ONE MILLION B.C. (1940)

Best known for comedy shorts, Hal Roach’s feature-length Pre-Historic adventure is junk science & historical nonsense, but not the campy relic you expect.  Deservedly popular on release, it’s well-packaged entertainment with impressive special effects for the period.  Still fun, especially when seen in the fine UCLA Archive print that usually shows up.  (Give it a slight brightness bump for best results.)  Told in flashback as some lost hikers stumble upon a cave with drawings of past events, Victor Mature, in his first lead, is the beefy caveman who can’t fit in with either tribe in the valley.  Bulky enough to grab what he wants, he’s a meathead needing a woman’s touch to socialize him.  Enter Carole Landis.  Soon, he’s saving babies from magnified lizards passing as dinos, sharing root vegetables for a community stew, outrunning molten flows of lava, and merging tribes for mutual protection against savage beasts before heading off in silhouette to start a new family as the sun sets with Landis & saved child by his side.  D.W. Griffith had his last legit film job working Pre-Production on this.  Contrary to what’s been written not as director though he did find & film test Landis to play the civilizing mate.  Roach megged all the story material and Hal Roach Jr. did all the action & special effects.  Exceptional F/X for 1940, with perfectly matched film grain on the extensive process & optical camera tricks making all the difference.  Plus, clever use of simple painted backdrop cycloramas & matte work that enchant even when they don't completely convince.  Occasionally they’ll give a good shake to whatever’s at hand when an earthquake or volcanic eruption goes off.  Silly and endearing.  A famous 1966 remake, with Raquel Welch in fur and Ray Harryhaussen stop-motion dinos (not seen here) also has its champions.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Instead of the 1966 remake, here’s about half of Griffith’s MAN’S GENESIS.  (No musical accompaniment so blast out something suitably rude.)  Not only did this inspire Roach, but apparently Stanley Kubrick as well, who took the invention of the first weapon, and it’s potential as a useful tool of destruction against fellow man, straight from here.  (Note this was a very long one-reeler as cameraman Billy Bitzer cranked away at barely over 15fps to get more like 15 than 10 minutes out of a reel of finished film.  Slowest cranker in the biz.)   https://archive.org/details/silent-mans-genesis

SCANNERS (1981)

David Cronenberg's breakthru pic was designed to blow your mind right from the start . . . literally.  Though soon moved to the second reel, early preview showings opened with a trained  ‘Scanner’ publically demonstrating the Mind Reading/Mind Controlling technique by going mano-a-mano against a random audience member who’s actually a secretly planted ‘Master Scanner.’  It doesn’t go well; or perhaps it goes too well.  In any event, the exploding head grabbed attention in the burgeoning indie cult horror film market and Cronenberg’s rep was made.  Even sequels!  None of which he had anything to do with.  Turns out, the idea that Cronenberg was an exploitative sensationist confused content with topic.  But just what was he getting at?  Stephen Lack, a sometime actor with a wonderfully photogenic off-center face, plays a naturally gifted ‘scanner,’ kidnapped by expert Patrick McGoohan for his studies of these exceptional specimen.  Someone’s trying to kill them all off.  Someone else is trying to organize them to take over!  Take over what, exactly?  For what, exactly?  Not a film you’ll want to parse for narrative sense or consequentiality, but to simply follow along for the ride.  Gory, amusing, suspenseful, surprisingly well acted and (alas) at this stage and with this budget, very unevenly directed.  Even the cinematography a grab-bag of effective morbid atmosphere, flat underdressed sets and overlighting.  Still, nothing quite like it had been seen, and Cronenberg’s later, better considered films that followed unimaginable without it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For a jump in Cronenberg filmic evolution that retains his more subversive tendencies, try the underseen sicko thrills of CRASH/’96.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/01/crash-1996.html 

LADY, LET'S DANCE (1944)

In 1943, with 20th/Fox pulling the plug on ice-skating phenom Sonja Henie, Poverty Row outfit Monogram Pictures quickly moved in, making SILVER SKATES with ‘Belita’ (née Maria Belita Jepson-Turner), a British-born polyglot fluent in ballroom dance, ballet & ice skating to fill the gap.*  Presumably doing well enough for this second helping, after which no more full blown musicals, though fast-fading Belita did make a few more films in her on-and-off career.  An earnest attempt on the cheap at this hardest of all genres, this tuner is more 20th/Fox celebrity showcase than M-G-M integrated musical narrative.  Our storyline: Belita loses touch with hard-nosed agent/manager/discoverer James Ellison who enlists as she climbs toward stardom.  A move that effectively drops everything but musical turns for acts two & three, leaving nothing but a series of showcase ‘Numbos’ for our fair-weather/fair-haired star to dance & skate her way to B’way stardom.  And if most of her routines come off as pretty routine in content & presentation, we do get a couple of chances to see comic skating legends Frick & Frack and, finally, a legit ‘11 o’clock Number’ for our star.  (It’s the title track with Belita consecutively and concurrently wooed by tuxedoed corps of dancers & skaters.)  Then, post-lovers’ reunion, a kitsch patriotic solo for Belita, skating her way thru a truncated arrangement of Beethoven’s Fifth, the one that opens with that ‘V for Victory’ musical tattoo.  We laugh at it now; heck, they laughed at it then.  Hence, no more Belita Musicals.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Belita followed with THE HUNTED/’48, a film noir with a professional ice skating background to set up her specialty number.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-hunted-1948.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Belita a somewhat full-figured beauty for ballet, but, man!, could she skate!

KOKORO / THE HEART (1955)

A year before his international breakout on THE BURMESE HARP/’56, a large-scale anti-war fable, Kon Ichikawa made this far more intimate piece, too inscrutably Japan-centric for travel but superb filmmaking in its own way.  It’s 1912, and while the country is on edge as death approaches Emperor Meiji, what concerns us is a half-seen crisis between Nobuchi and his wife, the two haunted by miscommunication & tragic past events.  She’s convinced he’s seeing a mistress; he’s possibly suicidal over something he won’t discuss.  And that’s when he meets university student Hioki, the young man who jumps into the sea when he thinks Nobuchi has gone out too far.  Perhaps.  Soon, the two establish a warm relationship, sensei to pupil, Nobuchi something of a surrogate second father to Hioki whose actual father is dying on the same schedule as the Emperor.  Alongside Hioki, we witness the oddly formal relationship between Nobuchi & his wife (oddly formal even for Japanese culture; does she even have a name in the film?), subtly emphasized by Ichikawa thru the use of Britishisms (black tea with milk; knives & forks at lunch).  Returning from a trip to see his ill father (and to show off his diploma), he finds Nobuchi suddenly opening up about his past when he was living with fellow student Kaji at the home of his future wife and her widowed mother. Something of rivalry came between them, a certain amount of flirtation that led to Nobuchi suddenly proposing marriage and prompting a falling out between the men and four deaths before we reach the end.  Ichikawa, rigorous and riveting, gives just enough motivation to show how this happens.  Pulling back the curtains without losing the mystery.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, THE BURMESE HARP which you’d never expect came from the same filmmaker.  A range typical of Ichikawa.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/biruma-no-tategoto-burmese-harp-1956.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In addition to an immaculate filming technique, Ichikawa shows himself a master of the Japanese custom for using boxy rooms & sliding screen doors in homes as alternate framing & editing devices.  Hollywood directors, working in Japan, occasionally figure out such framing strategies, but never seem to catch on to their functionality as quasi edits.

THE GUILT OF JANET AMES (1947)

Well-intentioned WWII survivors’ guilt story has too much going for it to simply write-off, but you can’t grade on effort . . . even in Hollywood.  Rosalind Russell is the suicidal war widow desperate to find the five men her husband died to save.  If just one of them were worth the sacrifice, maybe she could get on with her life.  But when she’s knocked out after drifting into traffic, the cops find that list of survivors is the only identification on her.  Fortunately, just about everybody in town knows the last guy on the list, newsman Melvyn Douglas, once a first-rate reporter, now an unemployed habitual drinker.  Brought in to help identify Russell, he slowly gets her to unburden herself and they pal up by looking for the men on the list.  Turns out, these two broken souls have their own guilty secrets to work thru.  As post WWII problem pics go, this is a rather lovely and rather original idea.  The script may be too on-the-nose (lots to cover in 83"), but the real problem is studio hack Henry Levin’s stiff, unimaginative directing.  Drably functional at best, even in the more fantastic anti-realistic  segments, he weighs everything down.  Well, maybe not young Sid Caesar as a club comic, the most buoyant of survivors.  Mercifully, Roz catches on to who Douglas is before he has to go thru a big confession, but the film needs someone with faith & fancy to take off; a Frank Borzage or possibly Leo McCarey.  What does take off is Douglas.  In his first role after WWII service, he’s the least obvious tippler in Hollywood history.  So in touch with this character, merely hanging his head at the bar tells you all you need to know.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Everyone in the film keeps referencing PETER IBBETSON, a now forgotten piece of romantic fatalism where two lovers separated in life, stay together by ‘dreaming true.’  Icky stuff that works if the spirit is willing, as it did on stage and didn’t quite on film.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/peter-ibbetson-1935.html

THE MERCENARY / IL MERCENARIO (1968)

In ‘60s Spaghetti Westerns, no matter how good you were, if you weren’t Sergio Leone, you were always a bridesmaid never a bride.  So it was for Sergio Corbucci, here on a Janus-faced Alberto Grimaldi production originally put up for Gillo Pontecorvo to make after THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS.  But he ankled for Marlon Brando & BURN!/’69, another Grimaldi pic touching on similar themes, and MERCENARY got cast changes, a lighter tone, Mexican locations, a braggadocio rewrite for leading man Franco Nero, and Sergio Corbucci to direct.  Behind-the-scenes scuffles needn’t matter to the final product, but here, it’s obvious Corbucci bit off more than he could chew.  Worse, you can see this all done right by, of all people, Sergio Leone in his underappreciated DUCK YOU SUCKER!/’72.  Here, Franco Nero is a Polish mercenary in Mexico, figuring out how to turn bandito Tony Musante into a revolutionary winner.  Outnumbered, but always outwitting the Federales, everything’s fine as long as Nero gets his cut and Musante holds to strategy.  But when his myth starts to catch up to him, and a girl enters the picture, their luck starts running out.  Actually, that's where the film begins, with Musante hiding as a bullring clown North of the Border and Nero hoping to collect what he’s still owed by turning him in.  As told in flashback, will these two frenemies survive their rivalry?  Will they ride again?  Or be caught and executed side-by-side.  Under Corbucci we only care intermittently.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Seeking revenge for most of the pic, that’s Jack Palance showing off a firm middle-age ass and wearing the same scary youthful makeup Henry Fonda used in the flashback scenes of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST out the same year.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, DUCK YOU SUCKER!, a title no one was able to convince Leone not to use.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/09/duck-you-sucker-1972.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Ennio Morricone shares credit for the music score with Bruno Nicolai, so don’t pin your hopes too high.

REMORQUES (1941)

Standing just outside the charmed circle of classic French directors, Jean Grémillon shows his best form in this atmospheric work, now looking stronger than LUMIÈRE D'ÉTÉ/’43, his more acclaimed followup.*  In production on-and-off from 1939 to‘41, just as the German Occupation was taking shape, its poetic fatalism typical of the period.  With Jean Gabin (his last film in France before leaving for ‘the duration’) as a rescue/salvage tugboat captain who leaves a crewman’s wedding early when a distressed ship sends out an S.O.S. during a storm at sea.  Stiffed by its saved, but ungrateful captain, Gabin finds he’s even more upended by Michèle Morgan, the man’s unhappy wife.  No homewrecker, but ready to leave her husband if not entirely prepared to deal with her strong feelings for Gabin.  He’s shocked to find himself in the same emotional boat.  A curious feeling for a man who’s never stopped loving his wife (Madeleine Renaud).  Neither a man of  casual affairs nor a womanizer, Gabin is spiritually at sea and blithely unaware his wife’s health has turned precarious.  Jacques Prévert’s script sees cause & depth in all of them while finding individual characterizations & motivation for a dozen shipmates, land-based friends and various professionals.  Armand Thirard (go-to cinematographer for Duvivier, Clouzot, many more) is both precise & fluid for Grémillon.  Though he (or someone) can’t do much about the unconvincing model ships-in-a-storm F/X.  A quiet melancholy ending feels just right, but the lack of resolution may still be keeping this fine work somewhat in the shade. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Here’s our minority view on LUMIÈRE D'ÉTÉ.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/lumiere-dete-1943.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The title, often given as STORMY WATERS, translates literally as towline or to haul.

THE HILL (1965)

With all those battle-hardened vets to tap into, the ‘50s & ‘60s were, in quantity if not in quality, a Golden Age for WWII themed Prisoner-of-War pics.  This one, a particularly brutal example of the form, comes with a twist since both prisoners & guards are Brits.  It flips a lot of P.O.W. tropes toward traditional prison melodrama* since no one’s planning an escape; no Geneva Convention Rules to flout; no Red Cross packages withheld at Christmas.  If only director Sidney Lumet, working hard to move past his tv-trained limitations thru attention-calling stylistics (jump cuts, distorting lenses, showy angles) realized what a load of genre clichés he’s been given: laissez-faire prison chief; sadistic top-sergeant pushing  his charges to the breaking point; a loyal second secretly plotting to takeover; pathetic, ineffectual ‘Doc’; that decent fellow running the abutting prison block.  Convicts similarly standard issue: unbreakable hero; faithful Black cell-mate; self-denying married sissy-boy; fat squealer; the tough guy who folds.  Everything but a jute mill.  In its place, a Myth of Sisyphus punishment built by the prisoners/for the prisoners, a hill of sand to run up & down with full packs on until you drop.  Nothing inherently wrong with this, but Lumet plays as if he’d just discovered the nihilistic existential deep-dish inanity-of-war.  Powerhouse acting from Sean Connery, Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, Michael Redgrave, Ossie Davis, just too much of it.  And where’s the implied firing squad tag-ending.  Shot & removed?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Classic prison drama BRUTE FORCE/’47 has Burt Lancaster in the Sean Connery spot and clearly shows where this comes from. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/brute-force-1947.html   OR: One of the best, unfairly forgotten WWII P.O.W. pics out the same year, KING RAT/’65 with Bryan Forbes directing George Segal, Tom Courtenay, James Fox & Denholm Elliot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  R.S. Allen, who wrote the (unproduced?) play this was taken from, spent the year writing episodes for WWII themed P.O.W. sit-com HOGAN’S HEROES.  Yikes!

LE QUATRO VOLTE (2010)

There are a lot of goats in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Cycle of Life artfilm.  Shot Neo-Realist style in the hills of Calabria, small & incremental in story if not in theme, its first four reels (the film shot on actual 35mm*) carefully carry us thru the final days of an elderly goatherd as he tends his contented flock and troublesome cough.  The latter, unsuccessfully ‘treated’ with useless doses of ‘Sacred’ church dust.  His end a visual astonishment as goats come to call in his small room in the ancient town he lived in.  Immediately followed with a startlingly abrupt cut to the birth ejection of a beautiful white ‘kid.’  Small incidents continue in the second half of this short film, ending with a strongly etched sequence where a felled tree is broken down, cut up, stacked in a dome shape that becomes a purpose-built kiln where it is all transformed into charcoal.  A sequence that, in its far more modest manner,  need not be embarrassed to stand beside Andrei Tarkovsky’s casting of the church bell in ANDREI RUBLEV/’66.   Largely made in long patient takes, sometimes static/sometimes not, shot after shot has a rigorous compositional beauty (the goatherd’s kitchen a particular knockout), yet the frame-worthy look doesn’t stop forward momentum as it often does in these film-fest oriented projects.  A new Frammartino film, THE HOLE/’21, is about spelunking ancient historic cave sites.  Go figure.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *While advantages of 35mm over digital capture continue to shrink, fine disparities in Grey-Scale show the difference as much as anything.  A subtlety of graduation easily spotted in still shots of stacked charcoal logs seen here.  You’ll want to order prints for framing.

SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL (1959)

In what proved to be his antepenultimate film (excluding a late encore in RAGTIME/’81), James Cagney reaches back to the old menace that established his legend one last time.*   Almost shockingly good in this well-made ‘Irish Troubles’ story from the 1920s about a University Medical Professor who moonlights as a rebel commander in the I.R.A.  So wound up in  ‘the cause,’ he’s become enthralled to the violent struggle and doesn’t want the action to stop, even for a just peace.  Falling under his sway is Don Murray’s Irish/American med student, a WWI vet sure he’s seen enough killing till he’s radicalized thru a combination of family history, a friend’s death and a brutal interrogation by the British Black & Tan unit.  With unexpectedly muscular direction by Michael Anderson, a workaday talent regularly drafted into big assignments pleasing & perfectly awful (AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS/’56; SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN/’68), here much helped by fave lenser Erwin Hillier whose heavy use of red-filtered b&w gives off a glowering edge.*   Strong acting support too.  Murray’s romantic rivals, working-class Irish Glynis Johns & upper-crust Brit Dana Wynter are shoehorned in, but very good; so too senior I.R.A. head Michael Redgrave, poet rebel Cyril Cusack and early credits for a fresh-faced Donal Donnelly and Richard Harris as a pigheaded gunman.  (Harris even gets a splashy death dance right out of a ‘30s gangster film with Cagney.)  And if Anderson loses control as the suspense overflows toward the end, this is still a grand exit for Cagney’s snarling genius.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK - I:  Keen-eared listeners will recognize some propulsive music cues composer William Alwyn refitted from his own score to ODD MAN OUT/’47; Carol Reed’s film about ‘The Troubles’ and a robbery gone wrong with James Mason.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/04/odd-man-out-1947.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID - II:  *Presumably it was Cagney, taking no chances, who brought in Ivan Goff & Ben Roberts, scripters on WHITE HEAT/’49.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID - III:  *A superbly mastered 2022 edition on Kino-Lorber does Erwin Hillier proud.  But look out for a HUGE Spoiler at the end of a nice interview with 90-ish Don Murray.

IT STARTED IN NAPLES (1960)

Trying on Hollywood for size in 1957*, Sophia Loren stuck it out thru a fistful of forgettable films before fleeing.  (De Sica’s TWO WOMEN/’60 and Anthony Mann’s EL CID/’61 coming to the rescue.)  This light romance, pure Hollywood in spite of handsome VistaVision lensing from Robert Surtees on location in Naples, is typical of the misuse.  Clark Gable, in his penultimate role, plays an American lawyer passing thru the city to settle his black sheep of a brother’s estate and finding complications: specifically, the dead man's son, a cute tyke being raised by Zia Sophia.  You’ll guess the rest though Gable gamely finesses the ending to suit his age.  It’s why the heart-tugging train station climax writer/director Melville Shavelson (improving on similar duties for Loren & Cary Grant in HOUSEBOAT/’58) lifted from Billy Wilder’s May/December LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON/’57 for Audrey Hepburn & Gary Cooper plays out not between the leads but between Gable & Nephew.  Harmless and less Ugly American than you expect (Gable’s savvy tourist is quick to catch on to the local customs), the main takeaway is noting that Gable and Vittorio De Sica, expertly playing his voluble Italian lawyer, were both born in 1901.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Naturally, the one project in the bunch still worth watching was also the biggest flop, George Cukor’s sui generis theatrical Western, HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS/’60.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/02/heller-in-pink-tights-1960.html  

(Use the search engine on the Full Site to check out other Loren Hollywood pics.)

BLUEBEARD (1944)

This exceptional Poverty Row production from Z-budget auteur Edgar G. Ulmer offers a rare opportunity to compare & contrast similar projects made the same year at two low-end price points.  Over at 20th/Fox, John Brahm’s THE LODGER, coming in about a step-and-a-half up from a programmer, a Jack the Ripper suspenser on a tortured artistic soul stalking London, compelled to murder beauty till he hits the pause button with his next victim in sight and a police detective on his trail also falling for the woman at risk.  BLUEBEARD has nearly the exact same scenario, but set in Paris with blocked painter/talented puppeteer Gaston Morel (aka Bluebeard).  In THE LODGER, Laird Cregar, Merle Oberon & George Sanders get polish & smooth production values from a major studio that bargain-basement counterparts John Carradine, Jean Parker & Nils Asther can only dream about on a six-day shoot for the PRC releasing outfit.  Yet Ulmer, doing his own remarkable art design with his old U.F.A partner Eugen Schüfftan as cinematographer, creates powerful atmosphere & images thru obvious painted backdrops and false perspective.  At times, we might have stepped into THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI/’20.  Jean Parker disappoints as the object of desire (so too Oberon in LODGER), but most of the cast is unusually strong for this cost-level; Carradine particularly happy with his work, rightly so.  Bumpy going here & there, lots of coverage problems covered with awkward edits, and current prints range from unwatchable to just okay.  (Best I could find came with burned-in Spanish subtitles.)  Yet the film is strangely disturbing, with a stylistic unity of vision that posits a painter’s unique artistic style to unlock a murder mystery.  All in all, one of Ulmer’s more successful oddities.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, THE LODGER/’44. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lodger-1944.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Ulmer, unusually cognizant on film scores (see DETOUR/’45; CARNEGIE HALL/’47; THE NAKED DAWN/’55;), no doubt smiled at PRC music director Leo Erdody purloining Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ whenever a painting showed up, but may have cringed at Erody’s musical overload elsewhere.  The guy won’t shut up!

TREMORS (1990)

Mentioned near the top in recent obits for undersung actor Fred Ward, I’d not been aware of missing this sharp goof of a horror pic.  (Had I confused it with HOLES/’03?*)  A modest performer initially, it became a monster hit in home video, generating many poorly rated sequels.  But the original is a paradigm for this type of silly/scary night-at-the-movies fun, with everyone bringing their best to the survival game tropes as huge blind underground wormy beasts attack a small southwest desert community.  Director Ron Underwood, with stinkers like THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH/’02 to look forward to, is on top of every piece of business, either pushing or lying low as needed while getting strong eccentric perfs out of a pitch-perfect cast.  Ward’s co-stars, Kevin Bacon & the less well known Finn Carter, take charge trying to out think the fast evolving creatures, with a fine company of eccentrics joining battle.  Gung-ho survivalist gun-nuts Reba McEntire & Michael Gross are particularly winning & funny.  And now the film has acquired as extra layer of wit as prescient parody of A QUIET PLACE/’18 using the same gimmick of noise-activated attacks . . . but with more laughs.  And a bright, sunny look rather than the usual modern murk doesn’t hurt either.  The film is almost too much fun.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: You know you’re in a '90s pic with an opening shot that spots Bacon from the back as he shakes off a pee before giving his ass a scratch.  (It’s okay, he keeps his jeans up.)  Had to let the kids know they were seeing something they couldn’t get for free on NBC at home.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Here’s a link to HOLES which turns out to have little in common with TREMORS.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/holes-2003.html

And to QUIET PLACE which has rather more.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-quiet-place-2018.html

THE NORTHMAN (2022)

Perhaps tempered by exponentially growing budgets (4 mill for THE WITCH/’15; 11 on THE LIGHTHOUSE/19; now up to 60), this third project from gifted writer/director Robert Eggers is both highly accomplished & disappointingly conventional.  Visually an art-house blockbuster manqué with brooding landscapes fit for any freshman dorm room; in content an early iteration of Hamlet, like a second cousin thrice-removed; it's a museum instillation you admire but are unmoved by.  Alexander Skarsgård makes a stunning beast as Amleth, the Hamlet character, running away from his dad-murdering/mom-marrying uncle only to return all grown up for revenge.  Those who know HAMLET will get a kick out of the differences (Nicole Kidman’s Mom in on the plot; the Ophelia character sane & fertile; a guilt-free Uncle Claudius; a doubt-free avenging son; etc .), but also note missing character & narrative interest.  You only have to recall the immediate vibrations of Denmark being a country out of whack triggered right at the start when the wrong person (the visitor not the guard) asks ‘Who goes there’ to see the difference genius makes.  Though certainly a worthwhile watch, much of Eggers’ complicated staging techniques start to feel like efforts to camouflage rather than reveal.  Hopefully, the film’s relatively soft grosses will safeguard him from a soul-sucking call placed by the ubiquitous folks of MARVEL to the talented Mr. Eggers.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Eggers two other pics: THE WITCH and THE LIGHTHOUSE. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-witch-2015.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-lighthouse-2019.html   OR:  Ethan Hawke, over-parted in the Claudius spot here, had the lead in Michael Almereyda’s modernized HAMLET/’00.  (not seen here)

SAIL A CROOKED SHIP (1961)

From a novel by Nathaniel Benchley* (son of Algonquin Round Table Robert/father to JAWS Peter) a twee comic programmer where junior shipping exec Robert Wagner's idea to salvage a fleet of rusty old freighters leads him straight into a gang-who-couldn’t-shoot-straight pack of bank robbers.  Occasional director Irving Brecher (formerly a go-to writer for M-G-M comedies & musicals) hardly sweats the details on a plot that doesn’t add up, content to let a cast of good-natured comic zanies run the deck on board.  Wagner looks fit tossed by a hurricane in a Buster Keaton routine (alas, he grins thru the whole sequence); a pre-convent Dolores Hart holds on to her chastity; Ernie Kovacs, in his last film, fights Frank Gorshin for gang leadership; moll Carolyn Jones cuddles for warmth & loses her makeup to Wagner in a lifeboat (where’s Blake Edwards when you need him?); Frankie Avalon kicks a jukebox to life to accompany him on ‘Opposites Attract’; Jesse White & Harvey Lembeck can’t get a laugh; and so on.  Still, enough lands to keep you watching and there’s a fascination in wondering what possible audience Columbia Pictures was aiming at.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Benchley had far better luck in another nautical comedy, the well-played Cold War slapstick of Norman Jewison’s THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/russians-are-coming-russians-are-coming.html

OVER THE GARDEN WALL (2014)

Enchanting animation, odd & creepy, strange & whimsical, Patrick McHale’s hand-drawn mini-series (10 ten-minute chapters first seen on Cartoon Network) soon bewitched all who saw it.  Filled with subconscious childhood fears of loss & abandonment, it opens without explanation as two young brothers find they are lost in a Grimm forest and can’t find a way home.  Structurally, if not geographically, it’s familiar territory, each chapter set in a new location with fantastical creatures who might be friend or foe.  Surely one of them will know the way out!  But any directions they get are Delphic, designed to be inscrutable, confusing or contradictory.  So too our Freudian siblings: Kid Ego & Kid Id; while the communities they come across survive within Jungian collective memory & ritual.  Some of it, especially in the early going, frightening stuff . . . and not just for kids.  Loads of cultural & visual references, from WIZARD OF OZ to HANSEL & GRETEL; from the ‘30s 2-strip TechniColor of Isling & Harmon cartoons to an Auntie from Studio Ghibli.  Vocal stylings ranging from Jack Jones smooth Pop standards to Sam Ramey smooth operatic baritone.  Even a bit of faux Randy Newman.  Yet none of it feeling shoe-horned in for show, but part of the free-floating gestalt.  Something that gets too direct an explanation in Chapter 9 after we’ve given in to any lack of logic.  Better not to know or speculate, merely accept, like kids hearing a scary fairy tale for the first time.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  McHale’s sole credit after this is writer on the animated ADVENTURE TIME series.  Hopefully more of his distinctive voice will come thru on the upcoming Guillermo del Toro stop-motion PINOCCHIO adaptation where he's listed as co-writer.

CONE OF SILENCE / TROUBLE IN THE SKY (1960)

The suspense is largely cerebral in this courtroom & cockpit drama about jet aviation and a suspect new line of aircraft.  Intelligent & involving, timely too considering current problems at Boeing, it earns full credit for tackling a story based on technical specifications: the safe handling of planes under difficult flying conditions with only a soupçon of personal issues to complicate things.  Bernard Lee (‘M’ in the early James Bond pics) is the vet pilot under scrutiny after an aborted take off: pilot error or design flaw?  Checked out as AOK and back in the sky, further troubles pop up just as Inspector Michael Craig takes a shine to daughter Elizabeth Seal causing rival pilot Peter Cushing (in a rare unsympathetic role) to suspect favoritism.  With a reasonable production (other than some unhappy model plane shots) & typically fine British supporting cast, the film ought to be smooth sailing . . . er, flying.  Yet so visually dull, it just sits on the screen and dies in front of you.  Deplorably understated & tasteful, it plays like a veritable call to shake up British cinema.  Something already happening over at Hammer in TechniColored Horror, in stage-to-screen adaptations of Angry Young Man plays, and soon in the British New Wave.  All three sweeping this style of filmmaking aside.  Ironic that a film about the dangers of following the rules too strictly should be hoist on its own petard in Charles Frend’s unbending, by-the-book dependability.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Frend could be better, especially in films with Jack Hawkins like THE CRUEL SEA/’53.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-cruel-sea-1953.html

OR: Sticking closer to our subject, David Lean’s THE SOUND BARRIER/’52..  

WOMAN IN HIDING (1950)

Neatly twisted film noir has a lot going for it, but misses top-tier status; less from a lack of plausibility (common enough) than from a lack of inevitability.  Ida Lupino gets things off to startling effect as a newlywed in flight from her honeymoon, speeding away from deceiving husband Stephen McNally only to plunge to her death when she drives off the road and into the river.  That suits him fine since it’s not Ida he wants, but the furniture factory she’s just inherited from her late dad.  He killed him, too.  But if Ida’s dead, where’s the body?  He won’t own the factory till they find her.  So, he’s on the hunt and she’s on the run.  Enter free-spirited Howard Duff, halfheartedly running a newsstand at the bus station when this lost soul comes by.  Intrigued, if not entirely convinced by her story, he just might turn her over to the authorities as one mixed up dame (her picture’s in the paper) . . . or phone the husband to come pick up his deluded wife.  Director Michael Gordon can’t quite make all the pieces add up, but in a series of tight set pieces, he shows consistent visual imagination, much helped by long-time M-G-M glam cinematographer William Daniels, freed at Universal to show off some impressive noir bona fides with near night-owl vision.  (Check out a chase in an Emergency Stairwell and a gasp-worthy climax in the darkened furniture factory.)  Plus a bit of Hollywood matchmaking as co-stars Lupino & Duff married next year.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: No composer credited, but lots of tasty Miklós Rósza stock cues help to build tension.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Universal released an even better woman’s POV film noir this year, WOMAN ON THE RUN/’50.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/woman-on-run-1950.html

CONTEST:  Not the only 1950 film to have a ‘corpse’ narrate the film.  Name the other one to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up on a film of your choice.

ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY (1970)

Just what the title says, a 15 & a half hour studio session (plus pick-up vocal a few days on) as Stephen Sondheim’s career defining musical is recorded for vinyl shortly after opening to raves on B’way.  Condensed to an hour for primetime NBC tv by docu-filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, it’d never make it to network broadcast today.  One of Sondheim’s most revived/least reviled shows (currently on B’way with a gender switch: leading man Bobby flipped to leading woman Bobbie), the problematic book (a series of facile sketches meant to convince Bobby that marital plunge is worth  the horror show of couples he sees in his best friends) happily avoided in this behind-the-scenes look at Sondheim’s phenomenal score & lyrics.  Blood, sweat, tears & make-up-free skin pores from the amazing talent in front of the mikes and back in the booth.  Plus, you don’t have to be a B’way nerd to get into it.  But those who are will be shocked at all those singers puffing away; at how much better soon-to-depart leading man Dean Jones (yes, of the Disney films) sounds on Pennebaker’s sound mix than he does on the finished album*; at the phenomenal voice from little-known Pamela Myers singing ‘Another Hundred People’ (very Linda Ronstadt); spotting pre-MURPHY BROWN Charles Kimbrough; or just reveling in a lost B’way era.  If only Pennebaker would give us a longer cut, one that needn’t fit into a one-hour time slot.

DOUBLE-BILL: It’s an AUDIO Double-Bill.  Stream the original cast album to hear the two-thirds that goes missing here.  Including Elaine Stritch blasting out the longest, loudest, flattest note in B’way album history at the end of the opening number.  How’d that get by amazingly patient, amazingly calm album producer Thomas Z. Shepard?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Jones left the show soon after the opening (personal issues; he and his wife headed for divorce) with Larry Kert, B’way’s original WEST SIDE STORY Tony, taking over before being followed in turn by yet another WSS alum, George Chakiris, the film’s Bernardo.

MORGAN: A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT (1966)

Successfully marketed as a ‘Mod’ British New Wave sex comedy (see poster), a ‘60s Youth Culture film, like THE KNACK/’65 or GEORGY GIRL/’66, a must-watch to keep up at your next cocktail party, Karel Reisz’s film filters David Mercer’s politically facile script thru up-to-date Carnaby St. era stylistics.  It makes a fascinating time-capsule, but a very lumpy trip.  Star-making for David Warner & Vanessa Redgrave, commandingly glamorous as the uncoupling twosome.  HER: rich old-money, just divorced from Morgan, getting set to marry her ex’s agent, Robert Stephens.  HIM: artistically blocked painter, raised proletarian Communist and breaking apart with the stress of having a foot in both camps.  In an odd choice that likely ‘made’ the film, Mercer expresses Warner’s  metastasizing mania thru a gorilla fixation: real docu-footage (in the jungle/at the zoo); KING KONG and TARZAN film clips; and most memorably with a gorilla suit donned by both Redgrave and Warner.  Often wildly inventive (even structurally, skipping a first act), it’s really quite a sad film, with a downward trajectory that audiences somehow didn’t take out of the theater.  Our poster really is how people talked about this.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, THE KNACK and (first choice) GEORGY GIRL with Vanessa’s sister Lynn, both Redgraves Oscar nom’d this year.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-knack-and-how-to-get-it-1965.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/georgy-girl-1966.html

CONTEST:  Redgrave & Reisz reteamed on ISADORA/’68 which is prefigured here.  Name the scene mirrored to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your (streamable) choice.

THE BRINK'S JOB (1978)

The fourth version of this big deal 1950 robbery of the Brink’s Boston counting house, $25 mill taken by a third-rate gang of mugs, is too cute for words.  Director William Friedkin, just off SORCERER/'77, a disastrously received masterwork, no doubt leapt at the chance to step in when producer Dino de Laurentiis canned John Frankenheimer.  The idea was to give Universal Pictures the colorful, splashy followup to hit period caper THE STING/’73 they’d been trying to reproduce in a series of misfires.  It helps explain the bright gloss & shiny artifice in spite of being made in & around Boston, Mass. and not at Universal Studios, Culver City.  Maybe it would have worked better without the attempt at verisimilitude.  As it stands, Peter Falk & his colorful streetwise cohorts all seem to be constantly winking at each other (or us) as they work a ridiculously easy cash takeaway from the wizened Katzenjammer Kids charged with locking up all that protected loot.  Money launderer Peter Boyle (the one-eyed man in a gang of the blind) & wild card ‘expert’ Warren Oates manage to freshen up their moldy characters, while Sheldon Leonard, who once played wiseguys before becoming a top tv sit-com producer, is amusingly cast as J. Edgar Hoover.  Everyone else, including Friedkin, just take de Laurentiis money and run.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For some reason, this reminded me of the lightweight vehicles Universal was making in the mid-‘50s for a young Tony Curtis.  Sure enough, it was one of those vehicles: SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS/’55 (not seen here).  OR: Friedkin in excelsis with SORCERER.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/sorcerer-1977.html

THE WEB (1947)

After early ‘40s programmers & war service, director Michael Gordon returned to Hollywood for this neatly turned film noir.  Working on a very short leash at Universal, Gordon seems emboldened rather than curtailed by the tight budget, standing sets and B-list cast.  Make that B+ cast with Edmund O’Brien (still reasonably trim & sweat-free) as a striving lawyer just dumb enough to think he’s getting a career break from rich industrialist Vincent Price.  He’s really being set up in a scheme to knock off Price’s old partner just out of jail after taking the rap on a million dollar swindle.  (A clean-shaven Price always a giveaway to his being the bad guy.)  As Price’s personal secretary, Ella Raines has a rare good role playing the gal-in-the-middle (falling for O’Brien/loyal to her generous boss) while William Bendix steals all his scenes as the detective who’s O’Brien’s pal and the investigating officer on the case.  Part & perf a variation on Edward G. Robinson in DOUBLE INDEMNITY with Bendix none the worse for the comparison.  The film can’t quite overcome a certain over-familiarity, even at the time the twists couldn’t have surprised many, but its foreshortened perspective look and snappy pace, along with the moody Hans Salter score and a few unexpected edits (look fast for an unprecedented smash cut after a shooting) make the film a fun watch.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, DOUBLE INDEMNITY/’44.  OR:  Another Raines noir we’ve pushed your way before, IMPACT/’49.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/impact-1949.html

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE / CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DÉSIR (1977)

Luis Buñuel hit upon a distinctive new tone on his last three films; serenity of age buffering the old savageries.  Politics, religion & upper-middle-class mores still targeted, but now playing with the knowledge that the fight’s been won even before the lights go down.  If not in the world at large, than in the cinematic universe, adding an undertone of delight.  First & best of the three was DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE/’72, with PHANTOM OF LIBERTY/’74 less followup than vaudeville.  OBJET, something of a return to form.  Like DISCREET, it’s about not getting what you want.  There dinner; here sex.  And the closer you get, the surer your goal will prove unreachable.  Surprisingly, modern day terrorism a leading figure in both.  And if nothing here can match DISCREET's dinner guests hiding under a table from machine gun fire while hopefully reaching above for those untouched plates of food, there’s still plenty of food for thought (and hilarity) as wealthy, middle-aged Fernando Rey relates his amorous tale of woe to fellow train travelers all about young, beautiful, coitus-withholding Conchita, alternately played by warm/earthy Ángela Molina & elegant/angular Carole Bouquet.*   Filmmaking never looked so easy, but don’t be fooled.  At 77, it took a lifetime to get here.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Buñuel pulled the plug on his first attempt when Maria Schneider proved impossible to work with, coming back to the project after he & collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière thought to split the role between two actresses.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Pierre Louÿs’ novel filmed many times, including THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN/’35 (Marlene Dietrich/Josef von Sternberg).  But the basic idea of unconsummated frustration closer to Ernst Lubitsch’s equally frustrating misfire BLUEBEARD’S EIGHTH WIFE/’38.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/02/bluebeards-eight-wife-1938.html

CHISUM (1970)

Even John Wayne couldn’t avoid the customary post-Oscar® slump after TRUE GRIT/’69 brought the little man his way.  Eleven films to go before he was thru, all disappointing (or worse) other than THE COWBOYS.*  Wayne, hoping to buck tradition, tried with Howard Hawks, John Sturges & Don Siegel, but all three directors seriously off-form.  While here, in the fourth of five films with the reprehensibly coarse Andrew L. McLaglen, he’s not even trying.  A big production, too: handsome locations, lots of horse & cattle flesh, a bevy of second-tier ‘names’ in support.  But in dialogue, acting, bald-faced exposition, dramatic construction, use of ‘with-it’ fast zoom shots as exclamation points, indigestible title song repeating like a bad radish, two Bob Mitchum sons, risibly mean villains and a stunt double for the ages for our aging lead, this tussle over land & cattle may be the worst of Wayne’s later vehicles.  And to appease the youth market, Billy the Kid's on hand.  Alas, with the ‘wrong’ Deuel brother hired to play him; pixie-ish Geoffrey instead of talented, tragic brother Peter.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Pamela McMyler, shockingly bad as Wayne’s niece/Billy-the-Kid’s g’friend, got her start in AMBLIN’/’68, the short film that landed a 22-yr-old Steven Spielberg an agent.  No dialogue on that near silent, so maybe she’s a little better. 

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Normally Mark Rydell can give McLaglen a run for his money in lousy direction (see ON GOLDEN POND/’81).  But he's on his best behavior for THE COWBOYS/'72. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-cowboys-1972.html

NIHON NO ICHIBAN NAGAI HI / JAPAN'S LONGEST DAY (1967)

Corporate-style filmmaking to celebrate a corporate anniversary (35 Years of TOHO Film), this WWII endgame story makes a fascinating watch.  (As for accuracy, don’t look here!)  Directed by Kihachi Okamoto, a late draftee in the war*, it handles a myriad of military & government characters (much narration/much on-screen identification) thru intense cabinet meetings over a single day working out the exact terms of surrender & the precise wording of the Emperor’s announcement, recorded for air-play the next day.  In theory, in spite of sidebar scenes of military action, this might be as tedious for an audience as it must have been for the exhausted ministers & top-rank officers.  Both shown reluctantly tipping toward an admission of defeat only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed.  But at the halfway point, the film takes a decisive turn and changes focus to what had been minor background rumbling from military units fundamentally (make that fanatically) opposed to any terms of surrender and determined to fight on.  Quickly organizing a brutal multi-stage rebellion against their superior officers, insubordination in the name of ‘patriotism,’ their actions include violently taking over the Emperor’s compound.  Top priority: finding that recorded speech.  ‘My Kingdom For A Horse’ updated to ‘Our Kingdom For a 78rpm Laquer Disc.’  (A detail this bizarre has got to be historically accurate.)  Many well known faces involved, including Yasujirô Ozu’s usual father figure Chishû Ryû and Toshirô Mifune shortly after his last film with Akira Kurosawa.  Not great filmmaking by any means, but cumulatively effective.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The film leaves you with the impression that Okamoto believed the atomic bombs were the only way to end the war quickly.  And approved of their use?  The time factor likely saving his life as a late conscriptee.  Not an idea you expect in a Japanese film of the period.

NUMBER 17 (1932)

Flummoxing Alfred Hitchcock completists for decades, this comic thrilller wouldn’t have felt particularly unfamiliar to audiences of the day after popular fare like THE OLD DARK HOUSE/’32, THE CAT AND THE CANARY/’27 or THE BAT WHISPERS/’30.  But would have looked just as bad.  Hitch’s comments (in toto) per his seminal interview book HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT:  ‘A disaster.’  And yet Hitchcockians need to see it, but will have to sit tight thru the first five reels, stuck in a ‘vacant’ house infested with ‘not’ dead bodies; jewel thieves; undercover cops; a deeply unfunny ‘comic cockney’; ladies with a penchant for furs & handcuffs; and a putative renter with a nose for trouble who bumps into a scam no one could possibly make head or tails of.  Under the gaze of a surprisingly mobile camera & pointless visual trick shots hoping to liven things up, business plays out at a glacial pace except for a pair of amusingly undercranked fight scenes.  (Did the sound engineer order the cast from picking up their cues?)  At last we clear out for the final reel & a half, a dilly of a chase sequence via train and bus.  A fabulist’s conception of speed & movement with more cul-de-sacs than a 10-episode serial, setting up a crash of a climax with everything changing over to delightful miniatures, a demented out-of-control toy train set (the deluxe model with the bus); anticipating Orson Welles’ famous quote upon first entering R.K.O. Studios: ‘This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.’

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Finally available in pristine condition, marginally helping the drama inside the house before the film comes to life with those glistening trains, both real & toy.   Uptick in watchablility comparable to the improvement thru a proper restoration in Paul Leni's THE CAT AND THE CANARY, mentioned above.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/01/cat-and-canary-1927.html

THE BLACK CAT / GATTO NERO (1981)

Italian Giallo/Horror specialist Lucio Fulci tackles Edgar Allan Poe (really just the title) in this modest gross-out thriller from his late international period.  Here, with British locations and Italian interiors, Patrick Magee stars as our cranky psychic (vocal cadences courtesy of Boris Karloff) who’s either controlling our eponymous pussy (or is it pussies?) or is controlled by them in a series of murderous assaults.  Fulci’s action chops pretty weak here, cat attacks mostly feline free-throws for minimal shock effect, and deadly paws more like paint brushes slathering on stage blood.  Things turn dire as various characters start catching on to his act and the police investigate, but too late to save a randy fellow hoist on his own petard when his air-conditioned den of inequity is sabotaged to become a sweat-box of death for him and his unwilling nubile victim.  All very 'meh.'  What does hold your attention is an unusual score from Pino Donaggio along with dazzling production design from Franco Calabrese.  Some scaffold-like staircases the most Poe-worthy element in here.

DOUBLE-BILL: Lucio Fulci has an expanding cult following, but we’ve yet to be convinced.  Perhaps some Fulci fan has a suggestion.   Click where it says 'Post a Comment' directly below.