HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT (1937)

Improbable romance from director Frank Borzage (without his usual religious trimmings) is weirdly wonderful and slightly bonkers.  Lovers’ confidences shared via Señor Wences hand puppetry?  A Manhattan boîte run for the sole purpose of enticing a wayward lover to walk thru the doors?  A Titanic-like ship wreck to gin up a happy-ending?  An extravagant indie production for producer Walter Wanger, this one-of-a-kind romantic fable shows a technical facility rarely on display in Borzage sound films.  Equally rare, the notoriously self-doubting Jean Arthur reveling under David Abel’s severe glamour lensing.  She’s the miserable wife of insanely possessive Colin Clive, a master-of-the-universe type who orders a compromising assignation for Arthur to halt her divorce proceedings.  Enter Charles Boyer, overhearing the unfolding drama and stopping the charade with one of his own: he’ll be a jewel thief out to rob Arthur.  But if it’s love at first sight for Boyer & Arthur, Clive has only just begun to connive; murdering the 'planted' co-respondent and placing blame on Boyer, the ‘unknown’ burglar.  Yikes!  (And we’ve skipped half the story beats.)  Somehow, Borzage keeps this from collapsing into ridicule & laughter, largely by beating us to the punch with comic relief from Boyer’s partner/chef Leo Carillo.  (A French chef with an Italian accent.  Go figure.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Not everyone will succumb (their loss), and seen with a large audience it's often on the cusp of contagious ‘bad’ laughs.  But no problem when you watch at home.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL: Beginning with his four previous films, Boyer’s co-stars were consecutively Katharine Hepburn, Loretta Young, Danielle Darrieux, Marlene Dietrich, Arthur, Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Michèle Morgan, Hedy Lamarr, Irene Dunne(x2), Bette Davis, Margaret Sullavan, Olivia de Havilland.  Has such a run ever been matched?  (The films: BREAK OF HEARTS, SHANGHAI, MAYERLING, GARDEN OF ALLAH, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT, CONQUEST, TOVARICH, ORAGE, ALGIERS, LOVE AFFAIR, WHEN TOMORROW COMES, ALL THIS AND HEAVEN TOO, BACK STREET, HOLD BACK THE DAWN.  Use the Search Box on the Main Site to find Write-ups on most of these.)

EDGE OF THE CITY (1957)

You couldn’t make an urban waterfront drama in 1957 without genuflecting toward story beats & characterizations out of ON THE WATERFRONT/’54.  Here, scripter Robert Alan Aurthur hitches a ride on it, along with nods at Herman Melville’s BILLY BUDD*, moving ever closer to the Kazan/Brando classic in some late conscience-stricken heroics to gin-up a knockdown copycat climax.  Loaded with tasty debuts and/or breakthru roles for Sidney Poitier, John Cassavettes, Jack Warden, Ruby Dee and director Martin Ritt, the one letdown is Kathleen Maguire, a non-starter as the nice girl Cassavettes takes bowling.  (Eva Marie Saint she ain’t.)  A job-hunting drifter with a past, Cassavettes buds up with friendly floor manager Poitier whose small stevedore crew is in conflict with the kickback tactics of brutal rival Jack Warden.  Pulled between these two, Cassavettes is a man on a rack.  Not that he grows an inch from it, looking a foot shorter than Poitier in full-figure two-shots.  He also comes up short in the acting department against Poitier’s natural vibe, still effective while Cassavettes’ Method brooding now seems wildly over-masticated.  Mostly, Ritt’s straightforward direction keeps everyone in line, his lack of technique reading as honesty.  And if he can’t sell action (fights feel like they never left the rehearsal hall), his strengths served him well for decades.  What he can’t do is skirt Aurthur’s reach for Clifford Odets proletariat poetry .  Poitier actually apologizes for it at one point.  The film now coming off as a dramatic stretch.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *What a Billy Budd/John Claggart combo in Poitier/Warden.  Alas, no color-blind casting in films for another six decades!

DOUBLE-BILL:  Aurthur wrote another two for Poitier.  (neither seen here)  The change-of-pace rom-com, FOR LOVE OF IVY/’68, and an up-to-date political suspenser THE LOST MAN/’69 where Poitier met wife of 46 years Joanna Shimkus.

PARACHUTE JUMPER (1933)

Pre-Code programmer captures Douglas Fairbanks Jr on his way out at Warners and Bette Davis on her way up, both in pretty good form.  He’s a cashiered military pilot scrounging for a job when he meets-cute with unemployed secretary/stenographer Bette Davis at the park.  Mistaking her ‘profession,’ there’s mutual pick-up, a plate of ham & eggs, and an available bed at the flat he shares with fellow starving pilot Frank McHugh.  (Racy stuff even by Pre-Code standards, though it’s the boys who share a bed.)  Risking his neck on a dangerous fairgrounds parachute jump, Fairbanks raises a stake on the chauffeur’s uniform needed for steady employment by rich Claire Dodd after she gives him the once-over.  The lady all but undressing him with her eyes in their first interview, but soon losing him to boyfriend/bootlegger Leo Carillo.  (He seems to give Doug the once-over, too!)  Soon, bodyguard Doug is flying in and out of Canada with a cargo of booze, unaware he’s also carrying dope when he shoots down a couple of border patrolmen under the impression they’re hijackers.  A lot of plot in 72 minutes, especially when you factor in four or five perilous stunt flying sequences.  Some of those plane crashes ain’t model work.  Yikes!  Good fun from the normally draggy Alfred E. Green, and unexpected chemistry between platinum blonde Bette and dashing Doug Jr.   Starry too; look fast to spot Walter Brennan & Leon Ames in bit parts.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Inevitably, Carillo hires Davis as his office secretary, unaware she’s living with Doug who again thinks the worst of Bette.  The film entirely motivated by sex, booze, drugs, money and heavy fondling of guns.

WAGON MASTER (1950)

Like the humble grain seed they carry that’s worth more than gold to Mormon pioneers on their way West, so too the modest, plain-spoken beauty of this life-affirming John Ford Western, unjustly in the shade of recent larger efforts, FORT APACHE/’48 and SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON/’49.  Opening in violence as a vicious family rob a bank and leave in cold-blooded murder, the film soon pivots toward Westward idyll as fancy-free horse traders Ben Johnson & Harry Carey Jr. take up Ward Bond’s offer to lead his band of Mormon settlers to promised land.  (All three shining in first leads.)  Along the way, they’ll rescue a stranded little Medicine Show (heathens, but nice ones, especially strong-willed Joanna Dru), and later on, those thieving psychopaths we met in the opening.  Ford loads on just the right amount of community trials & celebrations (lots of singing in this one), and natural obstacles to overcome, using a gentle touch to capture the rhythm of wagon-train life, often as not in still shots that never feel static thanks to visual fugues of multi-plane staging.  Even Indians offer ceremonial dance rather than danger here, seeing Mormons as fellow victims of the white man.  And when the inevitable showdown comes, it’s swift rather than overblown and so cleanly staged, you could give a police report on it.  With Ford taking the opportunity to set up one of his earliest film curtain calls to show each principal with their wish granted, and last honors going to a small pony touching ground after a river crossing.  Long a personal favorite for Ford, it’s easy to see why.

DOUBLE-BILL: Compliment this overlooked Western masterpiece with Ford's equally overlooked war film THEY WERE EXPENDABLE/’45.

PAPILLON (2017)

In addition to writing BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, THE PRINCESS BRIDE, many others, William Goldman might best be remembered for that pithiest of Hollywoodisms: ‘Nobody knows anything.’  But surely, somebody knew nobody wanted a remake of 1973's PAPILLON, the ‘truish’ ‘30s French penal colony prison-break memoir, meticulously made into a lumbering marvel of masochistic melancholy for bromatically suffering tropical prison-mates Steve McQueen (loyal/unbending) and Dustin Hoffman (mainly bending to get into his portmanteau ass).  Yet, here it is!  With drabber colors and serried ranks of rank inmates showing perfectly sculpted chests (there must be a gym in that jail).  Charlie Hunnam & Rami Malek hetero-bond in the McQueen/Hoffman spots under Michael Noer’s busy direction.  Really not so different than before*; yet US grosses shrinking from a blockbuster 54 mill (that’s 1973 dollars!) to a pathetic two mill (that's gross not net).  And, pace William Goldman, I think everybody knew what the score would be on this one.  Why else blatantly steal the most famous scene and the most famous line William Goldman ever wrote for a film as your climax?*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For a great commercial prison escape film, Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood’s ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ/’79.  OR: Keeping things French, but with an existential angle, the thrilling restraint of Robert Bresson’s A MAN ESCAPED/’56.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/escape-from-alcatraz-1979.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/un-condamne-mort-sest-echappe-man.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Here’s a change.  In ‘73, the head flew off the guillotine and rolled right toward the camera.  Yikes!  (Lots of buzz on that.)  Now, it just drops in a basket from afar.

CONTEST:  *Name the movie, the scene and the line quoted to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

DESIGNING WOMAN (1957)

Credit M-G-M costume designer Helen Rose for coming up with a great title on an ‘original’ story idea that’s little more than a rehash of WOMAN OF THE YEAR/’42, the film where Tracy met Hepburn.  Now, it’s Gregory Peck as the beer & pretzels sports writer falling hard for high society couturier Lauren Bacall.  Loaded with wheezy routines (Bacall goes to a boxing match; Peck finds B’way’s Gay White Way in the living room*), and working obvious issues (a contentious babe in Peck’s background before their impulsive marriage; mobsters out for Peck), the film is easily saved thru expert execution and real laugh-out-loud moments.  George Wells’ Oscar’d script develops the cadence of wit with self-reflexive commentary; cinematographer John Alton trades his Prince of Darkness rep for MetroColor, Helen Rose takes advantage of late ‘50s schizophrenic dress codes (from minimalist black to the poofiest skirts); and director Vincente Minnelli coaxes relaxed comedy out of Peck & Bacall, normally a couple of stiffs.  He even holds back B’way belter Dolores Gray as the rival dame from eating anyone alive.*  At a full two hours, it probably runs a little too long; but everyone makes such pleasant company.  As Betty Bacall said about Peck (and might have said about herself), these two are very easy on the eyes.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The original, WOMAN OF THE YEAR/’42. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/woman-of-year-1942.html   OR: *Heard here merely as a run thru, André Previn’s ‘Music Is Better Than Words’ gets the full treatment with Gray in the little seen IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER/’55.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-always-fair-weather-1955.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The gay angle handled in a most unusual turn for the period from film choreographer Jack Cole in his only acting role.  He’s officially married with kids here, but you can’t miss the macho point being made by Minnelli & Co.

DILILI À PARIS / DILILI IN PARIS (2018)

Award-winning French animation from Michel Ocelot, an enchanting oddity conceived in a unique style that expands off a platform of classic silhouette technique into full dimensionality in physically stunning photo-realistic recreations of La Belle Époque Paris.  Breathtaking.  Barely released Stateside, the film has two cultural ‘bumps’ that may have limited exposure.  One comes right at the start as our charming heroine, Dilili, an African from Kanak comes to Paris as part of a Living Village ethnological display.  An exhibit uncomfortably close to the once popular living zoological dioramas of ‘primitive peoples.’  Unnoticed in France, it comes across, at best, as tone deaf over here.  ‘Bump’ #2 is the main plot, a kidnaping epidemic of young girls, stolen off the streets by The Society of Male Masters, out to halt Women’s Advancement while training new divisions of handmaidens & living footstools.  Yikes!  Okay, not the best idea in here.  But everything else a visual astonishment, as Dilili & new pal Orel, a tricycle courier, visit architectural landmarks and half the immortal cultural talent in Turn-of-the-Last-Century Paris.  A tour de force tour for the ages, with nifty celeb spotting (Proust to Debussy, Rodin to Toulouse-Lautrec, dozens more*) cleverly larded into the plot.  Story takes precedent in the last act, gorgeously designed but not quite as much fun,.  Yet anyone with a taste for late 19th century Paris will be pea green with envy as Dilili and her one-in-a-million tour guide Orel do the town.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Naturellement, Sarah Bernhardt shows up, but with her name consistently mispronounced as Sarah Bernard on the English-language track.   (They get it right on the French soundtrack.)  With dozens of people involved in translation & recording, had no one ever heard of the most famous actress of all time?  Typical, but depressing.

LINK: This trailer comes without English subtitles, but has far better resolution than the one that does.  Deal with it!  (Both subtitled & English-dubbed discs & streaming available.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVRUX8tloNw

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Structurally, culturally and developmentally, this isn't  so far from BABAR!

KING OF THE PECOS (1936)

For John Wayne, the ‘30s were ‘galley years,’ stuck on a treadmill of B-Westerns between his flop debut in Raoul Walsh’s pricey THE BIG TRAIL/’30 and John Ford’s ride to the rescue with STAGECOACH/’39.  But that decade of programers weren’t monolithic, steadily advancing in budget & acting opportunity.  Give this one an extra 20 minutes running time for story & character development, and it might have risen all the way to a major studio programmer.  But since it’s a Joseph Kane directed Paul Malvern Production for Republic Pictures, it is what it is.  Given a star’s delayed entrance after the surprisingly violent prologue (two parents shot dead, cute son beaten to a pulp), Wayne’s now a grown-up lawyer in the territory; long, lean & ready with facts & fists to take down ‘Mr. Big’ and his illegal Water Rights monopoly.  But will the independent cattlemen help?  And what about the purty gal whose Dad just made a deal with Mr. Big?  Not many twists along the way, but reasonably involving with plenty of time for the stuntmen, horses & wagons to execute some dangerous tricks that have Yakima Canutt’s signature all over them.  One horse does a damn flip.  Yikes!  Sure, so does the rider, but he’s paid extra for the ‘gag.’

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Some of the earlier Wayne programmers are showing up on tv in criminally awful restorations that replace the original soundtracks with modern ‘equivalents’ that have louder sound effects, musical scores, and sound-a-like voices dubbing the entire cast.  Wayne’s distinctive halting cadence coming from a voice not quite his.  (At least with those colorized editions you can adjust the color down to get something approaching the original b&w, but this leaves no option.)

KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949)

Known for Alec Guinness’s hilarious ‘octo-turn’ as eight members of the D'Ascoyne family, subtly rather than riotously varied, it’s easy to forget just how original and darkly subversive this comedy of inheritance is.  Dennis Price tells his own story in flashback, last in line to inherit the D'Ascoyne Dukedom, but moving up fast, scything his way thru the family tree while romancing Joan Greenwood’s unavailable purring Cheshire Cat (she’s married a rival), and Valerie Hobson’s widowed Lady (her husband an early victim).  Robert Hamer co-writes & directs in seemingly Po-faced manner, allowing the grisly humor to bubble up and release under real dramatic pressure.  Note the near absence of musical backing other than the early use of a Mozart aria from Price’s Italian tenor father.  Very unusual for an Ealing Studio comedy but just right here.  Same for Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography, blighted as a Dickens drama when needed.  Today, with no Production Code, they’d probably have Price get away with his plot, but how much more satisfying the twist ending seen here.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Director Robert Hamer shows a different ‘black’ mode in THE LONG MEMORY, a fine, but barely known film noir from his short career.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-long-goodbye-1953.html

EUROPA '51 (1952)

Distraught after the death of her only child, rich socialite Ingrid Bergman blames herself for not seeing the real distress behind the pampered boy’s calls for attention.  And as friends & husband Alexander Knox callously move on with their lives, she can’t.  Instead, a search for meaning, bringing the care & understanding to poor strangers she failed to provide at home.  Encouraged in her quest by a Communist social acquaintance (Knox believes she’s having an affair), Bergman wanders the slums of Rome, befriending city have-nots: mothers with too many children*, tubercular prostitutes, street kids, etc.  But her DIY sainthood fits no philosophy, not the social elite she comes from (though Knox’s checkbook must figure in); not the coldly clinical Communist playbook; certainly not the Catholic Church; each unable to fathom her stance of complete acceptance.  Leaving only the poor, the innocent, the mad and the very young to clamor in support as she’s committed to the madhouse, too pure for this wicked world.  (Add a miraculous last-minute turnabout from the authorities and this is less Roberto Rossellini than Frank Capra, SIGNORA DEEDS VA A ROMA.)  Indeed, at its core, the film’s really all about Roberto.  (Even the child’s death a real moment out of his own pre-Bergman past.)  It all adds up to make Bergman’s small ‘c’ catholic sainthood a coded defense of Rossellini, knight-errant filmmaker, too pure for any system, craft or expertise.  Not merely disdainful of art, but contemptuous of it.  Too much the thinking man to need it; too important; too deep.  The film did no better with public or critics on release than other Bergman/Rossellini films, but it’s rep has grown over the years.  Less debatable is that Bergman is utterly fascinating to look at.  Different in nearly every shot: haggard, beautiful, gaunt, elegant, worn, magnificent.  Only Bette Davis in ANOTHER MAN’S POISON/’51 (looking perfectly terrible most of the time) can match it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That’s Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina as the enthusiastic mom.  Cabiria speaking with Brooklyn-Jewish inflection in the English-language version.  LE NOTTI DI YENTA?

DOUBLE-BILL:  Rossellini’s lack of technique helped rather than hurt his trio of Neo-Realism classics just afer the war.  It made them look more real.  He’s all thumbs on any sort of conventional film whether comic social commentary (DOV'È LA LIBERTÀ...?/’54); wartime drama of conscience (IL GENERALE DELLA ROVERE/’59) or sweeping period piece (VANINA VANINI/’61).  So how to explain the transcendent power, physical beauty and emotional resonance of Bergman and George Sanders in VIAGGIO IN ITALIA / JOURNEY TO ITALY/’54.  The exception that proves the rule?

EVIL UNDER THE SUN (1982)

Last and least of the lux Hercules Poiret murder mysteries produced by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, three films that rebooted the entire Agatha Christie line from B-pic fodder to Class A status, a position it maintains to this day.*  But if much talent returns from the first two pics (actors, designers, writers), the drop in quality from four star MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS/’74 to three star DEATH ON THE NILE/’78 only accelerates, and largely without the compensating factors of the second film.  (Grosses declined accordingly too, 50% drops from ORIENT to NILE to EVIL.)  Fortunately, one compensating factor that does remain is Peter Ustinov’s supremely comfortable Poiret, ratiocinating his way thru a tropical resort murder case, solving not one, but three apparently separate crimes in traditional third act denouement style.  All exceptionally well-handled in Guy Hamilton’s pin-pointing direction and Ustinov’s tour-de-force clarifying dramatic recitation.  If only the rest of the film were half as entertaining.  Perhaps if Anthony Shaffer’s screenplay kept closer to the book.  A glance at our paperback cover promises voodoo and blackmail, who knows what else went missing.  Instead, campy posh clothes, anyone-for-tennis manners and a Cole Porter derived score that distracts with tuneful familiarity, but doesn’t pay off dramatically.  Neither did the film, moving Ustinov’s Poiret to tv for four films with lesser stars & smaller budgets.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, the first two in the trio: ORIENT and NILE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/murder-on-orient-express-1974.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/death-on-nile.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *One more Kenneth Branagh Poiret could send it all plummeting back down.

A LETTER TO THREE WIVES (1949)

It took twenty Hollywood years (silent inter-titles & scripting @ Paramount; A-list producer @ M-G-M; five learn-on-the-job directing gigs over three years @ 20th/Fox) for Joseph L. Mankiewicz to find his signature erudite film voice as writer/director with this witty, amusing, believable and quietly revolutionary upper-middle-class suburban satire.  Taken from a serialized novel*, it begins with a letter to all three wives announcing that one of their husbands has run off with the town’s most bewitching divorcée . . . but which guy?  Three flashbacks fill us in.*  Was it Jeanne Crain, out of her social depth as wartime bride to rich local catch Jeffrey Lynn?  Successful radio dramatist Ann Southern, losing unambitious but happy High School teacher hubby Kirk Douglas?  Or that scheming wrong-side-of-the-tracks looker Linda Darnell who hooked self-made chain-store success Paul Douglas, himself on the hunt for a broad to class up his act.  (A guy with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves but no books.)  Mankiewicz brilliantly mixes & matches personal relationships with social commentary, grass-is-greener jealousy and romantic philosophy.  And he’s yet to stop thinking visually to plug his wordsmithery.  Well, mostly, just a bit on Mankiewicz mouthpiece character Kirk Douglas.  Douglas also yet to fall into bad habits, though no one here can touch the great Thelma Ritter as his part-time housemaid (wife Ann Southern paying the tab), or Paul Douglas, phenomenally assured in his film debut at 42 after his starmaking BORN YESTERDAY run on B’way.  Double Oscar’d this year (and next for ALL ABOUT EVE), Mankiewicz’s script much admired and copied.   Yet its situations, characters & dialogue still feel freshly caught, thoughtful, even touching by the end.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: *Mankiewicz’s use of ‘taking’ instrumental transitions in & out of the flashbacks now more dated than clever.  But the ‘vocal’ technique had recently been popularized in 78rpm kiddie record sets like ‘Rusty In Orchestraville.’  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_0goEIuYk

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Cosmopolitan’s serial had FIVE WIVES, initially adapted down to FOUR by LAURA novelist Vera Caspary, then further reduced from Mankiewicz’s script by producer/studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck to THREE.  Today, they’d probably expand to EIGHT for an interminable streaming mini-series.

I CRUDELI / THE HELLBENDERS (1967)

Hoping to restart the South's recently lost Civil War with a coffin’s-worth of expired U.S. cash, Joseph Cotten and his three mismatched sons are on a killing spree, along with a heavily veiled tart posing as the coffin’s ‘widow.’  After massacring a squad of soldiers in an ambush to grab the loot, they ride thru Indian territory and small towns, even stopping at a military fort on their way home.  This bargain-basement war set-up a bit of a stretch in another B-list Spaghetti Western from director Sergio Corbucci, as usual running hot and cold on ideas & execution.  Here, impressive large-scale action sequences and better than expected acting.  Especially once the first ‘widow’ is offed, replaced by card-sharp Norma Bengell.  Even a satisfying finish on this danger-at-every-turn journey.  Too bad it comes at the end of the second act.   After that clever twist, the third act all forced nihilism in spite of a couple of decent surprises.  Corbucci not helping his case with lax staging and misjudged camera angles on smaller-scaled fights, close gun play & in-your-face punches that miss by a mile in spite of the usual comically loud dubbed sound effects.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Corbucci on a corpse-less coffin kick at the time, with DJANGO/’66 using one loaded not with corrupt cash, but a gatling gun.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/01/django-1966.html

HUSTLE (1975)

Having proved himself the rare director able to coax the best from ‘Good’ Burt Reynolds (the surprisingly resourceful actor) and ‘Bad’ Burt Reynolds (showboating Good Ol’ Boy) in THE LONGEST YARD/’74, director Robert Aldrich re-upped for seconds on this downbeat police detective character piece.  Once would have been enough.  Here, a similar coarseness in action, character & execution sours without the earlier film’s comic distancing.   (Even worse when it flips sentimental.)  Meant to be tough/true-to-life, it’s just hard-to-buy/needlessly vindictive with Burt as a burnt out cop going thru the motions on girl’s probable suicide (drugs, sex, runaway kid).  Pushed to dig deeper by parents (Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan) and partner (Paul Winfield), or to wrap it up by boss Ernest Borgnine, Reynolds’ homelife is also imploding since he’s attached to high-class hooker Catherine Deneuve and she’s attached to possible suspect/crime syndicate lawyer Eddie Albert, a big money client with connections.  Stewing when Denueve brings work home (left over phone sex with customers from BELLE DE JOUR?), Burt finally erupts, forcing himself on her.  That does the trick (no pun intended), clears the air, opens their hearts and sets up a pair of violent endings to resolve all Burt’s crises.  Steve Shagan’s pretentious, not to say misogynist writing earns much of the blame, but Aldrich is also seriously off form.  Lurching preposterously to the Reactionary Right here, Aldrich, about to turn sixty at the time, then lurched just as far to the Liberal Left on his next, TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMING/’77.  Mid-life crisis?

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, Aldrich fore and aft.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/11/longest-yard-1974.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/twilights-last-gleaming-1977.html

GRÂCE À DIEU / BY THE GRACE OF GOD (2018)

In this distressingly familiar story of pedophile priests and the Catholic superiors who moved them from parish to parish as cover (offering victims, at best, sympathy without justice), French writer/director François Ozon tamps down on cinematic stylistics to lay out this priestly game of ‘musical chairs’ as simply as possible.  Structured via personal remembrances decades after the fact by four very different men (the same overriding goal but with very different agendas), the trigger comes when the most stable of victims, also the most traditional practicing Catholic in the group, sees the priest who molested him still working with children.  When his report, if not his identity, goes public, it leads to others coming forward and openly petitioning the Church to take responsibility; and for the police to act.  An ensemble piece that’s delivered one personal revelation at a time, the most troubling comes last, superbly realized by Swann Arlaud as the most abused and least likely to move on.  While this all sounds impossibly grim, Ozon finds the perfect tone of qualified, hard-won success in shared experience over depression.  And a parting of the ways in place of any victory lap.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For a Stateside view emphasizing the power of the press, SPOTLIGHT/’15.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/02/spotlight-2015.html

BERKELEY SQUARE (1933)

Leslie Howard breaks the time continuum in this romantic piece of tragic whimsy, producing & starring on B’way before bringing it to Hollywood four years later.  Based on an unfinished Henry James novel (really?), Howard is both engaged & disengaged from his present day fiancée, lost in a morbid obsession with an ancestor’s past, informed by the man’s diary and a George Romney 18th century portrait.  So consumed with the past, he doesn’t seem to be ‘quite there.’  And he’s not; having traveled back to his preferred era where he attempts to join in the London society of the late 1700s.  But he wrong foots it, giving himself away thru too much knowledge & enthusiasm.  The closer he gets to people, the more he frightens them away.  All but the younger sister of the woman the diary says he’s fated to marry.  With his dream past spoiled and present day life impossible, he sees no way out.  This should all be a bit ridiculous . . . and it is!  Yet the combination of Howard’s delicacy; the lack of fancy in Frank Lloyd’s typically square direction, between award-winning work on CAVALCADE/’33 and MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY/’35, his limitations help keep things relatively dry; and the connection Howard makes with unheralded co-star Heather Angel; give off a powerful, not to say unexpected, emotional glow in a film that ends without compromise.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Similar impossible romantic folly with Gary Cooper & Ann Harding in PETER IBBETSON/’35.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/peter-ibbetson-1935.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Like many early ‘30s FOX films, the ones made before merging with 20th CENTURY, this once high-profile pic (Howard picking up an Oscar nom.) has largely slipped out of circulation.

HANGAR 18 (1980)

Deliciously inadequate.  Sunn Classics Pictures, fondly remembered by Boomers for flooding the airwaves with cheesy ads for phony ‘documentaries,’ NOSTRADAMUS a favorite subject, branch out to UFO Space Opera in this bargain basement project.  An all-TV line-up go thru the motions and hope no one takes notice, but bright, flat lighting leaves them nowhere to hide on the film’s pre-fabricated drywall sets . . . even inside the space ship.  That’s where things start to go wrong when a botched satellite launch blows up, striking a UFO and decapitating a crewman.  (Separated torso & helmeted head left spinning in space.)  Now, the UFO has come to earth (heavy on the dry ice mist) where it’s being studied in Hangar 18, and the two surviving astronauts are on the hunt for it.  Meanwhile, up in D.C., the President’s political team tries to stop the news from leaking out.  That’s Robert Vaughan & Joseph Campanella as White House based Dirty Tricksters (Vaughan having recently won an Emmy playing a serious version of this in WASHINGTON: BEHIND CLOSED DOORS).  Gary Collins can pass playing one of the surviving astronauts, but cuddly comic James Hampton as his space partner is a stretch.  Then there's Darren McGavin as their NASA boss, earning top billing and getting the film's best special effect with a decidedly alarming toupée.  IMDb says $11 mill went into making this.   Where?

DOUBLE-BILL: More nefarious lies from NASA in CAPRICORN ONE/’77.  (not seen here)

FIVE MILES TO MIDNIGHT (1962)

Unlike other WWII-exiled directors who left Hollywood ways behind on returning to post-war Europe, Anatole Litvak kept one foot in both camps.  A commercially adept move on his previous film (AIMEZ-VOUS BRAHMS?/’61 -  Ingrid Bergman; Anthony Perkins; Yves Montaud), less so in this off-kilter suspenser, again with Perkins, now with Sophia Loren.  If anything, it’s the smoother production, but didn’t catch on and is now forgotten.  Perkins a stumbling block in both films; overdoing coltish passion in the first film, here unable to find a line on his intriguing bifurcated character, a psychopathic charmer juggling a series of lies to collect an insurance payout when he secretly survives a plane crash.*  But will wife Loren report him or aid & abet?  A tricky proposition as she’d just given notice on their troubled marriage.  Then again, maybe this tainted windfall is a perfect ending to an imperfect union.  Or would be if only Perkins hadn’t such an unstable personality; smart enough to implicate Sophia in all his lies.  You’re never sure where you stand in this one, which is good.  But Litvak can’t find the right tone to play it in, which is not so good.  Still, worth the look, with ‘shifting-sands’ alliances between the couple, their inconsistent friends, and Gig Young as a new admirer who can’t figure this woman out.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Charles Boyer, back in his GASLIGHT/’44 heyday, would have known just how to play this guy.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html

DOLITTLE (2020)

A $200 million vanity project.  But whose vanity?  Miscast star Robert Downey Jr., adding the vocal cadences of Anthony Hopkins to latter-day Johnny Depp mannerisms as the country vet who talks to the animals?*  Is it Downey’s producer wife?  It wasn’t co-writer/director Stephen Gaghan.  He may have the face of a family-friendly pet and a past that leans toward self-important overinflated jollities like SYRIANA/’05 and TRAFFIC/’00, but he’s only a hired hand.  Maybe it was the same group of Universal studio execs who Green Lit the equally horrid Live-Action Dr. Seuss reboots and thought Downey, after jump-starting the MARVEL film boom in IRON MAN over a decade ago, might do it again.  As to development, first drop any resemblance to the gentle charm of the old Hugh Lofting novels, then make all the animals CGI pets so any surprise or wonder that they can speak the King's English will be lost.  Not forgetting to add in one magic dragon with tummy ache.  (Tie-in toys, don’tcha know.)  Sprinkle liberally with reaction shots from two tagalong tweens (one upper/one lower class) to goose kiddie demographics.  And you thought the good doctor, after a bust ‘60s musical and two flatulent modernizations from Eddie Murphy, couldn’t do any worse.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While the animals naturally have to be dubbed (cue the All-Star vocal cast), why dub Downey?  He sure sounds entirely post-synched.  A last minute re-loop to nail the accent?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The old 1967 musical is an odd artifact from a perilous moment in movie studio history back when they were desperate to find another SOUND OF MUSIC cash cow.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/doctor-dolittle-1967.html

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII (1933)

An enormous success on release, it put producer/director Alexander Korda, Charles Laughton & British film production on the map.  (First foreign film to breach the Oscars®.)  The trick of the thing swaps out stuffy, dignified Royals to lift the curtain on Court foibles.  Quite racy in Pre-Code fashion; and with five of Henry’s six wives, plenty of opportunity for suggestive comic touches.  (Korda picking up on Ernst Lubitsch’s intimate peeks at the titled with their guard down back in the 1920s.*)  The film remains famous for Laughton’s robust King, the Holbein portrait brought to life with his OTT style dovetailing with Henry’s OTT personality.  Made on a dime, but with sophisticated design from Vincent Korda and built-in structure from New Wives showing up every other reel.  And it doesn’t hurt that the best scenes come in the second half when Laughton’s real wife, Elsa Lancaster as Anne of Cleves screws the King on the Royal bed in a game of cards before the film takes a startlingly strong, unexpectedly serious turn to tragedy on the thwarted romance of Katherine Howard & Thomas Culpepper (Robert Donat), the King’s rare friend.  The change in tone beautifully accomplished in spite of Korda, a great producer who as occasional director remained a great producer.*

DOUBLE-BLL/LINK:  *Lubitsch found his filmmaking voice in 1920 with the same King and Wife #2 in ANNE BOLEYN/DECEPTION.   OR:  *Korda’s final shot at directing, AN IDEAL HUSBAND/’48, by far his best in that position. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/12/anna-boleyn-1920.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/an-ideal-husband-1947.html

SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS (2021)

When you hear, "I don’t usually like ‘fill-in-the-blank,’ but this was good."  Be it sushi, jazz, modern architecture, whatever; nod, and avoid the recommendation.  So, take this with a grain of salt: SHANG-CHI is the most enjoyable MARVEL sourced comic-book film adaptation in years.  It even skips on plugging the rest of the MARVEL product line!  (Or does till the end credits.)  Starting with double ancient prologues to lay out its origin story*, it then brings in a modern day platform for our hero & romantic sidekick (Simu Liu; Awkwafina) as a pair of car-parking slackers.  (Awkwafina an especial delight, like one of those wised-up characters Jean Arthur played for Frank Capra in the ‘30s.  Liu just fun to look at; a Super-Hero made from mismatched body parts: legs, head & torso.)  These two soon whisked into a fantastic chase for the Ten Rings worn by Tony Leung, Liu’s powerful pop, and for the green pendants stolen from Liu and his estranged sister who now runs a sort of International Fight Club before joining the mission to save their Aunt’s Magic Forest Paradise.  Don’t worry, it’s easy to follow under Destin Daniel Cretton story-focused direction, puling back on the CGI action when he can without pissing off the fanboys.*  Mostly in Act Two, where he substitutes Ben Kingsley as comic relief just when needed as a shanghied Shakespearean with Ringo Starr’s Liverpudlian accent.  Hilarious!  Naturally, MARVEL threaten with a sequel, but we know how that’ll turn out.  Take one more piece of advice and miss it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Not that Cretton skimps on the CGI action finale; very MOTHRA Meets GODZILLA.   Unlike the rest of the film which is relentlessly entertaining, this is just relentless.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Though out of fashion in modern psychiatric circles, what a Freudian Family Drama we have here!  Sacrificing Mom; revenge-seeking Dad; Mom-fixated son; Dad-fixating daughter; Flying Phallic Monster.  Yikes!

THE MALTA STORY (1953)

With a fact-based WWII story shaped by Thorold Dickinson, director of a superb QUEEN OF SPADES/’49, and helmed by Brian Desmond Hurst of the best of all CHRISTMAS CAROL films (1951), two under-the-radar British talents give this modest wartime actioner more than modest effect.  Alec Guinness makes a pleasingly unlikely pilot hero trying for Cairo in 1942 when he’s waylaid in Malta, the small island nation playing an outsized role as an irritant to German & Italian war efforts in North Africa.  Holding on by a thread thru bombing runs and  siege, Jack Hawkins (in regulation shorts, of course) commands the British forces  on the island who can only wait for supplies & fighter planes to get thru, advised on the situation largely from photo pilot flights like the ones Guinness carries out, finding disturbing train conveys when he disobeys instructions.  A couple of structural problems prove tougher to overcome.  One involves the brother of a local girl Guinness falls for (he’s spying, a tangent storyline that threatens to take over the film); another leaves Guinness literally out of the picture for two of the last three reels.  Even in an ensemble piece, this feels misjudged.  (An archeologist back in England, no doubt Guinness is having a fine time investigating Maltese artifacts.  Maybe digging up a Maltese Falcon!  But it does give the last act a stop/start feel.)  But on its own terms, this is generally well handled (good explosive effects & smoothly inter-cut docu-footage), and doesn’t push too hard.   Even when Guinness’s girl is shown working one of those ‘Map Boards,’ moving around the little token representing her man in the air.  As WWII war films go, this one’s . . . well, nice.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Best WWII Map Board can be found in SINK THE BISMARCK!/’60.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/sink-bismarck-1960.html

THE WRONG MAN (1956)

A master of film and publicity, one self-defining Alfred Hitchcock quote says, ‘Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake.‘  A motto ignored in this emotionally involving fact-based story which puts a Neo-Realism spin on a favorite subject: The innocent man charged with a crime he didn’t commit.  A core idea given outlier treatment, the film’s somber tone & near-documentary elements (a close look reveals plenty of Hitchcockian stylistics) are easy to appreciate now, but unsettled audiences & critics at the time.  Now, what’s unsettling are the lack of rights afforded the accused; it’s a defacto plea for Miranda Rights!  (A Line-Up with witnesses who have just seen the suspect at their workplace particularly egregious.)  Henry Fonda is quietly superb as the nightclub musician picked up for a series of local robberies thru circumstantial evidence and numerous eye-witness misidentifications, the real guilty man not only a doppelgänger for Fonda, but also for the lead in Vittorio De Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES.  (A visual touchstone Hitchcock undoubtedly had in mind, along with the Catholic iconography repeatedly used here.*)  Vera Miles also very good as the wife falling slowly into serious mental depression; and there’s a truly nice turn from Anthony Quayle as a lawyer taking on a case outside of his field of expertise.  Maxwell Anderson’s screenplay, sticking closely to the facts, makes for some abrupt, even awkward moments, but they mostly ring true.  One odd character quirk is that Fonda almost never removes his overcoat, even inside.  Fonda’s own behavioral touch?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Look for an impressively real shot of an enormous freight ship in the background when Fonda & Miles are looking for someone to vouch for Fonda.  (At the 107" mark.)  It shows just how the famously misjudged waterfront matte effect shot in MARNIE/’64 might have worked without getting a ‘bad’ laugh.  ALSO: If you watch on DVD, an excellent EXTRA with the usual suspects (Peter Bogdanovich; Richard Schickel), but also on set insight on Hitchcock the man & his method from art director Paul Sylbert.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: The groundbreaking interview book HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT is at its best discussing THE WRONG MAN, with a rare disagreement between François Truffaut, who feels that a less talented man might have been a better fit for this grounded story, and Hitch left to defend a film he has decidedly mixed feelings about.  (Had Truffaut seen the film since its original release?)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Complete your Hitchcock Catholic Guilt/Prayer/Redemption trilogy with two more underrated titles; I CONFESS/’53 and FAMILY PLOT/’76. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/03/i-confess-1953.html

GOOD TIME (2017)

Having bailed multiple times on UNCUT GEMS/’20 (Adam Sandler allergy*), we swing to the previous Josh & Benny Safdie Brothers’ feature.  Wound tight as a drum, it’s a tale of two brothers (who’da thunk?); low-life Queens boys who twist their way thru the unpredictable consequences of a bank robbery gone predictably wrong.  Robert Pattinson, the smart, feral whippet, leads brother Benny Safdie, large, lumpen, slow thinking in a sort of Hip-Hop George & Lenny inner-city picaresque OF MICE AND MEN.  Or does until a clever pivot midway thru pulls the rug out from under us and resets all the relationships.  For a while, the robbery, the prison scenes & hospital escape are enough to distract from plausibility issues, but the boxes within boxes within boxers structure nests the story beats in a form that drains comic suspense.  Did the Safdie boys ever stick their heads out the window growing up and look around, or spend all their time mainlining ‘80s DVDs from Scorsese, Demme & Spike Lee, with Guy Ritchie coming in with the ‘90s?  Watchable, but best turn off the left side of your brain.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Sidney Lumet’s last film, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD/’07, brings a different level to this kind of thing.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/08/before-devil-knows-youre-dead-2007.html  OR: To get back to the Safdie sources, Jonathan Demme’s SOMETHING WILD/’86, made before he turned earnest, and Martin Scorsese’s hopelessly square try at Downtown Hip in AFTER HOURS/’85.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Allergic reaction to Adam Sandler no metaphor; actual hives.  Same for Jennifer Jason Leigh who frighteningly shows up here!  Just not enough screen time to develop hives.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

Everyone’s at their worst in the opening scenes of this fictionalized version of the famous 1920s Monkey Trial, where liberal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow squared off against populist politician/religious fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan on the right to teach Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.  And as ‘everybody’ includes issue-conscious producer/director Stanley Kramer, ‘worst’ is pretty bad indeed.  Here, on airless small-town Main Street studio lot sets, he paints the mood by endlessly repeating ‘Give Me That Old Time Religion,’ sung as a dirge by Leslie Uggams while locals join in, not a phony strand of hair out of place, as character setting lines like ‘Don’t worry, I may be rancid butter, but I’m on your side of the bread’ rain down upon us.  (What does that even mean?  Is it the Kramer Family Motto?)  What a relief to get inside the courtroom, where, in spite of simplification to dumb-down issues for Junior High School Civics class consumption*, a certain level of B’way expertise from playwrights Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee rescue us.  Spencer Tracy & Fredric March showboat to beat the band as the Darrow & Bryan substitutes.  If only someone had thought of swapping roles to give Bryan a fighting chance at our sympathy.  (George C. Scott one of many to have played both.)  The sum effect leaving us without a question in sight.  And thru some alchemy all his own, Kramer managing to find the villain of the piece in soulless cultural pundit/reporter H. L. Mencken, the man who looked at America and saw the ‘booboisie,’ dubbed this ‘the Monkey Trial,’ and said, ‘As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.’  Villain or prophet?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The real story so much more involving, with the teacher in on the plan to test the restrictive state law, and social media of the era highjacking the Theory of Evolution into ‘Social Darwinism,’ pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo that was the Northern Racism of the day.

SUMMER OF SOUL (2021)

Acclaimed reclamation of six Harlem park concerts from the summer of 1969 both legendary and forgotten.  Put together 50+ years late by Questlove, working from hundreds of hours of warehoused footage, blanket praise for the film only seems justified in the last third when the acts, as if in response to the concurrent first man landing on the moon, a nearly meaningless event to many in the audience, take a decided political turn.  Not that what comes before is without interest, especially some Gospel material including a priceless scene where a tired Mahalia Jackson lets someone take a first chorus, only to completely annihilate the over-parted singer on the second.  On a sour note, current commentary from surviving performers, audience members & critics show a typical condescending attitude toward MOTOWN.  (Like a French intellectual's inbred disdain at merely having to pronounce bourgeoisie.)  Questlove’s selections also suspect.  Thirty seconds of the great Moms Mabley?  Surprisingly, a lot of the acts wouldn’t be off limits on tv variety shows of the day.  Maybe on a week Diana Ross hosted THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE.  (True story: when Bob Hope got to shoot the very first US tv special from Mainland China after the Richard Nixon visit, Hope’s idea for an appropriate use of The Great Wall had The Fifth Dimension lip-synch ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’ up there.)  And Questlove’s newly shot interviews?  Not much different or deeper than class reunion gush.  The final third can’t come soon enough!  Starting with a career advancing/coming-of-age set from Stevie Wonder; a shockingly good Sly and the Family Stone; and finally Nina Simone in fierce mode.  Inflammatory then and now, and all the more interesting for it.  Perhaps a different cut of the material would prove revelatory.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: When the sponsors and film makers back in ‘69 couldn’t interest anyone in the material, they tried pushing it as a Black Woodstock (WOODSTOCK all the rage just then) and still found no takers.  WOODSTOCK, released in a 3-hr cut in 1970, had the dramatic advantage of being an on-site catastrophe.  No such drama here, just a wildly enthusiastic audience.  OR:  Another reclamation from the period, the all Gospel Aretha Franklin concert AMAZING GRACE//’18.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/amazing-grace-1972-2018.html