STRANGE WORLD (2022)

Coming so soon after best-in-years animated releases from Disney & Pixar (Luca; Encanto*) makes this ham-fisted fossil-fuel allegory look even worse than it is . . . and it’s already plenty bad.  Rightly rejected at the box-office, its crude Gaia Whole Earth philosophy hiding under two generations of Father/Son misunderstandings (Dennis Quaid to Jake Gyllenhaal to Jaboukie Young-White); female empowerment role models; story & stylistic nods at RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (note titles & ‘wipes’ between scenes) and (God help us) AVATAR story arcs & æsthetics.  Even the color palette (pure Pepto-Bismol) and character design (potato noses on all the guys), if not deal breakers, as executed an insulting botch.  The main story a Fix-It trip to the other side of their dying planet (where they find Granddad, missing since the prologue) at least brings on the film’s one technical treat, some ethereal red pterodactyls.  But elsewhere, the stink of focus group-think fills in inclusive boxes (interracial marriage; gay son; parallel generation gaps) and retro analogue devices for home (vacuum tube radio; vinyl LPs played on a Victrola) and war (Gramps using Napalm flame-throwers on those pesky aliens - who came up with that one?).  It still might have played, but nothing in here feels organic; not even the vegetables.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: If you thought JY-W would only be half as annoying heard but not seen, you’ve got another think coming.  And poor Dennis Quaid, whose nekkid tuchus was a highlight of many a rom-com back in the ‘80s, finds his animated self given a signature stance scratching his behind next to Gyllenhaal at something like four times the width.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK/LINK:  *As mentioned, 2021 animated winners LUCA and ENCANTO.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/encanto-2021.html

COUP DE TÊTE / HOTHEAD (1979)

Patrick Dewaere is spectacular (and spectacularly brave) in this scorched-earth farce about a reserve soccer player in a third-tier town who takes revenge on . . . well, on just about everyone.  Inadvertently injuring the club’s star player during practice, Dewaere is  permanently escorted off the field, loses his factory job, gets dumped by his partner (hubby’s come home), run out of town; falsely convicted on a trumped up rape charge, and finally left to rot in prison.  All but that mistress mix-up orchestrated by the city’s leading citizen, an ‘upstanding’ businessman who owns the team, owns the factory, owns the cops and the prison warden.  Dreaming of revenge in his cell (especially about making a ‘collect call’ on the woman who claimed rape), Dewaere miraculously gets his chance when a bus accident leaves the team short a man for the semi-finals and he’s the only legit player close enough to make game time.  Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (who usually leans toward epic seriousness, here letting his inner Blake Edwards out); written by French comedy master Francis Veber (sampling Ben Jonson cynicism toward the human condition); so much right in here on professional sports, fickle fans, political expedience, moral compartmentalism, corrupt government, the lure of personal revenge and the satisfaction of self-limitation.  All but perfectly structured and executed, the film takes no prisoners and asks no mercy.  Hilarious, appalling and painfully believable.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Among social satires, perhaps only THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT/’52 takes on all comers with equally hard-headed honesty, outsized laughs and a sort of grim melancholy.  There Alec Guinness; here Dewaere, rare masters of the unsentimental little man.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-man-in-white-suit-1951.html

THE LAST RIDE (1944)

‘Junk’ programmer from Warners, close to a Poverty Row production, but pretty good fun all the same; it's like a  throwback to their Early Talkie muckraking pics, hitting some topical issue before the news cycle had passed.  Typically covering racketeers taking advantage of Prohibition Rules, with cops either collaborating or chasing, a couple of molls in skimpy lingerie, speeding cars with rat-a-tat-tat ‘Tommy’ guns and brothers on opposing sides of the law.  But oh, how times have changed!  Now, the bootleg items aren’t alcohol-based but strictly rationed rubber tires in wartime.  1 - Steal tires off parked cars.  2 - Let victims know your ‘insurance company’ can cover the loss.  3 - Rush over with a team to install over-priced sub-standard retreads.   What else you gonna get?  Here, the marks are a couple of rich, entitled college-bound Prep School lads who crash and burn (or blow to Kingdom Come) along with steady girlfriends in Pre-Code levels of violence.  Only then does the main story get going as two brothers get involved (Richard Travis; Charles Lang) ), one a rising cop who’ll go undercover to take down the mob; the other a weakling whose ‘entry vice’ was pinball machine rentals.  (Once they get those pinball machine hooks in you . . . )  Eleanor Parker has third billing but little to do other than make dinner for her beau . . the ‘bad’ brother.  No prize for guessing who she ends up with.  Still, not bad as these things go.  And at a notch under an hour.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Warner Bros. codified the good brother/bad brother mob routine in THE PUBLIC ENEMY/’31 where originally miscast James Cagney and Donald Cook swapped roles to spectacular effect shortly after shooting began.

XUAN YA ZHI SHANG / CLIFF WALKERS (2021)

Typically lux/lush Yimou Zhang, this Precursor-to-WWII ‘impossible mission’ yarn, an award-winning hit in Asian markets, cut a low profile Stateside.  Partially explained by pandemic concerns, but equally by the film’s pileup of spies and counterspies on all sides of its early ‘30s Japanese Invaders/Chinese Collaborators/Nationalist Chinese conflict.  At its core, a dangerous wintry assignment for two pairs of mixed-doubles spies, patriotic Chinese Communists unaware their cover & codes have been blown when they parachute into Japanese-controlled Manchukuo for a yet to be revealed mission.  Shhh . . . they’re to find and escort an important couple across the border under the noses of Chinese soldiers working for the puppet regime.  Got that?  Well, never mind, Zhang barely gives those hostages a second’s thought, concentrating instead on crosses and double-crosses between spies & military officers as everyone tries to ascertain loyalties.  And while it may take you half the film’s running time to get a handle on who’s stabbing, throttling, garotting, torturing or sabotaging whom, the flushed, wintry look of cast, costumes & settings has massive appeal simply as glamorous artifice.*  In fact, feints toward heroic Communist rhetoric come off as de rigeur pablum, pasted on to check all the necessary boxes of officialdom and green light production & release.  Eye candy & martyrdom for the masses, courtesy of Yimou Zhang.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Equally overlooked among Zhang’s recent output (at least Stateside), the even better YING/SHADOW/’18.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/ying-shadow-2018.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *If M-G-M’s motto was ‘Ars gratia artis‘ Zhang’s must be ‘Artificium gratia artificis.’

MUHOMATSU NO ISSHO / THE RICKSHAW MAN (1958)

Taking a break from Akira Kurosawa classics for popular commercial fare, Toshirô Mifune unleashes his inner Wallace Berry in this broadly played piece of Hollywood-worthy sentimentality.*  A poor rickshaw driver with a rep as a wild & crazy guy, some passing advice given to a put-upon schoolboy backfires, and now Mifune’s carting the shy kid home for repairs.  All’s well soon enough, but when the child’s military father dies suddenly from a stroke, the illiterate rickshaw man finds he’s been recruited by the new widow to play surrogate uncle.  A doting mentor in manly arts if no tutor, the close bond is bound to bust as the boy grows up and starts to be embarrassed by this lower class champion.  Shot ‘solid citizen’ style, largely on exterior soundstage sets by director Hiroshi Inagaki, the film perks up here and there for some head-scratching Japanese prioritizing (called to rush the stricken father to a doctor, the wife asks Mifune if he could stop to pick up an eight pound sack of rice), as well as a superb sequence of traditional Japanese drumming where, just briefly, Mifune drops the humble-pie routine to dazzle the crowd on screen & off with sheer athleticism.  But more often than not, this is sticky stuff any way you slice it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *You can see Berry play this kind of masochistic quasi-parental slush in a late film like THE MIGHTY MCGURK/’46 . . . but I wouldn’t recommend it.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-mighty-mcgurk-1946.html

CANYON PASSAGE (1946)

On loan from R.K.O. after graduating from the Val Lewton horror unit, director Jacques Tourneur made his first color film and his first Western with this A-list effort for Universal.  (Then right back to R.K.O. for classic noir next year in OUT OF THE PAST/’47. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/out-of-past-1947.html)  Long unsung, now highly rated, CANYON’s a handsome (lenser Edward Cronjager), location-heavy production with a strong cast and an even stronger, if unconventional storyline, the rare Western you can’t summarize as ‘Stranger Comes To Town.’  Instead, Dana Andrews is an ambitious outfitter for wagon trains & growing towns, always on the road and looking to expand his trading store into a NorthWest franchise.  Currently, he’s heading back to base with gal pal Susan Hayward, ‘near’ fiancée of guy pal/financial partner Brian Donlevy, banker to the town’s gold prospectors, now in serious debt from his gambling addiction, looting client’s gold dust out of his vault and writing I.O.U.s right & left.*  And while there’s a lot of sexual tension between Hayward & Andrews, both parties are already ‘claimed,’ Hayward by Donlevy; Andrews by the equally lovely Patricia Roc.   Add to these domestic troubles tension with the local Native Americans fully aware they’re being systematically displaced by a growing community (every new home a stealth attack), before they are all but forced ‘onto the warpath,’ after local psychopath Ward Bond (chillingly unhinged) rapes & murders one of their own, a pretty girl he’s caught swimming.  Plus another murder in town after Donlevy is about to come up short on the victim’s gold deposits.  Lots of situations, yet Tourneur is so well organized, he’s got plenty of time to work in Andy Devine (and his two kids) as sidekick & local cupid; for young Lloyd Bridges to show himself as hotheaded vigilante; and Hoagy Carmichael as local troubadour, commenting on the action thru song.  Confidently handled in fluid, rangy takes (the opening reels particularly, a masterclass of ‘invisible edits' and tracking shots), the complicated story and interpersonal relationships never feeling rushed or phony.  The film’s rapid critical rise over the last decade entirely justified.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Tourneur went on to make more traditional Westerns, but another rather untraditional one, STARS IN MY CROWN/’50 may be his best in the genre.  And with a plot you can reduce to Stranger Comes To Town.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/stars-in-my-crown-1950.html

ATENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Donlevy’s addiction, believable, melancholic, nuanced & non-hysterical, neither actor’s meal nor award-hungry showcase.  It may be unique in Hollywood films.

WOMEN TALKING (2022)

Now writing & directing, Canadian Sarah Polley (no acting credits since 2010) picks up on a riveting fact-inspired story involving the physical/sexual/psychological violation of women in an isolated ultra-religious sect; fictionalized in Miriam Toews' novel & here extrapolated into a sort of trial & debate among the victims on what to do.  Stay in the community as it is; remain but fight for change; or abruptly & permanently leave.   Presentation and playing are all you could wish for, but Polley seems better at executing her vision than inventing anything beyond a feminist 12 ANGRY MENNONITES.  Too many narrative & structural misjudgements (modest SPOILER Alert ahead!) like the surprise that we’re not following a 19th century period piece, but something from 2010.  What might have been allowed to seep in as possible anachronistic moments (smoking, a watch, modern vocabulary) is a ‘got’cha’ story beat ‘discovered’ as a modern tune plays on a passing car radio.  No one challenging or doubting their belief, only its practice.  The best written role going to the only male in the story.*  And the most problematic, making all the characters so articulate, especially when you consider the level of education/sophistication allowed to women in the community.*  The way this largely illiterate group figures things out, they’d fit right in to one of those near plotless George Bernard Shaw talkathon plays.  Only there, GBS provides theatrical distancing Polley can’t.  Still, the strengths in the filmmaking and the situation hold you all the way thru.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That’s Ben Whishaw drawing on his inner Stephen Rea as the member of the community assigned to keep a record of the discussion.  Between getting his mop of hair under control and how he looks more substantial playing against an all-female cast, he’s never come off better on screen.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Not so different from how Stephen King made all the boys in STAND BY ME/'86 'tween psychologists-in-training.

PEKING EXPRESS (1951)

Paramount’s third version of this exotic Jules Furthman/Harry Hervey adventure reverses direction from SHANGHAI EXPRESS/’32, the original Sternberg/Dietrich classic, so we now start the dangerous trip at Shanghai station and train to Peking.  And that’s not the only thing they get backwards.  (Version No. 2, NIGHT PLANE FROM CHUNGKING/’43, not seen here, is a cheap programmer.)  But first, here’s the one good switch: Thanks to political changes, the bad guys no longer warring feudal lords but the newly victorious Chinese Communists.  And they aren’t even the worst element, that’d be local renegade bandits, merciless villains who interrupt the journey with a deadly surprise attack before grabbing United Nations Doctor Joseph Cotten and past-partner/fallen gal Corinne Calvet, along with Catholic Father Edmund Gwenn and other assorted business & political bigwigs.  Made on a B+ budget, director William Dieterle uses plenty of stock footage and background clips from the original (some city street scenes look darn familiar) between endless exposition in train corridors & compartments.  Mostly about stolen drugs Cotten brought in with him/mostly in the shadow of slanted Venetian blinds.  Not really bad, but you’d never guess what you’re missing if you watch this instead of von Sternberg: one of the great Hollywood entertainments, Dietrich’s top grosser, and a film that did much to move the bar past Early Talkie technical problems and usher in Classic Hollywood Golden Age.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: As you’d expect, SHANGHAI EXPRESS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/shanghai-express-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Twenty years after SHANGHAI EXPRESS, PEKING still casts one major Chinese character with a White Guy.  Easy to forget just how long YellowFace remained a Hollywood practice, late as 1985 with Joel Grey in REMO WILLIAMS.  Was that the last one?

LIVING (2022)

Well-intentioned & relatively faithful, this refashioning of Akira Kurosawa’s uncharacteristic IKIRU/’52 replants the story from ‘50s Japan to ‘50s London* in an adaptation that retains story arc & structure from Nagasaki-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus.  This fable-like character study follows ultra-reserved mid-level city bureaucrat Bill Nighy who, after learning he only has months to live, comes alive (personally & professionally) just in time to complete a modest legacy project.  With four reels nipped from Kurosawa’s over-indulgent running time all to the good (the much-acclaimed original does hang fire), but a switch from what had been contemporary to what is now period setting distancing us by 70 years, inevitably adding squishy layers of nostalgia that risk pushing sentiment to sentimentality.*  Shot in a unique screen frame ratio of 1.48:1 (unexpectedly pleasing!), the intimate framing never feels cramped, often bursting into life.  Though it can’t quite cover the sense of manipulation that accompanies the lump in your throat.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *It’s just possible that Kurosawa saw J. B. Priestly’s LAST HOLIDAY, a 1950 Ealing Studios film with Alec Guinness whose similar elements come with a gimmick.

SCREWY THOUJGHT OF THE DAY:  *No doubt, Ishiguro felt ‘50s British social reticence would be more equivalent with Japan circa ‘52 than U.K. mores in 2022.  Or modern Japan come to think of it.

THE KILLER IS LOOSE (1956)

The real fun in this tidy police procedural can be told in three words: location, location, location. Helmed by Budd Boetticher before he began making the Randolph Scott Westerns he’s now best-known for, this little thriller finds its palette in the deceptively bland atmosphere of subdivision houses, square front lawns, sidewalks & detached garages that once defined middle-class suburban L.A.; a surprisingly rare sight in films of the day. The story gets off to good start with a quickly solved bank robbery as the cops trap the ‘inside man’ at his apartment where a gun fight leaves his innocent wife dead. The main story begins when the robber escapes and calmly carves, clobbers & shoots his way to a bloody revenge. You won’t swallow all the moves, and sometimes the low-budget defeats Boetticher, but there’s a tasty cast to root for (Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming, Alan Hale Jr. & an unexpectedly effective Wendell Corey whose sedate style grows progressively scary). By the end of the film, in spite of a few missteps that might cause a passing giggle, the climax builds up more tension than it has any right to.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: What a great poster for a little throwaway pic!

CONTEST: Find the piece of business that connects this film to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’62 to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a NetFlix DVD.

THE SUNSHINE BOYS (1975)

In good plays & bad, Neil Simon wrote all his characters with the underlying cadence of vaudeville: set-up and comeback.  The rhythm as ubiquitous to ‘Doc’ Simon as iambic pentameter to Shakespeare.   So whaddaya do when your characters are vaudevillians?  An ODD COUPLE variation about a long estranged comedy team reviving their double act after 11 years of silence for a one-shot tv special, surprisingly, Simon doesn’t push the rhythm much more than he does in his other plays.  More surprising, just how sturdy it still is.  As the cantankerous half of the team, Walter Matthau plays twenty years older than he was at the time, pressing harder than he has to, but still getting his laughs.  (On stage, Jack Albertson was sadder, slower, meaner.)  And as the obstinately sane half, George Burns (reviving his screen career after 36 years*) shows off his near supernatural comic timing.  (On stage, Sam Levene was stronger, less loopy, equally funny.)  Check out Burns’ first scene playing sans toupée against Richard Benjamin in the thankless role of Matthau’s agent/nephew for a masterclass in how to trigger laughs with quietly bravura agogic comic timing.  Director Herbert Ross keeps up the pace and shows off past choreographic skills in multiplane staging and long takes with the boys making a geezers’ gavotte out placing the furniture ‘just so’ for a rehearsal.  But Simon ultimately sets himself up to fail in a comic climax he can’t begin to pull off when the boys try to perform the old act.  A culmination unable to meet expectations of something valuable/something hilarious being lost.  Even Chaplin fell into this particular trap in THE CIRCUS/’28 and LIMELIGHT/’52.  And the old ‘Doctor’s Sketch’ routine makes for a considerable stumble.*  Yet elsewhere, the film earns some pretty big laughs and has aged nearly as gracefully as the eighty (going on to 100) yr-old Burns.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jack Benny originally had the role, but when he became too ill, showed his typical generosity personally suggesting Burns take over.

DOUBLE-BILL:  THE ODD COUPLE/’68 should make a perfect pairing, but the film is yet another cinematic botch by stage director Gene Saks.  The tie between the two plays must have been at its strongest when Tony Randall and Jack Klugman revived SUNSHINE BOYS on B’way for a half-yr run in ‘97.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Perhaps the old act is supposed to be this bad, this unfunny.  As if that was the point of contention driving them apart underneath the incompatible character traits.

MARLOWE (2022)

Neil Jordan’s Philip Marlowe: Senior Citizen Edition, largely ignored on release (indifferently received when not), with Liam Neeson as the classic P.I. working a case in late-‘30s L.A. (filmed in Spain and missing harsh L.A. glare & atmosphere*), shoots for world-weary, settles for weary.  Yet Jordan, an awfully talented fellow, locates sly, effective moments in a story (not by Raymond Chandler BTW) that centers on a dicey mother/daughter relationship (Jessica Lange/Diane Kruger); a missing Latin Lover (reported dead); a hidden cache of cocaine; and the usual crew of unhelpful suspects & ambivalent police.  (What, no water rights?)  Jordan jumps right into things, starting with the traditional office visit for client & detective, cutting to the chase as if he were filming a sequel and we were already up to speed.  (Hint: assuming you’re not up to speed, try repeating the first 30 or forty minutes before going on.  The film will actually feel 30 minutes shorter.)  Fortunately, both Neeson and the film grow on you.  And if Liam at 70 is no longer the first guy you’d call to go on a chase, he's still a powerful physical presence on screen.  Those ham hock hands really pack a punch.  As does the film, in its limited way.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  More underrated P.I. work from Neeson in A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES/’04  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-walk-among-tombstones-2014.html  OR:  *Robert Altman’s controversial, post-modern take on Chandler, with contemporary L.A. atmosphere to spare and a contemporary Marlowe in Elliot Gould.  It’s also centered on a plot keyed to a misreported dead guy.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-long-goodbye-1973.html

ISLAND OF TERROR (1966)

Directed by Terence Fisher/starring Peter Cushing, but not a Hammer horror pic.  Fisher temporarily on the outs with Hammer, working a pair of fright pics with short-lived Planet Film Productions.  (For a Hollywood comparison, imagine going from Republic Westerns to Monogram Westerns.)  Yet, not bad once it gets up on its feet.  The gimmick has a gaggle of bone-sucking monsters, by-product from cancer drug experiments, and on the hunt for skeletal forms of life.  In their wake, nothing but shapeless, loosely clothed blobs of human flesh.  Enter Dr. Cushing, London-based osteopathic specialist, helicoptered in to the remote island along with research scientist Edward Judd and girlfriend Carole Gray.  (Hey, it’s her helicopter!)  Slow and dopey till the end of the first act when the horrors begin and, for a change, lots of monster footage.   That’s what puts this one over, moving shells (the scientists call them silicates which are mineral deposits, no?) . . . anyway, those shells taking the form of floor-model vacuum-cleaners (you know, the kind with rotating wheels you pulled by their retractable hoses), but with scaly bods.  Ewww!  Mass panic by the islanders waiting in sheltered safety as the monsters quickly replicate and come ever closer.  Oh, it’s too, too horrible to even contemplate.*  Yikes!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: While this is dopey fun, in Japan, Ishirô Honda made something approaching Pop Art with similar elements in THE H-MAN/’58.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-h-man-bijo-to-ekitai-ningen-1958.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The only thing more horrible, Malcolm Lockyer’s chirping disgrace of a music score.

RAW WIND IN EDEN (1958)

‘Wet, she's a star. Dry, she ain't,’  Ziegfeld Follies star/Funny Girl Fannie Brice on swimming film star Esther Williams.  Easy to forget just how big a star she was, too (regular Top Ten lister for a decade); easy to forget how fast she fell after climbing out of M-G-M’s swimming pool.  Four pics & out, including this odd project from Orson Welles pal Richard Wilson.  Ignore that dangerous sounding title and the sexed up ad campaign, the film turns out to be more along the lines of one of those Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic farces.  Esther even acting & sounding a lot like Doris as a statuesque fashion model flying home with new gazillionaire pal Carlos Thompson (distractingly dubbed with Paul Frees’ familiar voice).  But the plane goes down on Jeff Chandler’s island hideaway where he gets by with girlfriend Rossana Podestà, philosophizing papa Eduardo De Filippo and the occasional ‘visit’ by jealous ‘ex’ Rik Battaglia.  You’ll guess the rest.  Hint: Chandler’s not some beachcomber but an eccentric gazillionaire disappointed in mankind.  Well, something like that.  Italian cinematographer Enzo Serafin does unexpectedly fine work, and horror film composer Hans J. Salter makes with the laughs on a lousy music track.  The one working joke is that someone must have agreed with Fanny Brice and keeps Esther wet as much as possible.  But in this case, the Adriatic a pale imitation of M-G-M’s backlot pool.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: For Esther at her early prime, try BATHING BEAUTY/’44.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/05/bathing-beauty-1944.html

THE WOMAN ACCUSED (1932)

One of a series of tie-in projects between Paramount and Liberty Magazine (click on bonus poster below to see the details), this little crime story sports lots of Pre-Code action as NYC party girl Nancy Carroll goes the distance against former lover Louis Calhern to keep new fiancé Cary Grant out of harm’s way.  Sneaking up the fire escape to confront the cad in his penthouse lair, Carroll stops him from phoning in a ‘hit’ on Grant with a hit of her own.  Then, with Calhern still warm to the touch, she slips off on a three-day Prohibition Cruise (Grant none the wiser) while her maid cleans up the murder site before Calhern pal John Halliday starts figuring things out.  And while Halliday quickly puts two-and-two together, proving it won’t be so easy.  These machinations are modest fun (Halliday makes like Hamlet putting on The Mousetrap to catch her out), but there’s real interest seeing Grant, fresh off his breakthru against Mae West in SHE DONE HIM WRONG/'32, starting to transform himself into the sleek leading man of everyone’s dreams.  Plus all those Pre-Code moves: Carroll’s past living in sin with Calhern; spending a night at sea in Grant’s cabin; a smirking reference to a dead man wearing lip rouge; even the sound of a flushing toilet.  Plus Carroll getting away scot-free on a murder. 

With journeyman director Paul Sloan calling the shots, Carroll must have known she was on her way out at Paramount (Colbert, Hopkins, Sidney & Dietrich made for tough competition).  But properly cast, as here, she holds her own, an adorable delight.  So too the whole cast.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Watch for a editing error that has Calhern dial up the ‘hit’ using an eight-digit phone number.

THEY LIVE (1988)

Credit John Carpenter for downsizing between full-budget/high-profile fare (BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA/86; MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN/’92) for this minor-league horror item.  If only it were better.  (Well, it is better than his Chevy Chase INVISIBLE MAN, a pretty low bar.)  This one has Carpenter trying on INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS for size, and finding an uncomfortable fit.  Too many alterations or not enough?  Starring ‘Bad Guy’ pro wrestler Roddy Piper as a drifter (with pecs to spare) looking for construction work in L.A., and getting a hand from fellow laborer Keith David, easily out-acting Piper as well as putting up a decent fight.  (Carpenter extending the mutual bashing to ridiculous lengths for the WWF crowd.)  Bonding thru the pain, Piper forces David to try on the magic sunglasses he’s found in a box on the street, glasses that reveal Alien Invaders in disguise living among us.  And not only programmed humanoids are revealed thru these glasses, street-sign ads, tv broadcasts, magazines, all can be seen plain (in b&w Arial Black font - Yikes!) hiding social and political conformist doctrine mottos out of a bad reverse translation of 1984.  (They’re like the green-tinted Emerald City glasses in the book, if not the film of THE WIZARD OF OZ.)  But why?, since it’s only aliens who see beneath the surface facade and they’re already under mind control.  Still, you can see what Carpenter was aiming for, a sort of anti-genre take on a familiar subject.  Something on the order of Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE/’65, but either unable or unwilling to go the distance.  We do get another one of those loopy repetitive Carpenter vamps as background music score, a touch of spacey ‘transport’ action for a Sci-Fi vibe, and the sensation of seeing Meg Foster switch from helpmate to killer . . . and back, behind those all but unfathomable alien-blue eyes.  (Are she and Ellen DeGeneres the only humans on the planet with this precise unworldly eye color?)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS/’56.  And I’d wager teenage Carpenter was also a big fan of the 1967 cult tv series THE INVADERS.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/01/invasion-of-body-snatchers-1956.html

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1931)

After buying & ballyhooing Theodore Drieser’s novel for the Hollywood debut of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Paramount soon scraped man & script, handing off the pricey package to Josef von Sternberg, briefly free between third & fourth Marlene Dietrich films.  Without much of a budget left, the book (remade at Paramount by George Stevens in his overly-studied post-WWII manner as A PLACE IN THE SUN/’51) was cut to pure narrative.  It runs three reels less than the remake, yet contains considerably more content.  Important stuff too, since literal prologue proves character prologue when Phillips Holmes social striver runs away from a fatal car crash, even though he's not responsible.  Poor family relation to a wealthy industrial family, Holmes uses that connection to wangle a job and a girl (Sylvia Sidney) at the family factory.  But after knocking her up, he falls hard for rich, beautiful upper-crust Frances Dee.  And, as per Dreiser’s social determinism, wish is father of the deed when the boy wants out of his quickie marriage . . . permanently.  Long in the shade of Stevens’ film, a UCLA restoration proves, if not revelatory, able to partially even the field.  Held back by Holmes’ inability to sustain a role thru an entire film, but much helped by Sidney’s appealing/sympathetic victim.  Especially in comparison to a purposefully drab Shelly Winters and her Oscar-winning yowls for Stevens in '51.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Best Drieser film adaptation by far is William Wyler’s CARRIE/’52. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/carrie-1952.html   OR: Check out Groucho Marx & Thelma Todd’s parody of the lake drowning scene in HORSE FEATHERS, made at the same studio just a year later.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/horse-feathers-1932.html

ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959)

Top-flight courtroom drama from Otto Preminger made during the mid-‘50s to mid-‘60s peak of his independent run.  The only one of the group not shot in WideScreen to really come off.*  (Did cinematographer Sam Leavitt convince Preminger that location shooting in featureless areas of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and in the tight interior spaces of actual homes would be challenging in CinemaScope and impossible in 70mm?)  Whatever the reason, the loss in visual flair helps rather than hurts Preminger’s expert presentation as low-profile attorney James Stewart (with alcoholic legal pal Arthur O’Connell & down-to-earth office assistant Eve Arden) takes on a newsworthy murder case after Ben Gazzara’s insolent army lieutenant murders the popular local bar owner who roughed up and raped flirty wife Lee Remick.  With George C. Scott making a big, early impression as a hot shot prosecutor brought up from Lansing, MI.  But everyone in here brings something special to the table, none more so than in the homey line readings of the Judge brought in to handle the case, played by true American hero Joseph N. Welsh, the lawyer who brought down Senator Joe McCarthy with a single line, ‘Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?’  Yet the biggest surprise of the thing is . . . that there’s still surprise to the thing.  That is, these sort of dramas have grown so ubiquitous, so sophisticated, so groundbreaking, it’s hard to fathom just how fresh and entertaining this continues to be six+ decades on.  And even with the loss of former shock value (Preminger must have been delighted with the number of times ‘Panties’ is spoken, an extra ten thou in ticket sales at every utterance!), now that we’re unfazed by such things, the film only looks better than it did on release.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *The ‘flat’ aspect ratio Preminger pics that don’t come off in this period are MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM/’55 and SAINT JOAN/’57.  In general, beginning with CARMEN JONES/’55, Preminger’s films really ‘swing’ when shot WideScreen. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/06/saint-joan-1957.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/10/carmen-jones-1954_8327.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The pulsating music Duke Ellington composed for the film is the first jazz score in a mainstream pic not about the jazz world or placed in an urban setting.  It threw people off when the film came out, but now seems perfectly natural.

CARTOUCHE (1962)

Two years and two films before THAT MAN IN RIO turned Phillipe de Broca’s partnership with actor Jean-Paul Belmondo into big international box-office, this period piece, a pre-French Revolution swashbuckler (very Robin Hood/Merry Men) got things going.  And if the chintzy production now looks overdressed and joie de vivre a bit forced, structure, pacey reversals of fortune and character shading keep it taut between action & crises.  Based on a real person (Louis-Dominique Bourguignon), Cartouche, as he calls himself, moves upwards from Bandit to Bandit King to Bandit King-with-a-purpose once he usurps power from the venal Marcel Dalio, and gets his fellow cut-pursers to pledge their loyalty.  Now if he can only keep away from the Aristos out for his blood.  All this complicated by his two loves: a passion for the elegant Odile Versois, wife of his main pursuer; and his shared bond with beautiful fellow crook Claudia Cardinale.  With Jess Hahn & a marvelous Jean Rochefort as his top aides, they raid estates and loot at will, crashing parties to steal jewels & plate between gavottes.  (We never do see much sharing with the poor.)  But when a love assignation turns into a trap, even a last-minute save will bring no more than temporary reprieve.  Good fun, though a lack of technical dazzle and some repetitive staging works against the film.  At this stage, neither de Broca nor French studios a match for Michael Curtiz working with Errol Flynn in TechniColor at Warners in the late ‘30s.  The leap forward on RIO by de Broca & Belmondo considerable.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Decades after this kind of thing went hopelessly out of fashion, de Broca showed how it still could be done, topping his own work late in his career with yet another version of LE BOSSU/’97.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/le-bossuon-guard-1997.html   OR: As mentioned: THAT MAN IN RIO.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/04/lhomme-de-rio-that-man-from-rio-1964.html

BABYLON (2022)

The last big prestige item to get this much wrong about old Hollywood was another money pit from Paramount, THE LAST TYCOON/’76, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s clueless if beautifully written M-G-M oriented roman à clef, embalmed by a sadly diminished Elia Kazan with an all-star cast of sleepwalkers.*  This 3+ hour marathon, set in the chaotic chasm of Silent-to-Sound transition (1926-1932) also out from (and about) Paramount, as well as M-G-M and largely focused on stand-ins for two great silent stars who succumbed to The Talkies: M-G-M’s John Gilbert (Brad Pitt) and Paramount’s Clara Bow (Margot Robbie).  Skipping the discipline of holding to actual personalities & facts, writer/director Damien Chazelle wants to have his cake & eat it too, going off the charts whenever something outrageous seems dramatically convenient.  Harold Robbins brought much the same shock & shlock ethos back in the ‘60s, fictionalizing Howard Hughes’ Hollywood beginnings with THE CARPETBAGGERS.  A big hit in 1964 for (wait for it) Paramount.  Crap, but all of a piece.  Here, nothing feels right, even chewing gum & camera cranking speeds inauthentic, to say nothing of Chazelle’s OTT set pieces.  (Chazelle’s takeaway moral seems to be that bacchanals were Gardens of Hedonism before sound turned them into Dungeons of Dragons & Geeks.)  Crucially, he misses half the melancholic tone by casting too old.  Pitt may look great for 60, but Gilbert was all done by his early 30s.  Robbie, looking frizzy & frazzled from beginning to end, may only be 32, but Bow’s career took off when she was a round-faced 17.  (She never did lose the round face.)  And who is the Black trumpet man supposed to be?  Good for current demographics, but the idea that a $1,500  Black-aimed musical short subject would either start or threaten a film exec’s career is a stretch.  It does allow Chazelle to feed his penchant for zippy tracking shots directly into the horn’s ‘bell.’  Finally there's Señor Outsider, the lowly go-fer who rises to studio exec before spiraling out of contention after doing someone a good turn.  Played by camera (if not vocally) ready Diego Calva, he’s our eyes & ears even if nothing about him or his journey makes sense.  They say there’s no justice in Hollywood, but this one did lose 100 mill.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  As mentioned above, THE CARPETBAGGERS still entertaining junk-food.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-carpetbaggers-1964.html   *And for masochists:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/last-tycoon-1976.html

CHANG CAN DUNK (2023)

Winning Disney+ pic, amusingly, if often exhaustingly, cleaves to underdog/outlier tropes, Sports Striver Division, as basketball mad Asian-American high schooler Bloom Li brags his way into a hot mess in order to impress a girl by proving a 5'8" sophomore can dunk at rim regulation height.  That slightly breathless run-on sentence mirroring the film’s ADHD filmmaking style (Michael Bay meets Nickelodeon), but which holds only for the film’s first two acts.  You know the drill: challenge & bravado lead to a bet against blonde cookie-cutter All-American varsity athlete; BFF film nerd covering every angle with . . . angles; reluctant ‘coach’ becomes a believer; working single mom unable/unwilling to see what’s going on in front of her nose; pretty girl who chooses him over the pretty boy; wild party that sorts out alliances; practice, practice, practice if you wanna reach the heights.  Standard issue teen fare, with personal goals kept fresh & lively by easy-going diversity casting choices.  Like Bloom, whose off-the-beat staccato delivery (voice & motion) is helped from looks that change on every new camera set-up and under three very different hair cuts.  But the film truly comes to life after that fake-out second-act ending; altering style, tempo, even lighting to comment & curdle via swelled head and a deep dark secret on all that’s come before.  Why it’s just possible the bad guys have a point or two after all, the runt brigade getting just desserts.  A bit of discomfort and insight before Bloom blooms.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: While not truly comparable, DUNK shows how the little film musical that couldn’t, DEAR EVAN HANSEN, just might have worked.  Lots of similar story beats and a chance to watch as high school aged kids play high-schoolers.

(AGATHA CHRISTIE'S) TEN LITTLE INDIANS (1989)

Umpteenth iteration of Agatha Christie’s all-time/best-selling murder mystery; the one with ten unrelated island guests knocked off one-by-one till AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, as per its alternate title.  (Original title, TEN LITTLE N . . . . S, now unmentionable.)  Odd for such a famous work (dozens of stage, screen, tv & radio adaptations), hard to find one that faithfully sticks to the book which begins with all ten already dead; ratiocination to follow.  (Even Christie's stage version cops out.)  But here, the main mystery isn’t whodunit, but why-dunit, as in why did the Christie Estate let the infamous schlockmeisters of Cannon Film make a bargain basement release.  (Best guess, producer Harry Alan Towers  had iron-clad remake rights after his previous adaptations in ‘65 & ‘74.)  Set, for no particular reason, in what used to be called ‘Darkest Africa,’ for a while the film seems to kill off its unhappy cast in order of least talent.  Ha!  Alas, four deaths in, Frank Stallone is still standing, so that can’t be right.  Brenda Vaccaro, Donald Pleasence & Herbert Lom hopefully enjoyed their trip to South Africa and got a decent paycheck.  Why are you here?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Unofficially, there’s a barely-legal, perfectly lousy near-remake: AGATHA AND THE TRUTH OF MURDER.  Best stick to René Clair’s 1945 Christie-lite adaptation and a BBC mini-series from 2015. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/01/agatha-and-truth-of-murder-2018.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/and-then-there-were-none-2015.html

A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK (2019)

Largely unreleased Stateside due to that Farrow Family Cabal you may have heard about, Woody Allen’s apparently antepenultimate film makes a belated appearance via MPI Media (who they?), but, unsurprisingly, proves hardly worth the wait.  One of those wild & wooly weekend stories, here where an upstate Liberal Arts College couple (girl: MidWest naïf/boy Upper East Side scion) misplace each other and wind up having separate adventures all around Manhattan.  HER: chasing an uncompromising film director for her college newspaper (really?) and just happening upon glam parties & possible flings.  HIM: chasing romantic pleasures & echoes of decades past (he flaunts a cigarette holder!) and just happening upon glam parties & possible flings.  You can see how this might have worked for Preston Sturges in his prime (heck, for Woody in his prime), but instead only managing the paradoxical trick of treading water and sinking like a stone.  An AI Chatbot version of Woody Allen tropes & jokes.  He’s become one of those old dray horses still pulling a delivery wagon but unable to change his routine, stopping by habit at long vacant addresses.  What little fun there is comes from spotting which actors are able to take care of themselves under Allen’s late-stage laissez-faire direction (Selena Gomez; Cherry Jones) and which go down without a fight (Elle Fanning attempting to channel Goldie Hawn’s giddy glow; Jude Law missing his key light on a Gig Young fifth-wheel routine).  As for young man-about-town Timothée Chalamet, he may be even too delicate for faux Noël Coward social comedy, but to his credit, doesn’t fall back on Allen mannerisms the way so many would-be Woodys have.  (See Jason Biggs in ANYTHING ELSE/'03:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/anything-else-2003.html . . . better yet, don't.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Once upon a time, in MANHATTAN/'79, Allen played this scene to a fare-the-well, underage girlfriend and all. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Note poster: No prob opening this over in Japan.

FROM HELL TO TEXAS (1958)

Exceptionally well organized Henry Hathaway Western ought to be better known.  Tweaked from standard ingredients* into something lean & interesting (Robert Buckner; Wendell Mayes on script), it basically skips the first act, or rather opens at its climax, to pick up Don Murray, working his way West in search of his missing dad, riding for his life when unjustly tagged for murder and just managing to use a threatening horse stampede to evade a posse out for him.  Hathaway fills us in as we go along: big boss rancher & son Dennis Hopper leading the hunt over that ‘murder’; Chill Wills & daughter Diane Varsi as sympathetic locals willing to give a hand; Murray, a deadly shot yet shy with guns/shy with girls, forced to confront both issues.  That horse stampede and a few other big set pieces, camouflaging what’s really a Chamber Western, with Hathaway in full logistical control of action scenes big & small; equally smooth handling shadowy interiors and spectacular California locations to rival John Ford’s Monument Valley.  Only Daniele Amfitheatrof’s score seriously letting down the side.  That, and a single action sequence that relies on unconvincing process work.  The film’s relative obscurity as unjust as the murder charge Murray’s running away from.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Paraphrasing Jean Renoir on Westerns: ‘I always wanted to make one.  Basically, they’re all the same which, as an artist, gives you complete freedom.’

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: That’s the film’s working title on our poster.  At least as good as the one they chose.

THE DUKE (2020)

In what proved to be his last feature, the normally dependable Roger Michell (only 65 when he died in 2021) makes a rather strenuous attempt to recapture the old Ealing Studio comic spirit with the improbable true tale of Kempton Bunton, an eccentric middle-class Brit with a passion for lost causes, bad playwriting, and (possibly) art theft.  Specifically, a valuable Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington.  Defending himself in political/philosophic terms, with whimsically excellent legal representation* (what is ownership?), his court appearances win just the sort of popular support he’s never been able to find crusading against larger injustices, like the BBC annual subscription fee.  But victory thru notoriety is still victory, even if it means jail time.  Oh, the wife may grumble between domestic employment, the two grown sons drift in & out of relationships, seasonal jobs & their old bedroom, but it’s the principle of the thing.  Jim Broadbent & Helen Mirren are splendid, as usual, but a quarter of a century too old for these two.  And there’s something off-putting, even condescending in the way Broadbent’s disdainful character is treated.  (The screenwriters all but showing up on set to pat him on the head.)  The Ealing films brought empathy to their monomaniacs without having to stoop.   Their eccentrics on screen were . . . us.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *Try THE LAVENDER HILL MOB/'51 as an Ealing starter.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-lavender-hill-mob-1951.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *That’s Matthew Goode on defense, walking off with all his scenes and nearly the whole pic.  Perhaps the film would have played better told from his POV.

A PÁL UTCAI FIÚK / THE BOYS OF PAUL STREET (1968)

Ferenc Molnár’s classic pre-WWI novel on rival Budapest boy gangs (one teen/one tween), once a classroom staple in Eastern Europe (like GERMINAL in France or HUCKLEBERRY FINN in the States), with half a dozen silent to mini-series adaptations, was probably best served by Frank Borzage in Hollywood’s NO GREATER GLORY/’34 (updated to the Depression Era*) and in this Oscar nom’d period telling from Hungary’s Zoltán Fábri.  The story remains largely the same, a YA fable for grown-ups that's also a blistering allegory for the upcoming Great War.  Fighting over rights to a vacant warehouse lot to use as an exclusive playground, the boys’ quasi-military maneuvers and corporal punishments for oath-breakers is both parody and deadly serious business.  The earlier version leans on sentiment while this homegrown remake fixes on Molnar’s comic/ironic tone thru triumph & tragedy, giving an expansive view of the loyalties and cruelties of youth.  If only the cast & style didn’t have that late-‘60s Disney house-style look.  Everything too clean, too cute, too Teen Beat magazine, with freshly washed cobblestones in the street and tousled locks on the boys.  Fortunately, Molnar’s storyline overrides a lot, and halfway thru, during a ‘capture the flag’ raid in enemy territory, his unique mixture of heartless & heartbreaking starts to come across in devastating fashion.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Here's a link to Borzage’s equally fine version mentioned above.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/02/no-greater-glory-1934.html

THE TURNING POINT (1952)

After bumping up from perennial leading man to A-list topper via SUNSET BOULEVARD/’50, William Holden’s string of ‘50s classics left even solid genre fare, like this William Dieterle mob exposé, lost in the shuffle.  (Also not helped by sharing a title with an unrelated prestige-item multi-Oscar-nominated 1977 film.*)  Here, Holden’s big city crime reporter worries that long time pal Edmond O’Brien, new D.A. on the mob beat, doesn’t know what he’s getting into.  And he’s right since O’Brien’s policeman Dad is already compromised by various favors he’s been trading for years (mostly cash for info) with Ed Begley’s modern businessman mob head; even more because O’Brien’s classy secretary/fiancée (Alexis Smith), quickly succumbs to Holden’s manly charms . . . and height, a helpful two or three inches taller than Smith’s 5'9".  The investigation and pursuit are fairly straightforward, but a fair amount of suspense going toward the climax and real interest throughout in watching Dieterle join the Hollywood bandwagon transitionng (partially) toward real location shooting, with cinematographer Lionel Lindon finding all sorts of interest whenever they move onto real city streets and actual building interiors.  A boxing-match sports arena finale really kicks ass.  Plus a mini-fest of character actors even in tiny roles and a debut for Carolyn Jones busy making like Judy Holliday in her one scene.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *More undeservedly ‘lost’ Holden in Rudolph Maté’s UNION STATION/’50.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/union-station-1950.html

CONTEST:  What actor in this film shares a birth name with a fellow Canadian who became a Hollywood movie star?  Name the two stars, along with the shared birth name, to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.  (Assuming I can get hold of it!)

REGENERATION / BEHIND THE LINES (1987)

Novelist Pat Barker had recently won The Booker Prize (for another book) when her WWI novel was adapted into this reasonably effective, if rather conventional film; script Allan Scott, direction Gillies MacKinnon.  Set at an officer convalescence hospital in a peacefully splendid pastoral setting, a very grand manor near Edinburgh, Jonathan Pryce is top doc at the well-staffed facility, gently trying to prod his charges thru mental traumas so they can quickly be sent back to the trenches; all expected War is Hell/War is Madness tropes front & center.  Jonny Lee Miller functions as a sort of baseline case, his ‘recovery’ less attributable to the good doctor’s services than to the simple pleasures of finding romance with a townie.  What really interests the filmmakers (if perhaps not the target audience) is When Siegfried Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, nonpareil British war poets; one rich, famous, published/the other discovered only after war’s end.*  It makes for serviceable drama, but not a surprise in sight, even when we jump in and out of the battle-lines.  Only a brief terrifying visit to a sort of electronic torture chamber of a clinic jars us out of our comfort zone.  Elsewhere, the horrors of war supplanted by a wish to book a room for the verdant lodgings and group sing-a-longs.  Not the takeaway we’re looking for.

DOUBLE-BILL:  British filmmaker Terence Davies covers similar territory in BENEDICTION/’21.  (not seen here)  This ‘marmite’ of a filmmaker, after two unequivocal masterpieces, has turned mannered & self-indulgent.  But perhaps a lack of conventionality is what's needed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Sassoon not there for medical reasons, but political/philosophical ones having publically denounced the war as having turned into an act of aggression.

DER RÄUBER / THE ROBBER (2010)

From Austria, a chilling tru-crime story that could just as easily been called THE RUNNER (DER LÄUFER?) as THE ROBBER.  Charting the rise & fall of Johann Rettenberger, a new ex-con who uses his skill as a top Marathoner to facilitate a series of one-man bank robberies before literally running away scot-free.  With little reason behind his actions (cash left untouched under his bed), his behavior more hardwired DNA than malice, turning to violence & murder when trapped.  Unreadable and unstoppable on a normal human scale, logically amoral and utterly ruthless, he’s Nihilistic Killer Rabbit meets Existential Energizer Bunny.  Co-writer/director,  Benjamin Heisenberg stages riveting Buster Keaton worthy cityscape chases (on foot thru paths & parks/in cars via street & alleyways), kinetically edited into fugues of pursuit.  Andreas Lust is the riveting actor who makes it all believable, with both the single-mindedness and the bod to do it.  (Though not the concave butt typical of long-distance runners, impressively on display when he’s with the girl from the parolee employment service.)  Eventually, he’ll run out of steam, run out of luck & run out of caring, but the mad dash there is grimly compelling stuff.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *The Greeks always staged a comic ‘chaser’ after tragedy.  You can do much the same with COPS/’22, a comic short with Buster Keaton on the run from an entire city police force.

NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1948)

Unstoppable short story man Cornell Woolrich brought a new twist to the old saw about a phony stage psychic who fears his predictions are starting to come true.*  Noired up at Paramount, transformative cinematographer John F. Seitz guided megger John Farrow to a personal best while someone (studio exec turned producer Endre Bohem?) did much the same for corrupt, sad-eyed beauty Gail Russell as the girl whose death Robinson foresees, but hopes to stop . . . perhaps with his own.  Twenty years ago, Robinson was working a high-class psychic mind-reading act with fiancée Virginia Bruce & best pal Jerome Cowan when unbidden visions started to come true (at the horse track, in the stock market, even saving a kid’s life), unnerving him into quitting and eventually running out on his pals.  Two decades on, his former partners have died, leaving daughter Russell who Eddie G. ‘sees’ as headed for trouble.  And since everything he says turns out sooner or later to be true, boyfriend John Lund and even no-nonsense detective William Demarest take note, surrounding Russell with 24-hr. protection as time runs out.  Cunningly designed and trimmed to the bone (just 80"), the film is shockingly effective in spite of a pat final explanation too concrete to match the general sense of mystery and fatalism that catches at the throat of the film’s alternate reality.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Here’s two: Claude Rains following a similar path in THE CLAIRVOYANT/’35 and Hitchcock’s swansong, FAMILY PLOT/’76, teasing Barbara Harris with hints of it.

MARY OF SCOTLAND (1936)

The dead giveaway are the frame-busting close-ups of Katharine Hepburn as Queen Mary.  Unheard of in a John Ford film, a cinematic sign the guy had fallen seriously for his miscast star in this misbegotten adaption of the 1933 Theatre Guild hit Maxwell Anderson wrote for Helen Hayes.  People still debate what sort of affair it was.  Intellectual pals?  Physical?, Platonic?*  Whatever it was, it didn’t translate to screen in their sole collaboration, a costly flop Hepburn's career couldn’t afford about the doomed Scottish Queen who ran afoul of Elizabeth I when she gave birth to Britain’s likely heir; pissed off the Scottish reform movement as a Catholic; then married for love after a politically appropriate marriage blew up . . . literally.  (Real story: the bomb missed the husband so he was strangled in the adjoining garden by men sent by Mary’s next husband.  Yikes!)  Plenty to work with here.  Too much?  With Hepburn aquiver with teary emotion and Ford trying to cover up with marching bagpipers and jaunty Scottish airs.  Coming off a jaw-dropping run in the past two years (Will Rogers hits; THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND; making Jean Arthur a top star; his biggest prestige piece in THE INFORMER), Ford settled  for getaways with Hepburn on his yacht and a visit with her East Coast family to make up for this one.  Only co-star Fredric March (braying Anderson’s faux Elizabethan free-verse) and cinematographer Joe August get out alive.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Many a Queen Mary film out there.  Try Vanessa Redgrave vs Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth I in the unexpectedly tasty MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS/’71.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/01/anne-of-thousand-days-1969-mary-queen.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Though Ford & Hepburn retained a close friendship till he died (Ford, whose wife was Mary, signaled his dual devotion renaming Helen in THE QUIET MAN as Mary-Kate), Spencer Tracy, another dark Irish soul with a drinking problem, took over as soulmate.