L’AUTRE VIE DE RICHARD KEMP / BACK IN CRIME (2013)

It’s BACK TO THE FUTURE meets SE7EN in a time-traveling thriller whose biggest surprise is that Hollywood hasn’t picked it up for an English-language remake.  (Nothing for Morgan Freeman, but Brad Pitt just right for the lead.*)  Admittedly, logic falls short next to story complications, but concept & execution make up for a lot, as does a pleasing touch of romantic melancholy.  Jean-Hugues Anglade is just right as the veteran detective working a new murder with a familiar M.O.  It’s déjà vu all over again, reflecting back to the serial killer case he botched 20 years ago.  Then, stopping in the middle of a bridge to investigate an abandoned van, he’s conked on the head and falls in the drink before inexplicably reaching shore not in the present, but twenty years in the past.  (None of this metaphysical hooey given even a cursory explanation; instead, it's enough that everybody chain smokes and uses land lines.)  The time leap puts him right back on that old case, now twenty years wiser and theoretically able to prevent a murder or two.  Only problem: how can he know this stuff and not be fingered as the serial killer?  Worse, he’s in constant danger of bumping into . . . his younger self.  Yikes!  Fortunately, nobody in the film seems to have changed jobs or address in twenty years (his key still works in his doorlock), and that fairy-tale pretty psychologist who was his witness in the present, is just starting in the same profession as a novice.  If only he could get her trust, get her to believe him . . . and not fall in love.  Yikes, again!  As mentioned, not all the twists & turns add up, but most of this is stylish fun with good suspense and a storyline unafraid to break the time continuum and alter the future.  Once we've jumped back to the present, the film’s moved on from FUTURE and 7 to THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR/’47 (where a ghost waits for his beloved to come to him) and HERE COMES MR. JORDAN/’41 post-reincarnation mumbo-jumbo when only boxing manager James Gleason retains an inkling of something lost.  Credit co-writer/director Germinal Alvarez with treating the supernatural with gritty no-frills realism and a soupçon of clear-eyed sentiment.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *If they did remake this in Hollywood with Pitt, you can bet they’d muck things up with digital de-aging for Brad, technical dazzle and pseudo-scientific explanations.

SWORD IN THE DESERT (1949)

A modest ‘find,’ this variation on WWII ‘Impossible Mission’ whoppers follows the fortunes of a boatload of post-war Jewish refugees, Concentration Camp survivors among them, being smuggled past British Gatekeepers and into Israel.  Dana Andrews makes like Humphrey Bogart as a mercenary ship’s captain who sticks his neck out for nobody, eager to get paid and get out before he’s trapped at the landing site by incoming British troops.  Stephen McNally, looking like a handsome hawk, is the Jewish/Israeli illegal alien liaison man, running the operation bringing in all those displaced European Jews; Marta Toren (an Ingrid Bergman type in her best Hollywood role) is the girlfriend/radio propagandist; Jeff Chandler is top Undercover Op’s chief.  Passengers and motley crew forced by missteps & bad timing into playing cat-and-mouse games with the advancing British troops.  George Sherman, more comfortable in action fare, pushes a lot of coarsely sentimental reaction shots at us, but comes into his own directing logistically believable skirmishes that pepper Robert’s tightly developed script.  (Also acting as producer, Buckner learned his lessons well working for Hal Wallis at Warners.)  Ending in true Hollywood fashion: Christmas Eve with Bethlehem aglow in the background.  The film remains little seen, possibly because the Brits come off so poorly diplomatic objections were raised and Hollywood apparently self-censored after early runs.*  After all these years, no need for you to continue the boycott.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Note how peripheral the Arab population is to the storyline.  An ominous omission. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Similar material in the first half of Otto Preminger’s EXODUS/’60 never up for censorship in spite of an even worse view of the incompetent British.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/exodus-1960.html

INTERMEZZO: A LOVE STORY (1939)

Producer David O. Selznick chose wisely, if not well, introducing Ingrid Bergman, his new, imported-from-Sweden star, remaking one of her slightest vehicles, a wan love affair between a 40-something concert violinist and his lovely young piano accompanist.  WISELY because Bergman came across so fresh, lovely & natural looking, audiences immediately fell for her.*  (And seemed not to mind – or notice? -- she’s playing home-wrecker.)   NOT TOO WELL because Bergman’s recent A WOMAN’S FACE/’38, far stronger fare, was also remade, but by Joan Crawford.*)  Leslie Howard’s the violinist, strapped in literally so other hands can work the bow & finger the strings in close-up (the bow hand noticeably not his) and figuratively strapped to wife Edna Best when his daughter’s talented piano teacher replaces his old accompanist (John Halliday in a rare sympathetic role).  Naturally these two end up making beautiful music together . . . for a while.  Selznick never did figure out the structural gaffe of having Bergman leave the screen in a truncated third act, but knew enough to cut the Swedish film’s running time by nearly two reels.  (Subtract music and the film runs well under an hour.)  Usually a heavily-accented supporting player, Gregory Ratoff is no more than functional directing Bergman’s first two Hollywood films (ADAM HAD FOUR SONS came next (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/05/adam-had-four-sons-1941.html ), but it hardly mattered.  Audiences flocked, and when CASABLANCA came round in ‘42, the whole world were goners.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Both versions of A WOMAN’S FACE linked here. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/01/en-kvinnas-ansikte-womans-face-1938.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Attention was paid once Hollywood saw Bergman’s make-up free screen test.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzrvzGtPSjo

CHOCOLAT (1988)

Forty-two when she made her directing debut (after second-unit work for high-profile art house types), Claire Denis looked back in contemplation with this superb semi-auto-biographical memory piece about her childhood in Cameroon, Africa, near the end of French colonial rule.  The film less about a young girl’s experiences than about her impressions of the adults around her: Father a district commissioner at a remote rural office; vaguely discontented wife; house servants; and a gaggle of unwanted guests stuck with them for a season when their plane goes down.  The main focus on something the young girl feels but can’t quite perceive: stoppered sexual tension swamping her mother, especially vulnerable with her husband off on official business.  Feelings centered on their handsome, efficient, seemingly impassive house servant Protée (Isaach De Bankolé, not as you might imagine a non-professional, but on his eight feature); and also negatively on one of the ‘guests,’ a self-regarding adventurer who enjoys finding weaknesses, telling hard truths (as he sees them), and about as welcome as a pebble in your shoe.  Passing over narrative points for enigmatic shifts in mood, Denis’s later more acclaimed films can often seems both under-developed and over-egged.  (Including her best known work, BEAU TRAVAIL/’99, last seen in seventh place on Sight & Sounds list of all-time top films.)  But this early work shows Denis at her strongest and least over-thought.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Look right below for another CHOCOLAT.  Totally unrelated, but excellent.  OR:  From 2000, five time Oscar nominated CHOCOLAT, very popular, sticky sweet, too cute for words.

CHOCOLAT (2016)

Heavily romanticized, but compelling bio-pic of CHOCOLAT, a Black immigrant who became one of the most popular clowns in turn-of-the-last-century France.  (See Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous sketch below; pose & costume copied exactly by Gene Kelly in AN AMERICAN IN PARIS/’51.)  Picked out of a country circus by George Footit, an established clown looking to freshen up his act, the two became a quick sensation in Paris with the interracial novelty of their act; made palatable to audiences of the day by basing their comic roughhouse routines on the inevitable humiliation of Chocolat by Footit in ‘clown white.’  As the movie would have it, a mix of too-much-too-soon lifestyle for the inexperienced Chocolat, his additive personality (wine, women, gambling, drugs & spendthrift ways), and growing resentment at second-class treatment in life and as the basis of all their physical shtick took its toll.  Though not before he tried going ‘straight’ as the first Black man to play Shakespeare’s OTHELLO in France.*  You can pretty much feel where co-writer/director Roschdy Zem forces issues with fanciful supposition, but slippery facts don’t stop this from working superbly on its own terms.  Fine period detail, solid, traditional story construction, and most of all, an absolutely stunning perf from Omar Sy as Chocolat and a standard setting one from James Thierrée as Footit.  (He’s not Charles Chaplin’s grandson for nothing.)  And what physical presence when these two are alone together in front of the masses.  Funny too!  No small achievement when clown acts get transferred to the screen, especially with material that’s racially dicey for modern audiences.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Did this even get Stateside distribution?  Post LUPIN, with Sy now an international star, someone should give this a relaunch. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The filmmakers cheat a bit having Sy play Othello as if ‘Method Acting’ had already come into fashion.  And note how in French translation Othello’s famous line: ‘I am one who loved not wisely but too well,’ has its order reversed: ‘I am one who loved too well but not wisely.’   Loses something in translation, non?

LINK: You can find clips of the real Chocolat & Footit in brief sketches on youtube.  This one is not only still funny, but in pretty good shape, showing fine acrobatic skill from Footit as well as being an excellent example of ‘stencil colorizing.’  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxbY9vtgJXI

THE DIAMOND WIZARD (1954)

Immensely likable (if too tall for his own good), Dennis O’Keefe tried to arrest ‘50s tv drift by starring in and directing a pair of European films.  How much he directed debatable with Montgomery Tully taking sole credit in this film's UK release as THE DIAMOND, and writer Edoardo Anton listed on IMDb as ‘uncredited director’ for ANGELA over in Italy.  Not that anyone’s fighting for credit!  DIAMOND, a typical low budget affair, sees a gang of counterfeiters hold a genius professor in their lab making artificial gems that match the real thing.  They’ll destabilize the diamond market and make a killing.  Actually, they’ve already made a killing, taking out a U.S. Treasury Agent hot on their trail.  Enter replacement O’Keefe, in London working the case with Brit Agent Philip Friend when the two aren’t fighting over Margaret Sheridan, daughter of that kidnapped artificial diamond inventor.  Threadbare stuff (other than a nifty chase scene that ends on a moving escalator), but stick thru drab production values, witless dialogue & insufferable upwardly mobile British accents to be rewarded by a crackerjack climax as the lab is attacked from within (feuding crooks) and without (police raid) for a proto-James Bond finale (think DR. NO meets GOLDFINGER).  (Did they bring in a third director?)  Made on a dime, with most of the budget and just about all the creativity in that climax.  It’s even more fun, as is the rest of the pic, when seen in a Blu-Ray 3D edition (see clip below) which adds life to almost every dull interior and boring camera set-up, not just the ones where they throw things toward the camera.  Britain’s first 3D release (it came out ‘flat’ in the States), the recent Kino Classics Blu-Ray edition, mastered in the old RED lens/BLUE lens system works surprisingly well.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *O’Keefe got a rare chance to put a twist on his likability factor a few years earlier in one of the great film noir ‘finds’ out there, starring against Ann Sheridan for actor-turned-director Norman Foster in WOMAN ON THE RUN/’50.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/woman-on-run-1950.html

LINK:  *Dig out that old pair of cheap cardboard glasses you stuffed in the back of your sock drawer to watch a Test Scene.   https://www.google.com/search?tbm=vid&sxsrf=AJOqlzVa1ISABjxSRaSDcwkoOcromt-hmg:1677180720609&q=the+diamond+wizard+3d+youtube&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj0r82Isaz9AhWrE1kFHRFsC-0Q8ccDegQIDBAH&biw=1517&bih=694&dpr=0.9#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:adb9ad32,vid:X4ZFJPOnMcE

TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST (1946)

The title retains some currency.  Jack London, right?  A coming-of-age sea yarn?*  It’s actually something of a muckraking ship’s journal by author Richard Dana on his travels under tack-hard Captain Thompson (Howard Da Silva), a commercial ship’s captain who let his crews suffer, even die, to break speed records.  Here adapted from the book’s controversial call for sailors’ rights and (of all things) religious instruction to cleverly bring aboard MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY tropes & action (everything but the breadfruit).  Alan Ladd’s a spoiled rich kid, son of the ship’s owner, shanghaied by first-mate William Bendix.  Effete at first, Ladd warms up to his mates (and they to him) under harsh conditions & floggings, especially once Dana (Brian Donlevy) notes him helping teen stowaway Darryl Hickman.  Paramount even found a way to bring a lady passenger on ship for love interest.  Writer/producer Seton I. Miller, helmer John Farrow & much of the ship's crew make the first half of the film pacey, exciting stuff.  But Farrow’s abilities are over-taxed in a third act & epilogue that need Michael Curtiz and that Warner Bros. water-tank soundstage.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Speaking of Jack London, Michael Curtiz & Warners, maybe you were thinking of THE SEA WOLF.  Filmed at least three times; best in 1941. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-sea-wolf-1941.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Ladd was certainly fit at the time, but more whippet than our poster’s heavyweight.

MUDBOUND (2017)

Powerful, if self-conscious, race-tinged drama, a long view on a pair of farming families, one Black/one White, in the violently segregated South during the WWII era.  Co-written & directed by Dee Rees, period atmosphere comes thru strongly as both families struggle with difficult times, muddy terrain and brutally unequal mutual dependency.  No doubt as to who’s on top or who owns what.  Yet the White family, forced to live with the husband’s despicably racist ‘Papi’ at the old farmhouse, is nearly as dirt poor as the sharecropper Blacks.  Hardscrabble times disrupted when war sends a son from each family to Europe.  The Black family’s eldest finding confidence in General Patton’s tank corps and a taste of something like equality.  The White son, glamorous kid brother of his oafish married sibling, becoming a war pilot hero.  The crisis comes when they return.  Jason Mitchell’s Black vet unable to readjust to second-class citizenship & a ‘Jim-status-Crow’ lifestyle*; Garrett Hedlund’s flyboy self-medicating PTSD thru the bottle.  Shared experience breeds a dangerous interracial friendship; and just as Hedlund sister-in-law Carey Mulligan admits to long suppressed desires.  Rees has no trouble parsing parallel plotlines, giving each scene time to make its mark before circling back, only to flub her landings in narrative confusion from prologue to climax.  Frustrating when so much else in here works this well.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *As (relatively) young Black actors go, Mitchell shows the kind of easy audience rapport and power of attack missing from the screen since Yaphet Kotto in his prime.

PAGE EIGHT (2011)

It’s been a while since a contemporary film had all its leading players smoke.  Lighting up inside & out, and with a leading lady who rolls her own.  And that’s not the only part of this ethically compromised spy drama that harks back to the John Le Carré ‘80s.   This solidly built character piece (better written than directed by playwright David Hare) has a stale, even exhausted feel to it.  Iron-poor geriatric British blood, remnants of a long-gone Empire, where agents go thru the motions till spy master Michael Gambon plants a metaphorical bomb under the government’s feet with evidence of probable complicity covering up a political murder.  (A MidEast peacemaker killed by Israeli forces while under a ‘white flag.’)  Bill Nighy* and Judy Davis are the agents working directly under Gambon given the info needed to work it all out.  But what will they do with it?  Especially tricky for Nighy as he’s just discovered his across-the-hall-neighbor (Rachel Weisz) is sister to the dead man and looking for justice.  A meet-cute or a set-up?  (Either way, a dramatic shortcut definitely beneath whatever Hare thinks he’s trying to do here.*)  Meantime, hovering behind the various moves, countermoves & ill-timed heart attacks, Prime Minister Ralph Fiennes (quite the cast for a BBC tele-pic, no?) pulls strings to bury the revelations of the top-secret report while maintaining good U.S. and Israeli relationships.  Hare holds his cards so close to his Savile Row vest even matters of life-and-death play out in a weightless vacuum of Spy-vs-Spy nomenclature.  Imagine the consequences if these Spies weren’t all playing for the same team!  Still, reasonably involving once Hare gets the pieces in motion.  Enough for a couple of sequels.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Any drier and Bill Nighy would be your martini's vermouth of choice.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Clever shit that he is, Hare manages to have it both ways: Meet-Cute and Set-Up. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  *TURK & CAICOS/’14 has Nighy in exile, less at stake & slightly more energy; followed by SALTING THE BATTLEFIELD (not seen here).

HUNTED / THE STRANGER IN BETWEEN (1952)

Trimmed to the narrative bone, this fable-like suspenser gets extra oomph from nearly abstract presentation as killer-on-the-run Dirk Bogarde tries to lose angelic-looking 6-yr-old runaway Jon Whiteley, who’s sticking to him like glue.  We never do learn much about that murder, but the kid’s terrified of going home to adoptive parents after playing with matches and starting a small fire.  Cops are called in but misread the situation, thinking the man abducted the boy when, if anything, the reverse is true; Bogarde doing everything possible to push the kid away.  (His treatment unusually rough for the day.)  With cash & food giving out, the two head up North, toward the sea, where Bogarde’s brother lives, and inevitably begin to bond as they run out of options and news spreads.  But what happens once they get there?  Best known for his Ealing Comedies, Charles Crichton revels in the dark atmosphere and off-beat characters of Brit Noir (bombed-out London and countryside by night), much helped by Eric Cross’s pitch black lensing, cinematography to challenge Hollywood’s ‘Prince of Darkness,’ John Alton.  The film a heart-racing pip with a strong cast and Bogarde at his most charismatic.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  A more traditional surrogate father/son relationship, with a storm-at-sea climax, can be found in Henry King’s DEEP WATERS/’48, with Dana Andrews & a very young Dean Stockwell.  OR: Bogarde and Whiteley bond again in the oddly effective THE SPANISH GARDENER/’56.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/deep-waters-1948.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/spanish-gardener-1956.html

THE CAT RETURNS / NEKO NO ONGAESHI (2002)

Initiated as a cat-themed anime short to accompany a proposed amusement park ride, a project that never happened, the resulting feature from Studio Ghibli seems unlikely to prompt someone into building one.  In his only feature film, director Hiroyuki Morita brings uninspired visuals to an uninspired no-good-deed-goes-unpunished story about a school girl who saves a cat from a speeding truck then lives to regret the consequences when an army of streetwise talking cats insist she marry their Cat Prince.  Luckily, there’s another gang of magical cats (and other animals) on hand, ready to get her out of trouble . . . if only she can find them.  Charmless by-the-numbers stuff , especially from this source (did Ghibli borrow executives from DreamWorks?), and they seem to have known it, giving this film the shortest running time of any Ghibli film.  (Less the end-credits, it’s a bit under 70".)  An all-star English-language track sucks out whatever flavor there is in here; best to stick with the original Japanese dialogue & subtitles if you want to give it a chance.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Legendary Ghibli Studio founder/animator Hayao Miyazaki gave the order to reuse some characters from the superior WHISPER OF THE HEART/’95 in here. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/05/mimi-wo-sumaseba-whisper-of-heart-1995.html

LA COLLECTIONNEUSE / THE COLLECTOR (1967)

Fourth in Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales ( MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S/’69 and CLAIRE’S KNEE/’70 best known in the series*) is an anti-romantic triangle for two men and one woman sharing a small villa in the South of France.  With prologues for each, Rohmer opens with debuting Haydée Politoff in barely there bikini getting the full ‘male gaze’ treatment; a portrait seen via Enlarged Details.  The men, also in debuts, are Daniel Pommereulle as a sour artistic pal no longer sharing a bed with the elusive Politoff, and antique dealer Patrick Bauchau, ridiculously assured as actor & character, letting us know thru incessant voice-over how he’s alternately repulsed & attracted to this carefree/careless stranger.  (Rohmer nothing if not overly verbal.)  The sexual politics very ‘60s (very French ‘60s at that), but often exploded by laughs or by Politoff who has a mind of her own behind a face that could pass for late teens or late 20s, along with whim-of-the-moment looks that change with every camera angle.  And comfortable using it to her advantage.  Keeping everyone off-balance, she’s a wedge between the men, and later between Bauchau and a possible buyer/investor who’s also intrigued by Politoff’s indifference . . . or is it provocation?  In a Rohmer antique store, the sign wouldn’t read You Break It/You Own It, but rather You Break It/You Giggle & Go.  NOTE:  Posted with only one ‘N’ as LA COLLECTIONEUSE sixteen years ago!  Oops!  Spelling now corrected, and a more involved discussion.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The casually caught atmosphere of Rohmer’s first color film is deceptive.  Here’s cinematographer Philippe Rousselot:  I saw a film by Éric Rohmer called The Collector (1967) and I thought the photography was absolutely brilliant.  It was really one of the turning points in the history of cinematography.  Néstor (Almendros) was basically the first to start bouncing lights.  (Rather than using ‘fill.’)  There was a little bit of that with Raoul Coutard but apart from that Néstor really invented a way of lighting that everybody has used since.  So not only was I influenced by Néstor, but everybody was.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Five Moral Tales to go.

A BRIDGE TOO FAR (1977)

Middling aptitude and by-the-numbers technical facility didn’t stop top-of-the-line British character actor Richard Attenborough from choosing epic-sized films for the bulk of the twelve films he directed, starting with debut pic OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR/’69.  And if, on the whole, the films were well-received/commercially successful, his ‘safe’ filmmaking can now look dull.  (It did at the time, but less people noticed . . . or seemed to mind.  When he finally made something intimate in SHADOWLANDS/’93, his comfort level & talent for working on a smaller canvas was something of a happy shock.)  But this, his third film came in Extra-Extra-Large.  A fact-based WWII story about an Allied operation to secure a series of Dutch bridges before the German retreat, a Cock-up and SNAFU since it was a joint British/U.S. effort, suffers from heavy lifting in a William Goldman script that telegraphs every wrong decision in the early going, then leaves too many plot strands hanging to dry at the end.  Attenborough keeps things straight (if not quite clear) using more than a dozen top stars, but since he’s unable to handle the fugal storyline, the film only starts to gain traction in the third act with Robert Redford (the last star to show up*) getting a full twenty minutes of Attenborough’s undivided attention.  Even at a remove of 80+ years, it’s hard to imagine such a huge operation making no plans for anything going wrong.  It’s like a throwback to the idiocies of WWI British war planning.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Cornelius Ryan, who wrote the book BRIDGE is based on, did a better job organizing the screenplay he wrote for an even bigger multi-pronged military campaign movie, THE LONGEST DAY/’62, though that film not without its corny aspects.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Redford’s startling charisma, at its zenith here, all the more impressive surrounded as he is by the likes of Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Ryan O’Neal, Gene Hackman, James Caan, Edward Fox, Anthony Hopkins . . . and so on.

MONEYBOYS (2021)

Thoughtful, ravishingly lit & composed, and just a tad dull, this debut feature from Taiwan writer/director C.B. Yi has the wide-eyed appeal of a fresh look at the oldest game in town . . . male division.  Laing Fei, new Call Boy in the Big City, earns cash to help his extended, disapproving family in a small town he hasn’t visited in ages, even missing his mother’s funeral.  Mentored, if that’s the word, by Xiaolai, a more experienced sex worker, they’re also romantic partners.  But after Xiaolai is seriously injured protecting Fei, and Fei’s delayed trip home leaves him further estranged from the family elders, they grow apart.  (Xiaolai will marry and become a father.)  Back working, Fei is soon reluctantly mentoring Liang Long, a doggishly devoted friend from his hometown who’s followed him to the city; the cycle repeating.  But a chance meeting with Xiaolai reshuffles all the relationships.  A visually elegant film about inelegant situations, Yi largely sticks to static full-figure shots, often with a slow tracking push-in, but not making a fetish of it.*  The film’s Achilles Heel is in Fei’s unbending personality, moody & depressed at all times.  You wonder why his ‘clients’ rebook.  Sure he’s good looking, but not that good looking.  Fortunately, Yi’s visual flair, especially for full frame 'master-shot' composition and color (check out an uncomfortable restaurant wedding celebration sequence throbbing with tension) make you want to see what he’ll do next.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:   *It’s one of those films where you catch yourself closely watching frame edges to confirm (or deny) that the camera really is tracking in.  Then give yourself bonus points for spotting if it’s a real tracking shot (as here) or a lousy zoom.

HUE AND CRY. (1947)

This post-WWII treat from top-tier Ealing Studio regulars director Charles Crichton & writer T.E.B. Clarke follows a devil-making (but basically harmless) gang of tenement teens who make their playground in the London ruins as severe rationing and shortages continue two years after the war.  A perfect opportunity for Black Marketeers, especially if they can send secrets & commands about the latest arrivals of food stuffs & scarce consumer goods to their conspirators (truckers, deliverymen, office supply clerks & accountants) right under the noses of government enforcers.  A system discovered by one of the boys when he notices weird similarities between his favorite comic book and local robberies, even non-existent license plate numbers copied directly out of his weekly edition.  Stumbling thru false leads & misread clues, the gang eventually find the criminals, putting themselves in harms way with little backup since Master Harry Fowler, the young leader of the kids, has made himself something of a boy-who-cried-wolf character to the cops.  Wonderfully shot on unique bombed-out London locations by Douglas Slocombe, with a few ‘names’ to play the adults (Alastair Sims as the unawares comic book writer; Jack Warner as a too friendly villain).  Clarke doesn’t bother to make much sense of the conspiracy, but sticks to the kids’ feelings of adventure, camaraderie & empowerment, bringing the film in at a tidy 82".

DOUBLE-BILL:  The template for this sort of thing is EMIL AND THE DETECTIVES, filmed in 1931; ‘35, ‘54; ‘64; ‘01; along with various tv iterations & series.  None seen here; take your pick!

CONTEST: The opening credits, in chalk on brick walls, prefigure the famous credit sequence of what Academy Award-Winning movie?  First correct answer (use the Comment Box) wins a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

ACE HIGH / I QUATTRO DELL'AVE MARIA (1968)

Likable, laugh-leaning Spaghetti Western from writer/director Giuseppe Colizzi*, a popular reteaming for Terrence Hill & Bud Spencer internationally, less so Stateside where it got lost next to Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST out at the same time.  (Look fast to spot the young red-headed siblings so memorably murdered in WEST.)  Eli Wallach, with comic technique able to sail past all genre limitations, stars as a framed robber who escapes hanging only to circle back for revenge against former partner Kevin McCarthy, now owner of a crooked casino.  Newly joined by on-again/off-again pals Hill & Spencer, along with traveling entertainers Brock Peters & his wife, Wallach makes this motley crew a sort of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE outfit to delightful effect thanks to Colizzi’s clever relationship twists and nifty plot turns with Wallach pulling all the strings (even past the expected shootout finale) as these five take on McCarthy’s cold-blooded crew of cutthroats.  With better than expected production values and image (lenser Marcello Masciocchi getting the most out of difficult to handle 2-perf TechniScope), the film is only held back by Colizzi’s lack of action chops as director.  The staging’s okay, but he’s done in by ‘bad’ camera angles.  (Or is the fight coordinator to blame?)  It was only Colizzi’s second film; perhaps he improved.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Unusually for commercial Italian fare, screenwriting not a group activity here.

DOUBLE-BILL: Dying young at 53, Colizzi only made six films, four with Hill & Spencer, a pairing he got started with GOD FORGIVES . . . I DON’T/’67.  (Not seen here.)

THE EMERALD FOREST (1985)

Shot in the South American Rain Forest, John Boorman’s environmentally-conscious Brazilian adventure takes a while to find its footing, but hits stride midway thru, doubling down in a thriller of a third act.   Even as it stumbles out of the gate, the basic plot quickly hooks you as dam engineer Powers Booth loses his 9-yr-old son when the boy is abducted by indigenous tribesmen at the edge of the forest Booth is busy denuding for development.  (Yes, knee-jerk irony and ‘80s style New Age mysticism come into play.)  But when Dad’s ten-year, on-and-off search finally brings father and son face-to-face, the grown boy is too fully integrated in his tribe for rescue while the incursion of modern civilization and the fast shrinking forest acreage is taking its toll on the forest peoples.  (That’s Boorman’s extremely fit son Charley as the boy, now 19.)  Son rescues father/father rescues son between ethnological set pieces (Rain Forest rituals of manhood, engagement, wedding feast) along with dangerous conflict between tribes (the son’s Invisible People; the cannibalistic Fierce People, night hunting Bat People, and the Termite People, the tree devouring modern man).  Superbly shot by Philippe Rousselot (his first work out of France?, he’d also do Boorman’s HOPE & GLORY/’87 and TAILOR OF PANAMA/’01 ), the film’s at its best in an action-loaded third act when the son must go to the city, find his father, and both return to fight for what’s left of his tribe.  (A visually spectacular epilogue is pure overkill, very David Lean, and obviously even less 'based on a true story' than the rest of the film ridiculously claims to be.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Powers Booth had a  belated big screen breakthru in Walter Hill’s SOUTHERN COMFORT/’81, a film much influenced by John Boorman’s DELIVERANCE/’72.  However Boorman found him, Booth is excellent here, and looks damn good in the revealing native ‘thong-ware.’  It’s tucchus city out there. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  More effective/less romanticized, EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT/’15 is something of an art house alternative and not to be missed.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/01/el-abrazo-de-la-serpiente-embrace-of.html

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON (2021)

Capped by a surprise Oscar nom. (Best Animated Feature 2022), MARCEL successfully jumped from viral youtube short to full-length film without losing its sophisticated charm, modesty of form or naïf weirdness.  Set in a Live Action world, but featuring thimble-sized star Marcel (and support) in Stop-Motion, it’s something of a Home Alone story, as Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate), in mockumentary style, tells its life story & current quotidian amusements to Dean Fleischer Camp’s interlocutor.  The little thru-line that passes for a plot: hunting up the rest of the ‘Shell Gang’ that went missing when tenants moved out and left Marcel behind.  It’s a Family Film, literally.  The shorts originally made all but entirely by married couple Slate/Fleischer-Camp who now command a small army of film technicians as unmarried couple Slate/Fleischer-Camp, without losing sight of the endearing character traits & slight, wistful tone that made the little episodes so memorable.  And no worry about snark setting in with the bigger budget either since Marcel has always displayed an over-sized measure of goofy snark for such an under-sized entity.  (Not the only playful use of scale here.)  The only danger comes in possible oversell.  But the film is proud of its thimble-sized ambitions and all the better for it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Dean Fleischer Camp seems a clever choice for his next project, the Live-Action remake of LILO & STITCH/’02, the final hand-drawn success of the Disney Animation renaissance that began with THE LITTLE MERMAID/’89.  (MERMAID itself coming out this May in a less than promising Live Action remake.)  Get a head-start by watching the delightful LILO original.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/07/lilo-stitch-2002.html

THE FLAME OF ARABY (1951)

Universal Pictures may have wrapped their series of exotic, campy, TechniColored romantic adventures with cult favorite Maria Montez in PIRATES OF MONTEREY/’47, but they weren’t done with the formula, sliding Maureen O’Hara into BAGDAD/’49 and this Arabian Nights fantasy.  (It’s supposed to be Tunisia, North Africa, but what does geography matter when you’ve got tempestuous Irish redhead O’Hara as a Middle-Eastern Princess in American SouthWest locations?)  Longtime hack Charles Lamont, who’d worked himself all the way up to ABBOTT & COSTELLO and MA AND PA KETTLE pics, directs in an unfussy manner that lets everyone in on the joke, O’Hara and Bedouin lover Jeff Chandler relish their silly, poetic dialogue as frenemies out to trap a world class wild horse.  Meanwhile, O’Hara’s destined to be a bartered bride (maybe to oafish Lon Chaney Jr., yikes!) after her father is poisoned and a horse race will decide her fate.  Those horses giving Maureen quite a run for the money in the looks department.   Maybe Chandler should just go off to his desert home with one of the horses.  Maureen was luckier, running off next year with Johns Wayne & Ford to Ireland for a career rescue in next year’s THE QUIET MAN/’52.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  With the traditional keffiyeh (Arab headdress) covering his prematurely grey locks, Jeff Chandler never looked so young on screen.  Quite a shock when he finally takes it off in the penultimate reel.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  See Burt Lancaster & Jacques Tourneur make a real show out of this sort of thing with another FLAMING adventure in THE FLAME AND THE ARROW/’50 a year earlier.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/flame-and-arrow-1950.html

GUINS FOR SAN SEBASTIAN (1968)

You know what they say: ‘If it looks like a Spaghetti Western, swims like a Spaghetti Western, and quacks like a Spaghetti Western, then it probably is a Spaghetti Western.’  And here, the vibe, title, poster & Ennio Morricone score support the thought.  But you’ll look in vain for much Italian seasoning from international mid-list megger Henri Verneuil, vet Hollywood scripter James R. Webb* or on classy cinematographer Armand Thirard’s C.V.   GUNS more a modestly budgeted, but lux-looking period epic with a Mexican patriotic tilt; heavy on action spectacle, soldiers, explosive ordnance, dam-busting & horse flesh.  With outlaw Anthony Quinn on the run from the Spanish Army in 18th Century Mexico; finding sanctuary with aged priest Sam Jaffe; then accompanying him to the ruins of Cathedral San Sebastian where he’ll hide behind a hassock and play possum priest to local farmers under attack from indigenous Yaqui Indians.  Along with Quinn & Jaffe, the only other ‘name’ actor is Charles Branson, half-breed leader of the Yaquis.  (Branson would make his spectacular Spaghetti Western debut later this year in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST/’68.)  Unquantifiable, GUNS is a real curate’s egg, good in pieces, but attention wanders between highlights & atrocities, and it never builds.  The few women in the story all seem to be looking for the nearest exit.  Understandable, but enough here to keep you watching.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *If anything, this is more in line with Webb’s slightly mad KINGS OF THE SUN/’63.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/kings-of-sun-1963.html

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM (1932)

Though best known for chronicling Upper Crust/Main Line society in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY/’40, playwright Philip Barry’s best play was HOLIDAY/‘30; ‘38, still surprisingly fresh & modern.  Both plays famously filmed by George Cukor, both with Katharine Hepburn & Cary Grant, HOLIDAY’s the one where Grant’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks investment whiz plans a sabbatical with the rich society gal he's engaged to, a couple of years holiday while he's still young, before getting back to the world of big business.  Turns out the fiancée’s not on board with his iconoclastic ideas & non-work ethic.  On the other hand, her unconventional sister just might be.  KINGDOM, Barry’s charming, if lesser follow up, takes an alternate path.  Here, he marries that 'wrong' gal, in spite of his unconventional old flame returning to town with second thoughts.  There’s a different tone here, too, perhaps because The Depression showed up between the two plays opening.  And the most interesting change comes in how the bohemian set are now seen as being just as snobby, in their unconventional bohemian way, as the fancy dress set are in their stuffy way.  (Howard’s artisan publishing outfit putting out a popular novel for profit drives them to distress.)  Even more interesting, you can’t tell if Barry wrote this disagreeable aspect intentionally.  Leslie Howard, Ilka Chase & William Gargan repeat their B’way roles as husband, society snob & uncouth butler, but the real show is between Ann Harding as the ex-lover who returns at the wrong time and Myrna Loy as the conventional, yet appealingly open-minded new wife.  It brings an unexpected topsy-turvy tone to Barry’s ideas that makes you think twice.  Edward H. Griffith, who directed the Early Talkie version of HOLIDAY (the one with Ann Harding in the role later played by Hepburn) takes advantage of two years’ improvements in film technology, but you still feel the stage floor beneath everyone’s feet.  Not always in a bad way.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Far more interesting if you see either version of HOLIDAY first.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/holiday-1930.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/08/holiday-1938.html

IL BELL' ANTONIO / BEAUTIFUL ANTONIO (1960)

From the darker side of commedia all'italiana, Marcello Mastroianni is ‘Beautiful Antonio,’ handsome & marriageable, with the reputation of a womanizer, who thinks he’s finally found ‘the one’ when he meets the equally beautiful Claudia Cardinale.  If only he could ramp things up beyond kissing & cuddling after the wedding.  Turns out, Mastroianni suffers from acute Madonna & the Whore syndrome, even more than most proper Sicilians.  Church sanctioned coitus as cancel culture.  And as Cardinale doesn’t believe they’re truly wed without consummation, she needs priestly consultation to figure out just what her position should be.  (Fortunately for Marcello, 'whore' might apply to chambermaids.)  Director Mauro Bolognini, who never hit the international awareness threshold of commedia all'italiana masters like Pietro Germi and Mario Monicelli (both out with a Mastroianni classic in the next few years*), is nearly as fine here, though not as distinctive a filmmaker.  But working off a trenchant screenplay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and finding a mordant vein that skews away from Pasolini in a more comic third act (largely the work of co-scripter Gino Visentini?), Bolognini impresses.  As does the entire production.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Those classics being DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE/’62 (the best known commedia all'italiana) and THE ORGANIZER/’63 (the most underappreciated). https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/divorce-italian-style-1962.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/i-compagni-organizer-1963.html

START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT ME (1970)

Inspired lunacy about two pairs of identical twins (one aristo/one peasant) mismatched at birth and destined to either start, stop or run off with the French Revolution of 1789 (as the helpful film titles keep reminding us) in this Alexandre Dumas burlesque.  (Mostly THE CORSICAN BROTHERS and THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.*)  More than just good fun, gags, character & plot mechanics are really built into watertight farce as the aristo brothers (Donald Sutherland & Gene Wilder) are waylaid (and misidentified) by the revolutionists before they can reach Louis XVI; while the peasant duo (again Donald Sutherland & Gene Wilder) are mistaken for the plotting Corsicans and whisked off to Versailles.  Often shriekingly funny, especially when Gene Wilder goes off on some entitlement tear with his role playing wife or stuffed falcon (how ‘brother’ Sutherland kept from ‘breaking character’ long enough to get a clean take is a mystery), enough so you hardly mind that Bud Yorkin’s merely functional direction isn’t able to pull the leaky ninth-reel action climax together or camouflage a wan epilogue.  With great comic support from Billie Whitelaw’s randy/devious Marie Antoinette; Hugh Griffith’s somehow touching Louis XVI; Victor Spinetti’s splenetic plotter; and especially Rosalind Knight as the wife who didn’t bring enough costumes for bedtime play.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *For real Dumas, Douglas Fairbanks’ THE IRON MASK/’29 remains top choice.  Look for  the restored version (104") out on KINO.

BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (1962)

Solid, if softened, bio-pic of Robert Stroud, a violent two-time killer whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison.  Brilliant and psychotic, his life’s work literally fell into his lap (well, into his prison courtyard) when a fledgling sparrow was shaken off the bough and landed at his feet.  In the face of myriad prison obstacles, his spontaneous rescue sparked decades of study & discovery on avian habits & medical treatments, even a kind of fame as his work began to slowly reach bird fanciers thanks to the strength of the two women in his life, a stubborn mother and a worshipful widow.  But in making dramatic sense of the story, scripter Guy Trosper & director John Frankenheimer (taking over when Charles Crichton ankled), flatten out what must have been a far stranger tale into something more digestible, trope-dependent and middlebrow, a prestige piece worthy of award consideration.  Indeed, it is award worthy, particularly Burnett Guffey’s Oscar nom’d b&w lensing, Elmer Bernstein’s score (kissing-cousin to his Oscar nom’d score that year for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD) and Burt Lancaster’s Oscar-nom’d restrained magnetism.  But only Thelma Ritter, as his mother, particularly in a final scene of abnegation, touches on something unknowable.  Otherwise, it’s what happens when a film needs Robert Bresson and gets John Frankenheimer.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Specifically, Bresson’s A MAN ESCAPED/’56. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/un-condamne-mort-sest-echappe-man.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Considering the attention to detail, that’s a pretty phony looking soundstage prison courtyard, especially that cityscape backdrop.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see Hugh Marlowe & Whit Bissell in the same film, even sharing frame in one scene.  You’ll never confuse these guys again.

THE BEDROOM WINDOW (1987)

Early full budget film from writer/director Curtis Hanson shows none of the narrative sense, stylish flair or confident execution he’d bring to L.A. CONFIDENTIAL ten years later.  But then, few of his other films do.  (WONDER BOYS and 8 MILE suggest otherwise to many.)  WINDOW does have a certain usefulness in highlighting just how bad standard production defaults were in the late ‘80s: Gil Taylor’s VHS-friendly over-lit lensing; a faux Kenny G. soundtrack; de rigeur naked backsides from our leads so producer Martha De Laurentiis (Dino’s daughter) can make her pre-sales target.  Ugh.  This voyeuristic thriller opens as Steve Guttenberg and boss’s wife Isabelle Huppert have their tryst interrupted by a sexual attack on the street below the bedroom window.  Huppert’s the actual witness, but can’t report it to the police without giving away her affair.  So Steve takes down all the details and fakes the report, even testifies in court.  But since no good deed of perjury goes unpunished, his story breaks down, the case falls apart, the sex fiend/murderer is back on the street, and even victim Elizabeth McGovern doubts his story.  You can see how this could work, but Hanson’s too busy quoting favorite directors (Welles, Hitchcock, Wilder) to build suspense or parse the plot.  He certainly gets no help from his actors: Huppert unintelligible in English; McGovern working those chipmunk cheeks, and Guttenberg’s alternating hang and puppy-dog faces.  While Hanson, like a foreign filmmaker on his first English-language pic, gets all the beats wrong.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Three years before this, Joel & Ethan Coen's BLOOD SIMPLE/'84 made the reimagined Neo-Noir thriller seem easy & inevitable.

THREE WOMEN (1923)

More like TWO WOMEN (Pauline Frederick & May McAvoy) AND A GUEST APPEARANCE (by Marie Prevost).  Having only just found his definitive voice in THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE/’23, and soon to refine (and better) many of the themes here in LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN/’25, it’s understandable that this Ernst Lubitsch dramedy lies somewhat in the shade of its neighboring films.  Understandable, but a pity, since this less breezy, largely serious drama has much of the sly innuendo, observational insight & cockeyed attitude of the society sex films that surround it.  (Not only CIRCLE and FAN, but also the lost KISS ME AGAIN/’24 and the miraculously glamorous FORBIDDEN PARADISE/'24.)  Typically, misdirected passion runs the story as impeccably dressed but debt-ridden ne’er-do-well Lew Cody woos Pauline Frederick, a rich widow of certain age, worried that college-aged daughter May McAvoy will only make her seem older.  But a surprise visit sees Cody, after  getting his loan from ‘mother,’  redirecting his passion toward May!  Threats, blackmail, marriage, distress, disappointed young male suitor, and yet another woman for Cody . . . the skunk!  That'd be Marie Prevost; late entry/little footage.  At its best in the first act, when you’re not totally sure of Cody’s rotten character, with clever details and ‘roaring’ mid-‘20s atmosphere taking precedent over Mother Love tropes.  The same structure applies in LADY WINDERMERE, and with McAvoy in much the same spot.  But, thanks to Oscar Wilde’s plotting, it’s cleverly unconventional all the way thru.  Here, nothing so original is being worked out.  Still, on its own modest terms, well played and beautifully executed.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN, perfecting many of the ideas in here, some of Lubitsch’s wittiest direction, plus Irene Rich & Ronald Colman in an outstanding cast. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/lady-windermeres-fan-1925.html