WERK OHNE AUTOR / NEVER LOOK AWAY (2018)

Twelve years after a dream debut in THE LIVES OF OTHERS/’06, eight after the commercial-oriented embarrassment of THE TOURIST/’10, writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s third film is a slow-burn 3-hr triumph covering three tumultuous German decades (mid-30s to mid-60s).  Structured like a 19th Century novel (‘rhymed’ plot strategies, coincidences & fateful meetings), Donnersmarck builds classic Bildsungsroman in pursuit of one of the least cinematographic of ideas: the growth of personal artistic impulse; and makes a thrilling thing of it.  Opening at the Nazi-proscribed ‘Degenerate’ Art exhibit in Munich, an indelible impression for a young boy taken by his beloved, if unstable aunt.  Falling deeply into depression & possible schizophrenia, she’s considered unfit for proper Aryan procreation, a case for sterilization or extermination.  Donnersmarck, constantly moving his story ahead in leaps of five years or so, covers the destruction of the boy’s family and the young man’s immersion into a post-war East German art world dominated by ‘Soviet Realism,’ an unchallenging style easily mastered by this preternaturally gifted draftsman, it proves yet a different sort of trap.  One eased by his love-at-first-sight meeting with a woman who not only reminds him of his aunt, but whose father turns out to be the doctor, a gynecologist of great reputation, who signed the orders dooming her.  This highly civilized man will just as calmly/methodically operate on his own daughter to have his way in her life.  And if old-fashioned melodramas once announced, ‘And then came the storm;’ 20th Century Germany always has ‘And then the Berlin Wall went up.’  Here, narrowly getting out before border crossings are forbidden, the search for an artistic identity continues in the free-spirited West, still shadowed by the destructive influence of the wife’s parents.  With patterned novelistic rhythms & plot mechanics all carefully worked out to carry the ideas forward, and a surprising level of sharp comic relief, it's phenomenally well shot by the great Caleb Deschanel (a worthy gig for a change), and superbly cast.  (Lots of good sex, too!  Our leads with perfect/perfectly matched asses.)  If only Donnersmarck can stay away from Hollywood temptation his fourth film should be something to look forward to.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned, his remarkable debut on East Germany’s ‘Stasi’ department, THE LIVES OF OTHERS.                    OR:  For the curious, THE TOURIST.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/12/tourist-2010.html

HERO'S ISLAND (1962)

Did James Mason need quick cash in 1962?*  How else explain a year of LOLITA for Stanley Kubrick*; four tv gigs (including an ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR); a comic nonentity (TIARA TAHITI); an uncredited bit in ESCAPE FROM ZAHRAIN; and this unclassifiable oddity.  Co-produced with self-described ‘writer-dramatist’ Leslie Stevens, who cast talent-challenged wife Kate Manx as leading lady, the film might be one of the crappy piratical swashbucklers Mason is briefly seen filming in the 1954 version of A STAR IS BORN, but with immeasurably worse production values . . . and Steven’s DIY/Ed Wood filmmaking chops.  Yet pro support from Neville Brand, Rip Torn, Harry Dean Stanton & Warren Oates.; top-tier composer Dominic Frontiere; even Ted McCord (soon to wrap his career with THE SOUND OF MUSIC) lensing.  A tall tale of 17th century adventure for a clan of recently freed indentured servants (and kids) hoping for a fresh start on a deserted island paradise . . . only it’s not so deserted.  A scurvy gang of cutthroats got there first, and only James Mason, a mysterious stranger washed ashore, seems ready to fight.  And why not, he’s a battle-tested pirate on the run from a death sentence.  There’s a certain fascination to filmmaking this confidently inept.  What keeps a Leslie Stevens going?  Whatever it was, not enough for wife Manx who committed suicide at 34 soon after they divorced.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Maybe so.  Divorce from Pamela Mason (the two quite the famous Hollywood couple) finalized in ‘64.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Mason an outstanding Humbert Humbert in LOLITA.  OR: See Mason use a deserted island to set up a libel suit in the overly genteel comedy A TOUCH OF LARCENY/’60.  (Look for an outstandingly funny bit when he cries out for help.)

THE MOUNTAIN (1956)

At a paunchy 56, Spencer Tracy is a tough sell as either a skilled mountaineer or as the big brother of 26 yr-old Robert Wagner in this handsome, but empty Edward Dmytryk film. A plane crash in the Alps, near the brothers’ village, has brought outsiders to town: state officials, mail inspectors, newsman, insurance agents. But when the sanctioned rescue party fails to reach the crash site, Wagner presses his retired brother to help him make the dangerous climb for plunder. Tracy reluctantly goes along as protector & guide, but when they find a survivor among the wreckage, their mission has to change . . . or does it? Edward Dmytryk, trying for the calm authority of Fred Zinnemann or William Wyler, shows effective patience during the climbing sequences, but Ranald MacDougall’s script paints the contrasting brothers with too broad a brush. Tracy’s good/noble peasant vs Wagner’s venal/callow youth. How much stronger the drama would play if we could at least partially sympathize with the young man’s desperation to get away from cows, sheep & simple souls. But only the superb cinematography of Franz Planer rises to the dramatic level Dmytryk is aiming at. And what a show Planer makes of it! Shooting on location in the enviable VistaVision format, there’s so much depth & clarity to the images, even the special effects & process shots go far above the norm. No small consideration when you’ve got to fake every mountain climbing scene for the physically restricted Tracy.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Okay, how ‘bout: HEAR THIS, NOT THAT? Get a real taste of mountain air with Richard Strauss’s ultra-humongous AN ALPINE SYMPHONY/ EINE ALPENSINFONIE. What version? Well, Christian Thielemann conducting the Vienna Philharmonic on DG is a solid modern digital choice.

THE HELEN MORGAN STORY (1957)

‘Twenties torch singer Helen Morgan finds voice, stardom and (like so many others of her ilk) misery with a mobster in this slick, heavily fictionalized bio-pic. On its surface, smartly put together, director Michael Curtiz almost back to form after losing a couple of steps in early WideScreen efforts, and consistently stunning work from lighting cameraman Ted McCord, but Ann Blyth is all sharp angles & squared jaw, an unlikely Helen Morgan going thru standard dramatic struggles with men & alcohol. Paul Newman the mob guy she can’t shake; Richard Carlson the classy nice guy who’s married; Prohibition-Era booze the easy crutch. Even on its own terms, nothing convinces. Period details are way off and the musical side of things, with Gogi Grant handling the Morgan vocals, sounding like cast-offs from Judy Garland’s A STAR IS BORN. (The real Morgan had a distinctively warm, tangy voice, unexpectedly high-flying, with unique vowels & overtones to die for.*) Top with a particularly bathetic ending and Paul Newman consistently mispronouncing Florenz Ziegfeld as Florenz Ziegfield and you’ve got one big missed opportunity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *From 1936 and the only SHOW BOAT that matters, just nine years after Morgan opened in it. The film has been restored for DVD, but here’s a taste of four legends sharing the screen in CAN’T HELP LOVIN’ DAT MAN - Morgan; Irene Dunne, who toured the show back in ‘29; Paul Robeson, who played it in England; and Hattie McDaniel, who didn’t, but should have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPR3X9AjhaU

BAD FOR EACH OTHER (1953)

The heightened-emotion acting so common in ‘50s melodrama, on the razor’s edge between revelatory honesty & neurasthenic hysteria, can all too easily ‘set off’ the popcorn munching yokel in the eighth row, enough to make home viewing a preferable option.* But it'd be hard to blame the guy here, as director Irving Rapper sets the knob to 11 right from the start, leaving him nowhere to go but the faintly ludicrous . . . and not so faintly. Charlton Heston, huffing & puffing at friend & foe, home in 'Coalville’ after ten years & two wars as a military doc, finds himself being vamped by spoiled, rich gal Lizabeth Scott who introduces him to all the right people from the right side of town. Soon, our principled surgeon is pushing placebos on wealthy nabobs while letting old army acquaintance Arthur Franz do real doctoring for chump change at Coalville’s workers’ clinic. If only Heston would close his pocketbook and open his eyes to pretty nurse Dianne Foster, live up to her ideals and his potential. Why, it’d take an explosion in a coal mine to reboot Chuck from Hypo Hypocrisy to Hippocratic Oath. Hmm. Little conviction or effort on this one, with Scott & Rapper on the way down, and Heston on the way up, all wondering how they wound up making a glorified B-pic @ Columbia. And master cinematographer Franz Planer wondering how he jumped from revolutionizing romantic comedy with on-location Neo-Realism shooting techniques in William Wyler’s ROMAN HOLIDAY a couple of months back, to airless, underdressed sets at Columbia Pictures and the eternal struggle of lighting Lizabeth Scott so she doesn’t look like she just got worked over.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Not only in bad films, either. Masterpieces from the likes of Minnelli, Sirk & Nick Ray are loaded with character/plot epiphanies that can make Mystery Science Theater Wannabees unload, destroying the mood for everyone. Yet there’s nothing quite like seeing a mint print of SOME CAME RUNNING/’58, WRITTEN ON THE WIND/’56 or BIGGER THAN LIFE/’56 on a huge screen with a sympathetic audience in a packed auditorium.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: With about 80% of the plot lifted (if reordered) from A.J. Cronin/King Vidor’s THE CITADEL/’38, might as well try that flawed, but moving original.

KIMI TO WAKARETE / APART FROM YOU (1933)

Small, but beautifully observed late-silent from Mikio Naruse, about a Geisha mom who’s aging out of clients at work, and worried about a High Schooler son at home who’s falling in with a bad crowd of delinquent youths. In fact, he’s been skipping class for weeks, partly thru a lack of direction and partly from the shame of being a single-parent son of a ‘Geisha-Slut.’ Worse, he’s got a bit of a crush on his mom’s best friend at work, a younger Geisha who finds her job degrading, but keeps at it as the sole earner for her parents & siblings. The film’s short running time doesn’t keep it from working up considerable interest, especially during a bittersweet sequence that takes the son & the young Geisha to her seaside hometown, where hope curdles with the tide; and in simply letting us see the mix of traditional & modern (read: Western) cultures clashing on every street corner & in the background of every location shot. Though a lack of tidy resolutions and an emphasis on character over plot, may limit the film’s appeal, you needn’t be a Naruse completest to find it unexpectedly moving.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Naruse, already a seasoned master after three years & a score of films, does have an Achilles heel in his technical armor: overusing fast dolly shots to Push-In to Close-Ups for all sorts of dramatic emphasis. In the ‘60s & ‘70s, he’d have gone Zoom Crazy! Too bad he didn’t toss one at the gang members with their leather jackets & slouch caps. Too cool, Daddy-O, too cool.

INSIDE OUT (2015)

Last year’s Pixar hit looks like a ‘lock’ for all the major feature animation awards; deservedly so. A clever anthropomorphized brain scan of the emotional ‘humours’ warring inside the head of 12-yr-old girl just uprooted from her happy Minnesota life when Dad moves the family to San Francisco, it’s sweetly comic, touching & wildly imaginative. Perhaps a bit relentlessly so. You can all but feel the weekend pressure to come up with something awesomely creative for writer/director Pete Docter at the Monday morning staff meeting. (That visual degradation sequence earned someone major bonus points.)  Still, very entertaining stuff even when it could use a few more belly laughs. (The best gag in the pic shows over the end credits with a peek inside a kitty cat head.) There’s a great vocal cast handling each emotion (Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, the superbly self-sacrificing Richard Kind). Though Amy Poehler, with the toughest assignment carrying the pic as Ms. Goody-Two-Shoes ‘Joy,’ might have leaned less toward Ellen DeGeneres panicky accommodation and more in the direction of Doris Day sunshine. (Also on this disc, LAVA, a mating fable about a couple of animated serenading volcanoes, and the strangest idea for a short in Pixar history.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Woody Allen did something of a live-action INSIDE OUT, to side-splitting effect, in the last chapter of his hit-and-miss adaptation of EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX/’72. Hardly Family Friendly in the normal sense (it’s about getting an erection), high school kids should watch when the parental units aren’t around.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: We’ve mentioned this before, but horror aficionados hear the words Inside/Out and think of radio’s all-time creep-out from a LIGHTS OUT episode: THE DARK. The chilling tale of a haunted house where all the victims are turned . . . INSIDE OUT. Shut off the lights; hit the PLAY button and hold on till the final gruesome sound effect to hear a man turned inside out! Yikes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?

SMART WOMAN (1931)

Early Talkie from Gregory La Cava runs the old story of a straying husband who mends his ways when led to believe the wife is enjoying a fling of her own. Tepid stuff, but worth a look to see La Cava abruptly figuring out how to accommodate sound. While most of the film follows the dialogue like a dog trolling for a treat, signs of cinema keep popping up. Note how spurned wife Mary Astor (sharp & charming) greets faux love interest John Halliday in overhead shots, with camera movement, composition in depth and a grand staircase giving rhythm & pace to vapid drawing room dramatics. Real filmmaking!; back from the dead zone of Early Talkie technical tyranny. (And giving a brief glimpse at the Gregory La Cava of MY MAN GODFREY/’36 & STAGE DOOR/’37.) It’s also a rare chance to see Robert Ames, a might-have-been star who drank himself to death by the end of the year at only 42. In a lousy part, love-blind hubby falling for blonde Golddigger while Astor pines, he’s expert at the task. No wonder he made 20 pics in less than three years. The film’s an antique, of mostly historic/technical interest, but La Cava & Astor fans should dig in.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The big other might-have-been star from 1931 was Robert Williams, co-star with Loretta Young & Jean Harlow in Frank Capra’s PLATINUM BLONDE/’31. Dead from appendicitis that year at 37. On screen, he was a bit like Lee Tracy who was a might-have-been star who didn’t die, but peed his career away. Literally. On a drunk during the filming of VIVA VILLA/’34 he pissed over his hotel balcony and on to some Mexican Cadets marching below.

DOUBLE-BILL: Three from this film, Ames, Astor & Edward Everett Horton co-star with Ann Harding in an excellent, if stagebound, version of HOLIDAY/’30, the great Philip Barry play best known from George Cukor’s ‘38 beauty with Kate Hepburn, Cary Grant & a repeating Horton. Yet, the earlier film is unexpectedly fine, and Mary Astor, a far stronger sisterly rival than Doris Nolan was in the redo, serves the drama as revelation.

HILDA CRANE (1956)

Misfiring on all cylinders, you can just make out the tawdry melodrama writer/helmer Philip Dunne must have been aiming at. Without much in the way of style or social commentary, he’s no threat to masters of the form like Douglas Sirk   . . . or even Mark Robson. Jean Simmons is tight, overwrought & unaccountably loud as a divorcée² who reluctantly goes home to the same insular university town she left years ago, only to find she's pursued by the same two guys she left behind: caddish professor Jean-Pierre Aumont and dull, successful contractor Guy Madison. Can an independent-minded woman find happiness with either type? Dunne probably never should have tried building this on Samson Raphaelson’s flop play, with one controlling bitch mother (Madison's); one chilly, unloving bitch mom (Simmons’); and enough Freudian guilt to warp each one’s only child. There’s little to do but hang around and wait for dramatic inspiration to spark between inadvertent giggles. Then, halfway along, a lethal plot turn kickstarts a series of crises and eventual resolution hardly worth the trouble . . . or inadvertent giggles.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Out the same year, Douglas Sirk’s great WRITTEN ON THE WIND/’56.

HELL BOUND (1956)

John Russell, at 36 his face aging to look like a handsome lizard, has a plan to smuggle drugs off ships right under the nose of customs inspectors.  To do it, he’ll need three accomplices starting with a faked rescue at sea to plant a ‘key’ man onboard; a real doctor to risk a dangerous insulin overdose; and a fake nurse to carry ‘the stuff’ off the boat.  Russell’s even made a little film of the plan to show his 'investor' how it can work.  But just like UNFAITHFULLY YOURS/’48 and GAMBIT/’66, showing the best made plans on screen/in action doesn't guarantee it will play out as written.  A dandy setup for a caper, and twenty years ago any studio in town could have done a bang up job of it.  But building a little indie from scratch in ‘50s Hollywood means some things will work and some things won’t.   Best is cinematographer Carl Guthrie, putting out pitch black locations and camouflaging bare bones interior sets.  Nearly as good is Russell, unapologetically vicious as he beats his team into submission.  On the other hand, the script has him choose ridiculous partners in crime: drug addict ‘key’ man to break down under stress; a diabetic whose blood sugar has recently stabilized and now can’t take any insulin at all; and a sentimental nurse who falls for the emergency medic (Stuart Whitman) she’s using as unwitting patsy.  (That’s June Blair, a shockingly bad actress in a rare feature film made after she was a Playboy model and before she became Ozzie & Harriet daughter-in-law Mrs. Dave Nelson.)  Still, a neat little watch that ends at a classic L.A. graveyard of decommissioned trolley cars stacked one atop the other.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Shot full frame, but meant to be cropped by the projectionist to about 1.78 - 1.  The 16x9 feature will distort the image, but you can bump up your picture size to get there.  

DOUBLE-BILL: See Hollywood pros take this construction and run with it in GAMBIT/’66.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/gambit-1966.html

KILL A DRAGON (1967)

Tacky low-budget SEVEN SAMURAI/MAGNIFICENT SEVEN rip-off (THE PASSABLY ENGAGING FOUR?), has Jack Palance & Aldo Ray (+ two) hired to defend a Chinese coastal town with a fortune in shipwrecked nitroglycerine from shady salvage operator Fernando Lamas and his gang of disposable bad guys.  Yet the three leads, all in underwater career mode (Palance alone to buoy back up), have fun with this damp squib made for quick sale to international markets under busy second-unit director Michael D. Moore, briefly stepping into the top spot and taking advantage of Hong Kong locations in backstreet inner-city chases and some more than respectable action set pieces.  Even generating real suspense with a townie ‘bucket-brigade’ to move those boxes of ultra-explosive nitro.  (Moore’s handful of directing gigs started the year before with, of all things, an ELVIS pic: PARADISE, HAWAIIAN STYLE/’66.  But after this, back to second-unit for the likes of Spielberg, Pollack, Huston, etc.)  Interest lags in the third act when an honor-among-thieves relationship between Palance & Lamas blurs the edges, but you’ve seen worse Saturday matinee fare.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Aldo Ray must be the only scratchy-voice actor whose voice grew less scratchy as he got older.  He looks a wreck (beet red), but retains the same inexplicable charm.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: A decent music score could have helped.  But it’d be a shame to lose the nutty title song, sung over the credits by a small group who keep falling off pitch.

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959)

Ludicrous and ludicrously popular (La Liz and her spill-out one-piece bathing suit snagging the year’s fourth highest gross - see poster), Tennessee Williams’ symbolically inclined one-act poetic-horror was expanded by Gore Vidal into something concrete and obvious for producer Sam Spiegel & director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.*  Elizabeth Taylor, vocally over-parted in a role that’s mostly monologues, is scheduled for a needless lobotomy by rich, eccentric Aunt Katharine Hepburn, a deluded grand dame who’ll do anything to silence her from talking about the death of Sebastian, the artistic son who scouted sexual adventure using Taylor as bait once Hepburn aged out of the role.  Poor Montgomery Clift seems hopelessly dense as the operating surgeon/psychiatrist who can’t immediately see that it’s Hepburn who’s off her rich rocker and Liz who’s quite appropriately high-strung after playing unwitting catalyst to a horrific murder . . . and worse.  Yikes!  Mankiewicz getting away with his troubled cast (Clift in bad mental & physical shape; Hepburn going her own way - she famously spat at Mank and producer Spiegel after wrap; Taylor helped with her big climatic monologue on the death of Sebastian thru a dream-like fantasia of ill-clothed homoerotic bathers menacingly swarming the beach like some Pier Paolo Pasolini wet dream*) accepted the bad reviews and came out with his commercial rep reinvigorated.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Williams claimed to have thrown up after seeing the film, calling out ‘unfortunate concessions to realism that Hollywood is too often afraid to discard.  And so a short morality play in lyrical style, was turned into a sensationally successful film that the public thinks was a literal study of such things as cannibalism, madness, and sexual deviation.’  While Mank called the one-act ‘a badly constructed play based on the most elementary Freudian psychology and one anecdote.’

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Lobotomy nothing abstract to Tennessee Williams whose sister, the model for Laura Wingfield in THE GLASS MENAGERIE, never fully recovered from one.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Follow up the idea in Pasolini’s best film, his directing debut ACCATTONE/’61 which shows a technical facility largely at odds with later work.  (Credit 20-yr-old second-unit director Bernardo Bertolucci?)

MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD (1935)

First task when adapting Charles Dickens to film: What to cut?  Unless it’s Dickens’ uncompleted last novel.  Then it’s: What to add?  But the missing second half hasn’t stopped a score of film & tv adaptations, including this 1935 version, faithful to Dickens as far as he got, before a quick wrap in spite of the twenty installments still unwritten when Dickens died.  Scripter John L. Balderston (MUMMY; GASLIGHT; FRANKENSTEIN) gets a lot in, and finds reasonable closure in a short-cut resolution, but execution lets it down.  Director Stuart Walker, fresh from an underachieving GREAT EXPECTATIONS/’34, never finds the story’s thru line.  Good things jostle with bad, and the film bumps along as opium-addicted choirmaster Claude Rains finds he's unable to handle suppressed passions just as his nephew’s long-time fiancée sees her affections drifting toward a new stranger in town from Ceylon.  That’s Douglass Montgomery, goony of voice, dusky of face as the hot-headed interloper; blandly smiling David Manners as the abiding putative bridegroom; and lovely young Heather Angel (such a Dickensian name!) as the girl everyone wants to take home.  If only the filmmaking lived up to Albert S. D'Agostino‘s atmospheric sets this might have been canonical filmed Dickens.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Rains’ voice double on Handel’s ‘Where’er you walk?’ may not be a good vocal match, but the anonymous fellow sure has a heckuva voice.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  You can barely spot the shady ‘Ceylon’ makeup on Montgomery.  Is he darker in the novel?  Would the Production Code have let this romance continue had he been?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Walker probably makes his best showing on THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK/’33.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-eagle-and-hawk-1933.html

SANDOKAN THE GREAT (1963)

Dropping peplum trappings of toga, sword & sandal, body-building HERCULES star Steve Reeves donned a burnoose as freedom-fighting liberator Sandokan in this surprisingly lux production.  Fighting British colonialists responsible for his mother’s murder and his father’s imprisonment, he’s abducted the niece of his fiercest enemy and forces her to accompany him after escaping a death sentence.  Soon, these antagonists are billing & cooing as they make their way to the coast, briefly interrupted by various physical obstacles (a gooey swamp the yuckiest, a fight with a tiger the silliest*) when yet another set of struggling natives (flown in from Africa?) abduct them.  Happily, it’s soon straightened out (the tribesmen are natural allies!) in time for the big climax, with all hands joining in for a jolly massacre of those despicable Brits back at the fort.  (How Sandokan survives disguised in enemy uniform is anyone’s guess.  He’s a pretty big target!)  Hunk fanciers get their fill, Reeves managing to disrobe now & then to show off his massive upper torso and weirdly slim lower half (if he were a Super Hero he’d be Articulated Man!), and he’s hardly the only bodybuilder in this little army of beef-cake guerilla warriors . . . just the biggest!  If only the story, dialogue, acting or camera technique were half as strong as the physical production, this might be more fun.  Reeves did a sequel, and a sort of Western a few years later, before calling it a career at only 42.

ATENTION MUST BE PAID: Many Sandokan movies & series out there.  Who knew?  And who knew composer Giovanni Fusco wrote this score between regular assignments for Michelangelo Antonioni.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: *The risible stuffed tiger fight actually tops the risible stuffed lion fight in DeMille’s SAMSON AND DELILAH/’49.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/11/samson-and-delilah-1949.html

CRISIS: THE NAZI WAY (1939) LIGHTS OUT IN EUROPE (1940)

First on the ground in Czechoslovakia with a documentary look at the coming Nazi invasion, Herbert Kline, partnered with cinematographer Alexander Hammid, followed with a warning from Britain & Poland on the fast-approaching war with Germany.  Depressingly timely in light of current events (Russia/Ukraine), history repeating itself rarely so obvious or ghastly.  The two films, each a bit over an hour, are solidly built from non-staged material in a traditional manner (not the time for Ruskie-styled Dziga Vertov constructivism), while the opening of the first film, CRISIS, using imaginative map graphics & animated political logos surely influenced Frank Capra in the WHY WE FIGHT? series.* And CRISIS must have made an impression with Hollywood movers & shakers as LIGHTS OUT adds star power bringing in Fredric March to read narration by James Hilton, plus Douglas Slocombe shooting alongside Hammid.  Much unique footage here, particularly in the complicated political situation in Czechoslovakia with German speaking Czechs taking sides as patriots or pro-Nazi sympathizers.  In the next film, the divide is focused between appeasers (an overwhelming majority at first) and those standing in the Winston Churchill camp.  And in Poland, a late response to events that now seem painfully obvious.  (Though would it have made a difference?)  Even knowing the outcome of all these events doesn’t lessen the tragic interest in this nearly lost footage, recently restored by MoMA.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, WHY WE FIGHT?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/11/why-we-fight-1942-45.html

THE BOOKSHOP (2017)

Thick on the ground from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, eccentric little British dramedies (eccentric towns with eccentric characters, cuisine & customs backing comedy, romance, adventure) now rare as a hen’s tooth theatrically.  Migrated to PBS and various Brit-centric streaming sites, the genre never the same after Bill Forsythe left the field.  Yet here’s a worthy revised example of the form, servicing the old rom-com tropes while moving the goal line toward the modestly tragic.  A first feature film based on a Penelope Fitzgerald novel (something of Barbara Pym to her), it’s very well acted by Emily Mortimer, playing a young war widow (it’s the late ‘50s), who opens a progressive/literary bookshop in a historic old house only to find herself at war with rich, self-appointed civics & cultural leader Patricia Clarkson, hoping to use the building as a local arts center.  (Such a convincing upper-crust accent from this New Orleans born gal!)  But Mortimer gets support from the town’s second wealthiest resident, retired book-loving recluse Bill Nighy.  Not much drive in Isabel Coixet’s direction, holding to a reticent approach that eventually pays off, not only in character development & growing emotional depth, but unexpectedly in crosshatch third-act plot machinations and devious Machiavellian curve-balls . . . not only from the bad guys.  The scale may be small, but the aim is true.

RANSOM! (1956)

Decades after they came out, two mid-‘50s Glenn Ford thrillers got big budget/big star remakes.  The superb 1957 Western, 3:10 TO YUMA (career bests for everyone in it; Ford, co-star Van Heflin, director Delmer Daves), got a reasonable rethink in 2007, though not a patch on the original.  And, from the year before, this ersatz powerhouse, refitted for Mel Gibson’s righteous anger under Ron Howard’s megging.  The whole construct in ‘57 a set up for a twisty gimmick: Ford’s rich industrialist refusing (on LIVE tv!) to pay the half mill ransom for his kidnapped son’s release, but offering all that lovely cash (covering the desk he sits behind) as reward to bring in the kidnappers dead or alive.*  From the opening scenes of suburban bliss (happy family: Ford, Donna Reed, generic tousle-haired kid, over-parted Juano Hernandez & Juanita Moore as house servants) to the company boardroom; from cynical reporter Leslie Neilsen (in a GUYS AND DOLLS suit) to the cops & jeering local yokels mobbing the soundstage exteriors, the smell of dramatic mendacity is overwhelming.  (No wonder Gibson & Howard jumped at the material.)  And even as it manages to generate some tension toward the end (with Robert Keith as chief officer on the case, something's gonna work), the film remains manipulative trash no matter how you serve it up.  And using series-tv tech hardly helps.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Kidnapped single sons must have been in the air at the time.  Hitchcock’s MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH out the same year, followed a bit later by Akira Kurosawa’s masterly HIGH AND LOW/’62.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/man-who-knew-too-much-1956.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/07/tengoku-to-jigoku-high-and-low-1962.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Ford (and later Gibson) may think he's saved some cash, but later psychiatrist bills to straighten out a kid who discovered Dad wouldn’t cough up the dough far more costly.

MADE ON BROADWAY (1933)

Dandy little Bright Lights dramedy from M-G-M, of all places, with Robert Montgomery in rare form as Manhattan’s go-to Pubic Relations guru, Mr. Fix-It for celebrities and politicians in a jam.  Monitoring the pulse-of-the-city from his swank apartment at afternoon ‘socials’ where the whole town comes daily to shmooze, booze and ask favors.  Everyone from the Jimmy Walker-like mayor to labor bosses with extended families sucking the public teat dry, they all find Montgomery’s happy to take charge for a sliding fee or percentage.  Congenially divorced from Madge Evans (still pals), he meets-cute with Sally Eilers’ classless girl-on-the-make one evening when she jumps off the ferry and he dives in to save her.  Soon, he’s acting as Pygmalion to her Galatea,  setting her up in all the social niceties (modeling, fancy digs, expenses, clothes, lessons in couth), too smitten to see that for once the player’s being played.  The rest of the story leans toward CHICAGO (1927 on B’way & filmed as a silent): secret lover shot dead/PR man to the rescue.  Lots of fun in spite of an oddly barren production for M-G-M (director Harry Beaumont behind the times & on the way out), with too many minor league supporting players to fill all the tasty bits, though Eugene Palette shines, murder victim in 1927, now playing valet.  The whole film worth a look simply to see him slip an undershirt over Montgomery’s head when he gets the emergency call from Eilers.  Loaded with Pre-Code double entendres and even a bit of Yiddish from Montgomery and his shark of a lawyer.  A modest find.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Sally Eilers may be billed above the title, but she doesn’t have the moxie or style to pull off such an unsympathetic character.  Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Harlow needed.  The vacuum allows ex-wife Madge Evans to walk off with the honors.  And she’s even better in her next, another gossipy Manhattan item, now against Lee Tracy as THE NUISANCE/’33. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-nuisance-1933.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Next year, William Powell came to M-G-M and took over these roles.  Powell is, of course, supreme, but Montgomery more than holds his own with flair & youthful physicality.

FOSSE/VERDON (2019)

Channel surfing some years back, and hit Bob Fosse’s transparent self-portrait ALL THAT JAZZ/’79 somewhere toward the middle.  Not exactly high on my revisit list!  Yet, the scene I’d stumbled on knocked me sideways.  Real moviemaking!  Confident & compelling, stylish stuff.  But ten minutes later, I had to turn it off.  Self-justifying, self-centered, self-loathing, self-indulgent pretentious crap.  As with all Fosse films (he only made five), once is enough.  Which makes this fine duo-bio of Fosse & wife/muse/work partner/other-half Gwen Verdon a project that honors the brand since, while it's plenty good, you’d never want to go back to it.  Shitty to himself and everyone around him, Fosse as choreographer got more mileage out of fewer dance steps than anyone since Busby Berkeley. (Both also sexual predators and addicts.)  But Fosse knew enough to attach himself to Verdon, one of the greatest of B’way stars, then ride past her in Hollywood where she became one more B’way divinity unable to transfer her luster on screen.  (DAMN YANKEES/’58 her only starring role.)  This mini-series tries to add context, explanation and expiation to a very old story as Verdon enables ‘her man,’ not quite able to walk away even as she keeps getting walked over.  The filmmakers work hard to camouflage the cliché with non-linear continuity jumps, too clever-by-half ‘countdown’ calls, even a fresh title card for each episode.  Only one face-plants, a would-be Long Days Journey Into Night award-bait playlet with everyone working too hard to impress.  Meant as a showpiece episode, its an embarrassment of emotionally empty platitudes.  Elsewise, not too inaccurate as these things go*, the film ultimately sells itself thru remarkably strong casting.  Sam Rockwell makes a self-coruscating and utterly believable Fosse while Norbert Leo Butz is close behind as truth-telling windbag of a friend Paddy Chayefsky.  (Imagine going to a bar with the guy who wrote NETWORK.  Yikes!)  (Lin-Manuel Miranda is a stretch as Roy Scheider in ALL THAT JAZZ, but so darn pleased with himself, he makes you grin.)  And if Michelle Williams’ Verdon manages to get everything ‘right’ as Verdon, somehow (especially for those lucky enough to have seen Verdon on stage) she completely misses the most important element, preternatural yet unforced stagewise sexiness.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *A characteristic  inaccuracy has CABARET/’72 producer Cy Feuer out to deliver a carefree musical comedy and a ‘difficult’ Fosse demanding a dark redo.  Only Jay Presson Allen’s stage-to-screen adaptation (cute older couple out/non-diegetic musical numbers removed) written before Feuer’s surprise hiring of an ‘unemployable’ Fosse whose sole film directing credit was all-time bomb SWEET CHARITY/’69.  LINK: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/sweet-charity-1969.html   OR: See the real Bob Fosse in his brief, but spectacular turn as the ‘Snake In The Grass’ of THE LITTLE PRINCE/’74.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-little-prince-1974.html

TIN SHUI WAI DIK YAT YU YE / THE WAY WE ARE (2008)

Small-scale and intimate (in the humanist/Neo-Realist/DOGME tradition), Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui is something of a ‘close-up’ magician in this pink-collar/working-class family drama, cumulatively involving us thru quotidian detail.  Opening with little more than a widowed mom in a dead-end supermarket job and her teenage son wiling away the day at home with naps & video, we expand step-by-step to meet the whole extended family along with the boy’s friends in and out of school.  Mom is pretty much ‘there’ from the start, while the son (cute enough for ‘boy-band’ material) turns out to be a pretty good kid, if no self-starter.  But it’s the widening interpersonal relationships (and shopping trips) between Aunts, Uncles, Cousins & Grandparents that build the film’s considerable interest.  With Hui’s understated technique seemingly gliding by events, yet not missing a trick or losing us in a score of crisscrossing characters.  (On the other hand, the digital capture used here nothing to celebrate.)  And between health crises, a funeral, test score results, a dismal out-of-town lunch with a remarried son, meals in/meals out, more shopping (and de rigeur gift refusal), a portrait of working class/high-rise neighborhoods on the outskirts of Hong Kong is beautifully caught and, by the end, quietly moving.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Though Hui has a knack for letting us know who’s who with no need of a family scorecard, I couldn’t quite figure out which of the Aunties had died.  Perhaps relieved it wasn’t that sweet hospitalized grandmother with a yen for ‘bird’s nest’ congee.

SOMEWHERE I'LL FIND YOU (1942)

Off-putting WWII romance reunites Clark Gable & Lana Turner as a pair of misaligned lovers (he can’t commit/she can’t walk away), news reporters with a shared past and any future complicated by her current/nicer beau, Gable’s ink-stained kid brother Robert Sterling.  So, when Turner goes missing on assignment in SouthEast Asia, rival brothers team up to find her just as Pearl Harbor hits the news.  You can see the possibilities, but the script can’t gloss over Gable’s shitty behavior, and Sterling can’t pull his weight against either star.  It’s more uncomfortable than amusingly louche.  Meanwhile, back in the real world, all but impossible to forget that Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard, died in the middle of production when her plane went down after a War Bond rally.  Gable finished the film (some dialogue toward the end cuts shockingly close to his personal tragedy), enlisted in the Army-Air Force, stayed off the screen four years, came back looking a decade older.  Oh, the film was a big hit.  Director Wesley Ruggles coasts on M-G-M’s even-paced/over-lit studio house style (Manhattan, Hanoi & Manila all look alike), but the film only sparks to life in an end-game series of war sorties when Bataan comes under attack.  Second-unit work?*  With tasty early credits for Van Johnson & Keenan Wynn as heroic types during the climax (such distinctive voices), action that's unexpectedly dark for the early war days when news from the front was unceasingly bad and Hollywood responded with lighthearted messaging.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *To Ruggles’ credit, a pick-up scene between Gable & Patricia Dane in a Manila hot spot really lands, showing the kind of breezy, easy sex Gable prefers to Turner’s smothering sincerity.  Why didn’t someone pick up the ball and run with this?

IL COMMISSARIO / THE POLICE COMMISSIONER (1962)

The poster may look like copycat Inspector Clouseau, a quick Italian ripoff for the local market.  And Alberto Sordi’s overly ambitious detective certainly shows Clouseau-esque qualities as he fumbles his way thru a ‘closed’ murder investigation.  But this film came out the year before THE PINK PANTHER/’63, a follow up collaboration for Sordi with director Luigi Comencini after the critical & commercial success of TUTTI A CASA/’60.  (Not seen here; hard to find a decent subtitled print!).  This one is fun, and has its moments, but it’s not quite fully worked out; and the ending, though conceptually brilliant, is more than a little abrupt.  Very Italian in its manners, too, which may explain why it didn’t get around.  A meet-cute for Sordi and his putative fiancée sees him tailing his beloved as if she were a suspect.  Local teen toughs shoot a cat up in a rocket.  Later, the dead cat shows up as dinner for a night watchman.  Yikes!  At least the fatal rocket crash lands on the film’s main case, a murdered big shot politico whose killing is an easy case until Sordi finds enough discrepancies to reopen the investigation and make his rep.  (A promotion will allow him to propose.)  If only the case would stay solved!  Between withdrawn ‘confessions’ and newly uncovered facts, Sordi’s heading for a breakdown at the murder trial, a disgraced mental wreck.  In Comencini’s world view, the rich and politically connected get away with murder, literally.  (As if we didn't already know.)  But neatly handled on the whole, with sidesplitting asides from Sordi’s future in-laws and thru sadder-but-wiser advice from Sordi’s superior.  (Advice not taken in Sordi’s rush to get at a truth no one really wants uncovered.)  Plus a magnificent finale featuring the unconquerable Italian appetite.  Good stuff, if not fully reaching its potential. 

DOUBLE-BIL/LINK: Sordi’s even better on his next pic, working with Alberto Lattuada on one of the greatest (and darkest) of all commedia all'italiana films, MAFIOSO/’62.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/mafioso-1962.html

COLETTTE (2018)

Maddeningly tasteful and dramatically timid, this bio-pic of French author Colette must have been looking to fill a schedule slot on Masterpiece Theater; that’s Masterpiece Theater circa 1983.  With a bi-focal approach, director/co-scripter Wash Westmoreland covers Colette’s youthful marriage to established literary entrepreneur/writer Henry Gauthier-Villars, over-committed/debt-ridden/society darling, who published her popular semi-autobiographical stories under his own name.  But if he’s stolen her work (at first with her blessing), her heart has been stolen by an artistically ambitious cross-dressing lesbian lover.  Let les scandales begin!  Alas, they never do.  Even a small riot in a theater after a same-sex kiss looks pretty harmless and the film never comes to life, rough edges smoothed over and details, details, details all wrong.  Even the clever use of music from the period, by composers Colette & ‘Willy’ likely dined with, doesn’t help.  What’s Saints-Saëns ‘Carnival of the Animals,’, a score he famously hid during his lifetime, doing in here?  With cool, foggy color when we need a full 1950s palette of TechniColor’d Sirk or Minnelli*, and the wound up emotions to go with it.  The filmmakers all so worried about putting a foot wrong, they never put one right.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *See what this should have looked like in the eccentric, animated wonder of DILILI IN PARIS/’18.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/dilili-paris-dilili-in-paris-2018.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF HE DAY: The specific French tone missing from COLETTE’s all-British cast even manages to top the wrongheaded lineup of eccentric Brits hired to play all the French supporting roles in the Gare Montparnasse sequences of Martin Scorsese’s HUGO/’11.

THE PHANTOM OF PARIS (1931)

Famous for PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Gaston Leroux’s CHÉRI-BIBI was probably his second most adapted novel.  Here, retitled PHANTOM OF PARIS to boost any connection to his big hit, it was the fifth Talkie, and third attempt, at ‘course correction’ for pricey M-G-M silent-star John Gilbert, in career meltdown after his first two disastrous Talkies.  This one at least has the right idea.  After just playing a reluctant bootlegger and shortly before a turn as a nasty valet, Gilbert makes a better fit as suave illusionist, a sort of Parisian Harry Houdini, hoping to marry society gal Leila Hyams.  Only Papa doesn’t approve.  Neither does ex-fiancé Ian Keith, who’ll lose a big inheritance.  It’s a workable set up under John S. Robertson’s functional direction and the first act comes off well enough.  But once the whackadoo plot kicks in (Keith kills putative pop before the old man can change his will; Gilbert is blamed; uses his professional skills to escape; returns disguised as his rival to prove his innocence), this combo platter of Alexandre Dumas & Victorien Sardou proves ridiculous.*  Gilbert does little to distinguish the two sides of his double role, while M-G-M house style smothers what’s left of the fun.  Gilbert just dug his hole a little deeper.

WATCH THIS, NO THAT/LINK: *The basic idea is a modernized COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, the old Dumas story best served three years after this, splendidly, on a tight budget, by director Rowland V. Lee and an irreplaceable Robert Donat.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/count-of-monte-cristo-1934.html

THE CHASE (1946)

Barely known absurdist film noir, loaded with tip-top talent cosseting former Mack Sennett silent comedy vet Arthur Ripley, an occasional director with nothing else like this on his C.V.  Adapted by Philip Yordan from a Cornell Woolrich story, it runs a normal course in its first half as down-on-his luck army vet Robert Cummings returns a lost wallet (and its cash) to tough guy Steve Cochran, earning a job as chauffeur to this rising thug, wing-man Peter Lorre and abused wife Michèle Morgan.  For lady & driver, love is inevitable, along with one-way tickets to Havana.  But their single cabin cruise comes up on Cochran’s radar and escape may prove impossible.  And here’s where the story throws a curve, hitting the reset button on about half of the storyline.  It’s throws you at first, but once you catch the drift, plays out nicely.  Or does until a cop-out climax that settles all scores and comes loaded with toy trains and risible model work.  As the army vet, Robert Cummings already shows the supercilious quality that kept him from fully connecting on screen, but Cochran’s mob guy has a real sense of threat (slapping dames, murdering rivals) while Morgan gets an uncredited second role as a brunette who helps Cummings escape a pair of assassins.  (Note her prominence on this French poster.)

Peter Lorre purrs like a kitty-cat and Jack Holt shows up post-‘reveal’ to explain things psychologically.  Best is cinematography great Franz Planer, undoubtedly responsible for Ripley’s occasional savvy calling the shots.  The big set piece in a Cuban nightclub might be an audition for Planer’s next two jobs with Max Ophüls.  (If only composer Michel Michlet didn’t push comic buttons at wrong moments.  Miklós Rósza the man needed.)  Exiled producer Seymour Nebenzal, a lost-in-America UFA type who collaborated with Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Julien Duvivier, Douglas Sirk & Joseph Losey, promoted this one into being during his frustrating stop-and-start Hollywood period.  And while he can’t quite make the story add up, this all-of-a-piece bizarrerie is still something to savor.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: If only Nebenzal had reunited with Edgar G. Ulmer, a fellow UFA exile-in-America,  they'd collaborated in Berlin on PEOPLE ON SUNDAY/’30.  He’d have been perfect for this.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Look for the restored print out of UCLA.

TURNING RED (2022)

Pixar’s latest animation aims at its narrowest demographic yet: pubescent Asian-American tweens  coping with adolescent separation issues from ‘Tiger Moms’ and anxiety overload from emerging dynastic family genes.  No wonder they bypassed theatrical release for Disney+ streaming to help hide this disappointment.  UPDATE:  Ha!  A big hit for Disney+.   (And after Pixar & Disney each recaptured their groove last year on LUCA and ENCANTO.  --  LINK: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/encanto-2021.html)  Set for no apparent reason in 2002 (tapping autobiographical resonance from writer/director Domee Shi?), its familiar coming-of-age tropes maladroitly disguised (a la INCREDIBLE HULK or TEEN WOLF) as a big Red Panda who takes over the bodily form of previously perfect 8th grade princess Meilin whenever she gets uncontrollably mad.  A dicey visual metaphor when the topic being so strenuously avoided is a girl’s first menstruation cycle.  Acknowledged when helicopter mom Ming rushes in with an assortment of feminine hygiene pads.  (Just imagine the story development notes!)  Naturally, Shi tries to broaden appeal with mix-and-match ethnicity in friends & classmates (not unlike a ‘60s menu from an old school Chinese restaurant her pals are One from Column A; One from Column B, etc.).  Then pumping up a suspenseful finale with ‘will she/won’t she’ get to the boy-band arena concert on time.  Not that she’d miss much if she didn’t make it.   Same for you.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Why is Meilin, our troubled form-shifting teen drawn in a manner that ‘reads’ less Asian than the rest of her family?  Especially compared to her mother & grandmother?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A far too brief sequence in what looks like hand-drawn animation explains the complicated family history in a pastiche style based on Chinese landscape painting with its mysterious moving infinity focal points.  Lovely.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Comedians with elaborate set ups for modest pay-offs call such jokes ‘long walks.’  And TURNING RED sure feels like one long walk.  Instead, see Shi get a lot of these ideas and gags across in an eight-minute directing debut, BAO, her compellingly weird & wonderful 2018 animated short-subject Oscar-winner.

CAGED (1950)

Sober-minded (as in not much fun) Women’s Prison pic, something of a throwback to the muckraking ripped-from-the-headlines films Warner Bros. made in the early ‘30s*.  At the time, largely fallen into B-pic fare, here it’s classed up (three Oscar® noms) with ‘serious’ director John Cromwell, and something close to a ‘name’ cast.  Eleanor Parker, a young innocent jailbird soon to be hardened by fellow convicts & corrupt guards; Agnes Moorehead, in sympathetic mode, the fair-minded warden unable to provide justice or safety; startling Hope Emerson, a sadistic/venal matron with political connections to protect her; Jan Sterling, friendly recidivist trying out her Judy Holliday impression (for a tour of BORN YESTERDAY?); Jane Darwell; Ellen Corby, etc.  But while the flesh is willing, the spirit is weak in this retread.  Jail yet again an institution where reform and even punishment take a backseat to the matriculation of professional criminals.  Further tamed by the passage of 70 years, it’s neither strong enough for straight drama nor sent up & stylized to play as camp.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *In turnabouts from the ‘30s: No Black inmates to be seen, integrated or segregated.  And far more undertones of lesbian longing among the prisoners & staff than visible twenty years back.  Both changes the opposite of what you expect.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Had this been ‘30s Warners, B-pic producer Bryan Foy would have soon brought out his very own low-budget knock-off.  He’s still doing it, now at Columbia in the preferable WOMEN’S PRISON/’56.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/womens-prison-1956.html

INIMI CICATRIZATE / SCARRED HEARTS (2016)

Just now, controversial Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is having a spotlight moment with BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN/’21, a film that opens with an extended hard-core non-simulated ‘amateur’ sex scene that’s been leaked to the internet, a provocation for the political & social upheaval that are the film‘s main topic.  It makes a tough watch.  Perhaps a better place to start is this bio-pic based on the short tragic life of Max Blecher, taken from his autobiographical ‘novel’ about his time at the sanatarium where he was treated for ‘bone tuberculosis.’   The film, challenging and compelling, is also beautiful & funny, as Emanuel, played by a freakishly thin Alex Bogdan (he makes POWER OF THE DOG’s Kodi Smit-McPhee look stocky), takes the cure under the care of a positive-thinking doctor (Serban Pavlu), while stretched out flat in bed wearing a half body cast to hold his spine in place between procedures.  Yet what a lively life he manages to lead in this unusually open sanatorium, as much 1930s spa as clinic.  Not only discussions & friendship, but sexual affairs & his writing.  Excerpts from these (strikingly wise, mysteriously poetic) providing literary bridges between scenes.  He even manages a few adventures lying flat in his hospital bed, carted like some pasha to a date in town, a visit to the beach.  Or sidling over from ‘his’ bed to ‘her’ bed for sex in a fellow patient’s room.  And always choosing intellectually stimulating women for company.  Fascinating stuff, matched in Jude’s execution with mostly static shots (as if the camera were stuck in one of those hospital beds), rarely out of mid-range.  A large-screen showing might be revelatory.  And while the end is all but ordained (Blecher died at 29), the film is terribly sad without being a downer.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: An earlier Radu Jude film, AFERIM!/’15, shot in WideScreen b&w as opposed to SCARRED’s Academy Ratio color, is even better, richer & more mysterious. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/aferim-2015.html

OBSESSION (1976)

Made right before his mainstream breakthru in CARRIE/’76, director Brian De Palma, with co-scripter Paul Schrader, can’t find dramatic footing even in the wading pool depth of this snarky cineast puzzle.  More ripoff than homage, think of it as a ‘refrigerator door’ poem made from magnetic word tiles.  The ones you arrange (and rearrange) to create cute haiku or doggerel-of-the-day.  Only here, instead of words, each tile a famous scene or moment from Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO: looming tower; brooding portrait painting with a hair style to copy; switchback staircase; telltale piece of ‘borrowed’ jewelry;  dead love doppelgänger; terrifying dream sequence; confessional letter written but not sent; two fails at saving the love of your life; all fogged up cinematography (Vilmos Zsigmond extrapolating off an unrestored print of VERTIGO?); Bernard Herrmann score.*  Plus, Bonus Tile from DIAL M FOR MURDER/’54: deadly scissors!  How’s the old saw go: Talent borrows/genius steals?  Not so much here.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Quite a contest in bad accents between John Lithgow’s southern drawl and Geneviève Bujold’s Québécois Italian.  He’s the villain/partner; she’s the reborn love; both still topping Cliff Robertson’s befuddled patsy, moping at having to play leading man on a low budget.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Composer Bernard Herrmann didn’t live to see his last two films (this and TAXI DRIVER) Oscar nom’d.  Shamefully, his first nod from the Academy since 1947!  None of the Hitchcocks even nominated.  Not PSYCHO, not VERTIGO.  And while he likely split his own vote, at least he lost to the great score Jerry Goldsmith wrote for THE OMEN/’76.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/omen-1976.html

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Don’t ruin VERTIGO by seeing this first!  And note our Truth in Advertizing poster with ‘money quotes’ from the likes of Rex Reed and Liz Smith.

ANOTHER LANGUAGE (1933)

When a newlywed husband brings his independent-minded bride home to meet the in-laws after a blissful stay in Europe, his overly possessive mother immediately goes to work to divide (and conquer) the happy couple.  Over at R.K.O. this scenario played out in a superb adaptation of Sidney Howard’s decade old play THE SILVER CORD*, beating this roughly similar M-G-M project from Rose Franken’s recent B’way play to the screen by three months.  (Production delayed when Helen Hayes took over from Norma Shearer after husband Irving Thalberg’s heart attack?)  And who to direct but Edward H. Griffith, new to M-G-M after specializing in just this sort of literate play-to-film transfer back at R.K.O. where he’d helmed Philip Barry’s HOLIDAY/’30 and THE ANIMAL KINGDOM/’32.*  Robert Montgomery is the weak-willed husband, folding to Mother's wishes & will at family gatherings while losing the romantic spark Hayes once felt in him.  Now, it’s family outlier John Beal, a lovestruck nephew, who speaks ‘another language’ with her.  All expressed in an unintentionally intimate dance in front of the whole family, their defining romantic moment.  If only the emotions came thru on film.  It’s not that the character motivations or story beats are less obvious or psychologically transparent in THE SILVER CORD, but everything there still ‘lands,’ while everything here dissipates, leaving an ending that feels both unearned and a cheat.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Four members of the B’way cast went West, including Beal and Margaret Hamilton as the sole aunt who talks the family talk, but also knows the score.  She’s fun!

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Director John Cromwell picked up the Edward H. Griffith mantle at R.K.O., including THE SILVER CORD/’33.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-silver-cord-1933.html

ZULU (1964)

Physically impressive ‘Last Stand’ war film (its sweeping TechniRama® visuals best seen in Hi-Def resolution), a fact-based late-19th Century southern Africa battle of attrition with 100 British soldiers holding the Rorke’s Drift outpost against 4000 Zulu warriors fresh off major victories against large British units.  Michael Caine made his first mark here, playing a ‘toff’  officer, heavy with class attitude/short on field experience coming against lower-class army engineer Stanley Baker who just barely outranks him.  Building mutual respect as waves of Zulus attack and attack (Northern fortifications; South barrier; Chapel; Surgery, even Cattle corral).  Director Cy Endfield (who co-scripted with Baker) masters the tricky logistics while expanding on the usual formula for these things, so instead of filling only the last two reels with battle, this 2'18" film is nearly all action from the halfway mark on.  Grueling for the men; grueling for the audience.  But done up proud, as they say, and, in spite of an unmistakable Imperialist tone, for its era the film plays fairly.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Caine, who’d quickly show range and solidify his new-found stardom with IPCRESS FILE/’65, ALFIE/’66 and GAMBIT/’66, maintained that only an American director (Endfield had been Blacklisted in the States) would have countenanced a Cockney in this role.  He does lay on the upper-crust accent pretty thick, like Robert Downey Jr faking Sherlock Holmes, when he should be speaking like Edward Fox as . . . Edward Fox. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  A prequel (not seen here), ZULU DAWN/’79, has bigger names and a smaller rep.

THE UNFINISHED DANCE (1947)

Where has this deranged monstrosity been hiding?  Splashy TechniColored family film on the backstabbing backstage world of ballet finds ten-yr-old Margaret O’Brien, already a star for five years, entering the first (and last) growth spurt transition of her young career, guided by producer Joe Pasternak & director Henry Koster, now at M-G-M after helping teenage singing sensation Deanna Durbin work her way thru puberty at Universal.  Could they do the same for O’Brien?  (Hint: two years on she’d leave M-G-M at 12.)  Here, O’Brien’s a scary, whispering, psychopathic terror, officially cared for by a traveling showbiz aunt and unofficially cared for by debuting Danny Thomas, the creepy downstairs ‘uncle,’ with the permanent 5 o’clock shadow, swarthy complexion and hooked nose of a fairy tale ogre.  And he sings little ditties when pressed for advice.  Yikes!  Mostly, Margaret lives with fellow baby ballerinas at the dance academy where she’s become unnaturally fixated on company star Cyd Charisse and worried about new international superstar Karin Booth replacing her.  Perhaps an Opening Night accident could fix all her problems.  Crippled by a fall thru the on-stage trap door?  Blackmailed by students who’ve guessed her secret.  Panicky midnight flights from home.  Breaking up marriage engagements to keep people close to you.  Lying to anyone over the age of 21.  This is one psychologically damaged horror show of a kid.  A TechniColor first for lenser Robert Surtees with madly color-coordinated costumes and some surprisingly sophisticated dances, sets & decor.  Perhaps ‘dance director’ David Lichine did more than choreograph this one-of-a-kind oddity.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Baby-boomers will spot Elinor Donahue (eldest daughter on FATHER KNOWS BEST) debuting as O’Brien’s little turncoat dancing pal.

DOUBLE-BILL: Not seen here, but is the Grand Guignold ballet of BLACK SWAN/’10 any sicker?  OR: Melodrama at the ballet came into its own next year with THE RED SHOES/’48.

LAWLESS (2012)

Depression-era Moonshine Whiskey saga, from Australian director John Hillcoat, savages its way thru a violent three-sided conflict that pits local ‘still’ masters against prohibition authorities threatening annihilation unless they get a cut of the profits.  Agent Gary Oldman makes his entrance ‘Tommy guns’ a’blazing, while rival enforcer Guy Pearce comes in from Chicago to organize a brewers’ protection racket.  Only the Brothers Bondurant hold out, their manly independence embodied in the fraternally unlikely trio of Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, and baby brother Shia LaBeouf.  Key to the film’s failure seen in a pivotal attack on the head of this indomitable family.  Quite literally an attack on ‘the head’ since Tom Hardy’s noggin’ is all but lopped off, his throat cut ear-to-ear by protection enforcers who leave him for dead.  Too ornery to die, he holds his head on to walk twenty miles to the nearest clinic.  Or so local legend has it.  Truth is girlfriend Jessica Chastain came back and was jumped & raped before driving him to get medical attention.  But in a script sourced from a book by family descendant Matt Bondurant*, this incident stands alone in setting a legend straight.  Everything else overcooked, a series of set ups to ennoble the rather ignoble Bondurants.  The boys sure ‘take a lickin’ & keep on tickin’!  The dental bills alone!  And the astonishing power of recover after constant beatings; fine in a martial arts pic, but this needs something more believable.  One great moment, though: Guy Pearce, a John Hillcoat regular, carefully giving his slick hair a fresh dye job (black as night) before tomorrow’s confrontation.  The ultimate bad guy here, he even offs sweet, crippled sidekick moonshiner Dane DeHaan.  You may find yourself rooting for him.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Young Jeff Bridges’ overlooked moonshiner-makes-good pic, THE LAST AMERICAN HERO/’73, has more feel for the territory, even when it heads to the racing track.  And forgoes the loud showy ‘quiet’ acting on display here.  (Hardy, in particular, might as well be practicing vocal stylings in heavy breathing for his next film, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/02/last-american-hero-1973.html