THE PAJAMA GAME (1957)

Pivoting easily from Parisian haute couture & existential literary circles in FUNNY FACE/’57 to petit bourgeois concerns of labor vs. management at a MidWest pajama factory adapting this stage hit, Stanley Donen (here working with B’way legend George Abbott) pulled off the near impossible act of following one of Hollywood’s most sophisticated musicals with its most proletarian.  Both great, yet GAME never quite gets its due from most critics.  (Though not Jean-Luc Godard who raved & raved.)  Bringing in all but one of the original B’way cast pays off, as does the one swap out that put perfectly cast Hollywood ringer Doris Day (truer of voice/warmer of personality) in for Janis Paige.*  Perennial B’way leading man John Riatt (yes, Bonnie’s dad) gets his only film role as the new superintendent who falls for Day, head of the grievance committee, showing off his all but perfect legit B’way vocal technique (baritone with a crazy upper extension), while the supporting cast all hit their larger-than-life, but accurate targets.  Eddie Foy Jr. and Reta Shaw do a heavenly soft-shoe duet while eccentric Carol Haney, particularly in ‘Steam Heat,’ helps choreographer Bob Fosse mature from pupa to butterfly.   A couple of songs from the stage show are missed, but they’ve trimmed the second act to good effect.  Special kudos to lenser Harry Stradling Sr., giving almost unheard of depth & texture to picnic grounds and factory interiors for the period.  WarnerColor was rarely this expressive.

CONTEST:  In 1957, the Hollywood Production Code still had enough clout to bowdlerize even mildly suggestive lyrics that might cause offense . . . to whom?  Spot any of these rewritten couplets in 'I’m Not At All In Love,’ ’I’ll Never Be Jealous Again,’ ‘Small Talk’ and ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.  Extra fun for those who know the tune to ‘Hernando’s Hideaway.’   Substitute the song's lyrics with the words of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping By the Woods On a Snowy Evening.’  

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

(Add ‘Ole!’ at the end and it scans perfectly.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Paige licked her wounds (and ‘an anchovy’ per Cole Porter’s lyrics) the same year with the second lead in SILK STOCKINGS/’57.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/silk-stockings-1957.html

THE WIDOW FROM CHICAGO (1930)

Modest, but cleverly structured Early Talkie from Warners opens with a neat fake-out after a mob man from Chicago leaps from a moving train to avoid arrest, probably falling to his death as the train was crossing a river.  Cut to NYC, where a police detective uses that unreported death to impersonate the guy and take down the criminal organization from within.  The script giving him a full half-reel of exposition before blowing it all up in our face when he’s shot dead by a rival gang before he even gets started.  On to Plan B and his sister picking up the gauntlet, presenting herself as the grieving widow and begging for a job.  Now, she's the one who'll expose the gang from within.  But things get a bit dicey when that ‘probable dead guy’ (her supposed husband; the guy her late brother hoped to impersonate) shows up alive and well.  Yikes!  Visually kept on the move by Eddie Cline who usually helmed comedy, he’s unable to make much of Alice White’s squawky voice (she’d soon slip back to supporting roles), but Neil Hamilton is fine as the returned husband . . . if he is the returned husband.  But the main interest comes in watching the short, squat mob boss who takes on rivals twice his size.  It’s Edward G. Robinson in a sort of test run for his very next film, LITTLE CAESAR, and Hollywood immortality.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Naturally, LITTLE CAESAR/'31.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/little-caesar-1931.html

WILD GIRL (1932)

The last time director Raoul Walsh took on a spectacular location shoot was in 1930 for his 70mm Western THE BIG TRAIL.  An uneven, often striking Early Talkie flop, now remembered for stalling John Wayne’s career climb for a decade.  Now, Walsh takes on California Sequoia country in a plot-crammed story reminiscent of an Ozarks melodrama.  Joan Bennett, still a blonde, daringly voluptuous (‘nekkid’ swim with a gaggle of kids, even a ‘side boob’ shot), has half the town proposing, but has yet to feel tru-love.  Passing gambler Ralph Bellamy gracefully takes no for an answer, telling Joan she’ll know the real thing when it hits her.  Exactly what happens when Charles Farrell shows up from the East, looking for the town’s leading citizen, a pious fraud who ‘sullied’ his sister before she killed herself.  Soon, Farrell’s a cold-blooded killer on the run as a town posse hunts him and a neighbor of Bennett’s who robbed Eugene Palette’s stagecoach.  Yikes!  How much plot can Walsh squeeze into 80 minutes.  (BTW, Palette consistently hilarious here, especially when imitating horses.)   Both men caught and quickly lynched, leaving the field open for all the others still hankering for Joan’s hand.  But wait!  Farrell managed to escape the noose.  Stopping by to repledge his troth before he’s back on the run . . . this time with Bennett and her dad who lied about killing a man Bennet also lied about killing because Farrell was the guy who really did the killing.  Wha?  Remarkably, in the film this is not only easy to follow, but is relatively believable.  It’s also tops technically, showing all sorts of 1932 advances in Norbert Brodine’s phenomenal cinematography.  Almost entirely shot on location (other than that swimming hole and interiors), check out the weird dissolves between scenes; optically printed ‘wipes’ that look like a page being turned.  Very cool.   (Or very distracting?)  Bellamy & Bennett play wonderfully together, but he’s already typed as third-wheel to Farrell, a handsome cross between Rock Hudson & Gregory Peck, but a silent film star who never quite found a speaking style to match the image.  Fascinating stuff here; damn entertaining.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In addition to the nude swim and side boob shot, the film’s Pre-Code bona fides has hookers who are hookers and (at least) three unpunished, if semi-justified, murders.

BUTLEY (1974)

The only complete success from the handful of faithfully filmed ‘serious’ plays given limited release in the mid-‘70s as The American Film Theatre subscription series.*  Initially advertized as never to be shown again (Yikes! - was that supposed to be a threat?), ironically, BUTLEY was 100% British: play; cast; cinematographer; director; locations & studio.  A coruscating comedy on the literally self-lacerating Butley, an English Lit. Prof at some dingy London university, played by Alan Bates in a daringly big, non-stop full-throttle mode of acting that’s not supposed to work on screen unless you’re James Cagney . . . or Alan Bates.  Proving his own worst enemy over one long day, Butley finds all his professional & personal relationships (intertwined as they are) coming undone.  His former star pupil & present lover/office-mate is moving on (again professionally and personally); his estranged wife is moving in (plus their little girl whose name he can’t always remember) with the most boring man in London; his one-on-one student tutorials a torture to be avoided at all costs; and a promising new T.S. Eliot student-candidate not so appetizing when sober (that is, when Butley’s sober); even his safety-razor (well, somebody’s safety-razor) lets him down.  And it’s not merely ‘one of those days;’ more the new normal.  Covering misery with ironic arrogance, Bates manages to make a disagreeably smart fellow laugh-out-loud audacious.  Perfectly cast (Jessica Tandy does wonders with her wounded retirement-age Prof.), it was the sole feature film directing gig for Nobel Laureate playwright Harold Pinter who’d staged the play in London & on B’way.  (Tony Award for Bates.)  Likely as not, Pinter stood with the actors & left the technical side to cinematographer Gerry Fisher.  And if BUTLEY’s not for the fainthearted, Bates spectacular self-combustion act (with but the merest touch of balm at the end) makes it essential viewing.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One elaborate set piece, between Butley and his b’friend’s as yet unannounced new partner, concerning current British gay nomenclature, totally unexpected in a 1974 film.  ‘Gay’ and ‘Nancy Boy’ not in the mix; ‘Queer’ and ‘Fairy’ all but exclusively used by Gray in a play first staged in 1971.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *The other recommendable title in the AFT series was John Frankenheimer’s honest attempt at Eugene O’Neill’s THE ICEMAN COMETH/’73.  (A 'symbolic' double-bill since ICEMAN runs 4 hours.)

SUBMARINE D-1 (1937)

Granted star-billing after his breakthru as boxing phenom KID GALAHAD/’37 behind Edward G. Robinson & Bette Davis, handsome, likable, tall (6'2" at Warners!, home of the scrimpy leading men), Wayne Morris's road to stardom screeched to a halt after this ill-considered rush job.  A by-the-book Navy recruitment pic, co-stars Pat O’Brien & George Brent had become used to these B+ pics by now.  This one, even with top tech & producers involved, drops to programmer level.  Heck, even the stock footage and model ships phone it in.  Submarine mates Morris & O’Brien, old pals who loved-and-lost Doris Weston (who she?) to fellow Navy man Regis Toomey, in for the wedding when an accident at sea scuttles any plans.  Instead, new Commander Brent has them going out (or rather down) on a new assignment.  O’Brien, whose position as Chief will land in Morris’s lap, runs roughshod on his crew while working ‘round the clock on a new underwater rescue tank.  Good thing too since this experimental submersible will be needed during the War Games finale out at sea.  Hard to fathom Frank Wead, Hollywood’s go-to Navy pen-man, behind this disjointed story.  He mixes in all the right ingredients, then forgets to light the oven.*  Frank McHugh helps out with comic relief (he’s almost funny, too), but this peacetime film is merely pre-war exercise with little at stake.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Frank ‘Spig’ Wead, an injured vet who specialized in military mores (usually hard-bitten commanders forced to send young recruits into harms way) well played by John Wayne in John Ford’s uneven/underrated THE WINGS OF EAGLES/’57.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/wings-of-eagles-1957.html

YIM JI KAU / ROUGE (1987)

Hong Kong’s Stanley Kwan’s time-traveling ghost story on love, loss & redemption is told with breathtaking simplicity and even rarer lucidity.  Leslie Cheung & Anita Mui are beautiful & doomed as an unequally matched couple in the early 1930s.  HER: refined, luxury-grade prostitute in Hong Kong’s still legal brothels; HIM: Scion of a wealthy business family, the ‘Twelfth-Master’ in his house.  Between opium-laced love, they languorously plan marriage as he starts an unlikely apprenticeship at the Chinese Opera, a literal pipe-dream that can’t win over family objections.  Despairing, the couple agree to a suicide pact.  Fifty years later, Mui returns to Hong Kong as a ghost, at sea in modern society, depending on the kindness of strangers to reach her scheduled meeting with her soon-to-return ghostly love.  That’s newspaper employee Alex Man as the 'kind stranger,' pointing the way as he slowly realizes he’s helping a corporeal ectoplasm to her destiny thru the Want Ads at his newspaper job.  Eventually joined by his no-nonsense girlfriend Emily Chu, they’ll learn that ultra-romantic reality can be brutally anti-romantic.  Working with rich color for the past, and naturalism in the present (and what a pleasure to see the past rendered more vividly than the present for a change!), the story & script (Kang-Chien Chiu; Pik-Wah Lee) move in unexpected directions thru an acceptance of the paranormal that is catching.  With Kwan cleverly handling it via editing & composition rather than strenuous Special Effects*, it easily hits the top ranks of his output.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *For another nearly Special Effects-free ghost story, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s enchanting THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR/’47.

BRUTTI, SPORCHI E CATTIVI / UGLY, DIRTY AND BAD (1976)

Selectively distributed Stateside, Italian writer/director Ettore Scola was chiefly known ‘over here’ by an early release (THE PIZZA TRIANGLE/’70), prestige items (A SPECIAL DAY/’77; PASSIONE D'AMORE/’81, THAT NIGHT IN VARENNES/’82, LA FAMIGLIA/’87), and meeting the challenge of converting the popular dialogue-free theatrical event LE BAL/’83 into legit cinema.  But with 42 directing credits (90 as writer), these barely scratch the surface of a protean film figure; last survivor of the immediate post-WWII Italian film generation.  So it’s a special treat to watch him toss caution to the wind in this scabrous comedy about what once was called ‘the undeserving poor.’  Like a Ben Jonson Elizabethan ‘comedy of humors’ set in a shantytown on the outskirts of modern Rome, Nino Manfredi leads a four-generation shackful of dysfunction, the main source of ‘wealth’ after receiving a million lira compensation for losing sight in one eye.  Great-grandma (his mother), the only other member of the dilapidated house pulling in any cash with her small pension.  The rest, a rabble Fagin wouldn’t have accepted as apprentice pickpockets, squabbling & screwing, snoring & scarfing the days away, on the lookout for a scam to pull, a government handout to finesse or a relative to fight with (or cuckold).  Scola spends the first half of the film setting up the appalling (and appallingly funny) interpersonal dynamics (not forgetting to lock up all the little children in a fenced-in pen) before Manfredi, finding true-love in a plump, plush hooker, decides he can do without the twenty-odd souls he’s supporting.  And just as those twenty odd souls figure they can do without Manfredi!  It’s all against one and one against all with nothing at stake since Manfredi is determined to sell the house for profit or burn it down.  Maybe both.  Films with plots & a catalogue of characters this messy rarely get this close to perfection, but Scola, who won Best Director at Cannes on this, knows exactly what he’s doing every moment, and somehow pulls it off.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: For Scola’s look at a more genteel family, LA FAMIGLIA/’87, with Vittorio Gassman rather than Manfredi as paterfamilias.  Scola worked a lot with Gassman, even co-writing Dino Risi’s masterful IL SORPASSO/’62 for him.  And, fine though he is, the Nino Manfredi role here feels like it was written with Gassman in mind.

BATAAN (1943)

Though very much a WWII period piece: diorama sound-stage set; John Ford’s sniper-in-the-desert pic THE LOST PATROL/’34 as structural template (M-G-M purchasing remake rights); One from Column A/One from Column B ethnic casting for the fighting unit (Latino, Black, Jew, Asian-American, Filipino); it’s an interesting, often effective WWII period piece.  As war news tilt positive post-MIDWAY, even staid M-G-M thought to try a tough, basically downbeat story on the loss of the Philippines.  Not an overview of the island’s defeat, but coaxing a sort of 300 Spartans holding-action tale of men, honor & sacrifice.  Director Tay Garnett, just off Bob Hope’s MY FAVORITE SPY/’42, of all things, working with M-G-M ordnance, brings off more than you might think.  Even making Robert Taylor’s affectless speech & lack of charm an asset as the efficient, unimaginative Sergeant who all but assumes command over Lee Bowman, his superior officer.  Their assignment?  Blow a bridge and hold off the Jap onslaught.  A suicide mission . . . and they know it.  Debuting Robert Walker, as a naïf sailor who’s fallen in with the outfit, may overplay the aw-shucks element for modern audiences, but sure hit the sweet spot for audiences at the time.  The part made him an instant star, and he’s surprisingly powerful at the end.  In fact, everyone fine; yes, Desi Arnaz, too.  With Black actor Kenneth Spencer a standout in his second and last Hollywood role.  Unusual just to have him in the mix.  More unusual in the still segregated army, he’s neither cook nor driver, but a demolitions expert.  Advanced stuff for ‘43!  Not so advanced; he's always singing up a bass-baritone storm.  Advanced; he sings Blues not Spirituals.  Not so advanced; he gets the most gruesome death; much like 'token' Black actors got in so many ‘70s/’80s comic-horror pics.

DOUBLE-BILL:  M-G-M’s returned to the Philippines for John Ford’s THEY WERE EXPENDABLE/’45.  Released just as the war was winding down, this superb film didn’t find an audience then and hasn’t found one yet.  OR:  A sequel made over at R.K.O.: BACK TO BATAAN/’45.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/back-to-bataan-1945.html

AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970)

Something of a cult figure for the stylish campy horror of two Vincent Price/DR. PHIBES pics (THE ABOMINABLE/’71; RISES AGAIN/’72), director Robert Fuest had just made this modest, but more than modestly effective thriller featuring Pamela Franklin and Michelle Dotrice as a couple of mismatched student pals biking the backroads of France on holiday.  One always eager to get a move on for the next town (Franklin), the other (Dotrice) hoping to lounge around and flirt with the cute guys hanging at the café.  They hit the road, but not for long as Dotrice quickly needs a break.  Fighting over what their vacation should be, Franklin heads out, leaving her stubborn friend behind.  Big mistake . . . for both of them.  Suspense and surprise only mild, but Fuest nails the inherent creep factor as both young woman have second thoughts but few options (or the language skills) to fix a situation that appears to be spinning out of control.  (Control of uncomfortable story beats & scare tropes just what Fuest excels at.)  Bringing in slightly ‘off’ characters who offer help but may have had something to do with an unsolved murder in the exact same featureless rural spot three years ago.  Yikes!  Ex-pat English lady; bickering couple running a little rest stop; Paris detective a bit too fascinated by the old murder case; local gendarme; who to trust, who to turn to?  With a well structured script from Brian Clemens & Terry Nation and well-caught atmosphere from lenser Ian Wilson, the film sticks with you.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Pamela Franklin’s best known perf was as the favorite student in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE/’69, but her specialty in psychological horror roles started right from her unnerving debut in THE INNOCENTS/’61 (aka Henry James’ THE TURN OF THE SCREW.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-prime-of-miss-jean-brodie-1969.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-innocents-1961.html

THE OUTLAWS OF RED RIVER (1927); THE BEST BAD MAN (1925)

Pickford, Fairbanks, Valentino, Chaplin or Lloyd, Garbo, even Rin Tin Tin; all still names to conjure with as silent cinema’s #1 Sweetheart, Swashbuckler, Latin Lover, Comic, Goddess and Dog.  Only Tom Mix, by far the biggest Western star, no longer a known name.  Two recent restorations show why he’s mostly forgotten, if not why he was once so ubiquitous.  An anodyne presence in the formulaic BEST BAD MAN, he’s better in one of his ‘Special’ productions, OUTLAWS OF RED RIVER/’27.*  The former mostly of interest for a chance to see nineteen-yr-old co-star Clara Bow as the land owning gal who thinks Mix has duped her out promised water irrigation when it’s really Mix, an effete out-of-state landowner, who’s been duped by locals who’ve stolen the money he sent out West.  So, heading West undercover, he sorts things out (with a light comic touch) and falls for Clara after a couple of back-loaded action set pieces: a roller-coaster of a train ride thru the mountains and a flood/rescue after that unfinished dam explodes.  (Note director John G. Blystone credited as co-director with Buster Keaton on OUR HOSPITALITY/’23, also with a flood/rescue finale.)  OUTLAWS is much better, with a nifty backstory for Texas Ranger Tom whose foster parents were murdered by outlaws and his little foster-sister taken.  Sixteen years later, he finds the head of the gang who’s ‘adopted’ the now grown little sister and clears everything up (by  posing as an outlaw & joining the gang) with many thrilling action scenes all thru the pic.  Some for him and some for his remarkable ‘wonder’ horse, Tony.  (It’s Tony who’s worth the price of admission!)  Well staged on great locations with good stunt doubles for Mix, it’s neatly-plotted, well-acted and physically handsome, with exciting direction from B-pic stalwart Lewis Seiler and even a black hat on Tom for a change.  One of Tom’s best.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Mix’s ‘Special’ release of ‘25 was Zane Grey’s RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, possibly his best pic.*  So it was back to programmers like BEST BAD MAN.  (PURPLE survives in superb physical condition, but all home viewing options are lousy dupes.)  OR: Blake Edwards had a great idea in SUNSET/’88: Tom Mix and pal Wyatt Earp (Bruce Willis; James Garner) solve a murder mystery during Hollywood’s silent-to-sound transition.  It opens with a bang up runaway stagecoach sequence then quickly turns lazy, inaccurate and dumb, in Edwards’ worst late period manner.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Au contraire per silent film expert William K. Everson whose ‘Pictorial History of the Western Film,’ a far more serious look at the genre than its title suggests, celebrates the standard Mix mix of horsemanship, action, top technical work & consistent use of stunning filming locations in his regular output, and finds him stumbling on attempts to step out of this formula, listing DICK TURPIN and PURPLE SAGE as rare misfires.

MADRES PARALELAS / PARALLEL MOTHERS (2021)

After a sober prologue on the possible discovery & reburial of villagers who ‘disappeared’ in unmarked graves during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Pedro Almodóvar shifts gears for (of all things) a switched-at-birth-babies story.  A stretch even for Almodóvar to link up all the opposing tones & tropes before an epilogue returns us to that village.  But credit due for packaging it all so beautifully.  Favored muse Penélope Cruz is the fashionable & nearly forty photographer (single/childless) whose current assignment, archeological researcher Israel Elejalde, not only comes up with a possible plan of action on the gravesite, but also falls for Cruz.  Nine months later . . .   But when Cruz delivers, teenage maternity wing roommate Milena Smit goes into labor at the same time.  And while the mix-up isn’t shown, the discovery is handled with a kind of grace that shows Almodóvar in full melodramatic Douglas Sirk form.  (Hard not to reimagine the two woman with ‘50s Sirkian casting: Jane Wyman & Sandra Dee?)  Abetted as usual with full saturated color from cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, and boasting an exceptional Alberto Iglesias score nicely recapped in the end credits.  Considering how a young Almodóvar once thought his generation lived as if Generalissimo Franco had never existed, you can see how Smit’s cultural & political ignorance of the past has him rethinking his own youthful posturing.  And if some of this feels shoe-horned in, the final scenes at the gravesite are intensely felt/intensely moving.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Just as ancient Greeks & Romans followed serious plays with something sublimely comic, these old swapped-at-birthed tropes get hilariously twinned (nay, goosed) in START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT ME/’70 which Donald Sutherland and an inspired Gene Wilder keep aloft for eight of its nine reels in spite of pretty lame filmmaking.

CARNIVAL (1935)

Robert Riskin was Columbia Pictures Prexy Harry Cohn’s ironman writer in the ‘30s.  Eight Frank Capra pics that put the studio in contention with ‘the majors,’ and about a dozen with other directors.  Best of the non-Capras probably THE WHOLE TOWN’S TALKING (John Ford/Jean Arthur & Edward G. Robinson) made directly after this surprisingly weak effort with a good cast & situation.  Starring three ‘mutts’ on the outs at their former studio, now taking Columbia B-pic leftovers: Sally Eilers, lately of Fox, now fallen out of fashion; Jimmy Durante, lately of M-G-M, now out of favor; Lee Tracy, also lately of M-G-M, just plain out!  The trio making a fine team of puppeteers doing voices & pulling strings on a Carny marionette show.  The gimmick in Riskin’s original screenplay has Tracy lose his wife in childbirth then trying to keep his kid as a single dad always on the road.  If only he had a steadying wife to back him up.  Blind to Eilers’ charms, Tracy searches for an upscale mate only to wind up on the lam with kid in tow when the authorities come a’calling.  Riskin, who wrote some of the best supporting characters of the ‘30s, makes them the leads in this sentimental comedy.  But plotting and structure are too formulaic, too obvious.  The weirdest moment comes on a group tour of a ‘preemie’ baby ward where Tracy meets a prospective bride.  But the fat, healthy babies behind the windows of their germ-free baby-boxes stop the narrative cold.  (Presumably real preemies couldn’t’ be filmed.)  Journeyman director Walter Lang, shortly @ 20th/Fox for a 25 yr run, megs like he’s looking for the exit.  Even Dickie Walters, the painfully adorable fat-cheeked son-o’-mine, a dud.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Still determined to see a CARNIVAL film from 1935?  Heigh thee to 17th Century Flanders for classic French cinema in CARNIVAL IN FLANDERS.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/carnival-in-flanders-la-kermesse.html  OR:  As mentioned, Riskin back on form in his next script THE WHOLE TOWN’S TALKING.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-whole-towns-talking-1935.html

L’IMMORTALE / THE IMMORTAL (2019)

Well-received directing debut for actor/writer Marco D’Amore who takes the lead as Čiro Di Marzio, a sort of Mafia Foundling who acquired his ‘Immortal’ moniker beating the odds on survival from birth to young adulthood: pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building; shot in the chest; left to drown in the Gulf of Naples.  The Unsinkable Molly Brown has nothing on this guy.  Though coming out of the Italian GOMORRAH crime series, it’s a stand-alone feature (first since the original back in 2008?*), the story picks up as series regular Čiro is ‘rewarded’ with one of those coveted Mob positions no one really wants, running cocaine distribution for his Naples outfit up in Latvia.  There, he’s immediately thrust into a winless war of control between warring local & Russian criminal syndicates.  Yet the film is at its most involving not in these sequences, but back in Naples during a prologue which has Čiro shot & dumped overboard; surviving that apartment collapse; then in flashbacks thru-out the film detailing his sentimental education as a 12-yr-old in tough Naples nabs, mentored by cog-in-the-wheel drug delivery man Bruno (whom Čiro cleverly saves from arrest in ‘immortal’ fashion) and his relationship to a girl ‘singer’ he’s sweet on.  Back in Latvia, it’s THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE DRUG RUNNER as Čiro is forced to quickly deal with leaks inside his ‘posse’ and defuse a three-way power struggle involving his own team as well as the opposing Latvian & Russian teams.  Surprisingly, the weakest aspect of this first feature isn’t writing or direction, but in the acting, plenty of weak links among the cast.  (The kid in the flashbacks especially tame.)  And while neither this film nor the series feels as eye-poppingly original as the first GOMORRAH film, it certainly works on its own terms.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The original GOMORRAH/’08 has a documentary vibe no longer felt here.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/07/gomorrah-2008.html

STELLA DALLAS (1925)

Hiding in plain sight on a 2020 Warners Archive DVD of the Barbara Stanwyck/King Vidor 1937 STELLA DALLAS (listed on the back-cover as Vintage Featurette STELLA DALLAS) is director Henry King’s better 1925 silent.  A mediocre 16mm dupe and no music track, but still worth the effort.  (You may be able to find the out-of-print Sunrise Silents edition on-line.)  Little remembered Belle Bennett is even more believable than Stanwyck as a low-class gal who manages to hook a rich society type rebuilding his shattered life in a small town after his father’s suicide.  Incompatible from the git (unlike Stanwyck, you know she’ll never be able to change her spots), she refuses to move with him when his job sends him permanently to New York, their little girl staying with Mom.  But as the daughter grows, Stella comes to realize what’s best for the girl means giving her up to the father.  Frances Marion, adapting Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel, works this up into a fine set of waterworks, especially the last four reels beginning with a renunciation scene for Mom and Step-Mom, while a typically patient Henry King knows just when to push and when to back off.  He also has a dream supporting cast in Ronald Colman, teenage sweethearts Lois Moran & Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Jean Hersholt; far superior to the remake.  Both remakes if you include Bette Midler’s STELLA/’90.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Here’s Stanwyck in 1937; and full credit to King Vidor on that final tracking shot ending the pic.  And a link to the next collaboration for Henry King & Ronald Colman which comes (hurrah!) in near-mint condition, THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH/’26.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/stella-dallas-1937.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/09/winning-of-barbara-worth-1926.html

CONTEST:  A big emotional scene sees no one showing up when little Laurel Dallas throws a party.  It’s not the only 1925 release to use that idea.  Name the other No-Show Party scene of 1925 to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Hard to imagine now, but there were so many Mother Love stories in silent film (the pre-M-G-M Louis B. Mayer specialized in them), they all but constituted their own genre: Westerns; Thrillers; Slapstick; Mother Love.  See our Movie Tie-In book reprint cover above. 

ALL QUIET ON THE WEWSTERN FRONT (2022)

Handsomely produced, physically impressive, this remake of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel, an early Talkie triumph for Lewis Milestone in 1930, is this year’s prestige disappointment.  It starts well enough as young Paul Bäumer (Remarque’s alter-ego) and friends sign up in their German town for an already stalemated war only to be shocked by the reality of WWI combat, bleak living conditions, and the pointless nature of being used as cannon fodder in a war of attrition.  But somewhere between casting and story emphasis, something goes terribly wrong in what was designed to be a more German-specific look at what had always been a German POV story, anyway.  Key missteps of commission & omission include top brass Armistice conferences and the loss of Paul’s haunted return home on short leave.  (The latter the very heart of Remarque’s novel.)  And worse to come as writer/director Edward Berger goes all Steven Spielberg on us as the Armistice is about to go into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month/1918 when (SPOILER ALERT!) a vainglorious Captain sends hundreds of new recruits and the few vets not fast enough to have taken off, on one final territorial thrust for the honor of the Fatherland.  And only fifteen minutes of war left!  An actual ticking clock adding suspense.  After two years at the front, Paul’s being stabbed in the back; that’s literally stabbed in the back.  (Well, bayoneted.)  Left as a beautified death-mask in plaster dust; eyes & mouth inauthentically shut, posed as if to complete a Pietà.  Remarque’s novel doesn’t end on Armistice Day or even in November, let alone with a huge battle sequence. ‘He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.’  Death coming not with a bang, but a whimper.  An unremarkable death on an unremarkable day.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The 1930 version, if not without Early Talkie awkwardness in its dialogue scenes, remains a stunning achievement.  READ ALL ABOUT IT: Particularly in how Milestone and cinematographer Karl Freund came up with something to visually match the devastating final two lines from the novel.  A fine chapter in Kevin Brownlow’s THE WAR, THE WEST AND THE WILDERNESS.

MISSISSIPPI BURNING (1988)

Lord, I miss Gene Hackman.  This Civil Rights drama, a hyped-up telling of the real 1964 F.B.I. investigation ‘Down South’ after three Freedom Rider activists went missing (presumed dead), well-received, awarded, successful, later took a double hit.  One trivial: historians uncomfortable with fictional/thriller liberties (as if this were unusual); and one that stuck a couple of decades on when the film became a prime example of White-Savior Syndrome*, stories with Black political & social issues treated as platforms to laud heroic White Folk, any Blacks in the cast kept to supporting roles.  Neither issue exactly untrue, yet on its own terms, the pic remains an exciting, often exceptional work.  Hackman’s on tremendous form as the seasoned F.B.I. agent with roots in the Deep South, ready, willing & able to play the White Supremacist field as it lays to get the job done, chaffing at much younger boss Willem Dafoe, an out-of-his-element/by-the-book technocrat FBI man.  (It’s much the same dynamic Brian De Palma used the previous year for Sean Connery & Kevin Costner in THE UNTOUCHABLES.)  With director Alan Parker and lenser Peter Biziou turning in probably their finest work capturing what was then a shockingly recent past of violent, proudly open racism (and other than the ‘openness,’ how much has really changed in that benighted State, still last or near last in so many social categories?)  Mostly though, Lord, I miss Gene Hackman.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Fourth of five Oscar noms for Hackman in what was elsewise a surprisingly weak Best Actor field, he lost to Dustin Hoffman’s twitchings in RAIN MAN.  Medical conditions always trump good acting at the Academy.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *William Wyler’s little-known racially-charged final film, THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES so far ahead of the curve, it was already beginning to move past White-Savior Syndrome in 1970.

THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS (2020)

‘Can’t-miss’/award-winning documentary on Northern Italy’s truffle trade doesn’t exactly miss, merely underwhelms.  Between nosing dogs, sweetly eccentric aging owners, retail middlemen & restaurant purveyors, fungi assayers & connoisseurs, writer/director/lensers Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw dig up plenty of photo-friendly material, but never find an organizing principle to set their gems in.  Everything given more or less equal weight other than the dogs who suffer a double indignity: not only acting but also as unpaid camera operators!  (Attached POV ‘Go-Pro’ collars?)  Where’s the canine union when you need it?  Still a fun watch, but this ought to have been better.  Stick it out and you’ll be rewarded with the best shot in the pic as a stubborn old owner sneaks out for some nighttime foraging urged along by the panting anticipation of his eager partner.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  That funky/earthy truffle odor something of an acquired, and very expensive, taste.  Hence, truffle oil, an item most great chefs studiously avoid.

TÁR (2022)

Writer/director Todd Field, a suspiciously deliberate filmmaker (deliberate in output, three features in twenty years; deliberate in pacing; deliberate in what he doesn’t show), makes his chilliest film yet about a chilly (and reckless) Western classical music conductor (a rare woman at the top of her field) who ‘has it all’: Berlin Phil appointment; concert-master wife; child; acolytes (with benefits) to assist & mentor.  She’s also due for a fall, fated to be undone by an overblown sense of entitlement, personal hubris and by decisions made thru sexual attraction.  Extremely accomplished filmmaking, but with something of a hole right in the center as the dramatic fulcrum feels jerry-rigged purely for dramatic effect when Tar (Cate Blanchett, even better than advertized) pointlessly humiliates a student conductor in a Julliard Music School masterclasss who’s not only chosen to work the student orchestra thru an atonal piece of modern music she disapproves of, but disses White Western (cis)Male composers in general.  (Whatever is he doing there?  And why would she bother with such easy pickings?)  The scene, Tár toying with the nervous lad like a cat with a mouse, designed solely with an eye to a precipitous fall and well-earned comeuppance.  It has the uncomfortable feel & texture not of life, but of bad playwriting; a sham set up for the last two acts you'd expect to find in late David Mamet or anytime-at-all Neil LaBute.  Fortunately, craft, acting & suspense manage to work around this weakness, especially when Field also turns reckless with a double climax; first in an over-the-top moment of action, then in an over-the-top final ‘reveal.’  Each one making you laugh out loud . . . in a good way.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Preston Sturges humiliates classical music conductor Rex Harrison to a fare-thee-well in UNFAITHFULLY YOURS/’48.

RAGTIME (1981)

E.L. Doctorow’s literary fantasia about pre-WWI New York society (high, low & in-between) is like a rich, historical vaudeville where all the acts bump into each other backstage.  One of the great reads of the day, its jokes, lively coincidence and plethora of famous & fictional characters packed into 270 pages, had most of its fun flattened when Michael Weller’s script and Milos Forman’s direction ennobled Doctorow’s kaleidoscopic view into scolding social drama.   A well-made disappointment upon release, now that the book has somewhat receded from view, the film, if still no RAGTIME, seems to work better than it did at the time.   The second half does turn into the Coalhouse Walker story (Black stride piano-playing striver turns avenging martyr when his Model T is defiled), but enough of the whirligig character (in people & plots) comes across thanks to tasty period settings and effective casting.  Police Commissioner James Cagney, hilarious, spunky & vital after a twenty-year hiatus; Brad Dourif’s sweetly off-kilter fireworks anarchist; Kenneth McMillan’s gleefully racist fireman; even Mandy Patinkin’s reinvented Jewish filmmaking immigrant.  (Look fast, that’s Fran Drescher as his unfaithful wife.)  Though any adaptation that skips J.P. Morgan & Henry Ford’s fireside chat and can’t find a believable font for silent film inter-titles can hardly be called RAGTIME.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Originally optioned by Dino De Laurentiis for director Robert Altman, his post NASHVILLE/’75 slump left him a commercial pariah till THE PLAYER/'92 resurrected him.  That film’s tricky structure showing what might have worked here.  On the other hand, Altman really was putting out a lot of stinkers at the time . . . almost as many as producer Dino De Laurentiis.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The original Stateside poster a High Concept dud blamed for poor initial grosses.  Replacements all de-emphasized the Coalhouse Walker/racial storyline.  The messy Japanese try (see above) coming a little closer to combining sales pitch with honesty.

GLASS ONION (2022)

Writer/director Rian Johnson follows his KNIVES OUT/’19 success with a second murder mystery for private detective Benoit Blanc.  Bigger, if not better (the sole improvement sees Daniel Craig firming up that wayward Southern accent), the general effect like getting a free upgrade from Coach to First Class only to find yourself stuck in a world of entitled a-holes obnoxious enough to make you prefer Coach’s lack of leg-room, squalling kids & stained cushions.  (On the other hand . . . Free Drinks!)  Lightly suggested by Agatha Christies’s A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED/’85 and the puzzle-mad LAST OF SHEILA/’73 (note cameo from SHEILA’s co-scripter Stephen Sondheim), here Master-of-the-Universe tech whiz Edward Norton invites a gaggle of old pals to his spectacular island retreat for a wknd game of ‘murder,’ only to find any ‘quotation’ marks dispensed with when one of the guests really dies.  Yikes!  Dropping clues like Hansel & Gretel drop bread crumbs in the forest, Johnson then doubles back to highlight anything we might have missed with re-enactments from revealing angles.  (More overheard secrets than you’d get in a Georges Feydeau triple-bill.)  But the fun feels forced, missing the sense of relief generated in KNIVES OUT.  How much nicer to have stayed home with Craig’s surprise life-partner Hugh Grant.  Maybe a third outing will see this pair go all Nick & Nora Charles on us . . . in Business Class.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED; THE LAST OF SHEILA. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-last-of-sheila-1973.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/agatha-christies-miss-marple-1984-92.html   OR: KNIVES OUT: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/knives-out-2019.html

PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH (2022)

Does anyone actually know the original story of Puss in Boots?  There’s a cat . . . in boots . . . and a Princess?  That’s about it.  But the character showed up, then got its own film, when even DreamWorks Animation had to admit the SHREK franchise had just about run its course.  And though 2011's PUSS is a bit better than SHREK dreck sequels, it shares the hideous palette, lame pop culture references and quick reverse sit-com mentality.  But now it’s out with the old and in with the New Improved PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH.  Other than voice talent Antonio Banderas as Puss and Salma Hayek as Softpaws, just about every creative has been replaced with fresh hires.  And, mirabile dictu, DreamWorks Animation, courtesy of barely tested co-directors Joel Crawford & Januel Mercado, allow for some adventurous, innovative mixed animation techniques that revel in not blending into default CGI style.  Indeed, the differences all but 'comment' on each other; particularly so in some notable work when the Wolf-of-Death shows up to scare the pants off Puss who’s just finding out he’s down to the last of his Nine Lives.  Will knowledge and a chastened, fearful personality place him even more at risk?  This, rather than plot & chases, is the real concern of the story and its brings a sobering tone you don’t expect, but do welcome.  Something’s at stake; and that makes all the difference.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Puss takes his milk straight, in a shot glass and laps it up like a kid with an ice cream cone.  But real cats invert their little tongues to create a sort of tiny backwards cup which they then draw up into their mouths.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In a clever bit, a little conscience character, a sort of cross between Jiminy Cricket and Angel-in-Training Clarence from IT‘S A WONDERFUL LIFE gets James Stewart’s voice.

HELL DOGS (2022)

Now in his 70s, Japanese writer/director Masato Harada (of the erotic ghost story/thriller INUGAMI/’01) offers smash action sequences and an ultra-stylish look (cast, clothes, sets) in this contemporary crime pic.  Jun'ichi Okada, tough & toned as a revenge-minded ex-cop who’s turned himself in, avoids prosecution but not consequences when he agrees to an undercover assignment inside a Yakuza organization recently splintered into warring factions, a propitious if decidedly dangerous moment to take this on.  Quickly bonding with less mature partner Kentarô Sakaguchi, these two professional killers are so efficient they’re soon promoted to Team B bodyguards of their gang’s young mastermind, a boyish man of metrosexual mystery.  The Spy/Counterspy games are easy to follow in the first two acts, thanks to Harada’s clear limned logistics, deliriously filled with sex, violence, snazzy locations & Karaoke (surprisingly big on Verdi), accelerating into a third act that’s harder to keep up with (at least for Western audiences), but so loaded with stand alone and wonderfully ‘readable’ set action pieces, you’ll hardly mind.  The film a beaut just to take in visually.  No doubt a second viewing would clear things up, though not perhaps the amount of ‘reveals’ for characters turning out to be secretly working undercover for one agency or another.  (Even the F.B.I. in the mix.)  Exciting stuff, not too gruesome or CGI-sweetened for a change.

DOUBLE-BLL/LINK: As mentioned, Harada’s intriguing, if overcooked, INUGAMI/’01.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/inugami-2001.html

CONTEST:  Just before a plot-altering fight breaks out in the middle of Karaoke Night, the filmmakers borrow a trope from just about the last film you’d expect to find referenced in a Japanese actioner.  Name the famous film and the flagrant lift to win our usual prize: a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

12 MIGHTY ORPHANS (2021)

Tru-ish paint-by-numbers High School football pic about an All-Orphan underdog team and their new, inspirational coach is inexcusably poor.  Set in the desaturated film stock past of Depression-Era Texas, it feels like a vanity project . . . but whose?  Best guess is Martin Sheen who also co-produced, his supporting role as alcoholic school doc/defensive coach (Dennis Hopper had the equivalent spot in the very similar HOOSIERS/’86) beefed up with wall-to-wall explanatory narration & twinkly optimism.  The boys aren’t bad, each with a single characteristic to chew on (too mad, too skinny, too stubborn, stutterer, etc.), but what’s with new head coach Owen Wilson?  In what amounts to the Gene Hackman role in HOOSIERS, Wilson even more self-regarding than he is for Wes Anderson.  Trying for quiet depth he makes no impression at all.  (Perhaps disappearing into one of those WWI trenches he keeps flashing back to.)  Then there’s Wayne Knight, playing a vicious, corrupt school administrator as if he were Simon Legree in a 1914 silent of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.  D.W. Griffith might have asked him to tone it down.  (Let’s not even mention that FDR impersonator.)  Nothing wrong with clichés if you can execute them, but this ‘can’t miss’ football story from writer/director Ty Roberts misses just as badly as George Clooney did on his 'can't-miss' football tale, LEATHERHEADS/’08.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/leatherheads-2008.html

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Stick with HOOSIERS.  Make it a drinking game with one shot downed for every storyline & character rip-off.

CIRCO (2010)

The sole feature-length work from tv and short-subject documentarian Aaron Schock* is a paradigm of fly-on-a-wall non-fiction filmmaking.  With an unusual topic (one-ring family circus working out-of-the-way towns in rural Mexico); complicated relationships (Grandpa holding all the finances in his pocket, parents & kids the main labor force outside and inside the Big Top); backstory in a century of circus lineage, now four brothers running family circuses of their own; menagerie of wild animals no longer seen/accepted in North of the border shows; ceaseless one-night stops; performers taking off to try ‘normal’ life only to return like addicts to old ways.  There’s something elemental & touching in following the bonds and discipline of this lifestyle.  And Schock’s found just the right family to follow in Circo Mexico’s Tino Ponce & family.  Grandpa’s a bit of a shit controlling the finances, but there’s real pleasure in watching this fit & handsome new generation pick up on the family traditions/obligations, work ethic, and specialty acts.  A daredevil cousin returns to ply his star turn, a Circle-of-Death motorcycle act, but far better are the simpler feats of contortion and slack wire routines the Ponce kids (pre-to-late teens) put on to enthusiastic locals not yet jaded by internet connections.  You can really imagine what running off to join the circus might mean to the little day-and-date locales they stop at.  Hard to see many more years of this when even the smallest town gets up to internet speed.  A fact that only adds  poignancy to a waning profession and this lovely film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Exceptional Mexican-flavored score from Calexico.

DOUBLE-BILL: Disney’s original DUMBO/’41 remains the one-ring circus pic of your dreams.  (Avoid Tim Burton’s 2019 live-action misfire.)  OR:  *Schock’s award-winning 40" short, LA LAGUNA/’16 (not seen here) about a tween-to-teen Rainforest Mayan boy.

EN KVINNAS ANSIKTE / A WOMAN’S FACE (1938)

Swedish audiences must have had quite the pleasurable shock watching Ingrid Bergman (already an established star at 22) play Bad Girl in a story where looks = character.  So naturally, Bergman’s been disfigured since childhood; unfit for anything but villainy, part of a criminal gang of blackmailers now caught mid-job at the home of a (wait for it) plastic surgeon.  With encouragement from the doctor’s unfaithful wife (her secret love letters the reason Bergman was there), an operation is arranged to turn her monstrous face into angelic beauty.  Will it also change her character in time for the second half of the film?  Or will a new start merely set up a better scam, one involving an expendable little boy she’s just been hired to take care of?  Yikes!  And you’re not the only one to note the dramatic possibilities.  M-G-M snapped this one up for a 1941 remake with Joan Crawford.  There, the first half is elaborated (bigger criminal gang/futuristic operating room), but the second half gets gooey in comparison with the Swedish original.  So, swings and ‘roundabouts with both worth seeing.  But when her young charge says goodnight with a spontaneous hug, and Bergman must push her tussled hair back into place on her recently perfected face, Crawford doesn’t stand a chance.  No one would.  Best print found on Criterion’s Bergman in Sweden series.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, George Cukor’s M-G-M remake with Crawford.      https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/womans-face-1941.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: Three years after Cukor directed the Crawford remake, he remade another Euro-hit, this time with Ingrid Bergman stepping in to win the first of her three Oscars for GASLIGHT/’44.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/05/gaslight-angel-street-1940.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html   OR: Can it be coincidence that Conrad Veidt, villain in the Crawford remake, had his own disfigured face role in a classic late silent of Victor Hugo’s THE MAN WHO LAUGHS/’28?   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/man-who-laughs-1928.html

THE FABELMANS (2022)

Steven Spielberg’s likable, lightly fictionalized auto-bio, a sentimental education about a boy and his movie camera, has only one real surprise in it: Seth Rogan can act!  Playing family ‘Uncle’ to the Fabelmans clan, he’s incorrigible cut-up to the four kids, working partner & BFF to visionary computer geek Dad (Paul Dano), and secret soul-mate/ unrequited pash to unfulfilled stay-at-home Mom (Michelle Wiiliams).  And it’s the Spielberg character’s accidental discovery of the dynamic between the three adults in his life via his 8mm filming addiction (a BLOW UP/’66 moment a decade before that film came out) that becomes the lynchpin in his understanding in the power of film to capture & hold, his own powerful draw to the medium, and the power it offers to control after the fact.  Much of this underplayed and suggested rather than spelled out.  Nothing else in the film (well, nothing until a final hilarious meeting with aging director John Ford who bluntly offers something precious & specific instead of pep talk generalities) hits with the same force or originality.  The rest perfectly fine: a brilliant dad easily lost in his own computer-savvy mind; a mom unable to develop her artistic potential; an itinerant family life of new schools and changing levels of casual (and not so casual) anti-Semitism which the young Spielberg paves over by ingratiating himself with precocious filmmaking skills.  Co-scripter Tony Kushner, as so often, tends to be too on point (his default mode is all trees/no forest), while Spielberg remains stubbornly more craftsman than artist.  It’s why his bad films hold so little interest.  This one, filled with quiet interest.

DOUBLE-BILL:  François Truffaut takes this sort of thing to a whole other level in THE 400 BLOWS/’59.  No wonder Spielberg fought to get him in cast in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS/’77.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The color on those 8mm movies, especially the later ones made in ‘Super 8', look a bit pale.  As if young Spielberg didn’t use proper Kodak stock, but saved money by using generic store brand stuff.  Something he’d never do, right?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In yet another Hollywood cooking gaffe, Williams, who’s admittedly supposed to be a bad cook, is seen dishing out matzo brei from a pot.  Who cooks matzo brei in a pot?  It’s basically French Toast made with matzo.  Would you cook French Toast in a pot?  No one on set noticed?

JOCKEY (2021)

You know the drill: aging athlete, fighting against declining skills/advancing pain/physical & mental breakdown to get thru just one more goal/fight/race.  Here, character actor Clifton Collins Jr. takes on a leading role playing the worn out jockey going for broke in this well-meant, often effective indie from writer/director Clint Bentley.  Two complications: his longtime trainer pal (and sometime romantic interest) has a new horse with tremendous potential under the right hands (his), and a new kid at the track, likely competition and just maybe the son he never knew about.  It’s the latter complication that gives the film a fresh kick, since it plays out like a horse-track/gender-switched STELLA DALLAS/’37.  The old Barbara Stanwyck weepie about the slatternly mother who does right by her daughter by giving her up to her uppercrust dad & stepmom.  Bentley even ends his film with a near quote from this King Vidor classic.  Didn’t see that coming. That said, most of the film’s tropes are nearly as worn down as our jockey.  And Bentley’s idea to visually freshen things up consists largely of shooting everything in ‘Golden Hour’ sunset/sunrise haze, or in shadow, silhouette or heavily backlit.  The idea must have been to hold any bright sunshine in reserve for the races.  But, possibly from budgetary constraints, these are all handled via tight close-ups on Collins as he bounces thru a race.  (Collins also a rather presenational kind of actor for Bentley’s ultra-naturalistic style.)  Still, interesting stuff, worth a look.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For an aging horseman (rodeo, not racing), JUNIOR BONNER/’72 is tough to beat.  OR: Check out that final shot from STELLA DALLAS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/junior-bonner-1972.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/stella-dallas-1937.html