IL GRANDE SILENZIO / THE GREAT SILENCE (1968)

Friend & near contemporary to that better-known Spaghetti Western Sergio, writer/director Sergio Corbucci is always going to be in Sergio Leone’s shadow; rightfully so.  But at his best (much chaff amongst the wheat), Corbucci’s work is a considerable achievement.  None more so than this darkly existential, downright nihilistic snow-set Western with Jean-Louis Trintignant as a mute figure of frontier justice (and its limits) working against Klaus Kinski’s amoral bounty hunter.  Suggested by real incidents, the main conflict has Kinski and confreres grabbing easy pickings out west where a small colony of outlaws hope to start new lives, many still with a price on their heads.  Kinski, within his rights to kill & collect; Trintignant with a history of personal injustice that compels him to act for the oppressed.  Shot in stunning wintry conditions (and slightly less stunning spaghetti Western town), the film has unexpected nobility to it, with excellent perfs up and down the line.  The two leads exceptional.  (Trintignant happy to avoid Italian with a mute characterization; though you shouldn’t as the film plays better in Italian with subtitles than in the English dub.)  Corbucci uses a few brief subliminal flashbacks to explain past events and current motivations, something Leone also did that year to infinitely superior effect in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.  It’s the difference between talent and genius.  Same goes for Ennio Morricone with this score not a patch on his legendary music for WEST.  Still fine; the film better than that.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: A 50th Anniversary DVD out from Film Comment has an unusually sharp career appreciation Extra from British director Alex Cox.

DOUBLE-BILL: On our Main Site (scroll down to the View Web Version LINK if you’re on a SmartPhone), just type in Corbucci for a fistful of Write-Ups to choose from.

CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OLYMPICS (1937)

That’d be the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the one where Jesse Owens took the local team to the cleaners.  Not that we get more than a few stock shots of the activities.  But some clever lad at 20th/Fox thought it just the spot for Charlie Chan (Warner Orland in his antepenultimate appearance as the famous detective) to chase down unnamed foreign powers on a case of industrial espionage.  The missing gizmo a radio control airplane device, stolen mid-flight on a Honolulu test run, now making its way to Berlin.  Enter Detective Chan, doubly delighted at the chance to solve the case and take in Key Luke’s Number One Son on the USA swim team.  (His briefly seen form leaving everything to be desired!)  And he’s not the only Chan son on the case.  Back in Honolulu, 12-yr-old Charlie Jr has been helping out to mixed, but winning effect.  (The Hollywood norm at the time that had Euro-leads bringing up real Asian kids was standard operating procedure, but what must the child actors have thought of it?)  These late Orland episodes (he died the next year) are the best in the series with the previous release, CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OPERA, also directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, considered best of the lot.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OPERA/’36 (not seen here) has Boris Karloff as co-star, perhaps picking up pointers for his Chinese detective series as MR. WONG.  Five films, replaced in the sixth by (wait for it) Key Luke!  (see link for details)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/mr-wong-detective-1938.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-fatal-hour-1940.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Since it’s 1937, the Berlin police aren’t the bad guys, merely incompetent.

A WALK IN THE SUN (1945)

Released six months after WWII ended, this granular look at a 1943 assignment in Occupied rural Italy (blow a small bridge; take the nearby German-held farm house) has a somber, even downbeat edge new at the time.  (Suddenly able to skip Rah-Rah Recruitment tropes, only the overly triumphant music score missed the memo.)  Producer/director Lewis Milestone certainly knows his way around the material (note the use of hands to indicate death as he famously did in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT/’30), and he’s got the cast to make believable grunts on a dangerous six mile tramp thru enemy territory after a coastal landing (strafing from above, tanks roaming on land) before reaching their target.  Dana Andrews, at the time the only real ‘name’ in the cast, is particularly fine, still standing as the platoon runs thru four commanders ahead of him before the day is done.  There’s a seen-it-all-before attitude from the men and a fatalistic acceptance of death’s random call, weighed against survival, sacrifice and luck in combat.  But the honest, blunt affect shown by the men (and it’s all men, not even a token female for the poster) is seriously undercut by a script that’s too poetic by half.  They might be speaking blank verse.  (Out of the Harry Brown novella this was taken from?)  Worse, when that overripe score isn’t playing underneath the occasional battle, there’s sure to be a new verse of an Earl Robinson ballad on the troop’s quotidian duties.  It’s not much different than Robinson's ‘The House I Live In,’ the famous Oscar-winning anti-racist anthem currently playing in theaters as a short-subject with Frank Sinatra singing the praises of America’s melting pot.  Here, a Black singer brings out extra Gospel Music flavor.  (Ironic when  considered against the Army’s still current policy of strict segregation.*)  But generally well handled, especially once a pair of Italian deserters pass thru and bring a little relief to the grim tone.  After this, the poetic rambling dials down considerably.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Not till 1948 when President Truman officially desegregated the military.  During the war years, the only integrated (and defacto ‘Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell’) unit in the Army was Irving Berlin’s personal UFO traveling revue ‘This Is The Army.’   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/05/this-is-army-1943.html

GÔRUDEN SURANBÂ / GOLDEN SLUMBER (2010)

Terrific.  THE 39 STEPS meets Japanese action thriller in this political assassination/innocent man on the run mash up.  Cleverly worked out, if shy on explanations, writer Kôtarô Isaka, a Japanese sensation about to go global with BULLET TRAIN (Brad Pitt; Sandra Bullock) finds just the right plot twists even when he leaves us twisting in the wind.  Here, innocent patsy Masato Sakai, goofily handsome & wildly appealing as a deliveryman, sees his fishing trip with an old college pal turn into a ploy to set him up as the presumed bomb wielding murderer of Japan’s Prime Minister.  Falling back on a circle of friends for help (college mates, a fellow deliveryman, his former fireworks employer, the Pop star he famously rescued a couple of years back, a sympathetic older cop, even a wanted serial killer acting as impromptu Fairy Godmother), the action-packed story is a stretch, but too much kinetic fun to pick apart while you watch.  Remade (apparently to lesser effect) in Korea in 2018, a Hollywood redo would have knocked 20 minutes off the running time which makes this original release Yoshihiro Nakamura’s peremptory Director’s Cut.  Even at this length, not exactly neat & tidy; lots of time jumping as well as multiple mini-flashbacks at the end meant to settle questions that only leave you scratching your head (especially on the role of an imposter and on who is ultimately behind all the corrupt police & officials), but don’t let implausibility keep you off the case.

DOUBLE-BILL: Go out to the movies for a change.  If BULLET TRAIN is half as good, it ought to be worth the ticket.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The title, GOLDEN SLUMBERS, a reference to The Beatles/Abbey Road.

LE MARIAGE DE CHIFFON (1942)

First in a series of subversive-free light romantic entertainments made-to-order by director Claude Autant-Lara for Nazi Occupation days.  Pablum for nervous times, it has Autant-Lara regular Odette Joyeux (pushing forty, but playing a well-to-do 16½ yr-old) as a flirty thing whose long-standing crush on bankrupt aviation inventor ‘Uncle’ Jacques Dumesnil is tested after she meets-cute with middle-aged suitor Colonel André Luguet, newly stationed in town and rich enough to have her use her dowry to bail the guy out.  The novel (or perhaps it’s the adaptors) lay on a series of farce elements (lost-and-found recidivist shoe; independent-minded butler; domineering mother with weak-willed step-dad; rule-breaking dog; secret diary entries) only to solve them one-by-one when they need to be developed into a comic crescendo.  Where’s René Clair when you need him?  (Answer: in Hollywood exile.)  Overstuffed with decor, costumes & period bric-a-brac (circa 1912), the film is a bit too sweet, too comfortable, too easy in resolutions.  But pleasant enough to ‘occupy’ an hour or two . . . which undoubtedly was the point.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: More interesting than the film are similarities with Billy Wilder’s undervalued LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON/’57.  Not only in farce situations & characterizations, but even in how it repeatedly uses  Marchetti’s ‘Fascination’ on the soundtrack. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/love-in-afternoon-1957.html   OR: Autant-Lara’s DOUCE/’43.  More of the same, but better.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/douce-1943.html

THIS RECKLESS AGE (1932)

Not a particularly good film, but a fascinating social document.  A modest B’way success for playwright Lewis Beach in 1924 as THE GOOSE HANGS HIGH, then a 1925 silent from James Cruze with Constance Bennett, and here indifferently remade by Frank Tuttle off an early Joseph L. Mankiewicz script, it’s a Generation Gap story that must have played very differently in the Roaring ‘Twenties than it does in the peak Depression year of 1932.  Stuffy middle-class parents have strained their finances putting the kids thru college only to find them Home for the Holidays as selfish, self-centered brats.  Every bit of bad behavior generously excused.  But now, thanks to some office skullduggery, Dad’s in trouble and may go to jail after his boss purposefully misrepresents his work to put together a land swindle.  It’s fuddy-duddy parental concern, old-fashioned values & over-indulgence vs youthful spirits, free will for the next generation on someone else’s tab, and modern mores of ‘25 dragged into Hoover’s Depression.  Rah-rah-rah hijinks looking cruel, irresponsible disrespectful.  The daughter (lovely France Dee), thoughtless, at best; the son (blandly handsome Charles Rogers) tossing away his future and his parents’ sacrifice for a quick marriage.  Naturally, the kids (originally three, here reduced to two) come to see their faults before cooking up an absurd counter-scam to get Dad off the hook.  (And even more incredibly have Dee hooking up with family-friend eunuch Charles Ruggles.)  But the sympathetic ‘20s ear that defaulted toward the views of a younger generation is missing right from the start in 1932.   If only that 1925 silent weren’t lost.  Especially since the daughter in 1925 was played by Constance Bennett, the real life kid of Richard Bennett, this film’s father.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID::  *The lost 1925 silent not to be confused with THE RECKLESS AGE, a 1924 comedy with Reginald Denny that (naturally) survives in near mint condition.

BLAZING SADDLES (1974)

On Mel Brooks’ surprisingly short list of films (a mere eleven features), THE PRODUCERS/’67 wins Best Idea; YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN/’74 Best Film; HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART I/’81 Most Underrated; SPACEBALLS/’87 Sleeper; and BLAZING SADDLES Biggest Hit.  Not hard to see why; at its best, this uneven parody of Hollywood Westerns still rude & very funny.  Claims that Political Correctness would now stop it farfetched.  You’ll hear more ‘N’ word in Tarantino or currently on FLATBUSH MISDEMEANORS; and not to characterize the speakers as racist.  (Though, as seen on our poster, Brooks’ Yiddisher Native American might have to go.)  A larger sticking point for the woke generation all those passé references.  (Cole Porter songs, Howard Johnson’s Ice Cream, genre clichés.)  But it was a lucky production: original choice Alan Arkin passed, allowing Brooks to come in as co-writer/director.  Gig Young got sick, ankling for Gene Wilder.  Madeline Kahn pulled out of MAME for this Marlene Dietrich singer.*  And if the studio got cold feet about writer Richard Pryor as the lead, a blander, far less dangerous Cleavon Little for the Black Sheriff of an all-white town never competes for attention in setting up the action.  Heck, even an ad for a Frankie Laine sound-alike brought in the real Frankie Laine to sing Mel’s deliciously OTT theme song.  Things can get pretty dull between gags, Mel’s inert compositions a wonder of bad choices.  (One scene between Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens & Kahn a textbook example of pure staging incompetence.)  But when you’ve got comic inspirations like Wilder & Kahn to fall back on, not much else matters.  Heavenly farceurs amid coarser clowning.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Brooks’ peak year, BLAZING SADDLES and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/02/young-frankenstein-1974.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Kahn set for Gooch, the prim virgin nanny in Lucille Ball’s MAME/’74.  A musical monstrosity that, ironically, Kahn might have saved had she played Auntie Mame.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/mame-1974.html

THE MAGIC BOX (1951)

A partial list: Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier, Margaret Rutherford, Peter Ustinov, Herbert Lom, Michael Redgrave, Stanley Holloway, Richard Attenborough, Glynis Johns, Dennis Price, Michael Hordern, Cecil Parker, Kay Walsh . . .  Just about every known actor in Britain at the time wanted to be in this bio-pic of U.K. film pioneer William Friese-Greene.  And just about no one wanted to go see it.  A famous flop on release, one of those films that shows up in shorter cuts in hopes of getting back some of the costs (original length 118"), it never has shed its poor rep.  Yet it’s actually quite a nice bit of filmmaking.  Intriguing non-linear structure by Eric Ambler* (starts near the end; flashback to the middle with wife #2; jump ahead for more of the ending; then skip all the way back to early days and wife #1 before wrapping up the last act), handsomely produced (Ronald Neame), well paced (director John Boulting), and ingeniously lensed (Jack Cardiff with TechniColor & seamless trick photography).   Part of the 1951 Festival of Britain, a nationwide cultural event meant to signify the beginning of the end of post-war austerity measures, the appropriately patriotic subject on one of the long forgotten inventors of moving pictures.  (Many countries headed in the same cinematic direction around the same time.)  Here, it’s Friese-Greene, played by Donat as a slightly absent-minded optimist with celluloid in his veins.  A pageant drama, it’s tableaux consistently pleasant, if never riveting.  But enough episodes land to carry you along with it.  The most famous one (Olivier’s night cop called in to witness the first film ever projected) worth the whole film.  Maria Schell as the frail, sacrificing first wife is a bit much (Luise Rainer in her tremulous heyday had nothing on Schell), but the rest of the cast are pretty swell.  And if Donat looks far too ravaged by illness to be believably twenty, he’s sympathetic as ever.  Almost shockingly believable in his death.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Ambler largely pulls off the non-linear narrative design Preston Sturges had trouble getting Paramount to leave alone on his failed inventor bio-pic: THE GREAT MOMENT/’44.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The ‘Everybody Who’s Anybody’ cast just what W. S. Gilbert had in mind on this lyric from The Gondoliers: ‘In short, whoever you may be; To this conclusion you'll agree; When every one is somebody; Then no one's anybody!’  (Maybe that’s why the film tanked.)

APPOINTMENT IN HONDURAS (1953)

Jacques Tourneur’s Glory Days were at R.K.O. in the ‘40s, suggestive horror for producer Val Lewton, films noir with cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca.  He continued to direct fine, if overlooked films in a variety of genres thru the ‘50s*, but this isn’t one of them.  Helped by a few superficial similarities to THE AFRICAN QUEEN/’51 (jungle cruise, deadly wildlife & swarming insects, developing romance, military adversary), budget-conscious producer Benedict Bogeaus got it set up and brought in a better than expected cast (Glenn Ford, Zachary Scott, an obviously unhappy Ann Sheridan, Jack Elam, Rodolfo Acosta, young Stuart Whitman in a bit), but on a nasty plot that exchanges QUEEN’s whimsy, originality & character enchantment for dour political adventure in South America.  (That’s studio set South America; no location stuff.)   Ford and a crew of unwilling hostages from a tramp steamer he’s left behind, travel upriver in hopes of finding the rightful government in exile Ford’s promised to meet.  The group constantly attacked from without and within.  Tourneur does what he can, some of those stock animal shots are downright revolting.  Tiger Fish.  Yuck!  But it’s a sweaty, unpleasant, phone-it-in exercise for all involved.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Tourneur only recently ranging from the rural Americana of STARS IN MY CROWN to nifty swashbuckling in THE FLAME AND THE ARROW. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/stars-in-my-crown-1950.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/flame-and-arrow-1950.html

THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN (1935)

Seventh, last, but not least of the Josef von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich films reverses the outcome of their first American release, MOROCCO/’30*, by having Marlene go back to Papa at the end.  Typically, the older lover is used & humiliated when Dietrich chooses a younger rival.  In MOROCCO/’30, it’s Sternberg alter ego Adolph Menjou losing out to Gary Cooper.  Here, Lionel Atwill seems all set to give way to young, virile Cesar Romero. But perhaps Sternberg knew this was the end of the line and gave himself the woman he longed for in real life.  John Dos Passos, of all people, did the script, from Pierre Louÿs’ oft-adapted play, with an unusual structure: Big Prologue; Big Flashback; Big Race out of town.  But no doubt you’re here for the expressionist Old Seville Carnival Sternberg lays out for us while acting as his own cinematographer.  Densely textured with foreground objets, confetti & streamers, you need remarkable figures & faces to stand out amidst the decor.  And if Sternberg can be blamed for thematically running on fumes (the Zeitgeist having passed him by a couple of films back*), he shouldn’t be blamed for dropping the ball at the 33" mark when Marlene’s big musical number (‘If It Isn’t a Pain’) was lost thru censorship.  (Criterion offers a rare audio track of the missing song as an Extra and it’s a major addition.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, Sternberg/Dietrich's Hollywood debut.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/morocco-1930.html  OR: Luis Buñuel’s final film, based on the same  Pierre Louÿs’ play.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/05/that-obscure-object-of-desire-cet.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Sternberg, with but a handful of uneven films over the next 25 years, never really got back on track.  Dietrich, in spite of some heavenly films in between, took four years to reestablish her career with DESTRY RIDES AGAIN/’39.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/02/destry-rides-again-1939.html

ACROSS THE BRIDGE (1957)

Long before advancing to faceless family entertainments like THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES/’65, Ken Annakin was a faceless journeyman director offering British competence in the absence of any stylistic fingerprints.  A professionalism that well serves this adaptation of Graham Greene’s short story about a reckless embezzling bank exec racing to safety and cash reserves across the border in Mexico.  Rod Steiger (with Wallace Berry’s German accent from GRAND HOTEL) as the man on the run makes a hard sell of both character & plot in the early goings.  (Annakin not much help reining him in.)  But Greene comes to the rescue with two great plot twists that not only pull the rug out, but reset tone to Fatalistic Irony.  Suddenly, everything starts working.  Twist #1: Steiger steals the identity of a fellow traveler, unaware the man’s Wanted for Murder in Mexico.  Twist #2: Steiger winds up stuck with ‘Dolores,’ the man’s fiercely loyal dog.  The rest of the film plays as conundrum, with Steiger stuck in small Mexican town holding one too many passports.  Reason enough to take them both, effectively stranding him.  Mexican Purgatory courtesy of local Chief of Police Noel Willman, who steals every scene not taken by Dolores.  Bernard Lee (M in the early James Bond films) also shows up as a Scotland Yard man hoping to trick Steiger back to Stateside territory and make an arrest.  Plus, a young Texas couple trying to get a reward on the killer Steiger is only pretending to be; the widow of same; and an entire town against Steiger for the death of a killer who was something of a local hero.  (How did Greene get so much plot in a short story!)  Cleverly shot in England & Spain, so technically a Brit Noir, with book author as film auteur.

ED WOOD (1994)

Director Tim Burton ended his early artisanal Hollywood outlier days with this rose-colored bio-pic (in fantastical b&w) on the infamous life & career of talent-free bottom-feeding auteur Edward D. Wood.  Somehow striking out and reaching a nadir of artistic film immortality plying his talents off the beaten path in fly-by-night Hollywood studios, Wood leverages a chance meeting with barely functioning horror vet Bela Lugosi into a grab at the possible that turns both lives around: Lugosi now able to feed his various addictions; Wood in writing & directing.   Together they made unreleasable (if distinctive) crap; sincere work that played like a put on.  Somehow, all involved here catch Burton’s larky spirit of film as communal group activity for society outcasts, particularly strong in its inclusionary LGBTQ+ cast of characters.  And if the tone punches too broadly in the opening reels, Burton and a super cast (Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bill Murray, Jeffrey Jones, et al.) consistently add layers of humanity between the professional incompetence.  You start out laughing at them (especially over Wood’s hilarious one-take approvals on-set), but wind up laughing with them, even caring about them.

DOUBLE-BILL: Think of this as a Double-Bill WARNING.  Don’t be too tempted to watch a real Edward D. Wood film.  Amusingly inept when seen in clips, Wood’s oeuvre deadly seen whole.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Vincent D’Onofrio, physically convincing as Orson Welles bonding with Wood over film finance troubles, must have come up short vocally.  His entire part ‘looped’ by an uncredited Maurice LaMarche using the same ‘Orson’ voice he brought to the great animated series PINKY AND THE BRAIN.

THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1960)

More Hammer Films Horror from house director Terence Fisher and TechniColor enthusiast Jack Asher; with Wolf Mankiewicz in for regular scripter Jimmy Sangster.  Look in vain to find book author Robert Lewis Stevenson credited; less hubris than truth in advertizing since so many of the book’s themes go topsy-turvy.  Most noticeably Stevenson’s inspiration out of Genesis 27:11, NIV: Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, 'But my brother Esau is a hairy man while I have smooth skin.’  This is the one Jekyll & Hyde adaptation where scientific civilized Jekyll is hirsute and Hyde smooth as a baby’s bottom.  Mankiewicz also has him already married rather than torn between Virgin & Whore.  It’s Mrs. Jekyll who’s two-timing with a scoundrel while the Doctor labors in his lab.  These reversals might have been pretty interesting, but the production just goes thru the motions, flooded with over-lit sets indoors & out.  Dawn Addams’ shameless wife looks painted for a night at the Carnival while Paul Massie eyes turn bright blue whenever Hyde takes over. Not that we see the transitions.  Too difficult, too expensive.  Instead, simple edits for the changes.  On the other hand, Christopher Lee has a fine old time as the debt-ridden hedonist ne’er-do-well diddling his friend’s wife.  But in general, the film a missed opportunity.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  John Barrymore made a dream Jekyll & Hyde in 1920, but John Robertson's dull direction  not up to the task.  (Barrymore repeated his legendary makeup-free transformation to better effect in DON JUAN/’26.)  The best JEKYLL & HYDE would be Rouben Mamoulian’s with Fredric March and Karl Struss’s still striking transformation photography.  (Red filters on b&w stock.)  If only March were able to enunciate around Hyde’s huge teeth.  (Why his dialogue wasn’t looped a 1931 mystery.)  But the most interesting has Victor Fleming directing miscast Spencer Tracy in a John Lee Mahin script; less Horror Film than Great Man Bio-Pic Gone Wrong.  Fascinating.  With great dream sequences for an incandescent Ingrid Bergman playing whore and horse for whipping.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Look for a young Oliver Reed, improbably beat up by Hyde at a club.  And listen for a score written by Monty Norman just before he wrote James Bond's DR. NO/’62. 

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: In spite of current cinematic freedoms no one has yet done the transformation scene nude.  Surely Jekyll would wish to watch.  Yes?  And think of the CGI possibilities as smooth Jacob turns into hairy Esau.  (Or the reverse as here.)

THE BOB'S BURGER MOVIE (2022)

The worry when a beloved tv series tries on full-length feature film for size is less ‘Will it be bad’ than ‘Will it be necessary.’  The exact trap BB creator Loren Bouchard falls into with this perfectly pleasant, decidedly fun, tuneful, and largely unnecessary extension of the brand.  With a touch of tweaking on well-known characters (Bob, famille & diner looking rounder and more angular - something to do with a fussy use of shadows); major action sequences seemingly bumped-up to full animation frame-rates (or looking that way); more polished writing & production on the songs (a meet-the-characters number suspiciously like Fagin’s ‘I’m Reviewing the Situation’ from OLIVER!); three more ‘poop’ jokes than needed; and so on.  Two main story lines converge to save the family restaurant: Bob missing payments on a bank loan and on rent to Mr. Fischoeder* just as a sink hole in front of his restaurant sinks any chance for an extension; the hole also opening storyline #2: a murder mystery for the three kids to solve.  Anyone who’s enjoyed the past decade of half-hour tv shows should enjoy the film.  But newbies would be well advised to binge-watch any random three episodes.  More fun, more laughs, more welcoming family vibe, more outliers finding their own way to some sort of victory; in half an hour less time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Odd that Kevin Kline, who voices Fischoeder and is a multi-Tony-winning musical-comedy star (among his many other accomplishments), doesn’t get a note to sing.

MULE TRAIN (1950)

Nowadays, Gene Autry, the original Singing Cowboy, may be better remembered as co-owner of the California Angels than for making movies.  If that’s the case for you, this late feature is a fine, if atypical, entry point to his courtly charms.  Handsomely mounted (as film and on horse Champion); confidently directed by John English; shot in crepuscular style by William Bradford on spectacular Lone Pine locations, it feels more like a scale-model kit for an ‘A’ Western than a program ‘Oater.’  Everything but the rubber cement included.   And cement’s the thing running the plot, a mountain of natural cement ready for dam building if only the contractor weren’t thwarting competition.  Marshall Autry, going undercover with comic sidekick Pat Buttram to check things out, finds the rightful owner of the cement deposit shot* and a lady local sheriff who had been a sharpshooting trick horse rider running hot & cold for him.  Alternately locking him up or cooking him dinner.  Yikes!  (Sheila Ryan, not much in the acting department, never does find her character, but did find a future husband in Buttram.)  And as for that Mule Train?  It’s mainly there to cash in on Frankie Laine’s big novelty hit, sung three times with relish by Autry who really whoops it up.  Fun stuff, and at a zippy 69".

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *That’s well-known character actor John Miljan, uncredited as the ornery cement deposit owner.  Part of an unusually strong line-up of good supporting actors for one of these little films.  Alas, the comic relief is business-as-usual bad.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  People debate the merits of Roy Rodgers vs Autry as top celluloid singing cowboy, but when it comes to horses, Trigger beats Champion by a country mile.

THE COURIER (2020)

This fine, gripping Cold War spy drama, centered around the Cuban Missile Crisis, got lost in the cracks of another kind of world crisis, early Covid-19 panic.  Solidly constructed, reasonably fact-based, it’s old-fashioned moviemaking in a good way.  Director Dominic Cooke, a theater guy with the occasional film credit, could have tightened the screws a bit (say, ten minutes tighter), but impressively catches a drab early ‘60s time & place in this British/Soviet/American roundelay on a Russian minister from Khrushchev’s inner circle offering to leak State nuclear secrets as counter to the Premier’s instability.  Fearful of using a known agent, M16 and C.I.A. find their patsy in pasty-faced middle-class businessman Benedict Cumberbatch (bringing his inner Tom Hanks into play, weaselly little mustache and all).   And how smoothly it all seems to go . . . till Soviet source Merab Ninidze is spotted and can only get out if Cumberbatch breaks norms to go back in.  The film is split nearly down the middle: first half all spy-craft; second all prison drama/loyalty test.  It proves a pacing & structural issue Cooke can’t quite navigate.  But not a fatal one since the story is consistently involving, the motives on all sides fascinating and the acting on such a high plain.  (Cooke misses suggesting the sheer amount of material successfully smuggled out to concentrate on family tensions stemming from strict secrecy.)  With Cumberbatch going all out in the starvation method acting department.  Like Tom Hanks in CASTAWAY/’00.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: See Hanks play the Cold War Spy Game in Steven Spielberg’s BRIDGE OF SPIES/’15.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/bridge-of-spies-2015.html

THE SEA BEAST (2022)

After the underrated/unexpected delight of BOLT/’08 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/bolt-2008.html), animation writer/director Chris Williams’s even larger success with BIG HERO 6/’14 and MOANA/’16 no doubt got him carte blanche at NetFlix . . . the results ain’t pretty.  The story’s the old saw of a misunderstood monster and the little orphan girl who joins in the hunt only to discover the truth: those violent/heroic stories she grew up loving were all lies!  Williams gives a pushy ‘woke’ feeling to much of this, especially when our little heroine spouts off on being taught myths from an old book in place of facts.  (Project 1619, anyone?)  And coming from such an unpleasant child!  Meant to be feisty, smart, independent, she comes across as petulant & irresponsible.  Maybe send the brat to her room without supper or give her a time out.  Instead, she runs off from the orphanage to stowaway on a ship of old-school sea beast hunters out to beat the King’s own mega-ship as first to reach Sea Beast #1, Red Bluster, a sort of Hayao Miyazaki/Ghibli workshop leftover by the look of it.  Animated in an unhappy CGI system that’s fine on backgrounds, less so on characterization, at least our two leading men each get a magnificent prow-like proboscis.  With action sequences so elaborate & busy you can’t really follow them, so tension is cut to zero, you merely hang out till our beast has his day in the court of public opinion.  But as NetFlix never tells, we may never know.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:   For Kid and Misunderstood Beast tropes (played with incredible freshness, emotion and devastating twists), Brad Bird’s debut THE IRON GIANT/’99 is hard to beat.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-iron-giant-1999.html

SHOOTING THE MAFIA (2019)

Kim Longinotto gets about half a documentary out of pioneering Sicilian photojournalist Letizia Battaglia.  How she began her professional career late, her upscale, but ultimately unsuccessful marriage going sour, raising two daughters, then moving from a job writing with words to writing with camera as the first female photographer at an Italian daily paper, covering the Mafia killings just as they were becoming a daily event (sometimes a multiple daily event) in and around Palermo.  Weegee, that great eccentric street photographer from ‘30s NYC comes to mind, but æsthetically a bad comparison.  Where Weegee is purposefully raw, even coarse, Battaglia turns out shockingly well-composed, museum-worthy shots of bloody gore & horror.  (see poster)  Not only victims, but also relatives in grief and remarkable glances of onlookers at edges of the frame.  Stunning b&w stuff which she shot for many years.  The problem is that this part of her life runs out long before the film is done.  Following her admittedly interesting personal story (she chose young, unusual romantic partners!) proves far less universal in appeal.  Worse, the running time is padded out with a documentary on two brave Sicilian judges who put their lives in danger during the large Mafia trials.  Here, Battaglia is tangentially, not professionally involved.  And the footage, as elsewhere in the film, variously sourced and not properly credited on screen.  (Presumably the end credits cover it in tiny print.)  Much of it looking familiar from other documentaries.  There’s a magnificent short subject in Battaglia, but it's likely a feature-length film was easier to fund and get distributed.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Francesco Rosi’s SALVATORE GIULIANO/’62 gives superb 1940s background to many issues that led to Palermo’s Mafia vs Communist vs independent bandit culture, while Alberto Lattuada’s MAFIOSO/’62 has yet to be surpassed in revealing Sicilian Mafia culture.  (All thru the conventions of commedia italiana.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/mafioso-1962.html

ROLLERBALL (1975)

A mixed reception on release, something of a cult fave now, this dystopian fable imagines a world of Bread & Circus for the masses in a future run by a mysterious entity known as The Corporation.  Meant as an anti-violence cautionary, it never gets past a William Harrison script with too many missing pieces (he barely worked again), there’s really nothing but RollerBall, a game for punk gladiators that’s half Roller-Derby/half Quidditch and all Death Race.*  Even with a lot of second-unit work, director Norman Jewison not a fellow known for his action chops.  When we finally do get cookin’ on a semi-finals match, he abruptly leaves the arena to hunt up deep explanations at Computer Headquarters.  (No answers; but a neat comic turn from Ralph Richardson.)  Elsewise, James Caan is the aging player whose refusal to retire threatens to arouse a docile public happily sedated by this ‘opiate of the people.’  (Caan wears #6, but there’s something very #9 Gordie Howe about him.)  John Beck his bigger, hairier teammate; John Houseman dreadful as the corporate overlord (if only he & Richardson had swapped roles); Maud Adams the girl so we don’t get ‘ideas’ about Caan & Beck*; and the furnishings all leftovers from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.  Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe emphasizing a Stanley Kubrick color scheme so we don’t miss the reference.  And Jewison repurposing classical music cues also in Kubrickian fashion; Bach, Albinoni, Shostakovich, with André Previn at the helm.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *There really is something very Quidditch about this sport.  J.K. Rowling a rollerball fan?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Indeed, just a hint of a Caan/Beck/Girl threesome at a massage session in Japan.

VOYAGE À TRAVERS LE CINÉMA FRANÇAIS / MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA (2016)

Manna from heaven for French Film Fanciers.  The final project of writer/director/raconteur Bertrand Tavernier (quickly followed by a nine episode tv expansion), both a highly personal and surprisingly uneccentric survey of a century in French cinema.  All the usual suspects: Renoir, Truffaut, Godard, Carné, Varda, Chabrol, actors like Jean Gabin & Eddie Constantine, composer Joseph Kosma, with directors Jacques Becker, Claude Sautet & Jean-Pierre Melville landing as particular favorites.  A treat to be able to count on beautiful prints!  (Though a FRENCH CANCAN clip looks ‘blasted,’ its recent restoration unavailable?)  Perhaps easy accessibility explains why these walk-thru film histories are popular just now.  Martin Scorsese has done two (both poor); Mark Cousins’ 15-part STORY OF FILM loaded with cherry picked factoids and inaccuracies to make pre-digested points.  By comparison, Tavernier is an exemplary guide, unafraid to buck tradition, generous by default, always on the prowl for good films regardless of politics, Party Line or auteurist theory hegemony.  (Rather male-centric though; perhaps this is addressed, at least with actresses, in the tv followup.)  Tavernier knows everything, has met everyone and earned his opinions having worked all sides of the industry.  Plus, he’s fun . . . even when you disagree.  With his often hilarious anecdotes, love & knowledge of American cinema, what a Hollywood survey Tavernier had in him if only he’d lived long enough.

DOUBLE-BILL: Kevin Brownlow & David Gill’s all-enveloping Silent Cinema history, HOLLYWOOD, a giant documentary leap that set the modern standard for these things.  Made in 1980, its eleven hours now hard to find.  Perhaps it's getting a much needed restoration.

THE EUROPEANS (1979)

Writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory had been joined at the hip for a decade and a half when they suddenly found their true metier (and brand as Merchant/Ivory) adapting this lesser, lightly comic Henry James novel.  A mix of literary cachet, handsome period settings, and not quite enough camera setups to lend rhythm, proved catnip for a certain niche looking for cinema with manners rather than cinema that matters.  Their modus operandi less ask not what you can do for literary classics, ask what literary classics can do for you.*  (Great Books used the way other films ‘borrowed’ fine art or classical music for background and classy window-dressing.)  Here less smooth than later, and none the worse for it.  Awkward pacing and odd line readings from a cast that’s half spot-on/half over-parted lending interest to a simple story of worldly Euro-titled cousins from the Old World testing the bluff/honest charms of 1850s New England Transcendentalists.  Underrated Lee Remick is enchantingly uneasy picking her way thru this strange new world while brother (and minor Prince!) Tim Choate fits right in by not minding that he doesn’t fit in.*  The two spending all their time with cousins or friends thereof.  And if fur never flies, enough hackles are raised to keep things fairly lively, modestly entertaining.  If only it had a bit more drive (and less prettiness) to it.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *The grand Merchant/Ivory exception not one of their acclaimed serious dramas but the joyous A ROOM WITH A VIEW/’85 where they all took E. M. Forster’s advice to throw away their Baedeker and dare to get lost.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A mediocre if enthusiastic painter, perhaps the brother’s portraits would be better if he didn’t seat his subjects in front of windows where bright sunshine would make their face impossible to see.  (Or was he making cut-out silhouettes?)

KEDAMONO NO KEN / SWORD OF THE BEAST (1965)

Highly-rated Samurai pic from writer/director Hideo Gosha is expertly made and intriguing in its critical approach, but ultimately too brooding, even glum.  It’s Runaway Ronin/Pot o’ Gold storyline insufficient to justify the wholesale slaughter of so many warriors. (It’s like a human abattoir in the fields out here.  Yikes!)  Mikijirô Hira is the handsome, stoic Ronin hunted by various clans (minions & samurai) after murdering a high minister.  (He seems to be attempting some sort of reform, but Gosha doesn’t exactly spell these things out.)  The chase comes to a head in a forbidden area rich in easily mined gold and busy with poachers working the soil & rivers.  But is the married couple we meet working there toiling for their own profit or for one of the clans?  Why else would a husband refuse to give up the location of his gold to bandits threatening his wife with death . . . or worse.  Like the classic Jack Benny ‘Your money or your life’ routine, but played completely straight.*  Actually, there is one humorous character, an honestly venal sidekick for Hira, the one endearing male character in the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   Fine pieces of beautiful filmmaking in here (sword fights where you almost believe one guy could take out fifty attackers; tragic scenes of violence against women).  But on the whole, Gosha’s overlooked THE WOLVES/’71 offers the better intro to his work.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/07/shussho-iwai-wolves-1971.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Benny’s famously delayed reply: ‘I’m thinking, I’m thinking!’   

ESCAPE TO BURMA (1955)

At R.K.O. in the Howard Hughes death-rattle era, indie producer Benedict Bogeaus managed to turn out budget-conscious fare with good directors like Don Siegel and Jacques Tourneur before turning to the ultimate Hollywood vet, Allan Dwan, on a half dozen run-of-the-mill projects.  Barbara Stanwyck did two, CATTLE QUEEN OF MONTANA (with Ronald Reagan, not seen here) and this jungle plantation drama, probably the most ambitious of the lot.  You’ll need a hearty stomach to look past some threadbare studio work, especially in the first half (stock shots, rear-projection ‘locations’, soundstage exteriors - all second-rate), to say nothing of a story loaded with politically incorrect colonial trappings.  But hold tight for some neat boomerang plot turns; decidedly frank sexual propositions from horny man-on-the-run Robert Ryan; the love-match between Stanwyck & her elephant labor force; and a manly turn from David Farrar’s principled police agent.  The plot has Ryan on the run from a crime he did commit (shooting the Crown Prince to death) and now wooing Babs at her glam estate (for love or protection?) worried Farrar will bring in him in for trial or that Guards of the Prince’s father will nab him for immediate torture & execution.  That's Hollywood pioneer Robert Warrick, like Dwan in the biz since the ‘teens, as the vengeance-seeking ‘Sawbwa’ slathered in Max Factor’s Burmese-tinted pancake makeup.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Lots of subfusc editions out there, so beware.  VCI has a decent DVD out.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Who signed off on Stanwyck’s hair?  Not since DOUBLE INDEMNITY has she suffered from such a coif.  Only there it was supposed to be disruptive.

LILO & STITCH (2002)

After two boy-oriented, budget-busting, hand-drawn disappointments (ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE/’01; TREASURE PLANET/’02), Disney regrouped for this modest delight, likely to stand as the last hand-drawn animated classic from the Mouse House.  One of those projects where everything seems to go magically right without pressing too hard, it has the same feel of artistic refreshment seen last year in LUCA/’21.  Here, writer/directors Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders shake things up right from the start with an elaborate half-reel Outer-Space prologue to introduce Stitch, a little monster who’s all ‘ID,’ and soon plummeting to Earth, specifically Hawaii, where tough tyke Lilo, orphaned/living precariously with older sister Nani, adopts what she thinks is a particularly obstreperous dog.  A personality match.  Trouble ensues; a family is formed.  Loaded with bewitching local sights & sounds, costumes & customs, plus a ton of amusingly observed, convincing island flavor.  (No one groomed to look like an Aryan model with a tan.)  Considering how well this ended up doing (and what long commercial legs it’s shown), you have to wonder why Disney let so many projects well-suited to hand-drawn techniques get made largely in various CGI formats.  Sad. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, LUCA/’21.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html

FIRE IN THE MOUNTAINS (2019)

From India, Ajitpal Singh’s debut feature is fine, mysterious and unflinchingly cruel.  Set up north, with the Himalayas as magnificent backdrop, an unusual structure keeps changing its mind on tone and topic, but never loses your attention or its dramatic grip.  At first, we’re greeting tourists, fresh off the bus and getting the hard sell on lodgings from locals.  A bit of haggling before Chandra wins them over with her unbeatable mountain views, European-style toilets and cut-rate prices.  But it’s a hike to get there.  No road, only walking paths; a problem for Chandra whose son’s medical needs require thrice weekly visits for treatment.   She’s been saving to jumpstart a road project along with others in the area, and she’d have a chance if her government connection wasn’t also a business competitor.  But why bother since the boy is bound to get better thanks to her husband’s prayer offerings and religious advice from the local Guru.  Prayers & ill-fated business schemes all her husband seems to do while Chandra runs the lodge, cooks (for family & guests) and takes care of the animals.  (Except for that goat her husband gruesomely sacrifices to please the gods.)  Plus a very modern daughter busy making internet clips with her boyfriend, and her husband’s difficult widowed sister-in-law running off, so we’re barely shocked catching Chandra’s ‘crippled’ boy up & about when he’s not playing his part and being carried everywhere by his overworked mother.  (Would the boy’s act really be possible in such close quarters?)  Worse to come when the husband goes on a drunk, tears the place apart (seriously beats up Chandra) and finds those hidden savings.  Grim doings, yet the film, with its visual glories and vividly rendered characters & relationships feels revelatory rather than defeatist.  Ending with a lesson on how religious belief can be both deceptively and truly spawned at one and the same time.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Not a young man, with only a few shorts behind him and now some tv directing gigs, someone as naturally gifted as Singh shouldn't become an opportunity missed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Lots of diegetic music & background chatter, including acres of political puffery on radio India touting all the advances under the current government.  Hilarious blather for easy populist consumption.  Is it real Party Line propaganda ordered by P.M. Nerendra Modi or OTT satire from Singh?

(THE STORY OF/THE GREAT) GILBERT AND SULLIVAN (1953)

An expensive, celebratory flop on release (timed for Elizabeth II’s coronation season), this lightly sketched bio-pic on W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the great Victorian comic opera team, was dismissed at the time as little more than a series of pretty stage postcards (but such pretty postcards!), interrupted by bits of personal drama.  Gilbert eccentrically difficult; Sullivan ambitious for serious fare/battling health issues.  And not helped in trying to cover their entire career.  Yet on a recent BFI restoration, Christopher Challis’s TechniColor lensing looks so dazzling, you may not care.  With Robert Morley, born to play Gilbert and Maurice Evans, unexpectedly fine as Sullivan, plus young Peter Finch as producer Richard D’Oyly Carte along with members of the then still-running 1953 company in generous stage excerpts.*  Think of it as addendum to Mike Leigh’s superb G&S bio-pic TOPSY TURVY/’99, one of the best films ever made on the creative process.  Here, Sidney Gilliat, normally partnered with Frank Launder, co-writes & directs, loading in witty visual transitions to make it feel more cinematic (good luck with that!), but generally unafraid to let the musical numbers speak for themselves.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, TOPSY TURVY/’99.  Watch it first.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/topsy-turvy-1999.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Ironically, Martyn Green, the great G&S ‘patter’ man of his era who plays George Grossmith, the originator of those roles, had just left D’Oyly Carte & Co. after nearly two decades having fallen out with current company owner Bridget D’Oyly Carte, the granddaughter of Richard D’Oyly Carte played here by Peter Finch.

SCORPIO (1973)

Directed in Michael Winner’s reliably coarse style (DEATH WISH/’74 just around the corner), this Spy vs Spy nonsense reasonably good fun till it misses its Triple Salchow twist landing.  Burt Lancaster’s a C.I.A. troubleshooter tidying up an Orly Airport assassination with expert sniper Alain Delon, unaware he’s meant to be Delon’s final target.  Suddenly on the run and trying to figure out why the CIA is coming for him, Lancaster leaves D.C. after putting his wife in the picture (and killing a few low-level goons), before heading off to Vienna where top Soviet agent Paul Scofield may help.  Frenemies going back to the Spanish Civil War, this non-political friendship makes Lancaster look like he’s planning to defect.  Soon, they’re all gunning for him: CIA, KGB, even Delon.  TV scripter David Rintels, in his only feature credit, shades characters & politics with de rigueur ‘70s paranoid moral equivalency, but giving the CIA primus inter pares bad guy status.  (In dreadful perfs from John Colicos & J.D. Cannon.)  But nice to be able to follow the plot in a spy yarn and still occasionally be surprised.  Listen up for a bit of pseudo-Prokofiev (a wink at Piano Concerto #3) from composer Jerry Fielding whenever Scofield’s Ruskie shows up and look out for a touch of near-BlackFace (more Caribbean island makeover) on Lancaster which a Black pal gives him as a disguise.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: This and THE CONCORDE . . . AIRPORT ‘79 were Delon’s two tries at Hollywood stardom.  What was his agent thinking?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Quite a comedown from Lancaster & Delon in Visconti’s THE LEOPARD/’63 or with Scofield on THE TRAIN/’65.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/02/train-1965.html

MIDWAY (1976; 2019)

By taking on the December 7th surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Doolittle’s morale boosting Tokyo Air Raid  and the ‘turning-point’ Battle of Midway in the Pacific (along with abundant Japanese POV coverage of same), Roland Emmerich’s technically up-to-date remake of Jack Smight’s stolid 1976 MIDWAY runs (minus end-credits and tributes) a breathless two hours.  It makes for incipient structural problems that leave you thinking you’ve seen the lead-in to The Battle of Midway and missed the main event.  What keeps it a compelling watch, or does for movie nerds, is a chance to compare and contrast mid-‘70s Corporate Cinema style & standards with today’s Corporate Cinema.  And if the director-generated style of ‘70s cinema is something to mourn, the impersonal side of things favors current product.  (How production standards had dropped from the ‘50s to the ‘70s!)  Old-line studios like Universal loading in sub-par process work & mismatched borrowed footage even worse than today’s overused CGI.  And while we lose the corny father/son personal drama stitched into the earlier film, there’s corny tough-guy dialogue and lame comeback lines in recompense.  All told, the total effect less different than you might expect.  (Though far bigger, if slightly wilted, names in the earlier film.  Here, we get fun up-and-comers.)  The kicker to the comparison?  1976 MIDWAY a big hit.*  2019 MIDWAY?  A caboodle of debt.  Go figure.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For Pearl Harbor and the immediate aftermath, there’s Otto Preminger’s IN HARM’S WAY/’65.  The model ships no longer convince but its cast sure does: John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, Henry Fonda, Burgess Meredith, Dana Andrews, Franchot Tone, Carroll O’Connor . . . )  For Doolittle’s Raid, M-G-M’s smoothly corporate THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO/’44.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/thirty-seconds-over-tokyo-1944.html  And for the rest?  John Ford’s shot-on-the-spot documentary (partially recreated here).  Best restored print of THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY found in BECOMING JOHN FORD.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/becoming-john-ford-2007.html 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *To ballyhoo the rollout, Universal installed huge low-bass reproducing woofers in the four corners of many theaters to introduce wall-rumbling ‘Sensurround.'

AN ACT OF MURDER (1948)

Following his 1946 Oscar for THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES and 1947 Tony for YEARS AGO on B’way*, Fredric March returned to Hollywood not in triumph, but via two mid-list prestige items at Universal that did him no favors.  ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST, Lillian Hellman’s so-so LITTLE FOXES prequel, then this issue-oriented job with same director Michael Gordon and repeat co-stars Edmond O’Brien and March’s wife Florence Eldridge in her juiciest film role.  It’s one of those ginned-up controversy films that takes bows for turning ‘daring’ ideas into hash; Stanley Kramer style.  March is a no-nonsense judge who gets his comeuppance when a death sentence knocks on his door.  Not for him, but for the wife: inoperable brain tumor.  (Hollywood still shy about naming these things, but it might as well be ‘Prognosis Negative,’ as it was for Bette Davis in DARK VICTORY/’39.)  Complicating matters is March’s battle with ‘progressive’ lawyer O’Brien, all but engaged to headstrong daughter Geraldine Brooks.  Will suffering & empathy change our judge for the better . . . or lead him to mercy killing.  (Odds are, the film’s working title wasn’t ACT OF MURDER, but ACT OF MERCY.)  True to form, a truncated third act sees prospective son-in-law defending him in court.  Credit Gordon with three or four well run set pieces, especially a smooth montage of medical tests in Stanley Ridges’ office.  But soft landings at every curve avoid any difficult conclusions.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST/’48  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/another-part-of-forest-1948.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *March lost this role to Spenser Tracy in George Cukor’s superb film adaptation of Ruth Gordon’s YEARS AGO, retitled THE ACTRESS/’53.

THE GERMAN DOCTOR / WAKOLDA (2013)

Exceptional . . . and exceptionally creepy.  Lucía Puenzo adapts & directs her fact-inspired speculative novel about an Argentinian family who unknowingly host notorious Nazi Concentration Camp doctor Josef Mengele for a few months in 1960 during his three decade peripatetic years of hiding in South America.  The film pretty much swept the Argentinian Award circuit and showed at Cannes, but seems unaccountably little known Stateside.  Alex Brendemühl is quietly friendly (before turning quietly threatening) as the chilling eugenics enthusiast who quickly insinuates himself into the family dynamic of Diego Peretti, Natalia Oreiro and their large family as they reopen a luxurious hotel the wife’s parents operated.  The doctor is not only pleased to find this hideaway, but doubly intrigued by young daughter Lilith who suffers from growth hormone deficiency and by the mother when he learns she’s expecting twins, the doctor’s particular obsession.  With a secret Nazi estate just down the shore line, a German-oriented private school the children attend & an Israel undercover agent hovering in the school’s photography department, the possibilities & dangers of overstuffed narrative are obvious.  In hindsight, it’s hard to relate the story without seeing a thousand and one angles for Black Comedy.  (Including an unfortunate likeness between Florencia Bado as the growth-challenged daughter and the young Veronica Cartwright as she looked in Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS/’63.)  Yet the film doesn’t play that way at all, gathering and holding a hushed sense of foreboding that avoids oversteps into melodrama as it manipulates a troubled teen starved for attention & authority.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  A batty commercial thriller built from similar elements in THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL/’78.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-boys-from-brazil-1978.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: That cheap horror pic getting such a big reaction from the students at a showing is TEENAGE ZOMBIES/’59.  Smart choice, like so much in here.