LARCENY (1948)

Dull programmer from dull journeyman megger George Sherman, breaking from his usual quickie Westerns to helm this jerry-built film noir.*  Too bad, it’s nutty enough to have been dumb fun.  John Payne, fresh off a surprise hit with MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET/’47, plays front man to a gang of con artists run by reliably amoral Dan Duryea.  On this job, Payne’s wooing small town war widow Joan Caulfield (in fast career decline), feeding her a line about raising cash for a memorial to her late husband while really planning to take the money and run before anyone’s the wiser.  But to the surprise of no one, he falls for the lady and tries to get out of his bargain with Duryea.  Even with avaricious moll Shelly Winters doing every low-down trick she can think of to keep Payne off the straight & narrow.  (Winters still in youthful flush, jaw-line intact.)  With plot & characterizations already tumbling toward inadvertent non-sequitor, we rush toward a third act where things turn positively ludicrous.  Easy to imagine someone else bringing a little pace & style to the proceedings to get away with this crap.  But with Sherman giving the orders, don’t get your hopes up.  Dreary stuff, right down to the repurposed dialogue and sets.  The cast phones it in, protecting themselves with indifference.  All except Caulfield who, as an actress, proves some kind of terrible.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: To see what can be done on this sort of thing (and with this sort of budget) check out next year’s noir thriller IMPACT/’49.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/impact-1949.html   OR: *Just as Sherman’s career was winding down, he finally got an A-list/full budget assignment when John Wayne tapped him for BIG JAKE/’71, one of the generic Westerns Wayne cranked out post-TRUE GRIT.  In the event, Sherman took ill and Wayne directed much of the pic himself sans credit.

RABID DOGS / CANI ARRABBIATI (1974)

This late film from Italian horror pioneer Mario Bava comes without the expected giallo elements (no bared breasts/no primary colored palette), but in its less flamboyant way reps something of a return to form for the director.  (Or would had it received a proper release.  Instead, two decades on the shelf before it came out.*)  Alarmingly nasty, often downright vicious (very proto-Tarantino*), it’s a suspense-filled hostage drama centered on a botched robbery that sends three criminal thugs (‘Doc’ and two feral accomplices) on the run, killing one curvy young thing to get past the cops, kidnapping the dead girl’s friend for protection.  Ditching their damaged vehicle, they commandeer the car of a father driving his sick boy to hospital and force him to take them (and the girl) out of the city.  Bava allows some pretty broad acting (call it Italian Method Enthusiasm; only the father holding back), with beautifully laid out story beats so the police don’t have to behave stupidly just to keep the plot moving.  And the threat of a sick kid needing to see a doctor; a father trying to hold things together; a pretty female hostage fending off backseat advances; a coolly composed killer running the show; and two whack-job partners give Bava plenty to work with.  G’normous George Eastman is particularly good as an oversexed thug nicknamed ‘32.’  (That’s in centimeters, it translates to 12.5 inches.)  Even the comic relief, a chattering female hostage who talks herself into a ride, is made quick work of along the way (Bava knows we're fine with murder as long as it shuts her up), before we reach final destination and the film pivots from sadistic to nihilistic.  Or does right before a shockingly playful twist explains the last remaining unknowns; actions you thought were pure narrative expedience.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Belatedly released in the ‘90s at 86", a further re-edit (with a bit of added footage & scoring) supervised by Lamberto (son of Mario) Bava came out as KIDNAPPED at 96".

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Often mentioned as an influence on RESERVOIR DOGS/’92, Bava’s film only came out five years after Tarantino’s film.  (Though he does credit Bava as a major influence.)

LOCAL HERO (1983)

In an interview on the Criterion DVD, iconoclastic Scots writer/director Bill Forsyth shows off a congratulatory letter he got from iconoclastic Brit writer/director Michael Powell.  And suddenly the influence of Powell’s enchanting Scottish romance I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING is obvious.  In tone, off-beat humor & eccentric town with a wise old contrarian to straighten things out; the celebratory community dance and single outdoor pay-phone to serve a whole town.  Even that film’s famously unseen rich industrialist here made flesh by no less than Burt Lancaster.  Strongly influenced, yet still feeling wholly original as Peter Riegert’s Texas-based oil acquisitions exec is sent off to Scotland to buy up coast & village for his boss’s new oil refinery.  But as this is a pastorale (if t’were late Shakespearean Romance the full title might be LOCAL HERO - OR: The Despoiler Foiled) traveling capitalist Riegert quickly falls for the town & its people, unaware those townies, an unsentimental lot, dream only of riches and profit-sharing.  If not for Riegert’s Scottish assistant (a debuting Peter Capaldi) with his love-at-first-sight crush on an ocean scientist/conservationist (and possible mermaid), along with Lancaster’s passion for the natural wonders of sea & sky, there’d be nothing to stop the momentum toward catastrophic development.  With almost no one doing just what you expect them to do, yet never stepping out of character to land one of the many jokes exploding at odd times & angles all thru the pic.  Beautifully shot by Chris Menges and acted without a hint of pressurized twee (Wes Anderson take note), HERO is a sui generis delight of serious proportions (and purpose), ending with a heartbreaking trade-off of magical realism for hard-nosed melancholy.

ATENTION MUST BE PAID: Both Puttnam & Forsyth were carried to Hollywood on this film’s unlikely success, Puttnam as Head of Production at Columbia; Forsyth on three misconceived projects.  They both quickly crashed & burned, packed their bags, barely worked again.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Before Forsyth’s Hollywood misadventures, another Scottish collaboration for him & lighting cameraman Menges on next year’s equally superb COMFORT AND JOY/’84. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/comfort-and-joy-1984.html

FLEE (2021)

The Animated Documentary, an oxymoronic idea that’s worked as a niche genre (really a niche within a niche as three examples of the form are Middle-East based), starting with the Iranian coming-of-age memoir PERSEPOLIS/’07, drawn in a stylized b&w realization that had little to do with the more realistic tone WALTZ WITH BASHIR/’08 used for its look-back-in-sorrow Israeli military scandal.  FLEE, an Afghanistan to Denmark Bildungsroman, lands somewhere between them, unraveling the truth behind ‘Amin,’ youngest son in a family trying to get to The West, holding fast to his asylum seeker’s fibs.  Structured as a series of confessional interviews between the now 30-something Amin and an old school pal (director/writer Jonas Poher Rasmussen) interviewing him for the film we are watching (very ‘meta’), animation proves a huge improvement on documentary re-enactments.  Loaded with moving family drama & suspense, there’s also a gay angle that might have overloaded things in other hands; not here.  The only constant of Amin’s life in interim country purgatory, the consistently corrupt Russian police.  Equally memorable/dangerous encounters all thru the pic, with a particularly fine set piece involving a Cruise Ship dwarfing their jammed illegal immigrant boat as it glides by.  Here and there, the film is a little shy on keeping us fully informed, but generally too honest and moving to nitpick.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Similar issues beautifully handled in Live-Action documentary style as a gay couple from Mexico sneak illegally into the U.S. in the immigrant saga I CARRY YOU WITH ME/’21.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-carry-you-with-me-te-llevo-conmigo.html  But FLEE feels closer to the animated docs mentioned above: PERSEPOLIS/’07 and WALTZ WITH BASHIR/’08  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/waltz-with-bashir-2008.html

THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE (1936)

Fourth time ‘round for this popular Hatfield & McCoy tale, here the feuding Appalachian clans Tolliver & Falin.  Director Henry Hathaway, A-listed after LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER/’35 and having made the similar TO THE LAST MAN/’33*, revels in the assignment, using the Great Outdoors to startling effect with those early TechniColor cameras and their painfully slow film stock.  The story and acting pretty much hold up, too.  Fred MacMurray (at his best here/very likable) is the big company engineer sent to sign up land rights for coal production and the rail line to move the stuff.  Only problem, the territory needed runs right thru those two feudin’ clans.  Henry Fonda, who lost his folks in the fighting, is pledged to cousin Sylvia Sidney, a bit of a minx who sees opportunity in MacMurray’s stranger-in-town.  Soon she’s dressing up, going to town and thinking about an education.  But as soon as Fonda & MacMurray come to blows over her, those pesky Falins attack, and romantic rivals suddenly join forces against them.  Hathaway pulls this off with gorgeous early TechniColor (in beautiful shape on a Universal DVD), understated acting for the period (Fonda’s natural rhythm improving everyone around him) and impressive action set pieces.  The story surprisingly violent & tough-minded at killing off friendly characters.  More than mere historical interest in this one.  If only comic relief Fuzzy Knight didn’t repeat the same damn song at every occasion.  Even at a funeral.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The 1923 version of TRAIL starred Mary Miles Minter in her final film role, only 21, but fatally tainted by her involvement in Hollywood ‘s greatest unsolved mystery, the murder of director William Desmond Taylor.  On the other hand, Hollywood’s second greatest mystery has to be: Why was Henry Fonda the go-to guy for early TechniColor features?  Two years in Hollywood and he’s on loan to Paramount for their first shot at 3-strip TechniColor before heading off to make England’s first TechniColor feature, WINGS OF THE MORNING/’37, then a pair for the home team at 20th/Fox in 1939.

DOUBLE-BILL: *If you can find it, that earlier Hathaway Feudin’ Families Film, TO THE LAST MAN/’33 is damn good, if a little stiff at times (especially the women), and features the spectacular debut of 5-yr-old Shirley Temple, star already written all over her.  OR:  For a wonderful comic spin on Hatfields & McCoys, Buster Keaton’s OUR HOSPITALITY, out the same year as the silent version of TRAIL mentioned above.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/our-hospitality-1923.html

LES GIRLS (1957)

Cole Porter’s LES GIRLS, as the billing has it, less Musical Comedy than Comedy-with-Music,  tells its court case in three flashbacks using three different points of view, searching for the truth behind a libelous backstage memoir written by one of the three long-legged gals who once made up ‘Les Girls,’ a touring musical revue led by Gene Kelly.  The ‘girls’ are Mitzi Gaynor, Taina Elg & Kay Kendall, and though its structure was lifted from Akira Kurosawa’s ROSHOMON, that classic couldn’t boast songs by Cole Porter or repartee from John Patrick.  Thrillingly designed, staged & shot (George Cukor directing, with striking visual assistance from Gene Allen, George Hoyingen-Huene and Orry-Kelly’s Oscar-winning costumes), the superbly caught theatrical milieu and attic apartment the girls share, offer bizarre angles that engage Cukor and cinematographer Robert Surtees to find spirited CinemaScopic solutions.  It’s one of those films where the sum is greater than its merely adequate parts: Patrick’s script not as witty as he thinks; Porter in obvious decline (though a fine ballad & a very funny risque song for The Girls).  It’s really Kendall who makes (and steals) the film (she stole every film she was in), hitting a highpoint in a drunken Carmen parody.* And if Gaynor wasn’t Cukor’s first choice, at least he was able to tone down her exhausting perkiness.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Though Classic Hollywood musicals were on their way out, a ‘swelegant’ surge of Paris-centric examples were appearing all at once with GIRLS; Stanley Donen’s FUNNY FACE/’57; Rouben Mamoulian’s SILK STOCKINGS/’57 and Vincente Minnelli’s GIGI/’58, all setting new levels of visual sophistication.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Kendall, showing vocal chops to spare as she rips thru Carmen in a drunken state during one of the flashbacks, was needlessly (if nicely) dubbed by Betty Wand.  Scheduling problems with recording sessions as her contract allowed her to fly back & forth L.A. to NYC where fiancé Rex Harrison was on-stage nightly in MY FAIR LADY?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Kendall even more enchanting next year against husband Rex Harrison in THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE/’58.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-reluctant-debutante-1958.html

ONWARD (2020)

More dispiritment from PIXAR.  This one with director/co-writer Dan Scanlon in magpie mode, cooking up a brotherly Road Trip with ‘borrowed’ elements ranging from DUNGEONS & DRAGONS to SHREK and HARRY POTTER.  It’d matter less if he hadn’t used the worst stuff from his sources.  So, from POTTER: unlimited get-out-of-jail magic incantations.  Danger & suspense Begone!  Just as much wrong in the setup: a smorgasbord of fantastic beasts from Days of Yore plopped into modern suburbia where a couple of mismatched teen ‘Elven’ siblings (Kid Nerd; Big Brother Fuck Up) leave Mom behind on a quest to find Dear Dead Dad.  Kid #1 too young to have met him; Kid #2 never said a proper goodbye.  Naturally, this being PIXAR, there’s technical polish in all departments and an All-Star vocal cast, but the adventures are contrived and the characterizations secondhand stuff.  With streaming & pandemic accounting, hard to know just how many people went in on this one (PIXAR films often contingent on how well the one before did), but the film ought to give pause; the creatives have been going to the same well a little too often.  More like DreamWorks than PIXAR.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Less ambitious & infinitely cheerier, LUCA/’21 had to skip theatrical release, but this PIXAR-Lite is the modest delight its company ought to have crowed about.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html

LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

James Bond producers Cubby Broccoli & Harry Saltzman pulled Roger Moore, still boyishly dewy at 45, out of tv doldrums as their Replacement Bond after one-shot discovery George Lazenby dropped out and Sean Connery pitched relief for (almost) the last time.  Too bad no one figured out how to properly use him until his third outing in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME/’77.  Instead, business as usual*, but with a cut-rate/generic feel to it as Guy Hamilton, the most faceless of early Bond directors*, leads us thru Tom Mankiewicz’s uninspired drug trafficking caper.  (Regular Bond scripter Richard Maibaum would soon return.)  One nice touch, in a story set mainly in New Orleans & some fictitious Carribean country, calls up far more Black actors in prominent roles than was common in big budget films of the day.  On the other hand . . . stereotypes & voodoo.  We do get Yaphet Kotto as the main villain.  (Hurrah!)  Bond going interracial with a bedmate.  (Yippee!)  Though, lordy! what a bad actress.  (Yikes!)  And you do have to wait far too long for the back-loaded action set pieces.  Best is a Bayou chase sequence for police cars, trucks and motor boats with Moore running from Black bad guys and a Good Ol’ Boy Southern Sheriff.  That’s Clifton James, pretty much stealing the film with his politically incorrect act, chewing tobacco, spittin’ and calling all the Black characters ‘Boy.’  Of course, he calls just abut everyone ‘Boy.’  (Brought back for an encore in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN/’74 which tells all you need to know about that nadir in the series.)  As Bond pics go, this one's nothing special.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Early Bond films tag-teamed not quite interchangeable directors Terence Young, Hamilton & Lewis Gilbert.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Well, almost business as usual.  Where’s ‘Q?’  Also, Beatles music producer George Martin steps in for regular 007 composer John Barry.  Securing Paul McCartney’s title song and paying back by using the melody all thru the pic?

JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (1996)

After a Stop-Motion animation hit co-directing Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS/’93, Henry Selick took full charge adapting this enchanting Roald Dahl scary tale.  (Burton on only as co-producer.)  And you can see what went wrong simply by comparing film to film poster; the latter getting just about everything right.  Classically composed; subtle undertow of melancholy built into perfectly calibrated scale; suggestion of quietude: traits missing in the film.  An orphan’s story (of course!), young James kept in squalid workhouse conditions by a pair of ogre-like Aunties till a magic figure appears with seeds of wonder to bring a dead tree to life with an oversized peach.  The aunties see commercial opportunity; young James sees a way to realize his parents’ dream of a trip to New York City.  Traveling with various overgrown bugs inside the peach, James & the film now transfigured from Live-Action to Stop-Motion, sets off.  Danger and excitement along the way, then unexpectedly touching at the finish.  (Hint: those Aunties show up in the Big Apple to take another bite of the Big Peach.)  But Selick just can’t keep still, pushing busyness for busyness’s sake, very ADHD.  Holding back now & then for one of Randy Newman’s melodically starved vamps.  Paul Terry, a sweet kid who has trouble pronouncing ‘R’s, isn’t much of an actor, but with the rest of the starry cast hamming things up, he is a relief.  And yet, in spite of the workout, the story does click in by the end.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Selick’s next complete Stop Animation pic, CORALINE/09, more on his wave length.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/08/coraline-2009.html

UNDER CAPRICORN (1949)

Ingrid Bergman, two flop films past her long-running contract with producer David O. Selznick.  Alfred Hitchcock, one flop film out of his.  Joseph Cotten still under contract.  All three getting together on, what else, imitation Selznick . . . bad imitation Selznick.  A bit like REBECCA’s faux Gothic romance, but with gender-reversed story beats & its very own evil housekeeper in Margaret Leighton’s transparently hissable villain.  Set in a handsome, if matte-painted Australia, Cotten’s self-made man is an ex-convict with a dipsomaniac wife slowly coming out of her shell thanks to scapegrace Old World childhood acquaintance Michael Wilding, her once-and -future supporter.  To his credit, Hitchcock chalked up this failure to personal hubris: triumphant return to the U.K.; nabbing film’s top female star; his new film company; all blinding him to script problems and lack of comfort in period pieces.  He’s not wrong, but underestimates the problem: miscast leads, meandering story, overstuffed production/underdeveloped action (so much happens off screen), endless dialogue, showy ultra-long takes; plenty of blame to go around.  To her credit, Bergman goes all in, a messy, depressed drunk, only giving off the usual radiance in the third-act ball where she ravishes like a portrait by British painter George Romney.*  While Wilding, charmingly effective next year for Hitchcock in STAGE FRIGHT, is weirdly supercilious.  Along with TORN CURTAIN/’66, the rare Hitchcock dud no one’s tried to critically reevaluate into the canon.  (ADDENDUM:  As of 03/27/23 New Yorker’s auteur absolutist film squib man Richard Brody boldly picks up the challenge by offering the usual thematic defense in lieu of decent execution.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Typically, Bergman, conforming to an old Hollywood tradition, tended to grow more beautiful the sicker she got.  Under poison in NOTORIOUS; suffering with TB in THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’45.  Not here!  Looking downright rotten when she's ‘under the weather.’

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: For Hitchcock & Cotten: SHADOW OF A DOUBT/’43.  For Hitch & Bergman: NOTORIOUS/’46.  And Wilding, as noted, much better in STAGE FRIGHT/’50.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/notorious-1946.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/stage-fright-1950.html

KUROSAWA (2000)

Standard bio on Akira Kurosawa, but high standard.  A British project, first seen Stateside on PBS/Great Performances, Adam Low’s film is particularly good on the director’s early years, helped by Kurosawa’s SOMETHING LIKE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (excerpts read by Paul Scofield, an odd vocal choice that works), which unfortunately for the film ends with the international release of ROSHOMON/’50.  Those childhood years: difficult father; beloved older brother (a silent film ‘narrator,' double suicide with fiancé); the 1923 Tokyo earthquake with enough destructive force to match the Hiroshima bombing; fascinating stuff.  Then the roll-call of films, regrettably skewed toward the over-praised late epics which came pre-approved by awe-struck Hollywood turks of the day (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola), leaving better work (THE BAD SLEEP WELL; SANJURO/’62 - the superior sequel to YOJIMBO; HIGH AND LOW/’63) unmentioned.  Even THE HIDDEN FORTRESS/’58, fodder for George Lucas’s STAR WARS given a pass.  On the other hand, usually irrelevant Hollywood star interviews earn their spot with James Coburn linking SEVEN SAMURAI/’54 to his THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN/’60 and Clint Eastwood rhyming YOJIMBO/’61 and A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS/’64.  For once, a bio both useful and interesting.  But newbies to Kurosawa should keep in mind that many of the earlier films look far better now than they do here thanks to recent restorations.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: There’s more than Samurai Warriors to Kurosawa.  Surprise yourself as he channels Frank Capra (I kid you not) on an outlier pic, SCANDAL/50, made immediately before ROSHOMON.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/11/shubun-scandal-1950.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT: As mentioned, Kurosawa’s unusual auto-bio SOMETHING LIKE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

THE THING (1982)

After consolidating a rep for ultra-profitable small-budget indies with a big studio hit (HALLOWEEN/’78 to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK/’81), John Carpenter underperformed critically & commercially on this pricey nihilistic followup, only to see it grow over the years in popularity & influence, undeservedly so.  Ostensibly expanded from the old Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks’ Arctic Monster pic, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD/’51, it’s more ALIEN/’79 meets INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (the glossy ‘78 remake).  And if you can still feel the unanswered commercial expectations of Universal Studio execs,* you can also see why it eventually caught on.  But Carpenter (or is it scipter Bill Lancaster?) makes missteps almost from the start (one minor; one major) and the film never quite recovers.  It opens well, an unsettling prologue as a rogue Norwegian helicopter from a neighboring Antarctic Science Outpost hunts down a husky in the snow, one of the American crew’s dogs.  (An updated silent film trope pointing out the villain by having him kick a little boy’s dog.)  But then the film proper opens with Kurt Russell wrecking his personal computer after losing at chess.  Really?  And where is he likely to get a replacement in 1982 Antarctica?  Character sacrificed for a cheap gag.  Next, they give the whole game away with an alien monster doing its transformation trick on the dogs and then a human.  Nothing for the rest of the film to do but enlarge scale in gore & creepy creatures bursting thru flesh.  No doubt, the idea was to stay ahead of an audience already on to the alien threat and looking for bigger gross-outs, or see who’ll die next, or hum Ennio Morricone Carpenter-esque repetitive two-note theme.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Why does D.P. Dean Cundey give so many of his films the same weird orange glow?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Universal Execs hoping to match ALIEN’s ‘In Space No One Can Hear You Scream’ only coming up with ‘MAN IS THE WARMEST PLACE TO HIDE.’  Lame

THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON (1950)

While top producer Hal B. Wallis had yet to leave Warner Brothers for his own unit at Paramount when DOUBLE INDEMNITY came out in 1944, he must have thought, ‘I want one of those,’ biding his time till this reasonable facsimile was published.*  Worth the wait, and though the film has a sticky time getting up & running, initial awkwardness is neatly explained by the end.  Barbara Stanwyck, the direct link between the two films, loses the blonde horror on her head from the earlier film (it’s briefly seen in a photo), and is once more looking at a big inheritance if the right person dies, once more romancing a dumb guy who thinks he’s smart (dull Wendell Corey in for dull Fred MacMurray, each cleverly used for their dullness), once more waylaid by her lover’s boss (here D.A. Paul Kelly, not a patch on Edward G. Robinson’s thirsty insurance investigator).  But if the twisty plot and characterizations are a bit off INDEMNITY’s high water mark, the layout is tip-top with present-at-creation film noir man Robert Siodmak plotting set pieces of uncommon suspense.  (A mid-point tour de force has Stanwyck & Corey ‘arranging’ the house to fit their story before the butler shows up and discovers the body.)  And if Victor Young proves he’s no Miklós Rózsa on noirish music cues, glam cinematographer George Barnes goes to town with the shadows and frames-within-frames of the genre.  Unexpectedly satisfying.

DOUBLE-BILL/READ ALL ABOUT IT: *Hal Wallis, from his tight-lipped auto-bio, STARMAKER, ‘Very consciously, I made a series of melodramatic films with strong characters and situations, films that proved to be extremely popular.  Movie going audiences had matured during the war and no longer required false and sentimental portraits of human nature. . . . SO EVIL MY LOVE, THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS, THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON, and SORRY WRONG NUMBER.  In every case, the motive for destruction was greed . . . We made no attempt to glamorize, excuse, or deify villains.  We explained them, that was all.’  Nice having Hal Wallis select our Double-Bills!

THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS / aka DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES (1967)

Unwatchable in producer Martin Ransohoff’s botched Stateside edit (writer/director Roman Polanski vomited after he saw it), this spoofy vampire pic now available only in its full Euro-cut (about 20 minutes longer at 108") that originally played as DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES.  Current editions keep the FEARLESS VAMPIRE title (Ransohoff’s sole improvement), but use the full cut.  And while the film still isn’t what you might call funny, it is fun; very watchable, indeed.  Watchable the key word as production design and Douglas Slocombe’s lensing drop-dead gorgeous, anticipating Tim Burton’s Goth stylings by decades in some fairy-book Carpathian Castle where vampire expert Jack MacGowran (hidden behind an unintelligible accent & bushy facial hair) along with Polanski, his bashful assistant, hope to meet the undead to test some theories.  But there’s more than vampires to meet, Polanski also eager to ‘investigate’ castle maiden Sharon Tate, pretty enough to attract anyone’s attention, vampires and non.  Chases, coffin accommodations, sharpened stakes, it all leads to a grand vampire ball, and a superb coup de théâtre with reflecting mirror for our Not-Yet-Dead trio.  So, at least in the original cut, this isn't for completests only.

DOUBLE-BILL: Polanski's distinct comic vibe also in PIRATES/’86, a financial & critical disaster of HEAVEN’S GATE/’80 proportions, and weirdly compelling once it ramps up its revenge story. A true & valuable film maudit, bleakly dark & funny, as if Samuel Beckett was gag-man on a comic pirate movie.

THE FIGHTING SEABEES (1944)

Even with allowances for Wartime attitudes (news of the Bataan Death March, a particular horror, coming out early this year), this is one of John Wayne’s more infuriating WWII films, single-handedly winning the Eastern Theater on screen while in real life conspicuously avoiding service.  And playing such a selfish shit, it’s hard not to root for the ‘Jap’ snipers the film refers to as ‘Slaughtering Bug-Eyed Monkeys.’  Wayne’s a construction team leader on Navy Projects, a civvy building bases & airfields overseas, he & his crew unarmed against attack & losing his best men.  Taking it out on Naval Officer Dennis O’Keefe (a rare co-star nearly as tall as Duke) unaware they agree on the issue.  But before Washington makes it official (Construction Battalion getting armed and becoming Navy SeaBees), Wayne ignores orders in the field, and jumps into action with his untrained crew, foiling O’Keefe's planned military offense.  Result: scores of men & civilians needlessly killed.  Hopefully, now that he’s part of the force, Wayne’s learned his lesson . . . NOT.  And it’s not only the enemy Wayne moves in on, he’s also advancing on O’Keefe's girl, reporter Susan Hayward, and largely responsible when she’s seriously injured in the field.  She loves ‘em both, but Wayne just that much more.  (Hey, he’s top-billed!)  Republic Pictures threw a lot of military ordnance & cash at this one, but impressive explosions can’t make up for Edward Ludwig’s haphazard shot sequencing or Borden Chase’s embarrassing dialogue, corny characterization & flimsy construction.  (Jap snipers repeatedly used for ironic punctuation.)  And as comic relief?  A Russian-American fighter Stalin could love.  But it’s Wayne, pigheaded, selfish, out for glory, an Ugly American we’re meant to cheer who really sinks the ship.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Wayne’s unteachable character not so far off Lt. Col. Thursday, the George Armstrong Custer stand-in Henry Fonda played against Wayne’s lower-ranked officer in John Ford’s FORT APACHE/’48.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/11/fort-apache-1948.html  OR: Wayne making up for WWII self-glorification in John Ford’s habitually undervalued downbeat masterpiece THEY WERE EXPENDABLE/’45.

THE H-MAN / BIJO TO EKITAI NINGEN (1958)

Terrifying ten-yr-olds for more than six decades, this might be director Ishirô Honda’s most effective Nuclear Monster film.  And that’s saying something when you’ve got GODZILLA on your C.V.  (The original Japanese cut: GOJIRA/’54.)  Honda wasn’t Akira Kurosawa’s go-to second-unit man for nothing, but on his own films, he rarely balanced horror and suspense elements as well as in this imaginative cautionary: part Police Procedural; part drug gang drama; part nightclub damsel-in-distress; and all Hydrogen-swollen Monster, creepy crawling over rain-soaked streets in the form of viscous blue jelly, a relentless Ooze that will suck your very being away, leaving behind a distressed set of clothes.  One unlucky nightclub dancer’s uninhabited black bottom panties a nightmare totem for the ages.  Yikes!  As for those 1958 special effects in shiny, grain-free EastmanColor, only the Monster now looking a bit tacky.  The rest, largely done thru suggestion and wall-climbing blobby goop, can still give a jolt to people past (way past) that ten-yr-old turning his head away from the screen.  Especially when the pretty girl goes into a phone booth, unaware this BLOB can slither under door cracks.  Yikes again!  What a shame no Big Screen options.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For more Honda, you could pair this to his socially relevant Nuclear Threat monster GOJIRA or try and imagine what he handled on late Kurosawa pics like KAGEMUSHA/’80.    OR: try Kurosawa’s failed attempt at Nuclear Threat issues in his atypical I LIVE IN FEAR/’55.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/ikimono-no-kiroku-i-live-in-fear-1955.html

SOUL (2020)

The surprise on this PIXAR animation isn’t that it’s a mess (and a miss), but that no one called it out as a mess (and a miss).  Instead, modified critical rapture and end-of-the-year awards.  Cowed by PIXAR’s rep for deep-think Pop Philosophy?  (See UP/’09; INSIDE OUT/’15.)  Cap-doffing at Le Jazz Mystique?*  Jamie Foxx tamps down vocal prowess as a music teacher/unsung jazz pianist who lands the club date he’s longed for/long deserved, only to miss his chance at a career reboot when fate whisks him off on that escalator to the AfterLife, his bucket list not even made up!  Hopping off the express line, he lands at the Young Soul Nursery, hiding out as mentor to Tina Fey’s obstreperous human-phobic Life Spark.  It’s HERE COMES MR. JORDAN/’41 (or A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH/’46) meets the ‘unborn’ children’s chorus of Richard Strauss’s DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN.  (If opera librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal couldn’t make sense of this idea, why expect it from co-writer/directors Pete Docter & Kemp Powers?  And they must have known something was off, overloading on visual fillagree like Gil Evans spinning out empty piano tapestries on an uninspired day when all he needed to do was wait for Billy Strayhorn to show up on the next ‘A’ train.  Best are the afterlife staff, drawn in ‘50s single-line style, all breezy empty volume.  The rest, far too corporeal and oddly flatfooted.  Disappointing, even for those who expected it.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *The lack of overreach in PIXAR’s downsized LUCA/’21 part of that recent film’s refreshing charm.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html

GOLD IS WHERE YOU FIND IT (1938)

At heart, a Cattlemen vs Homesteaders Western, but with a twist.  Here, the Homesteaders are already in place and the interlopers aren’t Cattlemen, but rough & tumble miners, flushing away California hills & ruining wheat fields with hydraulic water pressure to liquify land into slurry and collect the gold buried within.  (1870s strip mining.)  Olivia de Havilland is the daughter of farm baron Claude Rains, and a link between the two sides when she falls for George Brent’s stalwart mining engineer.  But after his money-grubbing bosses flaunt a court order to stop, war threatens to break out and Brent switches sides with a plan to stop the carnage.  With a script by untested Robert Buckner, there’s a didactic feel to the story, many a Civics Lesson interrupting a bumpy structure you rarely get from producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz, even when, as here, he had little prep time.  Add in a lack of chemistry between Brent & de Havilland, some tired supporting perfs (Margaret Lindsay dreadful in an underwritten role as sophisticated Aunt), and the film should be a write-off.  It’s not.  The early 3-strip TechniColor, uneven in the sourced print (registration & saturation problems), is uncommonly lovely when it’s ‘on’ under Sol Polito’s airy lensing, improving as it goes along.  And what surprisingly current issues in land use & conservation.  Even better, a striking turn from Tim Holt, like de Havilland a teen at the time, as her hot-headed brother.  Playing Prodigal Scion, he lights up the screen, disdainful or brave, playing with fire no matter the side he’s on.*   Next up for producer Wallis, director Curtiz & heroine de Havilland, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD later this year.  (There, Curtiz really had no prep time, taking over more than half the film shoot from Errol Flynn’s director of choice William Keighley.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Orson Welles was fascinated by Holt’s talent and his lack of discernment in choosing roles to play.  His career largely ‘program’ Westerns when not shooting classics like STELLA DALLAS/’37; STAGECOACH/’39; MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS/’42 (for Welles); MY DARLING CLEMENTINE/’46; THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRES/’48.

TRAIN OF EVENTS (1949)

Compact omnibus film from Ealing Studios opens at the finish with a fiery train crash before stepping back three days to simultaneously shuffle thru four non-integrated storylines of passengers & crew prior to boarding the doomed train.  Who will survive?  The answers won’t surprise you, but getting there is worth the trip as a trio of directors take on the four separate narratives.  Basil Dearden has the two melodramas (The Actor; The P.O.W.); Sidney Cole tackles love & marriage in The Engine Driver; then Charles Crichton holds the reins for comic relief (the usual weak link) with The Composer, teasing out a probable affair with a glam piano soloist for our composer/conductor before he discovers that Missus Knows Best.  UNFAITHFULLY YOURS it ain’t, but thanks to Valerie Hobson as the missus, it goes down smoother than it might.  Home & hearth amongst railway families sees long time engineer Jack Warner hoping for a desk job while his daughter toys with her lineman fiancé.  Head & shoulders above these are the pair of Dearden helmed mellers.  Escaped German P.O.W overstaying his British pass while English ‘wife’ steals just enough money to buy passage-for-one to Canada.  Then a debuting Peter Finch, unrecognizably young & gaunt, is a rep actor in a mid-level Shakespeare touring outfit* whose estranged wife surprises him at his rented room with unreasonable demands.  With its shockingly unexpected murder of opportunity, this compressed film noir significantly raises the stakes.  Finch alarmingly good.  A bit more toughness over the outcomes at the crash site would have lifted this film up a notch or two.  But with its tasty cast and flavorsome low-end London location shooting, it’s still intensely watchable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Europe seems far more enamored of portmanteaux films than here in the States.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Nice touch showing these mediocre traveling players rehearsing their road trip Shakespeare in an unheated theater while wearing hats, scarves & overcoats for warmth.

LA SIGNORA DI TUTTI / EVERYBODY'S WOMAN (1934)

Max Ophüls had already made one masterpiece (LIEBELEI/’33) before fleeing ‘30s Germany for work opportunities (and temporary safety) in France.  Struggles & triumphs in Hollywood claimed the ‘40s before a return to Europe, dying in 1957, only 54.  And everywhere he went, masterpieces followed.  Somehow this Italian gig gets lost in the shuffle; his name as director suppressed in the credits.  (For political reasons?)  It’s both a step back from the technically fully conceived LIEBELEI, and a step forward thematically, with obvious parallels to his final work LOLA MONTES/’55.  Isa Miranda stars (if only she’d played Lola Montes instead of Martine Carol!) as a young woman who can’t help attracting the wrong kind of attention and building a bad reputation: at school, between a wealthy father & scion, from their clinging invalid mother, she even arouses tensions in her own family.  Beautiful & talented, we begin with her suicide attempt, then flash back to events that led the young film star there in a strikingly designed hospital operating-room sequence that uses a frightening gas mask winching its way down to cover her face and put her asleep.  After so much bad luck in life & love, might La Signora be better off if she never came out of surgery?  Ophüls struggles to get his Italian technicians up to snuff, his signature camera movements left bumpy, the use of whip-pans in place of edits (not a part of his mature work) jumpy, even missing their mark.  (No time or money for another take?)  But too much fine work & ideas in this melodramatic woman’s drama to skip; including Miranda’s abrupt mood swings.  It’s both too much and frighteningly good.  And note a debut credit for film composer Daniele Amfitheatrof, a Russian ex-pat who'd be in Hollywood by the end of the ‘30s, with masses of projects thru the ‘60s.

DOUBLE-BILL: Go Janus-faced with LIEBELEI and LOLA MONTES.  Though Ophüls’ best lies in between.  Late ‘40s Hollywood; early ‘50s France.

AT THE CIRCUS (1939)

The ‘tasteful’ house-style that tipped M-G-M films toward ‘respectable’ film-goers during Hollywood’s Golden Age (compared to Paramount’s naughty Euro-Sophistication or Warners’ urban rough & tumble), an æsthetic now fusty & slightly ridiculous, was anathema to the rude tradition of classic film comedians.  So, credit M-G-M Production Chief Irving Thalberg for trying to fix it . . . twice.  Each time signing Bests-in-the-Field during career doldrums.  First, Buster Keaton after three flops (all now celebrated), taming eccentricity with sentiment to earn a well-deserved success in THE CAMERAMAN/’28.  The problem was the alarmingly fast drop in quality that followed.  (Financially, the films continued to be unaccountably successful.)  Two years after Buster left the studio, Thalberg tried again, this time with The Marx Brothers after DUCK SOUP/’33 tanked.  (It too now celebrated.)  Taming Dadaist energy by having the boys godfather romance, adding sentiment & narrative to gags, and A NIGHT A THE OPERA/’35 still holds its own against previous anarchy.  The problem was the alarmingly fast drop in quality that followed.  A DAY AT THE RACES/’37 is usually rated higher than this third outing, but now offers little to choose between them.  Both fighting an all but disqualifying decision to place the boys in an environment that fits like a glove (race track/circus) rather than an environment that makes them outsiders (Grand Opera House).  At least CIRCUS runs twenty minutes shorter, with neat, effective musical solos for Chico & Harpo.  (Harpo again backed by simple Black Folk in a manner meant to be progressive, now looking condescending . . . or worse.)  Groucho gets his best song (Arlen/Harburg’s ‘Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,’ lyrics slightly bowdlerized), and just as many funny comeback lines as in RACES.  (Hilarious when he counts all 400 Society Swells.)  Tenorino Kenny Baker & talent-challenged Florence Rice are hopeless dweebs in the romance department, and the staging of the action climax is nearly as poor as Groucho’s ‘Lydia’ was, though director Edward Buzzell gets a move on compared to Sam Wood’s snoozy RACES.   Added Attraction: HARPO SPEAKS!  Well, sneezes: ‘AHH-Chooo!’   Two films followed at M-G-M, both with added comic relief characters.  Comic relief?  For The Marx Brothers?

DOUBLE-BILL: The Marxes must have known something had gone off, trying an experiment between RACES and CIRCUS by adapting ROOM SERVICE, a straight B’way farce, to their needs as a one-off @ R.K.O.  Square Pegs in Round Holes.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Working at M-G-M, that’s legendary theater caricaturist Al Hirschfeld giving Chico’s faux Italian something beyond a Sicilian’s ‘olive’ complexion on our poster.

COLD WAR / ZIMNA WOJNA (2018)

This must have been the only year to see two foreign-language films Oscar-nom’d for Best Director.  Alfonso Cuarón winning for ROMA against Pawel Pawlikowski here.  With the same two films up for cinematography, both b&w with ROMA besting COLD WAR’s Lukasz Zal’s exquisite Academy Ratio lensing.  ROMA also copped Best Foreign-Language Pic.  No matter, both films worthy, the two hardly comparable.  Pawlikowski following his previous award-winner, IDA/’13, with another sui generis achievement, a politically-minded l’amour fou on a perfectly-paired Polish mismatch.  (Pawlikowski elaborating a story out of his parents’ volatile relationship.)  The willful woman in question, strongly played by Joanna Kulig, a blonde ambition type in post-WWII Communist Poland, scrambling to succeed in a new-formed musical organization working up a touring repertoire of nativist folk songs & dances, given professional polish by music director Tomasz Kot.  (And where has this sexy beast been hiding?  Somebody grab the guy while he’s still in his 40s.)  The two, instantly combustible though his sophisticated ambitions point toward freedom & The West; hers, more instinctive/goal oriented in spite of her bold, risk-taking nature, hold her in place, at first.  Over a decade, they’ll split and reunite a few times, crossing borders and trampling other relationships, unable to make a go of it or decisively split.  Pawlikowski running a hop, skip & jump narrative with wrinkle-in-time continuity to move things along.  It keeps you on your toes!  (Watch the neon signs for clues to the year.)  While also touching on East-vs-West issues of personal & artistic vision, and just what freedom consists of.  Spectacularly well-made, dazzling period recreation, spot on perfs, and not an ounce of fat in its hour & a half running time.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Kulig’s brief unsatisfying stint in Paris has her successfully launched as a ‘Cool Jazz’ Peggy Lee French chanteuse.  Nice.  Pawlikowski no doubt pulling from his own hit-and-miss sojourn in London & Paris.  Specifically his D.O.A. Ethan Hawke/Kristin Scott Thomas starrer THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH/’11 (not seen here).

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, IDA/’13.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/11/ida-2013.html

MISTER CORY (1957)

For Tony Curtis, a warmup for SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS two films later; for writer/director Blake Edwards, a graduation piece after early lightweight efforts; this Rake’s Progress tale ought to be better known.  (Hard to locate Stateside.)  Curtis, in a role cut very close to the bone, is a natural as a streetwise Chicago punk, trying to reboot his life among the Country Club set at a MidWest summer resort.*  But since busboys aren’t allowed to fraternize with the guests, he leads a double life, getting a foot in the door with Martha Hyer and wealthy family.  She’s already engaged, but that’s of small concern, especially with help from Hyer’s fresh kid sister, Kathryn Grant, who finds the whole situation excitingly dangerous and something of a turn on.  Meanwhile, trying to raise more than a ‘Detroit Roll’* for expenses, Tony skips work for high stakes poker with the nobs in a game run by professional gambler Charles Bickford.  And though this all comes cashing down, Bickford’s impressed by the kid’s moxie, teaming up to open a mob funded private casino in Chicago.  High life, love life, complications, comeuppance: it’s very entertaining stuff, and beautifully handled by Edwards (what pacing!), already showing uncanny accuracy in offbeat casting with a great comic turn by vet character actor Henry Daniell progressing from Tony’s officious resort boss to officious maitre d’ at Tony's shiny new private gambling salon in Chicago.  A triumphant turn!  Everyone equally good, even the bouncy Ms. Grant (really).  Only Hyer comes up short, her chilly but fast to melt act short of the mark.  Universal, expecting something special, assigned top lenser Russell Metty, no doubt unaware Edwards had a way of making just about any cinematographer look like a master.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Chances are the source novel was set in the Catskills and had more of a Jewish angle to it as the author was Leo Rosten of ‘Joys of Yiddish’ fame.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *‘Detroit Roll’: a big roll of bills held together with a rubber band, impressive looking, but actually all ONES with a couple of TENS on the outer layer so it looks like you’re carrying serious money when you’ve probably got about 43 bucks in there.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS/'57 which pulls Curtis's striver out of sunshiny color and into b&w noir.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PARTS I & II / IVAN GROZNYY (1944; 1958)

Demoted from a once impregnable iconic status (the British Film Institute tipped this film as sixth greatest back in ‘61; BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN/’25 long missing from its former spot in the SIGHT AND SOUND top-ten), Sergei Eisenstein is now a clip or two in a Film Class.  (Usually that baby carriage rolling down the steps . . . or parody thereof.)  Yet the films remain not only extraordinary, but available in much better condition than they were during his critical heyday.  Very extreme at times, they're not perhaps for the faint of heart, but magnificent in their way.  In this fabulist two part bio pic (Part Three never filmed; Part Two held back till Stalin & Eisenstein both safely buried), Ivan pulls Russia together to Tsar over, but can’t hold it or save his wife, going into retreat until the will of the people brings him back to Moscow.  Part Two has him settling scores with enemies at court, growing terrible in revenge with realpolitik culling.  But the main action is always erupting in the film’s style.  (Just not enough to fool Stalin from spotting the allusions.)  Style to make German Expressionism look tame.  But you adjust since Eisenstein exerts such control on every element: unified acting (crazy, but unified), image & sound (with his second Sergei Prokofiev score), and the most extraordinary murals ever painted for the movies.  (Andrei Tarkovsky would blush.)  The last act also features some amazing color sequences (again shades of Tarkovsky) with actors bent like preying mantises . . . or pretzels.  Little in film so outré yet so enjoyable.   (Criterion’s 2001 edition still looks good with a small reduction in your contrast setting.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Best Eisenstein entry point is probably ALEXANDER NEVSKY/’38, a patriotic Call-To-Arms historical shot as Nazi German was busy arming for war.  (Problematic once Stalin & Hitler signed a Non-Aggression Pact.  Eisenstein just couldn’t get a break.) https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/07/alexander-nevsky-1938.html    For silent Eisenstein, go for STRIKE/’25 rather than POTEMKIN. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/08/stachka-strike-1924.html

GIVE ME YOUR HEART (1936)

Poor Kay Francis!  Bad enough to be pregnant & in love to already married titled Brit Patric Knowles.  Worse, he still cares deeply for invalid wife Frieda Inescort, unable to provide an heir to the family.  (Raise your hand if you see where this is going.)  Yes, all the Woman’s Magazine Serial tropes you could ask for.*  (It’s not a Cosmopolitan Production for nothing.)  Duly & dully megged by Archie Mayo, it’s so visually inert the soundtrack could function as radio drama.  (That’s old school for PodCast.)  Yet, pretty entertaining all the same, with a lightweight cast fighting at just the right classification.  Why even stolid George Brent as the man Kay marries after secretly giving up her little boy to help the Knowles’ family line is just right here.  Only now, with Kay unable to expose her unspoken grief, there’s no chance for happiness till old platonic pal Roland Young tricks her into confronting her demons face-to-face.  This is all fine as far as it goes, but what truly makes this valuable is watching Pre-Code setups play under onerous post-1934 Production Code rules.  You couldn’t talk about certain taboo subjects and still get national distribution, so the whole cast speaks in ‘code,’ Production Code, that is.  Like listening to a puzzle.  Kids under 13 must have wondered what all the fuss & bother was about.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Hard to believe the author of the source material is the same Joyce Cary who wrote THE HORSE’S MOUTH/’58 about a scabrous modern painter; memorably filmed, from his own screenplay, by Alec Guinness.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: In the film, ‘adoptive’ mom Frieda Inescort figures out that Francis is her boy’s birth mom by ‘something in the eyes’ and the way husband Patric Knowles reacts to Kay.  But in an imagined Carol Burnett parody, the three-yr-old would suddenly start speaking with the same dropped ‘R’ that plagued Francis all thru her career.  (That three-year-old played by Tim Conway.)

FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (1943)

In his second Hollywood film as writer/director*, Billy Wilder shows preternatural confidence handling a tricky wartime spy thriller.  With Charles Brackett, his writing/producing partner, it’s an update of HOTEL IMPERIAL/’27, a superb Mauritz Stiller/Pola Negri silent, moving what had been a constantly changing WWI Austrian/Russian frontline to recent WWII North African action.  Focus also shifts, insider to outsider, as lone British survivor Franchot Tone clambers out of his destroyed tank and hides at a local desert hotel, the only place within miles.  (This opening reel, all but silent: sand dunes, tank tracks, a desperate man; a statement of cinematic purpose from Wilder.)  Once at the nearly deserted hotel, Tone talks his way onto the staff, replacing a dead man no one knew was also working as a Nazi plant.  And Field Marshall Rommel, due any minute, expecting a report.  Yikes!  With Akim Tamiroff as the skittish Egyptian hotel manager; Anne Baxter, excellent as hotel housekeeper (with zee French accent); and Erich von Stroheim, back in Hollywood to play Rommel.  This was Wilder’s first film with John Seitz, a transformatve cinematographer who does for Wilder what he recently did for Preston Sturges, making a visual stylist out of a dialogue man.  The effect miraculous; the film outstanding.  (Or is till a rushed ending with montage & titles quickly getting us thru what ought to have been a fourth act.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Preston Sturges led the way for Hollywood writer/directors with THE GREAT MCGINTY/’40.  Then Wilder, also at Paramount, stepped up to helm THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR/’42.  Forgotten in most accounts his previous work in France, writing & directing Danielle Darrieux in a fine 1934 romantic charmer MAUVAISE GRAINE.

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned, HOTEL IMPERIAL, if you can find it.  In addition to the 1927 silent, there’s a 1939 version with Isa Miranda & Ray Milland (not seen here).

GOOD SAM (1948)

After two gargantuan hits with GOING MY WAY/’44 and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’45, writer/director/producer Leo McCarey waited three years before returning to the screen only to discover he was through.  Just fifty-two at the time, he’d struggle to make four more films (two remakes; a Commie-Conspiracy embarrassment; a close-call social comedy) before calling it quits in ‘62.*  There’s something clueless in this discomforting moral parable about Gary Cooper’s pathological neighborly giving.  Unable to say no to anyone needing a helping hand, he discovers no good deed goes unpunished.  As written by McCarey, he’s more slow-witted sap than Good Samaritan, always putting wife Ann Sheridan & kids second to strangers in need.  An idea not without comic potential, but McCarey’s comic timing (always deliberate) is now a slow crawl of willful stupidity meant to be hilarious.  Perhaps with a slow-boil comedian like Edgar Kennedy (stellar for McCarey in DUCK SOUP/’33), but deadly inside this Father Knows Best setup.  About two-thirds of the way along, McCarey shows his hand and you can see he’s trying to ‘fix’ his friend Frank Capra’s IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, now a classic, but originally something of a disappointment two years before this.  And with McCarey’s collapsing technique (even at its best, something of an instinctual mystery), there's no solid craft to fall back on when the physical & relationship gags misfire.  At least, Coop looks better than he had recently, and Sheridan had a real gift for this kind of thing (see GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE/’42).  But another fizzle when they both needed a career boost.  (Sheridan got her reprieve in I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE/’49; Coop's delayed but spectacular in HIGH NOON/’52.)  And McCarey still showing a tin ear in choosing young secondary couples, here Joan Lorring & one-shot actor Dick Ross, both perplexingly bad.  One nice touch, a pregnant young woman big enough to actually be carrying a baby.  Unheard of at the time and the only forward looking thing in the movie.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *A sharp decline paralleling two equally prominent right-leaning Hollywood Catholics more or less the same age, Frank Borzage & Frank Capra.  There’s a book in this.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Before The Fall: usually rated lower than GOING MY WAY, McCarey preferred the sequel.  He’s right.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/11/bells-of-st-marys-1945.html  After The Fall: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-son-john.html

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985)

Something of a breakthru in New Indie socially engaged British cinema.  (Ironic how artistic antipathy toward Margaret Thatcher Conservatism helped rejuvenate the industry.)  But Hanif Kureishi’s script, acclaimed as fresh and politically/sexually charged on release, hasn’t aged well; show-offy apprentice work from cast, director, lenser & especially Kureishi who’s working too hard to be noticed.  Gadfly-ing on business vs academia; Paki vs Brit; Gay vs Straight; with crisscrossed love & violence forced into place by the entrepreneurial Saeed Jaffrey, a shady Anglo-Paki Pater Familias who lets his failed intellectual brother’s son take charge of a dilapidated laundrette before the boy (hopefully) heads back to university.  As various affairs of the heart & drug deals teeter in the extended family, the nephew (Gordon Warnecke) beautifies his new business with help from former grade-school pal Daniel Day-Lewis, a punk layabout eager to leave his bad ways (and racist gang) behind.  All other characters now looking more like political props than people, with Kureishi’s plotting contrived & facile, at times uncomfortably touched with unwarranted magical realism.  Much the best part now comes from a complete lack of preamble for an eruption of sexual heat between Warnecke & Day-Lewis, something new at the time (still new, come to think of it) and holding up better than anything else in here.  With director Stephen Frears, elsewise a bit too florid in this his second feature film, making sure these two are by far the most attractive people on screen.  In the movies, attractiveness attracts.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: What really put Daniel Day-Lewis on the map was the combination of this film’s punk hunk (his natural height accentuated with a dyed blond crop-top) in theaters the same time his foppish, buttoned-down period suitor in A ROOM WITH A VIEW/’85 was also in release.

IRON MAN (1931)

Master of the macabre in silent days, Tod Browning sleepwalked thru the Talkies, never waking to the emerging rhythms of dialogue before dropping out in 1939.  (Living till 1962, he couldn’t even be bothered to correct a premature report of his death.)  Here, in the second of a three-pic deal @ Universal, he follows DRACULA/’31, where sleepwalking was at least apt for the material, with this little boxing story where it ain’t.  Looking fit, but fragile, Lew Ayres is a lightweight in every way, fighting up to champion under manager/trainer Robert Armstrong only to fall under the spell of sexy opportunist Jean Harlow*, busy two-timing with John Miljan.  Still fond of the boy, Armstrong knows the only way to save him is to let him fail.  A promising setup, but Browning’s direction has become downright odd, especially in boxing matches largely shown in static shots from afar.  The big boxing film of ‘31, King Vidor’s THE CHAMP, has risible fight sequences with flabby Wallace Beery flailing away, but much of that film still feels remarkably fluid, almost caught on the wing.  In comparison, Browning seems unwilling to take a step in any direction.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: You can see why so many film lovers despaired of the Talkies by having a look at William Wyler’s little known, late silent THE SHAKEDOWN/’29, which has some of the best on screen boxing before BODY AND SOUL/’47.  And, in leading man James Murray, a fighter who looks like he could take care of himself.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-shakedown-1929.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Lord!, what a dreadful actress Harlow was before screenwriter Anita Loos figured out what to do with her next year at M-G-M; suddenly a first-rate comedienne was born.