspiration, John Houseman’s first A-list movie as producer would land on David O. Selznick, America’s best-known, now declining, film mogul as inspiration.  And if this Hollywood-on-Hollywood story isn’t quite as good as once was thought, it remains posh, glossy, facile fun, good enough to hold a high spot among dishy, Hollywood insider pics.  Just don’t expect more depth than a wading pool.  Vincente Minnelli, delivering a smash set piece with every reel, keeps the pace & scenery chewing up (in a good way) as hard-driving Hollywood Heel Kirk Douglas, our Selznick-like charmer, successively woos (than shits on) rising director Barry Sullivan, B-pic producer Walter Pidgeon*, lush vamp actress Lana Turner, Southern novelist (with ditzy wife) Dick Powell (with Gloria Grahame).  Somehow, they all come out better for the mistreatment.  (The idea unusually callous since he all but arranges the death of a loved one along the way.)  And while the film doesn’t exactly condone his acts, it does think it was worth it.  Maybe the films he birthed into being were significantly better than THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL.

DOUBLE-BILL: Messy, slightly ridiculous, butchered by the front office, with its entire cast apparently on steroids & suffering thru attacks of manic/depression, TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN/’62, a near sequel with Houseman, Minnelli & Douglas repeating, is by any measure the lesser pic.  Yet now looks rather more interesting.  It’s certainly less neat!  (If only it had a juicy role for this film's wonderful Gilbert Roland rather than George Hamilton!)  OR:  M-G-M made another Hollywood-on-Hollywood film in 1952.  SINGING IN THE RAIN, maybe you’ve heard of it.  Less prestigious at the time, now . . . 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Perpetually distinguished Walter Pidgeon convinced Houseman he could play the B-movie producer by donning a stiff wooly toupée that looks more like a carpet remnant than hair in the flashback scenes.  The prologue & epilogue retreat to the flowing grey locks of an elder statesman.

CAPTAIN KIDD (1945)

This ought to be better . . . or at least more fun.  Charles Laughton is Captain Kidd, a real person who really did get a commission to hunt Madagascar Pirates, went rouge, got caught, got tried, got hung.  But director Rowland V. Lee, with a knack for mounting swashbucklers on-the-cheap (COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO/’34; CARDINAL RICHELIEU/’35; TOWER OF LONDON/’39), can’t make a silk purse out of Benedict Bogeaus's sow’s-ear production.  (Many a bumpy edit where a retake was needed!)  Particularly threadbare topside (those dead cycloramas!), though lenser Archie Stout manages better in darkness below deck.  Quite a good cast, considering: Henry Daniell, John Qualen, Gilbert Roland, John Carradine, and a standout comic turn from Reginald Owen as a Gentleman’s Gentleman, hired to lend couth to the Captain, chiding Laughton into underpaying him and show proper contempt toward underlings.  Co-star Randolph Scott is hopelessly All-American as a Lord-in-hiding trying to win back the family title (he’s certainly in fine shape at 47!), if only faceless Lady Barbara Britton were worth saving.  What can’t be finessed is Robert N. Lee’s script.  Rowland’s brother, his buried treasure tropes, ship sabotage, kidnapings & thieves-without-honor has all the formal construction of a tossed salad.  More miss than missed opportunity, it still can’t explain why Lee, only 53, never worked again.

DOUBLE-BILL: Laughton burlesqued the role in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET CAPTAIN KIDD/’52.  (not seen here; does he use the same inspired lower-middle-class accent?)  OR: KITTY, also out in ‘45, with Reginald Owen walking off with another 18th century yarn, this one meant to showcase Paulette Goddard.  She’s good, too, third best after MODERN TIMES/’36 and AN IDEAL HUSBAND/’47.

FONG JUK / EXILED (2006)

Gearing down from the elaborate plotting and yard-long character lists of ELECTION (1 & 2/’05 - ‘06),  Hong Kong’s Johnnie To minimizes plot & persona in this Macao-set actioner about a self-exiled gangster returned home to mixed reception: One pair of hit men out to kill him/A second pair on hand to protect.  The rest of the film charts a stand-off that bends toward partnership as Macao sorts thru a new pecking order of mob heads.  So, as fast-rising Boss Fay, who ordered the hit to avenge his attempted assassination, waits with growing impatience, our five professional hitmen (Mr. Target; Killers; Defenders) debate what job opportunities to pick up on during the current citywide Mob shakedown.  Heck, maybe he’ll just naturally get whacked on a ‘job.’  Mission Accomplished.  Naturally, the situation is constantly upended: Wife & Infant Son a sentimental complication . . . with a gun!; Local Cop nearing retirement only wants to stay out of harm’s way; Rival Gangs jockeying for position; and, oh yes, there’s a ton of heist-worthy gold passing thru the area.  With violent mayhem elegantly composed, To makes the action & reversals of loyalty easy to follow (a wonderfully individualized cast*), while sailing thru the film’s unusual two-part structure with bravura control of pacing, and a tone that’s a mash-up of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah & Quentin Tarantino, yet speaks in its own singular voice.  The film should be far better known Stateside.

DOUBLKE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above, ELECTION and its less effective sequel.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/09/hak-se-wui-election-2005.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/hak-se-wui-yi-wo-wai-kwai-election-2.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: One of the ‘killer pair’ actors has an apt name in real life, Lam Suet, exactly what he looks like.

DOUCE (1943)

Class-conscious, but decidedly apolitical, set in an 1887 household at romantic cross-purposes between Upstairs & Downstairs at Christmastide.  Elderly Madame an overbearing tartar; a widowed middle-aged son with a wooden leg; his pretty, all-grown-up rebellious daughter; the governess who’s caught Father’s eye; the handsome estate manager who splits his attentions between them; and a household staff to see to every whim . . . . without seeing anything going on.  Taken from a novel (though it plays like a stage adaptation), it’s a first collaboration for classic French scripters Jean Aurenche & Pierre Bost.  (Collaboration a charged word at the time!)  All those misdirected avowals of love in an ever-shifting romantic quadrangle just the thing for an audience needing a mental break during the Nazi Occupation.  With a production as overstuffed in La Belle Époque furniture & decor as it is in delusions of la grandeur tragique.  Claude Autant-Lara’s film a plus-perfect example of the kind of ‘la qualité cinema française’ that drove the young turks writing at Cahiers du Cinéma in the ‘50s to distraction.  And Truffaut & Co weren’t far off*, though now, without having to deal with critical blindness on newer ideas, the film is never less than watchable even at its most stultifyingly sedate & tasteful.

DOUBLE-BILL: Films made during Occupation that can be read as anti-fascist allegory, like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s superb LE CORBEAU, also from 1943, get a lot more attention.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Autant-Lara will stick his camera behind flames in a fireplace . . . twice!  Always a bad sign.

O.S.S. (1946)

After the entertaining rush-job of THE BLUE DAHLIA, from Raymond Chandler’s only original screenplay, Paramount slipped Alan Ladd into this lackluster WWII spy yarn as soon as he’d wrapped his military service requirement.  With a script by founding James Bond screen author Richard Maibaum (13 in all), there’s fun in spotting future 007 spy-in-the-making tropes as Ladd and a group of O.S.S. (the WWII pre-C.I.A.) undercover trainees pick up the tricks of the trade along with a few advanced devices (shooting pipe; miniature camera) ‘Q’ might have demonstrated to James Bond.  But once Ladd gets dropped into Nazi-occupied France with co-star Geraldine Fitzgerald to find their resistance liaison and send back accurate bomb-run coordinates, director Irving Pichel goes into auto-drive, even when two team members come to grief and a Nazi officer takes an unwelcome shine to Fitzgerald.  Things pick up in the last act with a tunnel bomb gone awry just as romance comes into view for our leads.  But elsewise, pretty standard doings.  Even with a Hail Mary pass at an ‘honest’  downbeat ending, not enough here for emotional investment.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Warners also released an O.S.S. suspenser in '46, the Fritz Lang/Gary Cooper underachiever CLOAK AND DAGGER, now mainly of interest for how it anticipates Hitchcock’s TORN CURTAIN/’66.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/cloak-and-dagger-1946.html   OR: Pichel’s big effort that year, the wildly successful soaper TOMORROW IS FOREVER.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/11/tomorrow-is-forever-1946.html

NEWS OF THE WORLD (2020)

With a story centered on a twice orphaned girl in the post-Civil War Old West (Immigrant-German parents lost in an attack by the Kiowa tribe/adopted Native American family killed by unknowns), and the odyssey taken by her self-anointed protector thru violence & physical obstacles to bring her to an Aunt & Uncle, her only remaining family, it’s a wonder this Paul Greengrass film doesn’t come across as a woke version of John Ford's THE SEARCHERS/'56.  But if he neatly avoids that pitfall, there are plenty others to trap him in a film that errs from the start with a tone so sober, so somber it seems to have no place to go.  Odd when Tom Hanks' character is supposed to be an itinerant entertainer, traveling town to town as a storytelling messenger of joy & wonder, bringing News of the World to Texas pioneers when he finds himself stuck with that lost blonde ‘wild child.’  Too earnest by half, with a level of violence hard to imagine Hanks surviving over the four years he’s been wandering with his solo act since last seeing his wife.  Add on Greengrass’s penchant for jittery camera work, cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s severe earth-toned pallette and the crusty, wise-beyond-her-years voice of little girl lost Helena Zengel (once she starts to talk) and the film should be unbearable.  Fortunately, Greengrass drops a lot of the earnest crap along the route and the bonding tropes of child & surrogate dad kick in to reasonable effect.  Plus, always fun to watch Hanks latch on to another actor’s  persona when playing an abstraction rather than a real character.  So, just as Hanks glommed onto Walter Matthau for CATCH ME IF YOU CAN/’02, and Nino Manfredi in THE TERMINAL/’04 (LINK: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/terminal-2004.html), here Gene Hackman gets the treatment.  A decade after Hackman retired, nice to see a reasonable facsimile back on screen.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Since our previous post was on pioneer silent film director John H. Collins, we’ve jumped forward 106 years.  A new record!

DOUBLE-BILL: Some of the wilderness wandering and danger, especially during a sandstorm, brings Kurosawa’s underappreciated DERSU UZALA/’75 to mind as an unlikely Double-Bill.

JOHN H. COLLINS - Edison Films Director (1914; ’15)

The Museum of Modern Art rewrites a bit of early Hollywood film history with impressive restorations of one of few innovative directors to work at Thomas A. Edison’s film company.  (MoMA owns more than 400 original Edson nitrate negatives which can make for startlingly fresh prints at best; reasonably watchable, if occasionally incomplete at worst.)  As history and (now & then) art, especially valuable since the Edison films (1890s - 1918) are largely ignored even in Early Cinema study.  (Two exceptions: Edwin S. Porter’s THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY/1903 and LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN/1905; the latter too often seen in a long discredited MoMA edit that ‘modernized’ the original cutting continuity.)  Recently, six films directed by John H. Collins, made from these Edison negatives, show him pushing against arbitrary company limitations.  Beginning with MAKING A CONVERT/’14, a sort of silent film Public Service Announcement about trolley car safety, sweetly disguised as a single-reel comic romance; and on to near feature-length dramas snuck thru the front office as three or four single-reel serials.  The last of these new restorations an antebellum tragic romance, THE PLOUGHSHARE, stuffing two murders, suicide, unpunished villainy, slave brutality (by a slave owning kid with a whip!), miscarriage of justice, loveless marriage, brotherly love denied, and tragically thwarted romance in only 4 reels (about 50 minutes*).  Yet, it must have looked trivial next to BIRTH OF A NATION out the same year.  One of these films, THE PORTRAIT IN THE ATTIC, with future wife, actress Dana Viola, especially nice, as a motherless daughter refuses to acknowledge her father’s new wife until a crisis makes her need a mother’s touch!  With a ghostly dead mother giving her blessing to step-mom.  Collins’ films move a bit faster and have more editing than other Edison films of the period (but then, how many has anyone seen?), and often feature remarkable lighting effects.  One birthday celebration manages to show progressively dimming light as each cake candle is blown out.  In another film, a romantic reunion plays out entirely in silhouette.  And how quickly acting improves in a couple of years, with gestural indicators falling by the wayside.  Soon, Collins & Viola would head to Metro Pictures where they didn’t have to fight for longer running times.  Are any available to see?  And how far did Collins get before his life was abruptly cut short by the 1918 flu epidemic.  Viola continuing on screen well into the early sound period.  The other titles restored: LAST OF THE HARGROVES (a Hatfield & McCoy feud story of the kind Buster Keaton parodies in OUR HOSPITALITY*); WHAT COULD SHE DO? (department store employee pilfering leads to a detective job for a salesgirl, with Viola in extreme close up so we can read her lips: ‘I . . . Won’t . . . Tell!’); THE SLAVEY STUDENT (brother & sister orphans find redemption after he’s mistakenly jailed and she runs into the real criminal on a date).  Collins’ films don’t match the best from Europe (or of Griffith) at the time, but his early death lends a ‘What If’ quality to what we do have.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *If running times seem long considering the reel count, it’s because 24 fps wouldn’t become standardized till sound (each 1000 foot reel = ten minutes).  But silent camera cranking speeds varied widely.  And with persistence of vision kicking in as low as 16 fps, ambitious directors could squeeze an extra two to four minutes of screen time per reel at the slower cranking speed.  Save on film stock while tricking the front office!

LINK:  *Especially clear in the dramatically 'straight' prologue of Keaton’s OUR HOSPITALITY/’23.     https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/our-hospitality-1923.html

GION NO SHIMAI / SISTERS OF THE GION (1936)

Geisha sisters Omocha & Umekichi find themselves with an unwanted houseguest when longtime ‘patron’ of older sister Umekichi moves in after his fine arts/antiques shop goes bankrupt.  Cautiously welcomed by subservient, loyal, trusting Umekichi; less so by cool, calculating, mercenary younger sister Omocha who immediately starts plotting to get her sister a rich replacement patron, teasing a young kimono apprentice-tailor into fashioning a new outfit for Umekichi; a major expense they currently haven’t the money for.  This kills three birds with one stone: Umekichi can entice a new suitor; the apprentice will take the blame for non-payment; and Omocha can bat her lovely eyes under her expressive headdress at the young man’s rich boss.  Her justification: ‘I’m a Geisha; if I always told the truth I’d be out of business.’  And she’s right!  Omocha doesn’t come off as venal, merely as a realist; especially when we see how life is stacked against them.  This modest feature from Kenji Mizoguchi is, what else, a modest masterpiece*, fascinating in its multiplane/deep-focus staging & photography, and in the wealth of varied roles across class boundaries and in its sympathetic leaning toward unsympathetic actions.  Positively Renoir-esque in that everyone has their reasons, Mizoguchi is brutally cold-eyed, but never cold-hearted.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Perhaps not as modest as it seems since the film may have lost up to 20 minutes of footage over the years.  OSAKA ELEGY/’36 made right before this is just as good and may have lost just as much footage.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/naniwa-ereji-osaka-elegy-1936.html

THE NIGHT MY NUMBER CAME UP (1956)

Something of a genre unto itself, airplane-in-distress pics came two-ways in the ‘’50s: corny all-star big-ticket items (THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY/’54; NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY/’51) or unintentionally comic ‘Bs’ with fading players (THE CROWDED SKY/’60*; ZERO HOUR/’57).  So where does this mid-list British example from Ealing Studios fit in?  Pluses include legit players like Michael Redgrave, Denholm Elliot, Michael Hordern, George Rose & Alexander Knox working off a script by R.C. Sherriff (of the anti-war JOURNEY’S END and a co-credit on NO HIGHWAY); producer Michael Balcon and composer Malcolm Arnold (Oscar’d for next year’s BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, 2021 his centennial).  Minuses include a lot of conventional plotting & skyhigh boilerplate drama as a military flight gets into trouble due to bad weather & having 13 on board, now lost somewhere over Japan.  Flatly megged by debuting Leslie Norman who faces the double technical challenge of barely adequate special effects as well as having to shoot in tight airplane interiors.  What keeps it afloat (so to speak) is a truly wacky setup: both the crisis and the plane rescue contingent upon believing in a dream of future disaster reported by a high ranking nonparticipant.  More interesting is Sherriff’s idea on how actions and responses can be influenced by knowledge of a premonition.  The thinking similar to the well-known idea of how the very act of observation will inevitably alter whatever you’re observing.  If only this paranormal angle didn’t feel tacked on to conventional airplane-in-distress suspense tropes.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Cover all possible skyborne dramatics of the films mentioned above in one divine parody: AIRPLANE!/’80.  Of those listed above, CROWDED SKY is truly irresistible rubbish.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/12/crowded-sky-1960.html

CRACK-UP (1946)

Turn off the right side of your brain to savor the spectacular look of this stylishly imagined film noir.  A very tall tale centered around popular fine arts lecturer Pat O’Brien who opens the film in full crack-up mode, smashing his way into a locked museum, punching a cop and swooning in delirium in front of his own museum board.  Drunk?  Overworked?  Crazy?  Or does it have something to do with two possibly forged paintings gone missing?  The plot doesn’t add up, but director Irving Reis works up a hushed, threat-filled atmosphere fit for an Old Masters Gallery between the flashbacks to O’Brien’s terrifying recollections of a train wreck he survived . . . a train wreck that never happened.  Yikes!*  Going on the lam to find the truth behind his dreams after a tipster is murdered, O’Brien can’t even trust girlfriend Claire Trevor, awfully tight with suspicious police detective Wallace Ford, museum donor Herbert Marshall & board member Ray Collins.  Played at a deliberate pace Reis can’t quite pull off (O’Brien loses tension when he can’t shout his way thru a role), it’s still unusual enough to grab you.  You’re likely to guess who didn’t do it; but may not guess who did.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Hard to credit director Reis, best known for literary stage-to-screen adaptations like ALL MY SONS/’48 and THE FOUR POSTER/’52 as the man behind O’Brien’s breathtaking train hallucinations.  Best guess gives the nod to cinematographer Robert De Grasse, second unit director James Anderson, special effects head Russell Cully and most of all to transparencies & visual effects man Harold Wellman.

DOLLAR (1938)

Directed, like much of Ingrid Bergman’s pre-Hollywood work in Sweden, by Gustaf Molander (always with Åke Dahlqvist on camera*), this stage adaptation, less boulevard farce than boulevard roundelay, avoids the high film casualty rate of these misalliance comedies, if not by a lot.  Three friendly married couples, plus new couple in the making Overbearing ‘Ugly’ American Millionairess and Spa Clinic Doctor, find their flirtations & dicey finances taking consequential turns beyond lighthearted banter when a blizzard blows in at a ski resort and briefly strands the most vulnerable of the wives, opening many wounds.  Have they merely been playing at cross-spousal affections, or have mock affairs & overdrawn accounts reached serious levels?  (That sounds better than the film!)  Bergman, bewitchingly slim and curvy in form-fitting gowns, enjoys playing naughty catalyst, especially when sharpening her claws on the millionairess who’s telling tales and trying to buy her way into a marriage, somehow getting all the stories wrong and making the relationships right.  Everybody learns a bit about their spouse, and a bit more about themselves.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Bergman’s best-known Swedish titles were INTERMEZZO/’36: remade in ‘39 for her Hollywood debut; A WOMAN’S FACE/’38: Hollywoodized with Joan Crawford; and the slightly uncomfortable JUNE NIGHT/’40.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/womans-face-1941.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/june-night-1940.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Producer David O. Selznick gave cinematographer Åke Dahlqvist a backhanded compliment when filming his INTERMEZZO remake, ‘It would be shocking indeed if some cameraman in a small Stockholm studio was proven to be able to do so much more superior work with her (Bergman) than we are.’  Eventually, replacing Harry Stradling with Gregg Toland on the pic.

MAME (1974)

You’d never guess that AUNTIE MAME was the top-grossing film of 1959 after seeing this woebegone 1974 musicalization.  Then again, you’d never guess it after watching the 1959 film.  Time hasn’t been kind to Dennis Patrick’s carefully fictionalized memoir of his youthful days with his social-anarchist guardian aunt.  Mame’s iconoclastic upper-crust bohemianism long defanged, even smug; our erstwhile heroine not so far off the bourgeois conventionality she so stridently rejects.  The original stage play & ultra-faithful film version a triumph for Rosalind Russell*; again as a B’way musical with Angela Lansbury.  So, it’s easy to put the blame on Mame, here a painfully over-parted Lucille Ball, filmed in the softest of focus to hide 62 years of pratfalls & smoking.  Limping thru the part without the clothes-sense to pull off the Theadora Van Runkle monstrosities passing as outré couture; vocally ‘challenged,’ posing while dancers twirl about her; and missing the edge needed to meet the character halfway.  (Mame in the book far more abrasive, abusive, even scary.)  But the idea that Lansbury, or someone else (Cher, Carol Burnett*, Barbara Harris, this film’s eccentric co-star Bea Arthur) would have made much difference is nonsense.  (A decade after the film, a Lansbury led revival on B’way, with key members of the original cast repeating, closed in a month.)  And definitely not with flat-footed director Gene Saks, who’d done the 1966 stage musical, calling the shots.  Here and there, choreographer Onna White pulls off something simple (like the hat doffing backtrack shot in the title number), but elsewhere, her party scenes a mess.   Only Ms. Arthur’s basso-best pal (Mrs. Saks, BTW) and Robert Preston’s rich southern savior, get any kind of rhythm going.  These two carry just the right stylized style within.  They’re like cockroaches of musical comedy, they’d survive anything . . even without help from an army of technicians unable to get anything right.  (Though even Preston can’t do much with the ballad composer Jerry Herman added to beef up his part.)  Producer Robert Fryer, musing on this disaster in his office one day put it this way: ‘Well, the studio gave us a choice.  MAME with Lucy or no MAME.  Isn’t it better to have that?’   Discuss.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *As mentioned, the 1959 film version of AUNTIE MAME. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/auntie-mame-1958.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Film musicals are hard!  A film genre all but lost for a couple of generations after duds like MAME and the insanely awful LOST HORIZON/’73 of the year before.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/02/lost-horizon-1973.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Carol Burnett as Mame?  This Blackgama ad, from their famous ‘What Becomes A Legend Most’ series, sells the idea.  Shot  the same year MAME was in production.

DUELYANY / THE DUELIST (2016)

From Russian writer/director Aleksey Mizgiryov a plush, old-fashioned revenge fable among Tsarist nobility, honor-bound to answer insult with injurious duels.  Not exactly good filmmaking (he has some pretty odd ideas on camera placement & editing), but its magpie collection of faux Alexander Dumas tropes (the plot lands somewhere between COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and MAN IN THE IRON MASK*) is a fun watch.  Clever, too, in a facile manner.  (Easy to imagine 20th/Fox having a go in the ’40s with Tyrone Power, George Sanders and Gene Tierney in the leading roles.  But with OTT gore tastefully positioned out of frame!)  Pyotr Fyodorov is a tower of masochistic manliness as an unwitting pawn in a lethal game of kill-the-creditor, unaware he’s being led by the nose as Moscow’s go-to substitute duelist, paid to take out nobles by a mystery party who actually holds the key to the Duelist's past as escaped prisoner/disgraced ex-noble.  Yikes!  Big handsome production, DA!  But those glaring CGI cityscapes can really drag you out of the moment.  The old technique of mattes fitted up with glass painted backgrounds had their weaknesses, but rarely looked quite this ugly; and added rather than subtracted to a heightened storybook atmosphere that helped sell ‘rhymed’ narratives of circular payback, selfless sacrifice and just desserts.  Still, plenty going on in under two hours and nicely cast with memorable faces (and chests!) to keep confusion to a minimum.  As current ‘pop’ Russian entertainment goes, this will do.  (As NOTED before; our Family Friendly Label does not necessarily mean a kiddie pic.  Here, sex and violence at a PG-13 level.  Smart Phone users are directed to the Full Site for more info on LABELS.  Scroll down to the View Web Version link.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Lots of variations on these peer-sanctioned murders.  Naturally, Russian Roulette in the mix, but the One Bullet/Two Pistols/Choose Your Weapon game even better.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Of the many iterations, best MONTE CRISTO remains Robert Donat’s 1934 beauty and best IRON MASK is Douglas Fairbanks’ glorious/moving late silent of 1929. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/count-of-monte-cristo-1934.html

THE PRINCESS AND THE PIRATE (1944)

Bob Hope, at a career peak, is near top form in this farcical swashbuckler.  Even weighed down with posh production values (it might be a particularly posh British ‘Panto’), it can’t keep the buoyancy out of his gags, quips and fourth-wall breaking.  Some self-deprecating japes still hilarious in spite of contemporary references almost 80 years old.  David Butler’s staging can be deadly, his pirate action wouldn’t pass in an Edwardian production of PETER PAN, but Hope was at his most engaged around this time, and seems tickled pink to see Samuel Goldwyn, unlike home studio Paramount, laying on the deluxe treatment.*  Truth is, Hope’s more knockabout vehicles probably a better fit, and usually giving this underrated song & dance man a number or two missing here.  Instead, runaway princess Virginia Mayo, who mistakenly thinks cowardly Bob has rescued her from Victor McLaglen’s pirate, gets the sole number.*  But plenty of smiles and a big bang twist for a finish.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Arranged with a star swap: Goldwyn getting Hope/Paramount getting Gary Cooper to make FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS/’43.  Both films major hits though BELL hasn’t aged well with the notable exception of Ingrid Bergman’s spectacular boyish hair cut.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The opening measures of Virginia Mayo’s song (‘Kiss Me in the Moonlight’/McHugh & Adamson) awfully close to Rodgers & Hammerstein’s ‘Isn’t It Kinda Fun’ from STATE FAIR out the following year.

MISS SADIE THOMPSON (1953)

Few short stories turned profit-per-page like Somerset Maugham’s MISS THOMPSON.  Expanded for the stage as RAIN (romance with a young buck added to its Hooker & the Hypocrite action), it ran all over the world before Gloria Swanson, Lionel Barrymore & Raoul Walsh (who also directed) played its Gal with a Past, Missionary Zealot in Heat & standup Marine in the late silent SADIE THOMPSON/’28.  Then Lewis Milestone’s RAIN/’32 had Joan Crawford, Walter Huston & William Gargan; both films still effective.  Not much kick left by 1953, everything now feels telegraphed (and perhaps more so in its original 3D prints), little helped by having Rita Hayworth, José Ferrer & Aldo Ray all playing to the balcony.  Director Curtis Bernhardt under the impression he’s filming auditions for some touring company of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s SOUTH PACIFIC?  And why not?  The first half is a near-musical with three songs for Rita*, quarantined for a week on a tropical isle, and group singalongs for the randy post-war Marines stationed there.  But do check out a young Charles Branson in support, swamping gravel-voiced Aldo Ray in the testosterone department.  Elsewise, pretty stale doings.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A musical version of RAIN?  Not so farfetched, some top talent tried it on B’way in the ‘40s: Rouben Mamoulian, Howard Dietz, Vernon Duke, Boris Aronson, Motley, with Ethel Merman as Sadie.  But Merman smelled a flop early in rehearsals and let June Havoc take over.  As always, the Merm called it; the show limped thru 60 perfs.

MISSISSIPPI MERMAID / LA SIRÈNE DU MISSISSIPI (1969)

Oft claimed as his most Hitchcockian work, François Truffaut’s morbid suspenser THE BRIDE WORE BLACK/’68 doesn’t approach the bravura looting in this slightly bonkers l’amour fou from the following year.  Taken from a Cornell Woolrich novel, it’s very fou indeed, as a recently married Jean-Paul Belmondo wakes up to find he’s been taken to the cleaners by new wife Catherine Deneuve, history’s most unlikely mail-order bride.  Left flat on his tropical island plantation, Belmondo teams up with the sister of his missing real bride to hire Marcel Berbert’s unflappable private dick.  Objectionably stalwart, he’ll track down the no-show bride; the imposter who took her place; and the stolen cash.  With plot & character elements lifted out of the Hitchcock canon (lots of MARNIE*, SUSPICION and that painted coif in VERTIGO), Truffaut happily throws plausibility to the winds (plausibility a particular pet peeve to Hitch), especially in the second half when Belmondo (having chased Deneuve all the way to France) reunites with his undeserving spouse, giving passion precedent over self-preservation, and rapture proving contagious by the end.  Not well received on release, and easy to see why (perhaps the modern setting a mistake, along with the abrupt Truffaut manner), but there’s madness to Truffaut’s method.  And should that not work for you, Deneuve is so drop-dead gorgeous, you may not care.

DOUBLE-BILL:  The Woolrich story was reused to steamy purpose for Antonio Banderas & Angelina Jolie in ORIGINAL SIN/’01.  (not seen here)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *If you ever wondered how Hitchcock’s troublesome MARNIE/’64 might play with a truly beautiful woman who knew how to act, here’s your chance.

THUNDER BIRDS: SOLDIERS OF THE AIR (1942)

Squeezed in between two prestige pics the same year*, this morale-boosting early WWII Army-Air Force recruitment pic, a programmer in all but its use of TechniColor (blue-sky & planes born for 3-strip color), finds director William Wellman going thru the motions on a wan love triangle for top-billed 22-yr-old Gene Tierney wooed by older flight instructor Preston Foster & only slightly less older British trainee John Sutton, whose touch of vertigo provides the rest of the drama.  Will he make the cut and become an RAF pilot (and probably be shot down within weeks), or get sent down by a romantic rival?  Wellman shows his usual lack of sensitivity, shaving the age difference between the men to a mere eight years.  The dramatic loss made clear in a few, precious glimpses of heartbreakingly young real recruits (American, Brits, Chinese), looking like teenagers prepping to fight Nazis, Japs, All-comers).  If Sutton had looked like one of these kids, you might have a movie.  (Though fun to watch cinematographer Ernest Palmer struggle with the limitations of  ‘40s TechniColor, flooding an entire bedroom with light from a single match.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Wellman just off ROXIE HART, a disappointing second iteration of CHICAGO; and THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, his famous anti-lynching Western, out next, a film that congratulates itself for standing against mob ‘justice’ on the innocent.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Over at Warners, Michael Curtiz did a pair of these TechniColored WWII flyboy recruitment pics.  Beating Pearl Harbor by months with DIVE BOMBER/’41 (best of the two), then pumping up the drama for Cagney in CAPTAINS OF THE CLOUDS/’42.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/dive-bomber-1941.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/captains-of-clouds-1942.html

LOVE & ANARCHY / FILM D’AMORE E D’ANARCHIA (1973)

With thirty-three directing credits over sixty years, only three or four Lina Wertmüller films (all from 1972 to 1978) found wide international favor & distribution.*  And from this unprecedentedly fast rise & fall, L&A now seems best, certainly the best Wertmüller introduction.  Famous for giving her films long subheadings, she missed the obvious one here: A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO ASSASSINATE MUSSOLINI AT THE FORUM.  It’s just about what happens to Giancarlo Giannini’s freckled rural naïf, in Rome to meet ‘cousin’ Mariangela Melato, top whore at a lux brothel who’s his contact agent for the anarchist assassination assignment he’s here to carry out.  With three days to kill before the killing, Melato helps by hooking up with a Fascist ‘John,’ an insider with possible info on Il Duce’s movements.  Double-dating with Giannini & fresh-faced hooker Lina Polito, Melato endures while Giannini falls madly in love with his arranged date.  Wertmüller plays it all very broadly, her coarseness abetted by typically sloppy Italian post-production dubbing of her mile-a-minute dialogue.  You adjust to it when the gags pay off (Giannini expertly overplaying in a believable manner), as the screws tighten and the film tips from seriously funny to serious.  All greatly helped by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno’s warm interior pallette & from editor Franco Fraticelli’s control of pace & minutiae, sharply balancing Wertmüller’s farcical-chops with drama.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Any possibility of reestablishing the Wertmüller rep scotched after the Guy Ritchie/Madonna 2002 SWEPT AWAY remake.  Wertmüller’s 1974 original, with Giannini & Melato, looking pretty worn as well.

MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)

Warner Bros. tried, tried & tried again for that Universal Horror mojo, but never quite turned the trick.  Here, they improve on last year’s DOCTOR X, also with director Michael Curtiz, stars Lionel Atwill & Fay Wray, ‘glorious’ 2-strip TechniColor, even repurposed Anton Grot sets from the earlier film.  That one, more creepy whodunit than fright-fest, long held an advantage with better source material for the tricky early TechniColor, but a recent digital restoration reveals WAX as best of the pair, if something of a curate’s egg (‘it was good in part’).  Still, the old yarn about a wax museum that uses dead people in tallow as exhibits remains good for a shudder.  The prologue especially fine, with Lionel Atwill’s artistically inclined sculptor losing everything in a fiery blaze before the story restarts twelve years later in a new museum with new historical wax figures now created by embalming actual human corpses under a hot wax finish.  And if few surprises remain, lots of horrified shrieks from a terrified Wray help make up for it.  Turns out she’s the Marie Antoinette figure Atwill has long been searching for.  Yikes!  Meanwhile, gal-pal/roommate Glenda Farrell (with the most screen time) investigates as a reporter looking for a scoop and a husband.  Good guys & cops awfully bland, but Atwill does gets a nasty pair of assistants to order about while working up a solid John Barrymore impression* as the disfigured Monsieur Tussauds.  Worth a look for the prologue’s fiery wax meltdown and Grot’s spectacular sets alone.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, DOCTOR X/’31  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/doctor-x-1932.html           OR: The 3D remake with Vincent Price, HOUSE OF WAX/’53.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Why Barrymore?  DOCTOR and WAX more or less part of a series John Barrymore started at Warners before moving to M-G-M in 1932: Archie Mayo’s stiff SVENGALI/’31 (a hit) and Curtiz’s far superior THE MAD GENIUS/’31 (a flop).

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT (1951)

Darker than other Ealing Studio comedies of the post-war period (say WHISKEY GALORE/’49 or THE LAVENDER HILL MOB/’51), this novel satire of business, labor & science comes loaded with a bitter edge between the laughs as ‘mad’ inventor Alec Guinness creates a synthetic fibre that weaves into an indestructible, dirt-repellent fabric, a revolution for an antiquated British textile industry.  Naturally, everyone fights to get it, till they think thru the consequences.  This Textile Dr. Frankenstein could soon put them all out of business!  Yikes!  An equal opportunity offender, Alexander Mackendrick’s superbly wrought film takes no sides, it’s against everybody: management & union, factory owners & trade groups, research & development men, advisory boards and head-in-the-clouds chemical visionaries.  With the withering truth & justified exasperation of a present-day Ben Jonson or Jonathan Swift now aimed at the dismal prospects of post-war British social & industrial optimism.  (Did Thomas Hobbes have a sense of humor?)  And so deviously, you might enjoy the film without ever realizing you’ve been laughing at a father & fiancé willing to ‘pimp’ Joan Greenwood (indispensable) to keep the formula out of the news.  That union, management & owners would fight tooth-and-nail because they’re in agreement.   Or that Public Relations routinely lie to the press.  Really?  With exceptional layered work from cinematographer Douglas Slocombe and Benjamin Frankel’s devilishly witty, propulsive music score, all the technical elements rise to the top.  Few post-silent comedy classics produce more laughs; even fewer are more thought-provoking.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Great movies rarely get the great posters they deserve.  Not the case here.

DOUBLE-BILL: One last Ealing comedy for Mackendrick, with Guinness again in THE LADYKILLERS/’55.

WOMAN OF THE YEAR (1942)

After BRINGING UP BABY and HOLIDAY tagged Katharine Hepburn ‘box-office poison’ in 1938 (failures that now seem incomprehensible), Hepburn lured playwright Philip Barry to fashion PHILADELPHIA STORY as a comeback vehicle for her, bringing a society goddess down a notch or two after two acts of worship.  Audiences flocked; Kate controlled the rights; M-G-M had a top-grossing pic; Hepburn followed with five top-twenty films in the next five years: PHILADELPHIA/’41; WotY/’42; KEEPER OF THE FLAME/’43; DRAGON SEED/’44; WITHOUT LOVE/’45*.  WOMAN has an original story by Ring Lardner Jr & Michael Kanin but largely holds to Barry’s Goddess brought down game-plan.  But where PHILLY used three suitors to admire her, and a wandering dad she stoops to forgive, here Spencer Tracy’s  beer-and-pretzels sports columnist handles all sides of the quadrangle as one, falling hard and butting heads with Kate’s globe-trotting champagne-and-caviar world events editorialist.  A set up for their first pairing, but, at its best, exceptionally well staged by George Stevens when he’s not indulging in slow-boil comedy shtick.  (Having started in film with Laurel & Hardy, Stevens thought he could teach anyone to play Laurel & Hardy routines.)  Not without its obvious shortcuts, and a pandering finale for Hepburn to make a mess out of breakfast, but the chemistry between the leads is positively combustible, paving over cracks playwright Barry never would have allowed.  Oh . . . and Hepburn never looked more ravishing.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Her other Barry adaptation, WITHOUT LOVE/’45, about a companionate marriage that warms up, is the second worst Tracy/Hepburn pairing.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/12/without-love-1945.html    OR: Stevens, and just about all involved, claimed the embarrassing finale only added after a troubled preview.  But was it?  The ‘but-can-she-cook?’ motif is twice foreshadowed: on the phone with Spencer, Mom asks if his intended knows how to cook; then brought up once more when Tracy shows his stuff with eggs at the stovetop.  In addition, Stevens’ previous Hepburn pic, ALICE ADAMS/’35, also climaxes on a kitchen disaster, though not entirely of Kate’s making.

THE QUIET ONE (1948)

Before work on THE AFRICAN QUEEN/’51 and THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER/’55, James Agee, still best known for film criticism ('Pop’ mode @ TIME; deep think for THE NATION), got his first movie credit writing the wall-to-wall narration (read by Gary Merrill) for this largely dialogue-free (near) documentary about an emotionally paralyzed, disaffected Harlem youth (broken home, falling behind at school, barely cared for by Grandmother) sent upstate to the Wiltwyck Rehabilitation School, less classroom than camp (with shrinks) for kids.  And if much of the film’s originality has been lost thru repetition, it retains it’s hold thru an abstracted presentation of the boy’s city life (helped rather than hurt by technical limitations) and from Agee’s sophisticated/suggestive voice-over writing (far less dated than similar tries over the next 40+ years); trusting our emotional involvement to fill in missing pieces.  With time-capsule elements of the period in place (look, location, psychological techniques), but not pushed on us; much as Agee’s script sidesteps to keep expected uplift to a bare minimum. Progress, yes; happy ending, not so much.

LINK: Decent print available here:   https://archive.org/details/the_quiet_one

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Double Oscar nominated.  For Best Documentary, and the following year for Best Writing/Story/Script without Agee even mentioned!  Oscar® strikes again.

DOUBLE-BILL: New York indie films like THE LITTLE FUGITIVE/’53 grew out of works like this.

STRANDED (1935)

Celebrated for Catholic-tinged/romantic fatalism (especially late-silents @ Fox), in the mid-‘30s director Frank Borzage made three unjustly forgotten films centered on labor unions.  First was this politically centrist tale @ Warners, followed by two posher M-G-M productions, left-leaning BIG CITY/’37 and the reactionary MANNEQUIN/’37.*  Rough and bumpy, barely an A-pic compared to the later two, STRANDED holds the most interest, starting with docu-footage on the Golden Gate Bridge going up.  A feat of construction taking place well behind an ‘opposites-attract’ romance for George Brent, unexpectedly forceful & pigheaded as the tough-driving boss who says things like ‘you’d be okay with a spanking or two,’ to a flirt.  See, he’s only got eyes for Traveler’s Aid associate Kay Francis, even though she refuses to give up serving society’s unwashed (and occasionally undeserving) to marry.  And while her modern outlook is unusual, even more interesting is that she doesn’t capitulate for a happy ending; nor want Brent to soften his hard edge.  She likes the grit in the relationship.  It seems to turn her on.  Yikes!  Then there’s the union side of the drama, with nasty Barton MacLane out to wreck the construction company if they don’t start paying into his protection racket.  Brent’s in-between position comes loaded with political positioning certain to piss off his union workers, the captain-of-industry investors and Francis’s soft-hearted do-gooder.  Soft-hearted, but not soft-headed, which makes this film, in spite of feeling like they went into production before figuring out what they wanted to say, unexpectedly appealing.  One of those films that’s strengthened by its weaknesses.  Just don’t be put off by the slightly sappy opening reels which hold off on the good stuff.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *(Really a Triple-Bill)  As mentioned, over @ M-G-M in 1937 where Borzage had Spencer Tracy & Louise Rainer for BIG CITY and then Spence with Joan Crawford in MANNEQUIN/’37.  The three films all over the map politically.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/big-city-1937.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/mannequin-1937.html

TARGETS (1968)

Holding up remarkably well, the faults in Peter Bogdanovich’s commercially ill-timed sniper pic*are easy to see.  Not, as you might imagine, from a bare-bones budget or the need to incorporate footage producer Roger Corman had left over from an earlier Boris Karloff film, more from inadequate acting that pulls you out of the story (Bogdanovich himself a prime offender in a drunk scene); from a few missing story beats; and from cinematographer László Kovács -- fine outdoors, less comfortable on the film’s color-coded minimalist interiors.  But these are blips in a cleverly worked out story scheme that sees Bogdanovich’s debut pic already using the sort of independent storylines that only interact late in the film he’d favor throughout his career.  Here, Boris Karloff’s aging horror film star, aware of how real world violence has outdistanced his fantasy tales, reluctantly agrees to an In-Person appearance at a Drive-In movie premiere while a parallel development, Storyline Two (really the main story), tells a seemingly unrelated American Sniper story about a ‘Good Son’ who, after taking out Wife & Mom, heads to a highway for some quick target practice killing before finishing his spree of random murder hidden behind that Drive-In movie screen.  Now, any terrifying action happening to projected film images seems meaningless in the real panic happening to people in parked cars, an audience of sitting ducks for a bland, affectless shooter.  Very well handled, Bogdanovich much helped by (then) wife Polly Platt and an uncredited Samuel Fuller on script, with his own pacey editing and associative montage techniques camouflaging what isn't there.  Two decisions were crucial: One: no motivation or psychological explanation given for the killer; Two: Boris Karloff, in his best role since early ‘30s Universal Horror, getting the space (and dignity) needed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The film’s theatrical run doomed by 1968 political assassinations.

NAKED ALIBI (1954)

Surprisingly crummy.  With more than enough film noir elements in place (brutal cop chases cop-killing gangster down to crepuscular Mexico border town where he falls in with a sexy nightclub singer involved with the elsewise happily married hood), and tasty cast to pull it off (fast-with-the-fists detective Sterling Hayden; purring Gene Barry as a quick-to-boil mobster; seen-it-all club temptress Gloria Grahame), this one ought to be better.  But so poorly developed, you’d think producer Ross Hunter & director Jerry Hopper are at Republic Pictures rather than Universal; all phony story setups and character shortcuts.  A few good takeaways in the mix: Hayden waking up in pajamas after getting knocked-out in the street.  Who changed the guy?  Grahame is shown unbuttoning his shirt before a quick fade-out.  Yikes!  (Like James Stewart & Kim Novak in VERTIGO/’58, but with a gender reverse.)  And there’s Grahame sashaying thru Border City’s main drag in her nightclub finery.  (Seen from behind you can overlook her latest self-destructive cosmetic surgery.  Something around  the mouth this time; she can barely enunciate.*)  Best of all, a chance to see young Billy Chapin, the memorable kid Robert Mitchum relentlessly follows in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER/’55, with a nice little part playing Hayden’s street-wise helper in Border City.  Too bad these plums are served on the side of an undercooked main entrée.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Dubbed on her nightclub song, Gloria did her own vocals next year as Ado Annie in OKLAHOMA!/’55.  ALSO: Gene Barry’s physical outbursts so violent & arbitrary, they suggest a brain tumor.  Too bad they didn’t develop the script using that angle.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a vicious cop losing control, try ON DANGEROUS GROUND/’51 (Nicholas Ray directing Robert Ryan; with a blistering Bernard Herrmann score).  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-dangerous-ground-1952.html

DOG EAT DOG (2016)

Who’d thunk ‘twould be easier to pull the wool over critic’s eyes on faux Robert Bresson than on faux Quentin Tarantino?  (Make that Tarantino seasoned with Guy Ritchie & the Coen Brothers, all in ‘90s mode.)  Leave it to Paul Schrader, here directing but not writing*, on a by-the-numbers actioner about a trio of former prison pals, savage, amoral, drug-addled low-I.Q. goons who get together for the expected jokey, foul-tongued, ultra-gory violence (yet still a party!) working drug scams for small change before stepping up for a larger score kidnaping a mobster’s kid; only to watch it all quickly go south.  Trashed by reviewers and left for dead at the box-office, Schrader followed with his career-reviving, Bresson steeped, DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST/'51 rethink, FIRST REFORMED/’17, his best received pic in decades.  What neat justice if this grubby little film turned out to be as underrated as REFORMED was overrated.* Alas.  As lead thug, Nicolas Cage does warn us of the Humphrey Bogart act he’ll put on toward the end, distancing himself from one more pointless killing, here an unlucky, overweight Black couple; Willem Dafoe winks at us before similar distasteful work, with needless, lethal bloodletting for a doomed mom & daughter pair of unlucky, overweight gals in a pink house (doomed by decor?); then there's unlucky, overweight third-wheel criminal partner Christopher Matthew Cook taking himself out thru bad driving.  Do I see a pattern here?  Strangely, the fattest guy on screen survives; none other than Paul Schrader playing the mob fixer who gives the boys their running orders.  You get to do that when you’re the director.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Written by Matthew Wilder.  Three credits on IMdB earning what may be a record low 4.1 rating average.  Low ratings on IMdB, hardly a bad sign in many cases, but here . . .

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *See for yourself: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/02/first-reformed-2017.html

CHIKAMATSU MONOGATARI / A STORY FROM CHIKAMATSU (1954)

Seeing a film by Japan’s Kenji Mizoguchi, a bit like going to The Frick Museum in Manhattan, nothing but masterpieces.  This, from his nonpareil late works, if less well known than LIFE OF OHARU/’52; UGETSU/’53; STREET OF SHAME/’56, is equally exceptional, a period piece from an 18th century play with an unusually elaborate interlocking plot and a melodramatic tilt to its conflicts and suspense.  That’s literally melodramatic, with telling use of rhythmic underscoring at moments of stress & violence; and staged with half an eye toward Bunraku (puppet) techniques.  The twisty story involves a master printer whose attempt to help a servant girl raise cash for her ne’er-do-well brother escalates into a near noirish no-good-deed-goes-unpunished tragedy.  Money stolen from the lordly scroll master; attempted sexual blackmail (and a failed attempt at a reverse); misread adulterous sightings; a doomed dash to freedom; accidental love matches; all derailed by the formal demands of honor & justice in Feudal Japan court society.  By the end, the good, the bad and the ugly all punished without justice or mercy.  And if this closed society feels foreign to us, the swift movement in action & plot, paradoxically makes this one of Mizoguchi most readily relatable films for anyone unfamiliar with Mizoguchi or classic Japanese cinema.

DOUBLE-BILL: The earliest available Mizoguchi, OSAKA ELEGY/’36, is imperfectly preserved, but don’t let that stop you.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/naniwa-ereji-osaka-elegy-1936.html