THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES (2021)

Writer/director Derek Cianfrance gives three-for-the-price-of-one in this narrative pile up of guilt, delayed honesty and unjust rewards, the sum ranging from exceptional to hard-to-swallow.  The first part comes off best, and why not since it’s all but lifted from Ferenc Molnár’s oft-filmed LILIOM, best-known as the source of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s CAROUSEL.*  Ryan Gosling the Liliom character (Billy Bigelow in the Americanized musical), a studly ‘carny’ hunk whose life is turned upside down when he unexpectedly finds out he’s a father.  What’s a daredevil motorcyclist to do?  Why not rob a bank or two with a sleazy pal to give the kid what he needs.  And darn if he isn’t killed in a fall after a failed robbery right in the middle of the story . . . just like Liliom.  Cianfrance pumps this up with jangly hand-held camera work and fatalistic momentum before switching gears for the second story, suddenly very Sidney Lumet (think PRINCE OF THE CITY/’81) with Bradley Cooper doing Treat Williams in the hard-to-be-honest cop role and a very effective Ray Liotta taking on the Jerry Orbach spot.  Lots to accomplish in less than an hour, not only survivor’s guilt after trading shots with Gosling, but then sweating his way in & out of police corruption tropes before coming thru with the ambition, cunning & moxie of a born politician able to thread a ruthless amoral needle as he works his way up the system.  Lots of gaps to fill in, but you believe it.  That’s more than Cianfrance manages when he jumps a generation ahead to compare & contrast the late Gosling’s fatherless high school senior son Dane DeHaan with his new bestie, none other than Cooper’s troublemaking druggie son.  At first, unaware of any connection, this try at the rhymed plotting of a big 19th century novel (happy endings for all!) doesn’t come off.  You can only believe it as a sick joke.  The ambition is appreciated, especially a circular sentimental coda, but the plot’s like a shoelace that won’t stay tied and the film trips over itself.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Excellent as the friend who leads Gosling into robbing and serious trouble (‘Jigger’ in CAROUSEL), Ben Mendelsohn seems to age in reverse, appearing about ten years younger in the last section than he looks in the first.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Fritz Lang’s 1934 version of Molnár’s LILIOM, made in France on his way from Hitler’s Germany to Hollywood's America, is best of the lot, with Charles Boyer in the Ryan Gosling spot.  Henry King’s film of CAROUSEL/’56 needs a remake..  Maybe Gosling sings?   (He's got the abs to support his vocals!)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/liliom-1934.html

MAKING WAVES (2019)

Slickly produced and over-praised, this documentary on Sound in the Movies takes a brief hit-and-miss gambol thru the opening decades of putting the two sensory elements of film, projected sound & projected light, together as one.  The two biggest obstacles, getting them to stay in synch is lightly covered; figuring out amplification to fill a large space not even mentioned.  And everything surrounding it short shrifted (what, no Latham Loop?!) before we reach the part of the story they obviously want to celebrate: advances  begun in the ‘70 largely by Walter Murch and moving onward, with pit-stops, to the PIXAR sound world of Ben Burtt.  Lots of cherry-picked factoids to make their points; probably unavoidable, but why infer that stereophonic soundtracks came in with Barbra Steisand’s unwatchble A STAR IS BORN/’76, when they started showing up alongside ‘50s WideScreen formats?  Their use so ubiquitous at the time, Cole Porter satirized the practice with the song ‘Stereophonic Sound’ in SILK STOCKINGS; on stage ‘55/on film ’57.  And even that famously preceded with the use of seven channel ‘FantaSound’ in Disney’s FANTASIA/’40 at some first-run theaters.  (Less famously the M-G-M sound department recorded many pre-stereo features with a sound perspective technique called ‘angles’ to simulate directionality on a mono-soundtrack.)  WAVES also makes the case of music being too much by showing Hitchcock’s famous use of electronic ‘noise’ to back THE BIRDS and pointedly not showing analogous sequences from PSYCHO that used nothing but the shrieking strings of chamber orchestra.  This isn’t history, it’s propaganda.  Still, the middle section worth a look (and a listen), especially since all these aural titans are still around to be interviewed.  Alas, they continue into digital overkill days, with much the same problems of today's CGI overuse turning once exciting participatory addictions into de rigeur overloaded indulgence, Pavlovian narrative anticipation divorced from the imagination & individuality once seen & heard; now simply the latest formula, a new crutch, aural gravy covering leftovers on the latest cinematic blue-plate special.  On the other hand, if you ever wondered where the appeal of back-to-basics doctrines like DOGME came from, here’s your chance.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK: A recent New Yorker article highlighted the clubby world of Foley Sound Artists, a part of the soundtrack puzzle inadequately covered here, little changed over decades. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/the-weird-analog-delights-of-foley-sound-effects

IKITE IRU MAGOROKU / THE LIVING MAGOROKU (1943)

Hiding in plain sight behind wartime propaganda, Keisuke Kinoshita, in his second film, finds something like Japanese Chekhov in a story about converting sacred soil into farmland to help feed the troops.  Opening on an elaborately produced historical prologue about a great battle from the 1500s, the land now a memorial to the thousands who died there and the acreage controlled by a rudderless family whose chronically ill elder son is unwilling to step up and make decisions.  And what a lot of decisions need to be made!  A servant’s son proposing to the daughter of the family his parents had worked for.  A soldier stationed nearby who tries to buy the family’s most cherished heirloom, a rare samurai sword matching the one he stupidly sold as a young man.  A grandmother’s incessant chiming to Buddha and a mother’s fear for a frail son who believes he’s destined for the same early death as his ancestors.  Kinoshita perfectly crosscuts between all these modest dramas, then toward the end staging in counterpoint as they all climax at once.  With that special use of Japanese architecture, boxy rooms/sliding door panel walls, used like an extra editing device to help keep lines of action clear.  Brilliant depth-of-field staging, too.  And there’s real Chekhovian acting from the cast, balancing between tragedy, stubborn stupidity, sacrifice, lowdown comedy and quotidian duty.  Stanislavski would have kvelled.  (Though not at the overly tidy endings achieved by our suddenly recovered neurasthenic scion!)  Fascinating and entertaining, if dated by jarring wartime attitudes.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *His fine debut, PORT OF FLOWERS/’43, largely finesses wartime tropes.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/hana-saku-minato-port-of-flowers-1943.html

MACISTE NELLA VALLE DEI RE / SON OF SAMSON (1960)

Standard issue ‘Peplum’ (Italian-made Sword & Sandal spectacle) has nothing to do with Samson, the title merely a come-on for American audiences unfamiliar with the popular ‘Maciste’ strongman character.  (The name refers to his rock-like strength.)  Here, played by Bkln-born Lorenzo Luis Degni under the name Mark Forest, fighting for justice in ancient Egypt when the new Pharaoh completely blanks on their vow of eternal friendship after devious Chelo Alonso’s Persian Princess places the Necklace of Forget over his head and on his unimpressive shoulders.  (Maciste’s shoulders another matter entirely; something New Pharaoh takes bromantic note of.)  Silly, decently made, with Italian director Carlo Campogalliani over-achieving on big vista shots & mass movement compositions, but underachieving on bread-and-butter close-up action.  Lion & crocodile fights played with stuffed props that wouldn’t convince a half-price ticket buyer.  (On the other hand, a set piece with an unwieldy obelisk really comes off.)  What a shame no one thought of bringing Mark Forest’s real life story into the action.  Mr. America competing bodybuilder, ‘beefcake’ chorus boy for Mae West in her ‘50s nightclub act, future operatic tenor earning tuition with Peplum paychecks.  Have them all going on at once and you’ve got the makings of a ‘Meta’ comedy.  Big climax finds Forest getting a call on the Cinecittá set of this film for him to substitute at the Verona outdoor opera festival for an indisposed Radamès in Verdi’s AIDA.  Off he goes, no change of costume needed (see poster), socko with a strongman physique more proportionate and less freakish than others of his ilk, he’s a sensation.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *That plot not so far off ONE NIGHT OF LOVE/’34, one of those old Grace Moore pics that made the Met mezzo a movie star.  (Even the bodybuilding since she went on a big diet before filming.)

THE RELUCTANT DRAGON (1941)

Walt Disney’s first feature release after three under-performing ‘legacy’ pics (PINOCCHIO, FANTASIA, and later BAMBI) failed to repeat the overwhelming success of SNOW WHITE, leaving brother Roy to balance the debt-ridden books before DUMBO came out.  (Far less costly, DUMBO easily earned out.)  Hence, this portmanteau pic, generally written off as a ‘place holder.’  Insubstantial then/dated now.  Not so fast.  While something of a curate’s egg: half behind-the-scenes look inside the studio at their just opened campus (like a dream of a MidWest Liberal Arts College) and the other half holding two shorts (one ‘Goofy’; one still in storyboard form), plus a two-reel adaptation of the Kenneth Grahame title story,* these main attractions may be no more than run-of-the-mill Disney, but the so-called ‘dated’ view on all those old analogue techniques, along with the sheer loveliness of the new studio grounds & buildings shortly before a bitter animators strike soured things at Disney for the rest of Walt’s working life, are a priceless window into a brief labor/management Hollywood idyll.  Robert Benchley is our guide, he’s supposedly there to tell Walt about ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ as a possible film project, but he’s really there to show off an idealized ‘California Cool’ work environment and low-rise ‘modern’ architectural æsthetic.  The most fun is inside the Foley Sound Room (part of the first two-reels shot for some reason in monochrome, the rest is TechniColor); most gasp-worthy a look at the humongous MultiPlane Animation Camera.  (It’s how they got 3D effects thru analogue techniques.)  And look for Alan Ladd as sketch artist/baby ‘wrangler’ in the storyboard sequence, along with Walt, still the young, lean, tie-less bohemian, in the screening room.  Simplified for entertainment purposes & gagged up, but enough unique stuff in here all the same.  Worth it just to see the staff making the colored ink supplies from scratch.  Animators at the other studios must have been dreaming of the precise shade of green they’d have to choose from to show their envy.

ATTENTION  MUST BE PAID:  *After SNOW WHITE’s startling commercial success, PINOCCHIO, FANTASIA and BAMBI wouldn't go into profit for decades.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Disney would do better by Kenneth Grahame in a superb abridgement of THE WIND AND THE WILLOWS which makes up the first half of THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD/’49.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-adventures-of-ichabod-and-mr-toad.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Progressive attitudes 1941 style perfectly captured when an Asian woman is singled out in ‘life drawing’ class.  The gag is they’re not drawing nude models, but an elephant.  Yet when Benchley gets a closer look, her pachyderm sketch shows caricatured Asian features.

PRIDE (2014)

Excessively likable tru-ish tale of a loose Gay Rights group of activists in mid-80s London who branch away from expected fund-raising worthies to lend moral and cash support to striking South Wales coal miners.  Solidarity Forever meets fish-out-of-water.  But in spite of similarities between the two causes (gay rights/union suppression) will their good deeds even be accepted by this presumably conservative community, or rejected as somehow tainted, especially in the early days of the AIDS crisis?  Stage director Matthew Warchus, on one of his occasional film forays, revels in the seemingly unlimited supply of gifted British character actors* and runs a very smooth show with all lines of action clear & neatly in place.  Too neatly in place?  Even reversals of fortune predictable.  (Example: the team’s youngest member rejected by his family when they  see him in the tabloids.*  Why not have him sneak in only to discover the parents stealthily clipping articles for a scrapbook, secretly proud he’s come out at last.)  Still, there are real pleasures and moving moments even in such an anodyne telling.  Undoubtedly, the film would have been a very different animal had it been made closer to events: bite added to locals as they came on board; town biddies whopping it up discovering porn mags, leather bars & lesbian vegan cookery; an old townie ‘coming out’ decades late.  But within chosen limits, it’s a charmer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Too many to list, but Andrew Scott (with Philip Seymour Hoffman levels of empathy) and partner Dominic West (bravely demonstrating rusty Disco moves) are standouts.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The whole operation nearly derailed by nasty, misrepresentations in one of the big circulation British tabloids.  Presumably a Murdoch paper, but not specified on screen.  Sure enough, the film’s U.K. theatrical release thru then Murdoch-owned 20th/Fox.

SECRETS OF A SECRETARY (1931)

Irresistible romantic trash for Claudette Colbert as a fallen society gal whose carefree ways leave her married to fortune-hunting gigolo George Metaxa just as her ‘wealthy’ pop’s death reveals an empty bank balance.  Landing a job as social secretary to eccentric Mary Boland, Claudette’s just putting her life back in order when Boland’s daughter (Betty Lawford) starts cheating on charming British fiancé Herbert Marshall with Metaxa, separated but still married to Colbert.  Yikes!  Worse, Lord Marshall has fallen for Colbert.  (Talk about on-screen chemistry, these two on some kind of heavenly wavelength.)  And who could resist Colbert in those uncredited Travis Banton outfits.*  Note a meet-cute when fiancée Lawford is late to a formal dinner and Colbert briefly fills in before gracefully bowing out once her employee’s heartless daughter arrives.  But there’s more!  Metaxa, in debt to the mob even though he’s borrowed heavily from Lawford, is shot on the day of the wedding rehearsal.  And Lawford, in now bloodied wedding gown saved from social ruin by Colbert who insists they swap outfits so she can take all the blame and allow Marshall to go on with tomorrow’s wedding . . . to a woman he’ll never love.  Ridiculous as this all sounds, director George Abbott, in his last Hollywood shoot before returning to NYC for decades of stage hits, with a straightforward/no-frills style manages to keep it grounded and moving along in just 71".

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *But were the gowns Travis Banton?  And was the film shot in Hollywood as per IMDb?  Some of the technical work looks shoddy enough for Paramount's Astoria studios where Colbert had just made THE SMILING LIEUTENANT with Lubitsch and where Abbott would shortly direct Tallulah Bankhead in a pair of films before returning to B’way.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: In his auto-bio MISTER ABBOTT, this film is conflated with MANSLAUGHTER of the year before.  (He mixes up Fredric March and Herbert Marshall.)  That film definitely shot in Hollywood and probably Abbott’s best on a technical level.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/04/manslaughter-1930.html

THE SHOW-OFF (1934)

Third of four filmings of George Kelly’s once-popular play went begging for a leading man after rising M-G-M player Lee Tracy went on an epic drunk that left him permanently banned from all major Hollywood studios.*  Who better to step in then Hollywood’s other alcoholic Tracy, Spencer (no relation), just now temporarily banned at home studio FOX.  (This was Tracy’s first M-G-M pic before finishing up at FOX and returning under contract to M-G-M.)  It makes for an odd fit as Spencer’s ultra-natural style considerably alters the tone of Kelly’s largely comic horror, a know-it-all, motor-mouth who sabotages his go-getting ways with blowhard manners and bluster.  The part first played on film by Keystone Kop Ford Sterling and later Red Skelton (neither seen here).  But with Tracy, the idiotic bromides stick in the throat, leaving a melancholy aftertaste from this little man who’ll never make the grade.  The plot has him wreck his own career as a clerk along with the finances of his in-laws.  Or does until Kelly lets him off the hook with a series of happy reversals.  Not that he’s learned anything; the next disaster merely a brag away.  Clara Blandick, repeating from the 1930 Early Talkie version, is particularly good as the mother-in-law who loathes him on sight.  (Watch her close a door in Tracy's face.)   But director Charles Reisner doesn’t get much out of the rest of the cast.  Even lenser James Wong Howe disappoints, unable to figure out how to light Tracy’s inky blob of dark red hair.  (Or is it the print?)  Something the studio would soon have to figure out.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Many B’way revivals, one with Lee Tracy finally in the lead.  (He played the brother in the 1924 B’way premiere.)  Even a WPA Negro Theater production.  Nowadays, George Kelly, once known for community theater perennials like THE TORCH BEARERS, CRAIG’S WIFE and this, is mostly remembered for being Grace Kelly’s uncle.  As for those drinking Tracys: Spencer may have gone on bigger benders, but only Lee caused an international incident, peeing off a balcony in Mexico City onto a unit of Mexican Army Cadets while filming VIVA VILLA!/’34.

THE DJINN (2021)

‘Djinn,’ an Mid-East Spirit (think ‘Genie’) whose favors come at a terrible price, lends a mystical aura to this low-budget fright pic.  Here, our favor seeker is a one-parent mute kid whose dad leaves him overnight in a new home haunted by his own feverish dreams.  Written & directed by David Charbonier & Justin Powell, the film is half chamber horror/half art house Home Alone . . . and all hooey.  Attempting Old-School chills thru shock edits, snake-like tracking shots and carefully framed ‘reveals’ for our scared-out-of-his-wits/yet resourceful boy who first wanders, then runs from evil ecotoplasmic terrors; the film eventually succumbs to various CGI-laden effects once the monsters and his deceased mother appear.  And the boy always has a backup defense weapon just in reach.  Soon enough, it all feels like a cheat . . . or a film school project.  A book of ancient spells conveniently left over from the home’s previous owner?  Knowing where the fuse box is in a brand new home?  Heck, knowing how to use a fuse box.  Might as well discover an AR-47 automatic rifle hidden under the bed.  With the audience not trusted to work things out for itself, we suffocate under insistent voice-of-authority narration to fill us in.  Maybe Charbonier & Powell show up at screenings to hand out footnotes.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Classic Old-School Hollywood chills (mild, but honest) for another mute victim in jeopardy on THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE/’45.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/spiral-staircase-1945.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The DVD has three or four IFC Midnight trailers, all indistinguishable from each other, right down to their bump-in-the-night music cues.  Who finances these things?  Who watches them?

GEDO SENKI / TALES FROM EARTHSEA (2006)

Flying Dragons?  Patricide?  Prince and Princess (unaware of the others’ identity) meeting-cute, escaping the slave trade, then rediscovering each other while working incognito at a country farm?  (The prince also running from his own avatar.)  A wandering, wise, wistful wizard as mentor?  Who needs GAME OF THRONE or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON when there’s this debut anime from Gorô (son of Hayao) Miyazaki?  Set to a slow boil, and with a painfully depressed hero barely able to lift his head at times, this deep-dish philosophical fable about how life can only be lived with an acceptance of death in the future, dances to the tune of a sorceress who’ll go the ends of the earth (and dragons in the sky) to negate the idea and capture the secret to eternal life.  Maddeningly opaque and extraordinarily compelling in equal measure, it’s quite an audacious (and beautiful) opening statement, especially for the son of anime royalty!  Taken from a novel by late West Coast American Ursula K. Le Guin, the ideas so natural to Japanese culture that the film, in spite of a starry alternate English-language track, plays far better in Japanese.  Fortunately, there are excellent subtitles on the GKids edition.  Always worthwhile, at times enthralling, with revelatory use of light levels on the largely superb animation.  (NOTE: Another Family Friendly label that's not for the kiddies. - 12 and up more like it.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Miyazaki shows remarkable range following this with star-crossed high school romance set in a changing Japan during the lead up to the 1964 Summer Olympics in his insightful/delightful FROM UP ON POPPY HILL/’11.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/12/kokuriko-zaza-kara-from-up-on-poppy.html

THE GOONIES (1985)

Lots of residual affection for this Steven Spielberg production.  From his own ‘original’ story (shooting script by Chris Columbus, direction passed off to blandly efficient Richard Donner), this landlocked pirate treasure hunt is a backyard adventure for a gang of misfit suburban kids.  But mostly another attempt by Spielberg in his never-ending quest to recapture that RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK mojo, here given the Y.A. treatment.*   Maybe you had to have been there . . . that is, a 12-yr-old boy in 1985.  Donner unable to give the various Rube Goldberg action sequences studding the film Spielberg snap, crackle & pop; while Columbus hardly seems to try.  The likable chubby Jewish kid getting into trouble when he follows the smell of ice cream even though it's inside a freezer?*  A girlfriend unable to detect the guy she’s making out with isn’t tall, hunky boyfriend Josh Brolin, but wheezy kid brother Sean Astin, a foot shorter, forty pounds lighter and wearing braces on his teeth.  Naturally there’s a clueless ditzy mom, but what’s with the Quasimodo routine among the villains?  (Dozens of these careless moves.)  And too many of the stunts, like Brolin’s wild ride on a kiddie bike, simply don’t play.  There is a grand ghost ship for the skeleton pirates; a real ship, not a special effect.  If only Donner could turn himself into Michael Curtiz who made all the Errol Flynn films this is trying so hard to channel.  Instead, Spielberg brings in a sizable slice of actual Erich Wolfgang Korngold music from those old films to try and cover what’s missing.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Counting this, and his very RAIDERS-like TINTIN movie, how many tries has Spielberg made to date?  Six going on seven?  And only the third, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE/’89, worthy of consideration.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *This kid does get the funniest routine in the pic.  It's actually, a very old vaudeville routine, when the bad guys insist he tell them EVERYTHING or else, he does.  Everything all the way back to third grade.

THE ELECTRICAL LIFE OF LOUIS WAIN (2021)

The ‘other’ Benedict Cumberbatch film of 2021 (i.e. not THE POWER OF THE DOG), a fact-based bio of Louis Wain, the eccentric turn-of-the-last-century artist (and general polymath) whose whimsical drawings & paintings, via mass reproduction & popular press circulation, helped the common (and not so common) cat become common (and not so common) household pets.*   Under director Will Sharpe the presentation, shot in the old Academy Ratio format (1.33:1), is nearly as eccentric as Wain, which tends to cancel out his exasperating otherness.  Cash poor, but living in rather grand style with widowed mother and a passel of wild, charmless sisters, Wain seems somewhere on the autism spectrum (Asperger’s?) thru the first half of the film when he meets, courts and scandalously marries lower-class Claire Foy, the girl’s accomplished governess.  But upon losing her (and beloved cat Peter), his mental condition slides into a something more like madness which apparently runs in the family.  It’s a stylistic change Sharpe doesn’t quite know what to do with.  Worse, half the film remains.  Still, lots of superior acting and a fascinating, little-known story, if not the complete success you keep hoping it will be.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Another artist meets & marries an unexpected soulmate in SHADOWLANDS (tv film 1985; feature film 1993) has Oxford Don/religious author C.S. Lewis finding love with Jewish-American poet/mother Joy Davidson.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/shadowlands-1985.html   OR: Tim Burton’s BIG EYES/’14, for another way to fashion a look into the difficult life of an eccentric niche artist.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/11/big-eyes-2014.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Even more influential in domesticating cats into live-in beasts was the introduction of various clay-based kitty litter products which only came out as recently as the 1940s.  Before then, you had to ‘let the cat out’ before turning in at night.

THE PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME (2010)

Only twelve years old, this ‘Persian’ fantasy adventure (think 21st Century Arabian Knights/Douglas Fairbanks) would now be completely recast.  Here Persia (or Iran, if you must) shows up with an all-Brit cast you’d readily accept in a similarly up-dated Jane Austen adaptation.  All sporting peaches & cream complexions.  Our orphan hero, raised to princely level for youthful bravery, is played by Jake Gyllenhaal (in crazy good shape) with a slight Cockney accent.  (Dropped for posh BBC tones when his romance turns serious.)  And you’d need to go back more than half a century to match this film’s token Black sidekick; strong, laconic, expendable, dying for his White brothers-in-arms as if he were Woody Strode in SPARTACUS.  (Really!  He’s the only Black guy in the cast, including the thousands of CGI warriors.)  Based on a series of computer games, which does somewhat excuse CGI overuse, the presumed idea was to jumpstart a replacement series for the fading PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise.  Note the subtitle, as if we were beginning with Part Two.  Alas for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, middling grosses didn’t warrant another dip.  And the film?  It’s okay; a princely power struggle between three royal siblings and their Uncle, the King’s brother.  Poor Gemma Arterton, a neighboring Princess, holds her own thru wile and guile, but has the face of a British nanny.  While the usually original Alfred Molina makes like Hugh Griffith in the 1959 BEN-HUR, but with ostriches instead of race horses.  Even so, director Mike Newell, when not under the thumb of his CGI action masters (nothing ever seems at stake when they animate these slice-and-dice action sequences), shows his strong suit by getting something like real acting in the midst of noisy extravaganza.*  Though even he can’t explain why the big time-reversal gimmick everyone is fighting over doesn’t go all the way back to the beginning of the movie.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Mike Newell is the guy who taught all the HARRY POTTER kids how to act (and just in time) when he directed the third in the franchise.

THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS (1970)

Oscar’d in ‘67, if now little celebrated, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT/’67 at least had timing going for it.  With hot-button Civil Rights issues lending purpose to its murder investigation, it’s deservedly half-remembered.  Three years on, the sequel is all swings & misses, the precipitous drop in quality matching dud sequels like TRUE GRIT ➔ ROOSTER COGBURN; 2001 ➔ 2010; THE EXORCIST ➔ THE EXORCIST II; or THE HANGOVER ➔ PARTS II ➔ III.  With subpar production values & under-dressed sets you might have seen at the time in a Quinn Martin tv series, it's unaccountable from a heavyweight producer like Walter Mirisch.  Hack director Gordon Douglas (fresh off a declining trio of Frank Sinatra detective pics) suffering shoddy tech work & some odd, smeary lensing.  But then, what could anyone have done with this lazy police procedural?  Hookers, flaccid dicks, cocaine, hypocritical curates, politics and propositions; plus Mister Tibbs’ personal parental problems.  Poitier, smelling a dog, goes on auto-pilot, only rising for a few scenes with Martin Landau's not-so-principled pastor and disciplining his stubborn brat of a boy, slapping the disrespectful 'tween on the face.  Isn’t that what obnoxious kid’s bottoms are for?   So the welts won’t show.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Stick with IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT.  And let us know how it holds up.

SPIES IN DISGUISE (2019)

Busy and charmless, you know what you’re in for from the start of this corporate-managed CGI animation as soon as you notice the two leads get whatever personality they have by looking like street-art caricatures of the famous actors doing their voices.  That’d be Will Smith and Tom Holland.*  The latter a nerdy orphan boy, grown up to be Mr. Gadget at some spy organization, like ‘Q’ in the James Bond films.  That Bond influence coming secondhand, more INCREDIBLES/’04 than ‘007;’ and barely touching on the credited source material, PIGEON: IMPOSSIBLE/’09, a delightful low-resolution CGI short.  (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEjUAnPc2VA)  There, the gimmick has a hungry pigeon stuck inside a nuclear launch lock-box.  Here, Will Smith’s top-dog agent accidentally drinks Holland’s latest experimental transmutation potion, turning his fine self into a pigeon.  All things considered, the film, if rarely memorable, is better than it might be (though the ‘Pro-Nerd’ moral is awfully heavy-handed), but apparently not popular enough to hatch any sequels, presumably the point of the enterprise.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *On the other hand, the main villain looks less like voice actor Ben Mendelsohn than a ten-minute/$12 hand-drawn/suitable-for-framing caricature of Jonathan Rhys Meyers.  Guess he wasn’t available.

STOP TRAIN 349 / VERSPÄTUNG IN MARIENBORN (1963)

Neatly turned suspenser, filmed on location (and on a dime) with West Germany standing in for East Germany in a Cold War tale.  José Ferrer, recently scythed off Hollywood’s A-List, brings unsettling malice to the modest production, playing a cynical shit of a reporter forced to take an American military train with special dispensation to travel thru Soviet controlled East German territory on its way to West Berlin.  With a carefully vetted passenger manifest triple checked, no one suspects that an East German defector has jumped aboard en route.  But when news of a missing man leads to Ruskie suspicions at the final checkpoint, there’s a last-minute demand for a fresh check.  Not on Lt. Novak’s watch!  Question the honesty of the American officer in charge?  And so begins an East/West face-saving standoff. Director Rolf Hädrich gives good weight when forced to work in the constricted space of real train car compartments & corridors.  And has a trick up his sleeve in Sean (son of Errol) Flynn playing the Lt. caught in a series of lies not of his own making.  Properly delegating authority with every emergency message.  Trying to do the right thing as his career melts away thru circumstances out of his control.  Tall & handsome, if without Dad’s charisma and natural charm, he can even act!  The rest of the cast largely unknown, but more than equal to the film’s small demands before ending with some surprisingly tough non-answers to diplomatic and political questions.  Taken on its own terms, a find of modest proportions.  With Ferrer, atypically allowed to stay troublesome, never warming up; he's a wise prickly ass right to the end.

DOUBLE--BILL/LINK: Early example of post-WWII/Pre-Cold War suspense on a train in Jacques Tourneur’s BERLIN EXPRESS/’48.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/berlin-express-1948.html

BREWSTER MCCLOUD (1970)

After belated commercial & critical success via M*A*S*H/’70, director Robert Altman made this self-indulgent oddity before running-the-table cinematically for a golden half-decade.  Largely ignoring Doran William Cannon’s script (just off Otto Preminger’s disastrous SKIDOO and with little ahead for him*), Altman freely rewrote & improvised this hippie (or is it hipster?) Peter Pan rethink where young Bud Cort (looking like a prototype for WHERE’S WALDO and Harry Potter) learns to fly under the protection of Sally Kellerman’s fallen-angel Tinkerbell persona.  (Get in his way and this Queen of Bird Poop is guano kill you.  Yikes!)  Naturally, the police investigate the serial murders, bringing in Michael Murphy’s faux Bullitt detective who’s undercut by William Windom’s local politico.  (Windom as so often, astonishingly fine.)  Meanwhile, a couple of good-time gals are Jonesing like mad over Cort’s perfect naïf who, unlike Peter Pan, has crossed over from puberty before losing his virginity to a debuting Shelley Duvall.  Smelling semen in the air, Tinkerbell takes a hike and the boy is doomed.  Served up with ironic Americana edges and meta-cinematic tricks, the cast outdoes themselves to gain Altman’s attention and approval thru grotesquerie.  (One thing to watch pros like Rene Auberjonois and Stacey Keach fall on their asses, but must Altman make Duvall vomit before getting a kiss?)  On the other hand, how many counter-culture films of the period come out against sex?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Cannon pissed enough to write his complaint up as a NYTimes article.  ALSO: Look fast in the police forensics lab to spot a poster for a British film called DECLINE AND FALL OF A BIRD WATCHER/’68.  This is a real film!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Cort’s next was the slow to catch on cult fave HAROLD AND MAUDE/’71.  Altman’s next a masterpiece that sadly never caught on, MCCABE & MRS. MILLER/’71.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/mccabe-mrs-miller-1971.html

THE HEAT'S ON (1943)

If only this B-list musical were one-third as interesting as it looks from the cast list.  Here’s Mae West,  three years & thirty pounds off her last screen appearance (MY LITTLE CHICKADEE/’40; nothing after till MYRA BRECKINRIDGE/’70), looking better than she had since her debut in NIGHT AFTER NIGHT/’32;  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/night-after-night-1932.html.  (Mae and everyone else, including the art department, much indebted to lenser Franz Planer.)  She’s the star attraction who ditches desperate producer William Gaxton (B’way leading man for Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, George Gershwin yet hardly a screen credit) who then tricks professional Blue-nose Victor Moore (his frequent stage partner & lead comedian in shows by George M. Cohan, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter).  If Moore makes the show look spicy by denouncing it, sales should soar.  Unlike Gaxton, Moore had plenty of screen work (Fred & Ginger pics, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, SEVEN YEAR ITCH), but this is the only shot at figuring out what they were like together in shows like Gershwin’s OF THEE I SING.  West ‘tops and tails’ the film with two production numbers, but elsewise mere guest appearances in her own film.  Director Gregory Ratoff (best known for acting in WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD and ALL ABOUT EVE) fits in plot-free music videos for Xavier Cugat (fun!) and jazz great Helen Scott (even better!), but mostly stays out of the way as Gaxton struggles to get West back in the show.  Wan & predictable, it counts as a missed opportunity of epic proportions.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: This ‘original story’ of a bankrupt theatrical producer who’ll do anything to get his runaway star back not so far removed from another Columbia Pictures film, TWENTIETH CENTURY/’34.  Too bad they didn’t remake that one with this cast!  Add a couple of songs and West could have been wildly different and hilarious in the Carole Lombard role.  While Gaxton just made to play the John Barrymore producer.  And Victor Moore could have his choice of zanies to play.  Plenty for everyone else, too, even the boy/girl ingenue roles with Lloyd Bridges and never-heard-from-again Mary Roche.  (B’way musicalized for real in 1978 as ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: John Cullum, Madeline Kahn, Kevin Kline - Cy Coleman, Betty Comden, Adolph Green.)

JUNE BRIDE (1948)

After two flops (OTT in DECEPTION/’46; DOA with WINTER MEETING/’48), Warners hurried 40-yr-old Bette Davis off the lot with an unsuitable role, then drove the message home with BEYOND THE FOREST/’49.* And it worked!  Bette bought out the rest of her contract only to spectacularly relaunch the next year on ALL ABOUT EVE/’50.  So, it’s a bit of a surprise to rediscover this innocuous pleasure, the sort of light comedy neither Warners nor Bette excelled at.  Both tended to press too hard; unlike co-star Robert Montgomery, tops at this sort of thing, here all but wrapping up his acting career.  (Just two more self-directed films to go.)  Taken from an unproduced(?) little boulevard play, Bette’s a career gal editor of a Women’s Magazine off to the MidWest and a ‘typical' American Family in the middle of winter (with staff) to work up the June Wedding Issue.  Montgomery’s a foreign correspondence without a war to report on, assigned to write the feature story.  His task complicated by their past affair and from a fall out between the engaged couple.  Nobody does much with this setup, certainly not overqualified stage director Bretaigne Windust.  With The Lunts, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, LIFE WITH FATHER in his past, who knew he couldn’t figure out the movies?  And there’s that unfortunate total capitulation of an ending with Davis stooping, but hardly to conquer.  Meanwhile, good supporting players from New York get nothing to do while the MidWest family bore.  But Montgomery does encourage Davis to throw away the modest gags to get the best results.  What a difference it makes!  And it’s fun to hear a stylishly trim, if older looking Davis, pronounce ‘chic’ as they did in '48.  It comes out ‘chick.’  Who knew?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: And speaking of 1948 manners, the ‘hilarious’ Act Two ‘curtain’ has Montgomery spank the younger daughter for a big laugh.  Yuck, yuck.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Check out DECEPTION, or complete the journey with BEYOND THE FOREST.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/12/deception-1946.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/02/beyond-forest-1949.html

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER (1968)

Adapted from the Carson McCullers novel, one of those Hollywood literary prestige items designed as a credit to the industry only to age rapidly.  But not this time.  Two missteps hold it back a bit (an add-on Racial Injustice storyline, and updating the book’s Depression Era setting), but almost everything else is better than you expect or remember.  Especially in the warmly atmospheric Deep South color (Selma, AL; real interiors) caught near the end of his career by James Wong Howe.  (Utterly different then his next great effort, cool & sooty for THE MOLLY MAGUIRES/’70.*)  And from Alan Arkin as the deaf/mute engraver who goes to a new town to stay close to his friend (mentally unstable, insistently troublesome Chuck McCann, currently institutionalized), slowly becoming involved in the lives of the scrappy family where he rents a room, Stacy Keach’s vagabond tramp (debuting with his own fast-receding hairline), a doctor’s family in the town’s Black neighborhood (an early credit for a powerful Cicely Tyson as the resentful daughter).  To all these people, there’s something saintly about Arkin’s concern & altruism.  A sentimental view ruthlessly avoided by Arkin thru tact and restraint.  All precision, nothing soggy, less innate goodness than a desperate attempt to appease his unbearable singularity inside a community he can’t fully take part in.  (Easy to imagine how overplayed this part could have been.)  Debuting as the teenage daughter he grows particularly close to, a 24-yr-old Sondra Locke is almost as old for this 17 yr-old as 26-yr-old Julie Harris was for her 12-yr-old in McCullers' MEMBER OF THE WEDDING/’52.  Locke nearly as memorable.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, MEMBER OF THE WEDDING. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/member-of-wedding-1952.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Nice insights on filming HUNTER and Howe’s generous help to newbie director Robert Ellis Miller (much as Howe had been on Joshua Logan’s PICNIC/’55) in JAMES WONG HOWE/CINEMATOGRAPHER by Todd Rainsberger.

BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS PARTS 1 & 2 (2012; ‘13)

Jay Olivia directs, nicely putting the famous Bob Kane characters thru their paces, but the main creative force here is undoubtedly the Graphic Novel style of Frank Miller’s mid-‘80s comic books.  This animated version, initially released in two parts (a conjoined edition is basically the same thing), works best in the cleaner narrative lines of the first half.  Part 2 has too many story lines competing for attention . . . plus Superman; always a bad sign.  (But nice of Part 2 to nail down the date for us by bringing on President Ronald Reagan.)   The graphic style feels somehow thicker, heavier than it looked on page, a particular problem not only for our middle-aged Batman/Bruce Wayne (55 here), but also for the tank-like, serrated-toothed villain of Part 1.  A shame, the characterizations in Part 2 are all superior, but there’s just too many of them.  (And using reverse fast-forward to clear things up not nearly as satisfying as old-fashioned page flipping.)  But the real event here, at least for non-Batmanophiles, is noting how much the modern Batman franchise has relied on the Miller tone & template in the best of the Batman films.  Mostly in crepuscular aura & attitude for Tim Burton; plot & character lifts in Christopher Nolan’s film trio; and even more directly (downright steals) in JOKER which at least had the decency to list Miller in the credits . . under ‘Thanks.’  Yeah, thanks a lot!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  Frank Miller’s original ‘80s artwork in the news today!  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/arts/frank-miller-sues-widow-dark-knight-returns-art.html

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Any of the series entries mentioned above would do nicely.  (On Tim Burton, only his first.)  OR: For an unusually good animated take: BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM/’93.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/02/batman-mask-of-phantasm-1993.html

TWO WOMEN / LA CIOCIARA (1960)

After acting in 20+ films over four years (clearing gambling debts; earning his only Oscar nom. in A FAREWELL TO ARMS/’57), Vittorio De Sica returned to the director’s chair for this well-received wartime drama taken from CONFORMIST author Alberto Moravia.  A WWII story about a thirty-something widow (Sophia Loren) and her 12-yr-old daughter fleeing bombs in Rome for safety in her small hometown village, the journey not only dangerous & difficult, but reception something of a gamble: food, armed forces, friends all unknown.  Months later, with the tide of the war beginning to turn, the pair find the road back to Rome only more dangerous.  Superbly handled by De Sica and cast, Loren stunning in every way imaginable as the youngish mother and Jean-Paul Belmondo a happy surprise as the local, idealistic intellectual, likely the only Communist in town, extremely winning with a delicate characterization.  (And note how well Raf Vallone finesses a cliché near-rape sequence.)  De Sica shows easy command handling mass movement, armed attacks (a terrifying blitz by a Moroccan Unit), strafing from war planes (‘ours’ or ‘theirs’?), a complete moviemaking technique too easily taken for granted in his early Neo-Realist days where he made it all look as if he simply ‘caught’ the action.  But while everything here is exemplary, it does give off a slight impersonal quality somewhat removed from De Sica at his best.  Note that communal activities retain much of what’s missing elsewhere, but a lot of the film could have been done by any good craftsman.  Though certainly not Loren where his special gift for getting the most out of nonprofessionals provides the same magical effect with her.*  This time even earning the first competitive Oscar ever won for a non-English language role.*  (Caveat emptor on lousy Public Domain editions.  Look for the fine Italian Restoration.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Surprisingly, the De Sica magic doesn’t quite kick in with non-pro Eleonora Brown playing the 12-yr-old daughter.  She’s at that stage where her emotions quickly turn from 8 to 18, and the effort sometimes shows.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Comedy, of course, rarely wins competitive acting awards.  But for Loren/De Sica at their greatest, start with THE GOLD OF NAPLES/’54 (Loren stars in the second episode) or YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW/’63 (where she’s in all three).    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/11/ieri-oggi-domani-yesterday-today-and.html

CALCUTTA (1946)

Popular in its day, now overlooked, this film noir may not have much Calcutta atmosphere (not even much Paramount Studios Calcutta atmosphere), but gets full measure out of an ‘original’ Seton I. Miller screenplay that leans heavily on THE MALTESE FALCON/’41 and CASABLANCA/’42 for story beats & characters.  (Alan Ladd was never so Bogie-ish; it also explains the strange presence of debuting grotesquerie Edith King, a sort of gender-flipped Sydney Greenstreet.)  Flying cargo in & out of Calcutta with William Bendix & John Whitney, three pals who play the field with exotic beauties like June Duprez, or did until Whitney announces his engagement to Gail Russell, revealing a sultry, slightly corrupt beauty in her best perf.  But when Whitney turns up dead and a cache of gems goes missing, Ladd & Bendix are under suspicion even as they attempt to find the real killer(s).  Wary of the fiancé, Ladd soon falls for her . . . but is he being taken for a ride?  The usual investigation almost makes sense in this one, but what really puts it over is the visual boost director John Farrow gets from cinematography great John Seitz, almost as transforming here as he’d recently been to writer/directors Billy Wilder & Preston Sturges.  Even more impressive when you consider that Farrow had been directing for a decade and made over a score of largely unmemorable films.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Look fast to spot Hollywood’s first ever female croupier at a gambling table.  And check out some fine model airplane work in a pair of emergency landings.  Impressive F/X for the period.  (Presumably by Devereaux Jennings and better-known kid brother Gordon.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Seitz also brought more style than Farrow was wont to use on THE BIG CLOCK/’48, an escalating suspenser with opulent perfs by Ray Milland, Charles Laughton & Elsa Lancaster.

ÔSONE-KE NO ASHITA / MORNING FOR THE OSONE FAMILY (1946)

Where Keisuke Kinoshita’s first four films were made under wartime conditions (political & military policies to greater or lesser extent either sold, excused or put to the side), what a difference Unconditional Surrender made.  Questioning authority, once finessed away, now the main topic.  Specifically, the cost of war on a liberal-minded family of intellectuals and artists favorably inclined toward The West.  Opening at Christmastime 1943 as ‘Silent Night’ is played on the piano and sung by the family before a bit of Chopin played by a conscriptee one last time before he reluctantly begins military service.  One pacifist son has written a mildly critical article that’s enough to get him arrested while the youngest hopes to leave school early to become a war pilot.  A daughter is unofficially engaged to an unwilling draftee while a conservative Aunt & Uncle (a grafting Colonel stationed in Tokyo) move in after their house is bombed.  Simply set within the home of the widowed mother (Haruko Sugimura whom you’ll recognize from TOKYO STORY/’53), we move on to 1944, then two segments in 1945, before and after war’s end.  The four-act Chekhovian structure, another Western cultural reference, unmissable.  The Uncle & Aunt get their comeuppance, the family loses sons but survives.  And while it’s fascinating to see a film focused on this subset household lined up to resist the war, you do wonder how true to life this is or whether it’s just been careful designed to work hand-in-hand with new censorship/propaganda edicts.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Akira Kurosawa, who would later start a short-lived film company with Kinoshita, was more roundabout bringing similar concerns to his first post-war effort, NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH/’46)    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/waga-seishun-ni-kuinashi-no-regrets-for.html

LUCK (2022)

Resurfacing at Apple TV+ after a forced departure from PIXAR/Disney, animation-guru John Lasseter brought along his recipe box.  So why cook up this not-so-fresh batch of leftovers?  Famously ‘hands-on’ as producer (it’s what got him in trouble), the film is officially directed by Peggy Holmes (script Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger), but the relationships, characters, moral lessons and reflexive jokes all display the Lasseter brand.   Alas, some ideas reheat better than others, and the alternate world POV our heroine gets sucked into (here it’s the land of GOOD and BAD LUCK), offers far less possibilities for deep-think development than, say, INSIDE OUT or SOUL.  This time, Little Miss Orphan has just aged out of the kiddie home and is now on her own: new apartment, first job, new acquaintances, new face, too, since she’s been drawn to look like a middle-aged soap star just back from a face-lift.  Something very Susan Lucci about her.  Sucked into her adventure following a ‘lucky’ cat, her journey thru a garish playground of happy-go-lucky and happy-go-unlucky beasts underwhelming.  Selflessness will save her (she uses her lucky penny to help a young orphan snag a Forever Family), but does little to add interest to this bland creation.  I’m at a loss.  Not only at how poor this is (conceptually and in execution), but in generally respectable reviews.  Perhaps too much product & too many platforms have lowered old standards.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Instead, burgeoning teen self-awareness from Makoto Shinkai in the superb Japanese anime KIMI NO NA WA / YOUR NAME/’16.  An international phenom everywhere but the States where it stalled out at 5 mill.  No leftovers on this one.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kimi-no-na-wa-your-name-2016.html

TIEMPO DE MORIR / TIME TO DIE (1966)

Sober-sided debut for Mexican director Arturo Ripstein, a South-of-the-Border Western that leans self-consciously toward Greek Tragedy.  Taken from a Gabriel García Márquez story, it follows the heavy tread of Juan Sayago (Jorge Martínez de Hoyos), a middle-aged man back in town after 18 years in jail for a local murder his home town well remembers.  Especially the dead man’s two grown sons, patiently waiting to take revenge in spite of warnings from the local sheriff.  Turns out our prodigal murderer had his reasons, even convincing one of the sons to rethink his plans all while trying to restart a life put on hold with his one time fiancé (now a widow with a young son) and fixing up his long abandoned home.  Not a lot of surprises in how this all works out, though the film is at its considerable best zigging when you expect it to zag: Honor & honesty or thicker-than-blood vengeance?  That former fiancé foregoing love for pragmatism.  An unforgiving crippled old-friend.  (Ripstein hadn’t been Luis Buñuel’s assistant for nothing.)  But much feels as dusty and worn as the unpaved streets and town square.  And, like so many debuts, an unvaried pace takes its toll.  Still, a unique voice can be heard here.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: In Hollywood, a few A-list b&w Westerns with Greek Tragic aspirations in fashion during the ‘50s.  By 1966, when TIEMPO came out, THE GUNFIGHTER/’50, HIGH NOON/’52 and THE TIN STAR/’57 would all have been forced to use color.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/tin-star-1957.html

PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO (0000)*

(*Actually 1962.)  Oscar-winning leading man (mid-‘30s thru mid-‘50s), Ray Milland proved resourceful and game as the industry shed old-studio ways and he tumbled off the A-list.  First at Republic Pictures, acting & directing small-scale commercial fare off underdeveloped scripts, then turning to exploitation pics at American International Pictures, where he found himself sequentially ‘attached’ to FROGS, X-RAY EYES, and crocheting ex-footballer Rosie Grier.  Here, he directs & stars as the head of a nuclear family trying to outrun nuclear holocaust.  Thanks to an early start on a countryside vacation, Milland, wife Jean Hagen, kids Frankie Avalon & Mary Mitchel are lucky to miss the first nuclear blasts back home as their trip turns into a survivalist adventure against the odds and a suddenly lawless populace.  It’s every man for himself and every women in jeopardy as The Millands fight, hunt, hoard, hide and eventually kill or adopt when strangers call for help or supplies.  Milland’s character is intriguingly off-putting, jarring in his single-minded pursuit of any advantage to help the clan.  And if budget restrictions and Milland’s rather basic film technique hold the film down, it's still an interesting time capsule of the ‘Duck & Cover’ era.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Maybe a score that had more than Les Baxter’s jazz-licks and a few scare-cues could have lifted the drama.  Or dialogue less mockable than daughter Mitchel whining after annihilation by some mystery enemy (foreign power?, alien force?), blithely asking ‘What’s the matter with everyone?’

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)

One of a deluge of caper pics made in the wake of Jules Dassin’s game changing RIFIFI/’55, this early Jean-Pierre Melville film sees his signature touch come into focus.*  Filmed in drips & drabs over two-years as funds became available, its long production likely kept it from beating RIFIFI to the screen.  Those rickety finances also explaining some merely serviceable actors, though not elder statesman/leading man Roger Duchesne off-screen for over a decade; sexy teen Isabelle Corey spotted on the streets; and many others not the usual suspects.  The story is straightforward: High-Roller Bob, an ex-con on an epic losing streak, is tempted to rob Deauville Casino with a bespoke gang and some inside info.  Warned on all sides (even by a sympathetic cop) to drop the idea, you think you know where Melville is going here . . . but you don’t.  The young kid Bob mentors (an excellent Daniel Cauchy) blabs to teen tart Corey who then spills all to a former pal, now a police informer.  But this bit of typical film noir misogyny comes with a twist that takes the stink off it.  Same for Bob, losing himself in the run of his life at the gambling tables of Deauville just as the caper goes into motion.  It should ruin him.  Yet there’s saving grace in there as well.  Melville playing his cards very close to the vest.  Shot in varied monochromatic moods by the great Henri Decaë (with more Melville ahead for him), you’d never guess the stop/start nature of production.  Know where to place the camera and everything coheres.  It plays like Melville in training wheels, but takes you where he wants to go.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: Duchesne’s role might have been written for Jean Gabin, but the dicey on-and-off work schedule hadn’t a chance of attracting him.  Plus, he’d just done something similar for Jacques Becker in TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI/’54, with this film’s Daniel Cauchy.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Put it this way.  Halfway in, one of the gang reaches out to a former accomplice, now a Casino employee, threatening blackmail if he doesn’t ‘give’ with inside info.  Only then does he mention a ƒ500 honorarium.   Suddenly, a lightbulb switches on above the ex-con’s head, ‘Ahh, so I’m being paid.’

ALL THE KING'S MEN (1949)

The first, and certainly the best, of three major attempts at dramatizing the rise and fall of corrupt Populist Louisiana Governor Huey Long.  (A 2006 remake and 1953's A LION IS IN THE STREETS the other two.*)  Impressive & uneven in equal measure, the Robert Penn Warren novel a streaming mini-series waiting to happen.  Writer Robert Rossen had only recently added on director’s shingle and the lack of experience shows.  (Actually, it would in all his films; it’s the devil’s work to get his stuff to cut together.  Here, Robert Parrish came on to ‘fix’ an initial edit.)  The first third, charting the rise of ‘good’ Willie Stark (that’s the Huey Long figure), is the least successful.  Rossen has a reporter tag along thru early political strivings & stumbles in the poor rural South, finishing with a too early run for Governor, set up to fail by entrenched politicos.  But Broderick Crawford’s twice-burned Stark comes alive after that.  Winning the race at last, the hairpiece goes, the ties grow even shorter, the ennobling wife is left at home and he leverages his adopted son into big time college football.  But he’s also making deals for ‘the people,’ with plenty of kickbacks, even pulling that wised-up reporter into his circle, along with the reporter’s respectable girlfriend, her physician brother, and their old-school Judge of an Uncle.  And Stark keeps everything in order thanks to gatekeeper extraordinaire Mercedes McCambridge, stealing all her scenes on shockingly modern terms.  She’s the only thing in here that doesn’t feel pinned into place to make the next point.  Still, once it gets going, compelling stuff.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Promising on paper, the 2006 remake is a near complete bust.  While A LION IS IN THE STREET (dir. Raoul Walsh/James Cagney) is downright odd. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/all-kings-men-2006.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/09/lion-is-in-streets-1953.html

THE SOUND AND THE FURY (1959)

After big success turning William Faulkner’s THE LONG, HOT SUMMER into faux-Tennessee Williams the previous year, producer Jerry Wald, composer Alex North, director Martin Ritt, writers Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank Jr., and star Joanne Woodward went back for second helpings on this famously unfathomable Faulkner novel with a title out of MACBETH: ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of Sound and Fury, signifying nothing.’  Well, they got the ‘signifying nothing’ part right.  Here, the model is less Tennessee Williams than producer Wald’s earlier hit PEYTON PLACE (Yoknapatawpha Place?), and Jack Warden's ‘idiot’ doesn’t tell the tale, mostly hangs out on the porch.  And just what is that tale?  Something about a cursed Southern family, once prominent, now vaguely incestuous, with Woodward hunting up sexual possibilities off the decaying family grounds causing Step-Uncle Yul Brynner (sporting a fine head of hair) to lock her up for safe keeping.  Perhaps traveling ‘carny’ man Stuart Whitman can offer a way out . . . but does Joanne want out?  Meanwhile, Prodigal Daughter Margaret Leighton, Woodward’s mother, returns after years away to a shabby mansion largely run by no-nonsense Mammy-type Ethel Waters, trudging up & down the stairs, bringing tea & sandwiches to various interrelated semi-invalids, pipe dreamers and her own handsome grandchildren.  And you thought the novel was tough to follow!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Stick with THE LONG, HOT SUMMER; at least it’s an entertaining mess.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-long-hot-summer-1958.html

THE GIRL IN WHITE (1952)

Minor bio-pic on pioneering doctor Emily Dunning, first female to get an internship at a major NYC hospital, is pleasant and well-made, but never feels necessary.  Boasting better than average turn-of-the-last-century period details for 1952 M-G-M, the film is too careful for its own good.*  Only a few ambulance rides thru city streets rouse much response from director John Sturges while striving doctor-in-training June Allyson is her usual maddeningly nice self.  (She’s even nice getting pissed at the hazing from the all-male staff.)  Arthur Kennedy supplies romance as a fellow trainee leaning toward research abroad and Gary Merrill the most interesting character as the grumpy, but dedicated unit head who starts to question his bias against women in the profession as he warms to Allyson professionally and personally.  You keep thinking someone might have done something special with the material.  George Stevens’ I REMEMBER MAMA/’48 comes to mind; possibly because Barbara Bel Geddes would have been just right here.  But the studio was in transition (founding M-G-M father L. B. Mayer OUT/message-driven producer Dore Schary IN), and this mid-list film got lost in the shuffle.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For a plusher M-G-M take on a pioneering woman in the profession, try MADAME CURIE/’43.  OR: Get an idea of what I REMEMBER MAMA’s Barbara Bel Geddes might have done.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/01/madame-curie-1943.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/i-remember-mama-1948.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The script afraid to let Allyson’s young doc ever be wrong.  In a major character building sequence she revives a man thought dead by a callous intern.  If only her efforts had been correct . . . but for nought.