HER HUSBAND'S AFFAIRS (1947)

Protean writer Ben Hecht didn’t have input on all the films that made Golden Age Hollywood golden; it just sometimes seems that way.  But did he also invent the Lucille Ball of I LOVE LUCY fame?  Maybe so to judge by this neat little domestic comedy, co-written with Charles Lederer.  Far better, if less known than MONKEY BUSINESS/’52, which they’d write in a similar vein for Howard Hawks, it’s also far less asinine.  (Though don’t try convincing Hawks acolytes.)  It’s simply directed by S. Sylvan Simon, getting everything across without going stupid for easy laughs.  Franchot Tone, working very well with Ball (especially crawling over her in what’s almost a shared double-bed*), is Edward Everett Horton’s ad man (hats; shave-less shaving cream; hair growth tonic; embalming fluid that turns flesh to glass; an odd line up!).  Scattered, inspired and needing his wife’s helping hand Tone knows they’re a great team, but resents the assistance and then watching her get the Lion’s Share of credit.  Pretty funny stuff most of the way, with excellent payoffs and a real swing to its pacey delivery.  Fun seeing Ball’s character getting her laughs thru overbearing competence rather than overbearing incompetence.  But already very recognizable as LUCY.  Next year, when MY FAVORITE HUSBAND took her to radio, she’d add that quality and see the rest of the I LOVE LUCY elements fall into place.  Give Hecht credit for an assist.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Lucy’s even closer to her iconic self in MISS GRANT TAKES RICHMOND/’49.  OR: see another aspect of Ball in her next release, SORROWFUL JONES/’49.  Over at Paramount, she and Bob Hope make Damon Runyon characters for the ages in a film not quite up to them.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/sorrowful-jones-1949.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Our poster gets this wrong (see above), and entirely misses a daringly shared single headboard.

PIG (2021)

Oft-maligned Nicolas Cage nabbed good reviews on this quirky character piece; as did feature debuting writer/director Michael Sarnoski.*  Working at an eccentrically measured pace to chart the hermit-like existence of off-the-grid society dropout Cage, living in a shack that might serve for the sty where his companionate truffle-hunting pig waits to join him on his daily forest forage.  Elsewise, Cage interacting only with a young man trading baskets of food & supplies for the pricey fungi when his quotidian routine is brutally interrupted by a pig-napping and a thrashing.  Who could possibly be responsible?  Who would bother?  Cage has his suspicions.  But once he and his ‘buyer’ set off for the big city (Portland, OR) to get to the bottom of his missing pig, everything turns both conventional & sentimental, with pat ‘explanations’ from past actions and ripening payoffs.  What had seemed dramatically fresh now looking slow & obvious, every concrete answer a dramatic diminution.  Personal loss, business trouble, professional jealousy, father/son issues, a mental breakdown that swamps a genius of the kitchen and leaves behind bare subsistence in a hermitage of his own making.  With Cage restricted to vamping on a one-stringed instrument while he waits for resolution.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Naturally, Hollywood plans to bump Sarnoski up to a big-ticket franchise: A QUIET PLACE Part III.  Maybe his mordant nature will let someone rip a fart loud enough for the noise-activated monsters to make Part IV unnecessary.

IMPASSE (1968)

With its meaningless title, tv lineage, C- rating & pre-breakout Burt Reynolds, you don’t expect much from this B-pic adventure about mismatched fortune hunters meeting in the Philippines to loot a forgotten cache of WWII gold near Corregidor.  Yet it’s not bad at all.  (Reynolds has far worse on his sorry-ass C.V.)  Efficiently staged in & around Manila by Richard Benedict (who he?), there’s mean Lyle Bettger as a racist army vet; Rodolfo Acosta as the quick-to-fight alcoholic Native America; Vic Diaz as chubby cuckold with glam wife; and local salvage operator Burt leading the hunt and screwing the wife.  Plenty for scripter John Higgins to work with.  (He’s the class act here . . . but only if you go back to the ‘40s.)  Plus cheeky Anne Francis as a tennis champ on hand to play doubles with Burt and find her long lost dad, the man who knows where the loot is.  No doubt, low expectations help this one a lot; and where else can you see Burt putting his act together under his own head of hair, before the Good Ol’ Boy accent took over, looking fit rather than buffed & groomed?  Watch him in a big extended brawl that starts at a cock fight with the crowd switching gears to bet on him rather than the roosters before heading to the street, and with Burt still doing all his own stunt work.  Ouch!  The guy was a natural as long as he didn’t know it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Someone got away with a very ‘blue’ joke for 1968 when the Reynolds/Francis relationship suddenly heats up as they wait for an elevator.  The doors open & the operator boy looks at Burt, asking, ‘Going down?’  Yikes!  Elevators were all self-operating by then, but how else to get the line in?

IL TETTO / THE ROOF (1956)

The films that ‘top’ and ‘tail’ the Vittorio De Sica/Cesare Zavattini Neo-Realism cycle don’t get the attention they deserve.*  And while not reaching the heights of SHOESHINE’46, BICYCLE THIEVES/’48 or UMBERTO D./’52 . . . well, what does?  This one comes as Italy entered its economic post-war miracle days, the IL BOOM bubble, seen here in an explosion of building and a housing shortage.  A situation that traps attractive newlyweds Gabriella Pallotta & Giorgio Listuzzia (like most here, non-pros making debuts), forcing them to room with in-laws, ten people in a two & a half room flat.  But desperate times demand . . . desperate housing choices, and a loophole in the building code allows a residence that goes up complete overnight on some available site to get the official okay IF there’s a legit roof on the structure.  Pooling everything on this impossible shot, and borrowing enough to put them in debt for decades, the wife (a surprisingly spunky stubborn little thing - and the one cast member to go on to a decent acting career) and her bricklaying husband take the plunge.  De Sica finding all sorts of obstacles and workarounds: a particularly nasty speculator; a few vacancies dreadful enough to motivate anyone; a family feud mended by need for another pair of expert hands; and a delightful kid from the next door lean-to who knows a few ins-and-outs to at least give them a fighting chance.  Plenty of spirit, plenty of suspense, plenty of arguments, but with D Sica knowing exactly how far he can push without overloading the drama and making this look like a set up.  A fine wrap up to an era of Italian filmmaking.  And, of course, with many great things yet to come in different keys by this remarkable man.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *That Neo-Realism precursor: THE CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US/’44.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/children-are-watching-us-1943.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Both these stories working a step or two up the financial ladder from the others which may have something to do with their relative obscurity.  IL TETTO also ends with real (earned) optimism.

WILD IN THE STREETS (1968)

This late ‘sixties ‘youth culture’ provocation could have been a social/political time capsule of a volatile era, but AIP shlockmeisters Samuel Z. Arkoff & James H. Nicholson knew concept alone would sell the thing and hired t.v. hacks on the cheap to write & direct.  Too bad, the concept is a pip: Kids get The Vote & elect Twenty-somethings to take over the government.  Yikes! . . . or Yippee!  It’s Revenge of the Frosted Flakes Crowd.  Alas, jokey subversion as far as we get: forced retirement at 30; buses to Camp Concentration @ 35; tabs of LSD to sedate.  A level of pandering unimagined even by Alice Cooper in 1972's ‘School’s Out For EVER!’  (The songs in here going nowhere with the exception of ‘Shape of Things to Come,’ not a bad anthem.) A surprisingly decent cast of adults chew up the scenery (Shelley Winters, like fingernails on a chalkboard as Mom; Hal Holbrook’s means-to-an-end  Senator; old-school conservative Ed Begley), but can’t touch the dry comic edge Paul (ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE) Frees gets out of the overblown narration.  And the ‘youngsters?’  Mostly looking ready for that 35 & up Concentration Camp Bus.  Especially Richard Pryor (how’d he get in here?) and decidedly unfresh Christopher Jones, a tintype James Dean who’d soon self-destruct in David Lean’s RYAN’S DAUGHTER/’70, never to be heard of again.

SCEWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: You only have to imagine ‘60s Jean-Luc Godard taking this on to see the possibilities.  Try his lesser known LA CHINOISE/’67.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/la-chinoise-1967.html      On the other hand, Michelangelo Antonioni did try something along these lines, ZABRISKIE POINT/’70.  A famous disaster with another male lead never heard from again.

IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY (1947)

Unusual for a film this influential/copied to remain freshly felt and powerfully effective.  But this post-war ‘kitchen sink’ drama (about half the film actually in the kitchen) builds character & suspense out of well-observed working-class rowhouse detail, like a period piece made at the time so it doesn't feel dated.  It’s where dissatisfied second-wife Googie Withers gets the shock of her life when one-time flame John McCallum, just escaped from prison, shows up hiding in the old air raid shelter asking for help.  Sunday means the whole family (dull, older husband, grown step-daughters, young son) will all be out and about which gives them a chance to get away with . . . with what?  A change of clothes?  Rekindled romance?  A getaway future?  Certainly not happiness, life just too bleak.  Everything clicks here, the nearly realistic settings, the bitter relationships and past passion between former lovers.  With three or four more on-going interrelated little dramas playing out concurrently in neighborhood pubs, shops and street corners.  Quite a busy Sunday, plenty for nosy police detective Jack Warner to check on.  A breakthru for director Robert Hamer, whose next was the darkly comic KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS/’49, here pacing two-hours of plot into a tidy hour & a half yet not seeming to skimp.  (The films not only showing Hamer’s remarkable range, but also cinematographer Douglas Slocombe's.)  Sympathetic to every lying soul in the piece, and even to the only two people who don’t constantly lie: Withers’ nice dull husband, and the Music Shop wife whose unfaithful husband is making a play for one of the unhappy step-daughters.  Plus, a little bit of Yiddish from East End Jews!  Just three words, one repeated (shiksha); one mispronounced (schlemiel).  The film an unexpected treat from little Ealing Studios, better known for their British Everyman Comedies.  Here, an Everywoman Tragedy.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: During the character build-ups, Hamer gets in and out of a couple of flashbacks without the soft focus or wavy line transitions commonly used at the time.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Co-scripter Angus MacPhail, a past & future Hitchcock collaborator, brought even more realistic middle-class tone to Hitch’s habitually underrated THE WRONG MAN/’56.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-wrong-man-1956.html

BACKLASH (1956)

Decent chamber Western, if not as good as it might be.  Scripted by vet specialist Borden Chase and directed by fast-rising John Sturges in an early go at the form, it opens mean & lean, like a Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott Western, well grounded in bleak terrain.  (That famous series also starting this year.)  Here, it’s Richard Widmark at some ruined desert structure bumping into Donna Reed.  Strangers, she immediately sends him into harms way, bait to uncover a sniper.  A fine opening; if only the rest of the film continued in this tough/enigmatic vein.  Instead, a revenge tale, with Reed assuming Widmark’s out to find a missing fortune in gold when he’s really hunting for a ‘Sixth Man,’ a killer within that gold hunting group who murdered five partners, including Widmark’s own father, a man he never knew.  Chase’s script holds back on its few character & story surprises, and while you won’t be surprised by the guessable twists, you may be by some pretty sloppy camera angles Sturges should have fixed to better cover punches, slaps & action that seems to miss by a mile.  Sturges really could phone it in at times.  Maybe he was hoping for a script that would stay as brutally concise & bleak as that opening.  Or maybe he was just looking ahead to his next, a big budget/big star Western with Burt Lancaster & Kirk Douglas, GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL/’57.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: In spite of O.K. CORRAL and MAGNIFICENT SEVEN/’60, Sturges’ best Western is a modern one, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK/’55.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/bad-day-at-black-rock-1955.html

KOMA / COMA (2019)

Russian Sci-Fi horror, a directing debut for visual effects guy Nikita Argunov, has a thousand-and-one imaginative ideas.   About nine-hundred and eighty-three more than it needs.  We wake to a dystopian dream world built from the collective memories of ‘brain-dead’ coma victims who disintegrate if they die back in the real world.  But in this alternate landscape without gravity-bound physical laws or boundaries, death comes in the form of ectoplasmic zombie-like creatures.  Stay away from them, create something new, and perhaps there’s a life to be lived in this Brave New World . . . or something like that.  It’s not exactly written up for us.  There’s a decent cool factor in the look of the thing for a while, but the characters don’t make much of a mark and the guerilla-like military tactics by our motley group of survivors are all flash, bash & crash, without a sense of cause & effect to build rooting interest in the stakes.  Anyway, if they’re all ‘brain-dead,’ how can they have these memories to build on?  Or is mankind’s collective memory really just sitting in the slush pile of rejected projects over at Christopher Nolan’s office.  ZOMBIE INCEPTION, anyone?  The real threat comes in a final shot that suggests a possible sequel.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Our leading-man/coma victim is an architect who can conjure up walls, buildings & bridges simply by thinking about the structure.  No Frank Gehry, he comes up with spindly facades fit for a tween’s gargantuan dollhouse.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Not a fan of INCEPTION /’10?  Try Japanese anime PAPRIKA/’06, uneven but worth a look.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/02/paprika-2006.html

ANNA LUCASTA (1958)

Back in the mid-‘40s, some reader at the American Negro Theatre likely had the clever idea of turning a mediocre play by Philip Yordan (future top Hollywood scripter) from an All-White to an All-Black affair.  A sort of What-If take on Eugene O’Neill’s ANNA CHRISTIE, here the tart doesn’t return home to Waterfront Dad, but to a big noisy, mettlesome family setting her up to marry a Butter-and-Egg man.  Erotic meets exotic circa 1946; the play an outstanding two-year run success.  Snapped up by Hollywood for a 1949 film, the film went back to Yordan’s original All-White dramatic persona (Paulette Goddard, John Ireland - not seen here).  Nine years later, along with some loosening in the old Hollywood Production Code, it returns to the Big Screen with a starry All-Black cast (Eartha Kitt, Rex Ingram, Sammy Davis Jr.).  And while it couldn’t recreate that 1946 B’way buzz, it’s quite an entertaining show, now with added echoes of Tennessee Williams & Lillian Hellman in the bustling family mix.  The houseful of supporting actors so much silly fun, they quite overshadow the romance, marriage, redemption, renunciation angle that sees Kitt deciding whether she can be a quiet little wren to spouse-worthy Henry Scott or take that redeemable round-the-world coupon on offer from heavily pomaded Sailor-Man Davis.  (Davis knows he’s overdoing the Brylcreme, watch him wipe his hands off on a tablecloth after combing that mop.)  Fun!

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Hard to imagine this with the earlier All-White cast in ‘49, but have a go.  Other than its famous title, the play now seems completely forgotten.  You’ll see why, but still a shame.

CINDERELLA (1950)

Easy to forget that after SNOW WHITE, three of the four now canonical Walt Disney follow-up animated films came up short at the box-office on original release.  (Only cost-conscious DUMBO initially earned out.)  It was a full eight years between BAMBI/‘42 and this careful reentry into animated features with a significantly less ambitious project.  Lighter in tone & look (no more Grimm German Romanticism or childhood terrors), everything now fit for domestic consumption; burdensome troubles rather than life or death issues.  Yet don’t underestimate CINDERELLA’s pleasures, on its reduced terms, real imagination & fresh inspiration is brought to familiar terrain.  Surprisingly, nearly half the running time given to household & farm animals who befriend Cinderella.  And since everyone knows the plot, we can find the story development tweaks unique to Disney.  (Mastertweaks, really.  Perhaps from master story editor Walt?*)  Only in this version is Cinderella unaware that the nice young man she spends the whole ball dancing with is the Prince.  (Made clear in a single line of dialogue.  Such economy!)  That Step-Mother deduces Cinderella as the girl, the one who lost the glass slipper.  And only here does the glass slipper shatter before Cinderella can try it on.*  (It’s a fur boot in Perrault’s original story.)  Maybe you don’t know this version as well as you think.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Baby Boomers may also have forgotten that Mike Douglas, syndicated Philadelphia Talk Show host of the ‘70s does the meager six lines the Prince gets to sing.  Or that Fairy Godmother just sounds like Maureen Stapleton.  It’s actually vet character voice actress Verna Felton.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *A Disney live-action version (not seen here) was a hit in 2015.  Did they keep those three structural mastertweaks?

FORUSHANDE / THE SALESMAN (2016)

Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi repeated at the Oscars with a second Best Foreign Language win, after A SEPARATION won in 2011, for this considerably lesser achievement.  A series of unfortunate incidents, it begins when an unstable apartment building forces a married couple (he teaches, both act) into a blind move to temp housing arranged by a colleague.  A few casual missteps at their new building leave the wife vulnerable to attack; and while her physical wounds will soon heal, the pair seem to go out of their way to make every psychological & social mistake possible in the messy aftermath, the blame game & retribution.  It’s where the film comes up short, missing the sense of inevitable tragic escalation Farhadi specializes in.  The U-turn revelations that throw completely new light on not only what happened, but why it happened.  Manufactured story beats for calculated effect rather than dramatically organic development.  Ironic that the play being rehearsed & performed is DEATH OF A SALESMAN since so much Arthur Miller suffers from the same fault of preordained misery forced into specific shapes like those gourds grown in molds to resemble Nixon.  The film is well put together, but a disappointment.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Instead of A SEPARATION or one of Farhadi’s better-known later works, see his method in chrysalis with CHAHARSHANBE-SOORI (FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY)’06).   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/chaharshanbe-soori-fireworks-wednesday.html     OR: His new film, A HERO/’21.  (not seen here)

MY LOVE CAME BACK (1940)

Farce & romantic comedy rarely found the sophistication & delicate touch needed at hard-driving Warner Brothers.  The studio comic sensibility, fast, loud & obvious, funny stuff only to the humor-challenged, often relying on ‘Mickey Mousing’ musical scores to point up jokes like a laugh track.  Yet now & then, Olivia de Havilland got everyone to calm down just enough to allow situations to play out naturally, content to win smiles rather than guffaws.  You can see the effect in THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE, PRINCESS O’ROURKE, and in this modest charmer that works without over-egging the pudding.  It ain’t Lubitsch, but it ain’t bad.  ‘Kurt’ (later ‘Curtis’) Bernhardt made his Stateside debut with this remake of an Austrian hit, EPISODE/’35, bringing a lighter hand than Warner regulars like Lloyd Bacon or Archie Mayo would have given.  Still, for post GONE WITH THE WIND de Havilland, it must have been a disappointing assignment*, featherweight nonsense as a cash-strapped student violinist, unaware that her special scholarship money comes from music mogul/would-be Sugar-daddy Charles Winninger, but on the expense account of his second-in-command (bland Jeffrey Lynn).  Worse, Winninger son William Orr thinks this gives him just the dirt he needs to sully Lynn’s rep and leapfrog ahead at the office.  Worser, de Havilland’s musical BFFs, Eddie Albert & Jane Wyman ‘borrow’ the tainted money for union dues to get that society gig that will establish their Classical-meets-Swing band.  And guess whose grand house they’re playing in?  Yikes!  The sort of plot you expect to become too stupid for words; yet it never does.  Everyone playing mistaken identity/crossed-wires farce as sensibly as possible, and without embarrassment.  Note how quickly Spring Byington, Winninger’s sympathizing wife, figures the whole thing out without hysterics.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Bernhardt not alone making his Warners debut.  S.K. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall, in his third Stateside pic, steals all his scenes at the start of a long, productive Warners’ run.  He’s even passable as a symphonic conductor at the Academy.  No sure thing in Hollywood.

SCEWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *That generic title just one more reason for de Havilland to doubt GWTW had raised her position in the studio pecking order.  Valued as consort to Errol Flynn and . . . ?  On the other hand, she did get the great Charles Rosher lensing.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, STRAWBERRY BLONDE/'41; PRINCESS O’ROURKE/'43.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/07/strawberry-blonde-1941.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/06/princess-orourke-1943.html

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA (1958)

In the wake of B’way’s MY FAIR LADY (and its record-shattering movie rights sale) all things George Bernard Shaw become possibilities for big screen adaptation.  SAINT JOAN/’57, the four Ds: DOCTOR’S DILEMMA and DEVIL’S DISCIPLE/’59 plus THE MILLIONAIRESS/’60.  All major flops.  Then, a pause till MY FAIR LADY struck critical and commercial gold on film in 1964 . . . without generating more Shaw films.  His talky debates & lack of action always tricky to pull off.  LADY progenitor PYGMALION/‘38 a rare exception; each tweaked to add warmth to his cold-blooded rationality.  Nothing of the sort here.  Yet, if you can tough it thru the verbal chaff of a stultifying first act, there’s plenty of interest listening to Shaw disagree with himself thru his characters.  (With the usual Shaw trick of giving the best points & cleverest speeches to whomever he thinks is wrong.)  Our ‘dilemma?’  Who deserves to get a chance at a new cure for tuberculosis: a fine dull fellow-doctor or a gifted ne’er-do-well painter without a smidgen of honesty to him . . . other than owning up to his own dishonesty.  The latter, just about perfectly played by Dirk Bogarde which at least makes one of the three principals well cast.  ‘Wife’ Leslie Caron hasn’t the vocal range or style to bring off Shaw’s tricky dialogue; and an acting nonentity going by the name of  John Robinson as the doctor with ‘the cure,’ figuring out whether to help a worthy man or a gifted one, complicated by an interest in Caron, Bogarde’s putative widow.  The relationship, seasoning to Shaw’s lecture, going for naught between these two, leaving only an intellectual puzzle.  Some good support from Alastair Sim, Robert Morley, Alec McCowen & Felix Alymer largely wasted under director Anthony Asquith’s strolling pace even as Bogarde makes the second act work its witty paradox & contrarian logic.  Best for confirmed Shavians, and the patiently curious.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Bogarde’s character might be the bohemian nephew of PYGMALION’s Alfred P. Doolittle.  Described by Henry Higgins as ‘England’s most original thinker.’

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Asquith, who co-directed that superb PYGMALION, followed DILEMMA with Sophia Loren & Peter Sellers miscast in THE MILLIONAIRESS mentioned above.  A Maggie Smith tv film of the play from 1972 much better.      https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/pygmalion-1938.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/millionairess-1972.html

TRANSPECOS (2016)

The poster makes you think this is something you’ve already seen.  You probably haven’t, but you’d be half right.  A chamber-sized Mexican-American Border Patrol suspenser, and not a bad example of the form, it nicely revives ‘80s Neo-Noir style to 2016, but feels used up before it even gets started.  Co-writer/director Greg Kwedar sets up three contrasting types of patrolmen in the middle of SouthWest Nowhere: newbie Johnny Simmons; low-key local Gabriel Luna; seen-it-all Clifton Collins Jr.*, their tiny outpost dry, lonely, forgotten.  But when a suspicious vehicle tries to get past them, a can of hidden drugs, a shooting, an injury, and a member of the unit working with the Cartel on the smuggle turns a ho-hum assignment into a tangle of escalating danger.  Well acted (particularly by Luna whose original choices really pay off), with locations that scream No Way Out, and a neat ironic turn at the end for a group of ‘illegals.’  Some of the action might be more clearly staged, but it’s the well-worn story tropes and reversals of fortune that keep this stuck in first gear.  Like the quotidian duties at the border before things go kerblooey: been there/done that.  To its credit, at just shy of an hour & a half, it does know when to clear out.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL:  *After three decades in mostly supporting roles (well over a hundred credits), Collins is having a breakthru moment with a lead in the well-reviewed JOCKEY/’21.  Or would be having one if only people were seeing or streaming it.  A rare example of Covid-19 stopping a breakthru.

THE MITCHELLS vs THE MACHINES (2021)

Much-liked/hyper-active CGI animation, something of a mirror-image to those secret Super-Hero INCREDIBLES/’04, here swapped out for a nerdy nuclear family who derive a different kind of power not from colossal comic-book strengths, but from their reputations as misfit obsessives, socially awkward outcasts whose nonconformity can embarrass both inside & outside of the family.  (Even the family dog pushes the envelope.)  Yet, it will be their one track minds & outside-the-box improvisatory powers that just might save the world against an Artificial Intelligence Apocalypse.  Yikes!  Delightful & adorable close to home, the constant inter-familial bickering countered by clumsy loving support, gets put to the test when a computer genius mogul (memorably voiced by Olivia Colman) casts off last year’s Smart Phone Model for his new robot-machines.  And that’s about where the film starts to run off the tracks, jettisoning Revenge of the Nerds tropes for Revenge of the AI monsters as our dysfunctional family unit must work as a team if they want to put the genie back in the bottle.  A metaphor for writer/directors Michael Rianda & Jeff Rowe?  Giving up logic, logistics & consequences to incessant action, they wind up playing tennis without a net.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, THE INCREDIBLES/’04.  Our LINK is for the inferior sequel.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/03/incredibles-2-2018.html

GOOOD-BYE, MY LADY (1956)

One more Boy and his Dog story, at once effective and inadequate.  Brandon De Wilde, on the cusp of adolescence, living a backwoods bayou life with toothless/illiterate Uncle Walter Brennan, traps and trains a dog like no one’s ever seen before.  No mongrel, the dog turns into an outstanding bird-dog, attracting enough local attention to be found out.  Keep the companion of a lifetime or send it home?  What’s the right thing to do?  (SPOILER title!)  Loaded with lovely unusual things (nicely caught in impressionistic monochrome by William Clothier), if only director William Wellman in a late effort showed some sensitivity in his cinematic DNA, pushing too hard at all the wrong times and unable to keep Brennan and General Store owner Phil Harris from coming off as HUCK FINN Road Company Duke and The Dauphin.  They’re good in their way, but it’s the wrong way.  The project needs tact, and a touch poetry; Wellman can’t even get the dog to sound right.  (The breed ‘laughs’ instead of barks, but the audio is so poorly done it briefly stops the film cold.  And that folksy guitar strumming score also no help.*)  Far better, indeed shockingly fine, is that farming family across the creek.  A Black household who, for a change, get the nicely maintained home while our While leads live in something nearer a shack with a porch than a proper house.  And yes, that’s Sidney Poitier in fine support as the owner (something of a father surrogate to De Wilde), freed from having to play a symbol or be a progressive guide into racial issues.  Not ‘colorblind casting,’ BTW, just a Black neighbor with a solid working life & family.  How long before Poitier got this sort of part again?  Very much worth overlooking problems here, and young De Wilde was some kind of special film kid.

DOUBLE-BILL: See what’s missing here, fresh eyes/poetic tone, in De Wilde’s outstanding debut under Fred Zinnemann in THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING/’52.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/member-of-wedding-1952.html   OR: More Boy(s) and a Dog from novelist James Street, THE BISCUIT EATER/’ 40.  Also boasting pretty advanced race relations for the period. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-biscuit-eater-1940.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Singing the title track, that’s an unmistakable if uncredited Howard Keel.

GROßE FREIHEIT Nr. 7 / GREAT FREEDOM NO. 7 (1944)

During the war years, German director Helmut Käutner’s apolitical output could be labeled indirectly subversive.  He didn’t attack, but elided Nazi Propaganda.  Too technically gifted at that most maddeningly difficult of genres, popular musical romance to drop (Herr Hitler loved his musicals & operettas!), this unobjectionable film was banned by Nazi Authorities for a lack of Homeland heroics.  (Had it gone into production before Nazi Germany’s Total War policy was implemented?)  Cast with popular stars of the day, there’s barely a story to it: salvage ship sailor, currently singing star at a circus-like Hamburg nightclub, meets two old shipmates hoping to get him back to sea, but hopes his new gal is ‘the real thing.’  Alas, she finds true love with another, and the three sailors return to ship.  With corny comedy; a wan score (lots of accordion); no lookers in the cast (other than the girl), this seems none too promising.  But Käutner gets something going out of very little: a few jealousies, a nightclub brawl, a cozy den of iniquity, quick pans & serpentine tracking, all in beautifully restored, powdery AgfaColor.  It’s something to see.  Even a wild nightmare for leading man Hans Albers that might have graced a Vincente Minnelli musical.  Käutner did try Hollywood on for size in the ‘50s, but little came of it.  By then he’d been one of the first German filmmakers back on the job, early as 1946, now taking on all sorts of socially conscious, political topics post-war.  If only the material here was a bit better.

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (1972)

Briefly, if inexplicably in critical fashion after vaguely literary/vaguely European-in-style projects (DAVID AND LISA/’62; THE SWIMMER/’68), Frank Perry was ‘found out’ (Hollywood slang for commercial disappointment), reduced to tv gigs & embarrassments like MOMMIE DEAREST/’85.  This prestige indie, from high literary sources Joan Didion (novel) & husband John Gregory Dunne (screenplay) came between the highs & the lows.  Still, it manages to display most of the Perry faults, appropriating current (or just past current) filmmaking styles (here Cali New Wave montage) with a preternatural ability to find just the wrong shot to listlessly follow action (or inaction).  Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins are quite good under the circumstances as prematurely washed-up/mentally unstable actress and gay best pal who’s producing her ex-husband’s low-budget movie.  (Perkins actually able to pull off that early ‘70s dress/grooming style.)  Trying to get back in the swing of things with old associates, Weld can’t quite connect with the rhythm of pleasantly purposeless lives and the accompanying hedonism all around her.  Even contact with her own rarely seen daughter can’t get her to the metaphorical freeway off-ramp marked Tragic Events, the one she merges onto with a little help from booze, drugs, movies, abortion* and her friends.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *With abortion legal in California from 1967, and Weld’s character somewhere between 6 & 8 weeks pregnant, why the shady illegal provider?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: How to explain the gulf between the Didion/Dunne literary rep and their movie credits?  PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK’71 and this one just get by (more as failed experiments), but 1976's A STAR IS BORN; TRUE CONFESSIONS/’81 and UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL/’96 are the sort of thing you leave off your CV.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/06/true-confessions-1981.html

THE EAGLE (1925)

Career course correction for Rudolph Valentino, put together by producer Joseph M. Schenck after artsy projects & effete characterizations chipped away box-office clout.  This commercially savvy United Artists release about a young Russian officer who opts for true love over a Czarina’s invitation/assignation is an All A-list affair.  Clarence Brown to direct; Hanns Kräly just after FORBIDDEN PARADISE/'24 a superior naughty Czarina tale written for Ernst Lubitsch; George Barnes on camera; elaborate Muskovy sets from William Cameron Menzies a year after THIEF OF BAGDAD for Douglas Fairbanks; more Fairbanks influence from a second storyline out of THE MARK OF ZORRO/’20; top Goldwyn leading lady Vilma Bánky as love interest/villain’s daughter; prestige from Louise Dresser sharing second billing for ten minutes screen time; etc.  The film works, but remains earth-bound & mechanical.  Product.  Two films on, THE SON OF THE SHEIK/26, again with Bánky, got everything right this one got half-right.  Alas, Rudolph Valentino, only 31, died before its release.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Ironically, SON OF THE SHEIK, Valentino’s last film, is also the best introduction to his work.  But his best remains his breakthru role in Rex Ingram’s staggeringly fine FOUR HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE/’21 though its tableau staging suffers on a small screen.  OR: See Louise Dresser earn her salary with director Clarence Brown on their previous film THE GOOSE WOMAN/’25.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/08/goose-woman-1925.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Usually spot on, the new Alloy Orchestra score on KINO-DVD misses the mark.

THE GREEN KNIGHT (2021)

Any Modern English summary of this ancient, anonymous Arthurian narrative is bound to be surprised after seeing David Lowery’s adaptation of the old legend.  Not because he doesn’t follow the contours of plot & character, but because he does.  Honorably.  Or does until a major reversal at the climax.  It’s just that with so much misty, muddled atmosphere slathered on, plus all the whispered Arthurian Method acting, it’s impossible to follow the action or make sense of motivations & relationships.  Ironically, the heavily revised ending is the one thing you can follow.  (Maybe because the structure is ‘borrowed’ from Ambrose Pierce: INCIDENT AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE.)  Dev Patel’s a smart choice as Sir Gawain, his elegant frame supporting a story that starts with an ending: Young Hero lops off the Monster’s head.  That’d be the Green Knight, and Gawain has stepped in for the King in an unheralded display of reckless courage.  The main storyline tags along as Gawain adventures on the road less traveled, trudging thru natural, manmade & human obstacles at once cryptic & elusive.  All to keep his promise and meet Sir Green a year after this Monster Knight lost his head, picked himself up, dusted himself off, and lived to fight another day.  (No wonder the story, after centuries, is still being parsed for meaning.)  Even with missed opportunities and narrative confusion galore, Lowery does keep you watching, but the film is much less than the sum of its parts.  Pity, a few well chosen declamative line readings might have fixed a host of problems.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Check out Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in BECKET/’64 to see what the lost art of clear declamative acting can do for these things.  No Closed Captions needed.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/02/becket-1964.html

CRIMSON GOLD / TALAYE SORKH (2003)

Most films coming Stateside from Iran focus on middle & upper-middle class.  Cosmopolitan urban elites with attitudes & sensibilities that feel familiar to the West.  Not here, where the focus is on society’s lower depths, a proletarian POV, les misérables of Tehran.  Directed in minimalist/Neo-Realist style by Jafar Panahi, better-known Iranian writer/director Abbas Kiarostami has script credit, his car-centric world view swapped out for pizza deliverymen on motorbikes.  The pizza looks lousy; the traffic worse.  But we’re here for class division & income inequality, the obscene distance between Haves and Have-nots.  On display here in Hussein, a big bear of a man, bigger than normal from cortisone treatments that show him pale as a ghost in sunlight.  Engaged to the older sister of a fellow deliveryman, he barely shows interest.  The fiancée, normal-sized, deferential, meets him at a jewelry shop beyond their means.  His cheap suit and her manner tagging them immediately as inferiors.  Gently told they might be better served at a street market gold stand, Hussein snaps inside.  Or does he lose hope.  Or see his likely future.  Something.  Back on the job, he passes an evening in unexpected luxury, invited into the apartment of a rich young man whose date has just imploded.  The apartment, a DisneyLand fantasy compared to his shabby tenement home, fascinates him.  As does the rich boy’s openness.  Is it a put-on?  And when he leaves the next morning, something violent & tragic has taken hold of his mind.  The film opens with this violent act, the rest playing out in flashback.  Panahi doesn’t point out the time shift, assuming we’ll pick up on it.  And on a lot more, too.  Mesmerizing stuff.  Simply presented; cumulatively devastating. 

DOUBLE-BILL: Barely tolerated by the authorities, when Iran banned Panahi from making films he took a leaf out of the Abbas Kiarostami playbook, circumventing official government edict by shooting his next movie (the award-winning TAXI/’15) from the interior of a taxi.  Criticizing society while earning a hack license.

THE LITTLE THINGS (2021)

Smooth to the point of being frictionless, there’s nothing particularly wrong with this John Lee Hancock police procedural; maybe that’s the problem.  Denzel Washington’s a small town cop back in L.A. to sign off on some evidence when he’s confronted with a new twist on the serial murder case that stopped his career & personal life cold five years ago.  Rami Malek, the new detective in charge, and nearly as single-minded & detail obsessed as Washington, may be as neatly turned out as Washington is burned out, but is he on the same path to professional & family trouble?  Especially after letting Washington return to the hunt?  With Jared Leto coming in for a grungy turn as most-likely suspect, that makes three Oscar’d leads vying for attention on what might just pass as a modest indie built for underappreciated actors.*  Even with a hat-trick of a triple-twist ultra-cynical ending, the only surprise here is noting just how tiny Malek is when seen alone by his suburban pool at the end.  Away from the careful staging Hancock uses elsewhere (platforms?; boxes?) to even out a half foot/sixty pound disadvantage, Malek looks as fragile & delicate as a Dresden figurine.  (Hey!  Maybe he’s the titular ‘Little Thing?!’)  If IMDb can be believed, Hancock first wrote this script back in the ‘90s which sounds about right.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Did I miss something or is there a reason for all the ‘60s Pop tunes used here?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *ONE FALSE MOVE/’92 with Bill Paxton a good example of the type.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/one-false-move-1992.html

RETURN TO OZ (1985)

Between silent & sound; shorts & features; large & small screen; adaptations of the L. Frank Baum OZ books (he wrote 14) come by the score.  Tellingly, new attempts dried up for over a decade after 1939's THE WIZARD OF OZ, the classic M-G-M musical.  (So expensive to produce, it didn’t go into profit till re-releases & tv showings pushed it over.)  This try, by legendary Sound Editor Walter Murch in his sole feature film directing credit, has its faults (he’s no natural at calling the shots), but is by leaps & bounds the best of a pretty bad lot.  Officially adapted from ‘Ozma of Oz’ and ‘The Land of Oz,’ this accreditation presumably contractual as it’s ‘peopled’ & plotted to mirror the M-G-M film, equivalents & substitutions in character & story beats reordered but hard to miss.  Ergo, Jean Marsh’s Wicked Nurse, Nicol Williamson’s Great & Powerful Nome King, mechanical Tik-Tok in for Tin Man, Toto stuck on the farm, replaced by a chicken(!), Flying Monkeys OUT/Skating ‘Wheelers’ IN, an egg where once water destroyed a villain.  And the Ruby Slippers?  Still the Ruby Slippers.  This time, the narrative engine isn’t Dorothy wanting to go home, but Dorothy needing to get back to Oz to save her pals, currently turned to stone.  The substitution psychologically inadequate, so too most of Murch’s casting choices.  Voice casting for the non-human pals particularly off-putting.  But just as much works well enough to get you over the bumps in a very episodic plotline.  With one flying exception, the effects are super; a gallery of decapitated heads positively alarming, and the Claymation stop-motion work (especially a talking red stone tablet) a triumph.  Held down commercially on release as being too dark for kids, it’s easy to forget just how terrifying the ‘39 film is outside of the musical comedy business.  (I’m not the only kid to run out of the room during the chase around the castle.  Yikes!) But it’s true that the sensibility is closer to Tim Burton than to M-G-M musicals.  So, let the nightmares begin!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Instead of trying another OZ adaptation, go for John Boorman’s whackadoodle dystopian adventure ZARDOZ, a futuristic mystery play with Sean Connery, who else, as the last potent man on earth, and OZ showing up in a most alarming manner.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/zardoz-1974.html

RIZI / DAYS (2020)

Minimalist filmmaking from Malaysian-born/Taiwan-based Ming-liang Tsai on a familiar theme: personal loneliness amid the bustling city hordes.  Here, two men: older, presumably wealthy Kang-sheng Lee (regular Tsai alter-ego) and debuting Anong Houngheuangsy as the young masseuse/sex-worker he’s hired to meet in a hotel.  Largely shot with long takes in fixed positions (though Tsai does edit within his scenes to slightly change framing), there’s no interaction at first, only alternating looks at their daily routines in single shots that run minutes.  About halfway in, a sudden shift to movement thru the city via handheld camera supplies a jarring lift, like changing keys after an hour of C Major chords.  Then, back to the fixed position shots.  The technique giving off an intimate charge during the massage/sex act, but elsewhere the effect is merely slow rather than hypnotically still.*  But for those who can settle in (keep that remote with the Fast-Forward button hidden), the film gathers strength post-climax (so to speak) with an unusual non-cash tip involving, of all things, the musical theme Charles Chaplin wrote for his film LIMELIGHT/’52.  True to form, Tsai lets the eight-bar chorus cycle thru seven or eight times.  And damned if it doesn’t work exactly as he wants.  Even more when reprised.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *At times, you might think your streaming service paused, or a DVD stuck on a frame.  A glitch once easy to spot on celluloid stock where the film grain suddenly looked dead, now harder to see in a grain-free digital frame freeze.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Ming-liang Tsai designed the sparsely dialogued film to play without subtitles.  An image-oriented view of film going from F.W. Murnau’s THE LAST LAUGH/’24 thru Jacques Tati and beyond.

BATTLE CRY (1955)

From a big whopping bestselling WWII book, a big whopping top-grossing war pic.  Though, as our poster accurately shows, it’s more Fringes of War than combat.*  Men to the side of the main event a 1955 speciality at Warner Brothers where only MISTER ROBERTS (about a Navy supply ship that never gets near the war) made more money that year than this one about a Marine company that trains and trains, but keeps missing the big battles.  Not till the last ten minutes of a two & a half hour pic do they see serious action.  Before then, a few mop-up operations, but mostly on-base interpersonal dynamics between the men, and off-base romance with tarts, tarts-in-hiding, wives with husbands overseas, sad-eyed widows and (via the post) girls back home either pining or signing Dear John letters.  Raoul Walsh, already comfortable in his first try at CinemaScope, gets what’s needed out of a motley cast, even pretends the Marines were integrated at the time, handling the immense scale of the thing without batting an eye.  (Some shots look like the entire Marine Corp was ordered to show up.  No doubt explaining those just integrated units.)  The brief battle, when it does come, is well staged for the period, but ultimately, this is Leon Uris territory, which means mostly obvious character flaws and stiff dialogue.  He’d only do one more screenplay before letting others adapt his doorstop novels.  Standouts include scratchy voice Aldo Ray, losing his cynical attitude toward love, and the alarmingly pretty Tab Hunter falling briefly for an older gal in glasses.  (That’d be Dorothy Malone.  She soon takes the glasses off, but if anything, looks sexier with them on.)  Everyone else holding to the one-dimension Uris gives them.  Then there’s Major Sergeant James Whitmore.  Pulling Voice-Over narration duty, the guy never shuts up.  Even as the battle gets going.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Is this the first Hollywood studio release to show men ‘giving the finger’ on screen?  It’s during a hiking sequence when some jeeps drive by.  ALSO: Some of those soundstage exteriors really stink up the joint in a film with so much fine on-location shooting, courtesy of Sidney Hickox in his last feature film assignment before switching to tv.

DOUBLE-BILL: Two years on, Anthony Mann directed Aldo Ray in a chamber-sized Korean Conflict war story, MEN AT WAR/’57.  It takes a while to find its bearings, but settles down and digs deep into a No-Man’s Land both realistic and abstract/poetic.

AN AMERICAN TAIL (1986)

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF meets PINOCCHIO in the second animated feature from Don Bluth after he left Disney over quality issues.  And Bluth’s animation is often downright splendid, aspiring to Pre-War Disney level.  Not only the famous early features, but also in the playful abundance of early shorts like THE BAND CONCERT/’35.  What holds it back, as so often with Bluth, is story development.*  Little Fievel and the Mousekewitz family, ‘Pogrom’d’ out of Russia, get separated on their way to America and have to find each other.  But too many of Fievel’s on-the-road adventures play as distractions with songs that embellish character (and show a surprising nice tenor from Dom DeLuise), but stop the narrative.  (‘Somewhere Out There’ did became something of a standard.)  Plus a faceless army of bad cats where a single villain is needed.  About halfway thru, you wonder why use mice instead of humans?   For that matter, why animation?  You can spot much of what’s wrong simply by comparing the film to its poster (see above).  Someone in publicity knew exactly what producer Steven Spielberg was going for: the immigrant experience with a Chaplinesque Little Tramp figure always in danger of being trammeled by the Larger-than-Life competition.  Did Bluth not get the memo?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Sure enough, a classic Charlie Chaplin two-reeler, THE IMMIGRANT/’17, does the job to perfection.  OR: Disney’s take on Prokofiev’s kid-friendly concert piece, PETER AND THE WOLF, part of the MAKE MINE MUSIC/’46 omnibus feature.  It dumbs down the narration and ‘arranges’ the classic score, but the look of the animation is extraordinary, and extraordinarily Russian.  Might it have worked here?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/09/make-mine-music-1946.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Listen up when ‘The Pledge of Allegiance’ is recited.  The sound fades just as they get to ‘One Nation, Under God . . .’   But that ‘Under God’ clause shouldn’t be in there, not part of ‘the pledge’ till the ‘50s when President Eisenhower let it in as a sop to the Right Wing/Anti-Commie crowd.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *As a Storyteller, Don Bluth is a great Animator.  While, as an Animator, Walt Disney was a great Storyteller.  (Strictly speaking, Story Editor.)  The diff being that Walt knew it and worked with the best Animators he could get, starting with Ub Iwerks.

BEAU BRUMMELL (1954)

After KING SOLOMON’S MINES/’50 over-performed (third highest gross of the year), M-G-M cast Stewart Granger in a series of period costume remakes & near remakes.  Unlike MINES, none topped (or matched) the originals*, but this one, a commercial disappointment ending the cycle, is the most interesting.  Adapted from Clyde Fitch’s stage perennial (half a dozen B’way runs 1890 - 1916), Warner Brothers used it for John Barrymore’s Hollywood debut of 1923, shot between legendary runs as HAMLET in New York & London.  Dulled by director Harry Beaumont, and with Barrymore off-form as the striving clothes-horse, it suddenly comes to stunning life in an extended third act, once Brummell loses fame, fortune & health.  This remake never reaches any heights at all, but has something going for it the middle sections where Granger’s Brummell, a social climbing commoner who’s become the Prince of Wales’ favorite, starts to become too intimate with his Royal BFF.  The bromantic chemistry between Granger and a deliciously plump Peter Ustinov (promising to diet for his one true friend) is both odd & touching.  Granger nailing the cutting ambition, arrogance and self-destruction even with little help from Karl Tunberg’s unfocused script or Curtis Bernhardt’s bland direction.  As to the men’s grand loves, Elizabeth Taylor is held down by unbecoming white wigs and that breathy, little girl voice, while Rosemary Harris’s Mrs. Fitzherbert, marriage habitually put off by the future George IV, hardly connects at all.*  Instead, the plum part goes to Robert Morley as Ustinov’s father, ‘Mad’ King George III, using his little screen time to grand effect.  Shot in England, a British production team has composer Richard Addinsell sounding like Miklós Rósza (no harm in that) and cinematographer Oswald Morris getting dappled, painterly sophistication on location.  Rubbish as history, this complicated relationship has obvious possibilities; a streaming event waiting to happen.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Maybe the studio found it a bit too bromantic.  Note the suggested title BEAU BRUMMELL AND THE BEAUTY!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Never marrying the Catholic Mrs. Fitzherbert, the one-hour tv film A ROYAL SCANDAL/’96 lays bare his ghastly arranged marriage to Caroline of Brunswick with Richard Grant spectacular as the Prince of Wales in this rarely seen little wonder.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/royal-scandal-1996.html  

OR:  *Of the other remakes, SCARMOUCHE/’52 is best liked, but better remembered than seen.  Compare it with the original.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/09/scaramouche-1952.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/03/scaramouche-1923.html

THE LOST DAUGHTER (2021)

Well received directing debut from actor Maggie Gyllenhaal plays like a literary conceit that never made it off the page.  From Italian literary sensation/mystery woman Elena Ferrante, the book may have been set a few decades back, carting trunk-loads of books to Greece on a ‘working’ vacation a pre-internet thing.*  But this merely the smallest item not to add up.  Olivia Colman is the chilly protagonist, withdrawn, reserved, with a blemished past that partially ‘explains’ her wary behavior; and so socially off-putting you never buy into her island encounters.  Would Ed Harris’s resort manager hang around waiting for an invitation?  Would that noisome Italian family (from Queens, yet) after a false start, wind up sharing personal confidences?  And would Colman share back?   The ignition point comes when a little girl from that loud Italian-American family goes missing at the beach.  Found by Colman, she’s brought right back.  But in the confusion, Colman takes her little doll.  Why?  Souvenir?  Talisman?  Reminder?  The more Colman becomes immersed in various interpersonal dramas (including a handsome beach attendant to ogle), the more she clings to the doll.  Tending it; hurting it; cleaning it; hurling it; rescuing it.  Psychologically it’s tied to her own past as sometime absent mother to her own two girls twenty years ago.  (Jessie Buckley disturbingly fine as a young Colman.)  Turns out, she’s got something of A DOLL’S HOUSE history to her. Or is it fixation?  It’s Ibsen meets Ferrante meets Michael Haneke.  Yikes!  Technically, Gyllenhaal favors uncomfortably close hand-held camera shots the way some actresses break personal space even when not on stage.  No doubt it’s meant to be off-putting . . . and it is!  Her other bold stylistic choice raises the color ‘temperature’ in the flashback scenes.  Then, once we start to know the score and fill in the past, the look is reversed with present day scenes getting the treatment.  A bit precious, then suddenly dropped.  Was it even intentional?  And since not a single person on the island seems able to pick up on the most obvious social cues Colman keeps dropping like cement bricks, why should an audience try to read stylistic tea leaves?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Another clue to this being set decades back comes with a movie show of THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, a 1954 Elizabeth Taylor clunker playing on this Greek island’s revival house.  (In 2021?  A Greek Island Movie Revival House?)  To Gyllenhaal’s credit, she turns this unlikely moment into a visual gag, posing Dakota Johnson, mom of the girl with the missing doll, to look like La Liz in the following scene.

BY LOVE POSSESSED (1961)

After hitting a career peak in her mid-30s, even gaining critical praise on PEYTON PLACE/’57 and IMITATION OF LIFE/’59, Lana Turner had nowhere to go but down.  Trying a safe bet, she revisits the frank sex talk & New England autumn of PP, this time to little effect.  The film not so much bad as dull.  Lana’s a rich wife with a drinking problem & a limp husband in lawyer Jason Robards Jr., legal partner to Efrem Zimbalist Jr.  He’s crippled, too, not physically but emotionally, unable to see the womanly side of wife Barbara Bel Geddes.  Just as little going on with the younger generation where scion-of-Efrem George Hamilton & lovelorn presumptive fiancée Susan Kohner are on prenuptial hold.  Maybe that’s why everyone sleepwalks thru the pic, somnambulists not only in front of the camera but also behind.  John Sturges about as far from his directorial comfort zone as he ever got (lucky for him, THE GREAT ESCAPE but one film away) and Lana Turner vet cinematographer Russell Metty unable to do any more for her than he can for the art decorator's model showroom interiors.  Finally, some mismatched screwing comes into play, Lana becomes a woman again with Efrem and Hamilton takes the town tramp in his car’s reclining front seats.  That’s Yvonne Craig, asking for a cabin rental next time, the only lively thing in here other than Thomas Mitchell, senior attorney whose encroaching mental decline may be a dodge.  The one interesting plot element, frittered away without a proper dramatic confrontation for him.  Hard to fathom how pro scripters like Charles Schnee & Ketti Frings missed it.  Maybe just miss the whole film.

DOUBLE-BILL: Jason Robards followed this, his effective Hollywood debut, with D.O.A. assignment #2 working with Jennifer Jones (chalk & cheese against another Child-of-Hollywood actress), in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT/’62.  Equally dull, possibly worse filmmaking, but somehow more interesting.

THE TOMORROW WAR (2021)

A Live-Action Sci-Fi war film so loaded with CGI monsters, landscapes & urban mayhem, it makes sense to bring in animation director Chris McKay (LEGO BATMAN; ROBOT CHICKEN) to run things.  Working off a nifty, if not particularly original idea (Alien Threat dooms mankind in the future, but a wormhole brings military emissaries to today’s world to draft recruits and time-jump into the battle decades ahead*), it would make a solid premise if only half the pieces clicked.  But it’s one of those films that feel as if it died in development; too many executives sending too many story & character notes.  So, it’s a Climate Change allegory & warning.  It’s a now-and-future family crisis drama.  It’s a war fatigue & band-of-brothers tale.  And with an ironic twist since as things turn out the answer was back home, back in the present all along.  Fortunately, Chris Pratt is just about perfect as heroic regular guy in Dad Jeans (before heading into battle he’s entirely believable as a high school science teacher) and there are some nice supporting turns from the men (the women less so).  But loud & exhausting when it means to be exciting (it might have been unbearable in a theater), it’s another case of diminishing returns on the infinite possibilities of computer generated aliens, with suspense-free plotting from scripter Zach Dean (and all those execs*) that slips from the amusingly casual to the expediently lazy.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Where most time-travel plots are obsessed with small changes in the continuum having large repercussions on the past or future, here, it’s only about killing the aliens.  But presumably, half the next generation, the force fighting for time, wouldn’t exist with the alterations of history made by our guys.  An interesting lack of interest that plays as a cheat.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Was there a prize (The JAWS Memorial) for coming up with new ways of saying ‘Smile You Son of a Bitch’ as you took aim at an alien?