RAAT AKELI HAI (2020)

Handsomely mounted murder mystery/police procedural from India (the tone half CHINATOWN/half Agatha Christie whodunnit) is a bit like watching one of those BritBox crime shows where you’re not quite sure who everyone is or why the maid did it, but liked it anyway.  (As if playing a game of CLUE with twice the usual suspects, double the rooms and three lead pipes.)  It starts particularly well as a semi-truck runs a car off the road before finishing off the crawling victims.  It’s followed by a big wedding party where the mother of police detective Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) hunts up possible brides for her middle-aged boy.  (Typical blunt response: ‘Your son is much too dark for me!’)  But the main story (which eventually ties in with the double prologue)  involves the murder of a rich politician, possibly by the youthful bride who slept her way into his heart for cash.  Now she’ll inherit all.  Naturally she’s innocent; naturally Siddiqui interested, even protective; naturally the rest of the family want to pin the murder on this interloper and save the family fortune.  But his boss at Police Headquarters wants the case quickly taken care of, the sex worker wife charged and local political grumbling smoothed over.  But with his lead officer being shot at as he digs deeper and that officer's junior partner working against him, the truth may end up buried with the innocent.  The whole family seems involved in the murder either directly or tangentially as class, caste & cultural lines of demarcation come into play.  A fun watch even when you’re a bit lost, and with one of those train station farewell sequences that turns into a romantic epiphany.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *While it does feature a Private Investigator, no one is murdered in Billy Wilder’s LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON/’57.  But its train station finale might have been the model here.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/love-in-afternoon-1957.html

G.I. BLUES (1960)

For Elvis Presley, returning to film after completing his two-years military service, it was that old Hollywood story: The Catastrophe of Success.  Quickly signed by producer Hal Wallis after his national tv breakthru, Presley made three films fast enough to beat the draft (one on loan, two very good) that caught a raw side of Presley never to be seen again.  Once back from Germany, the rough edges were largely gone, he now played ‘The King,’ no longer dangerous but safe enough for this film’s babysitting climax.  No wonder Wallis assigned him to child specialist Norman Taurog as his regular director.  And no wonder the films became all pablum.*  They made pots of money, but let the creative tank run dry.  Some at least had tempting song lists; not here.  In this reintroduction, even the classical crossovers he regularly put in the mix were no match for ‘It’s Now Or Never’ (‘O Sole Mio’) nor ‘I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’ (‘Plaisir d’Amour’), but the instantly forgettable ‘Tonight Is So Right For Love,’ wrenched out of Jacques Offenbach's TALES OF HOFFMAN bacarolle.  And the plot is an old standby, the date (a misused Juliet Prowse) that starts as a sordid bet between soldier boys that turns into tru-love.*  With two years to develop something, this is what Wallis & Co. came up with?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The exception to Presley’s financially successful  buncombe was the film he made, almost by accident, right after this, FLAMING STAR/’60.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/03/flaming-star-1960.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A walk in the park with Prowse does provide the only visually arresting moment in the pic when the pair stop to watch a Punch & Judy show and Elvis pops up in the puppet proscenium.

A CIELO ABIERTO / UPON OPEN SKY (2023)

Best known for scripting early Road Movies for Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, here Guillermo Arriaga switches gears to write a Road Movie for his two kids, Mariana Arriaga & Santiago Arriaga in a joint directing debut.  And nepo-darlings or no, they all take to the screen in a perfectly natural manner.  Same for a cast of newcomers on this modest revenge saga on a case of unpunished vehicular manslaughter and its aftermath.  It’s 1995, two years after a semi-truck plowed into a car carrying father & 12-yr-old son heading North on a hunting trip.  The older son stayed home, not doing well enough in school to come along, and now obsessed with the accident (if it was an accident) and a kind of survivor’s guilt.  For two years he’s been haunting ‘junker’ lots looking for clues or some connection to follow and now has come up with a name & an address.  Heading North, he’s without much of a plan other than to confront the man.  He’s got the recovered younger brother in tow, as well as a new step-sister they barely know.  He’s also got a gun to back him up, but barely enough cash to get there and back.  For the film, the big problem is that you can guess exactly how the third act is going to play out, but the trip, along with the solid film technique keep you watching.  And while it’s fairly common to shoot a period film in matching period style, the Arriagas skip past the ‘90s indie scene and head farther back stylistically to what you might expect from an ‘70s indies pic.  A decision that pans out for them, perfectly dovetailing with the material and the flat land they pass thru.  A bleak beauty pervading the film’s look.  And if it’s all a bit generous in running time and goes overboard in giving youthful folly the benefit of the doubt, the film doesn’t plead for sympathy and delivers enough eccentric bumps along the way to more than merely hold attention.  (Though you wish they’d take that extra shot to show the food the kids order at diners along the way!)  And when the younger brother, now two years older and nearly a foot taller than he was before the crash, revisits some of the places he'd been, revealing how much he’s grown in two years, it packs an emotional wallop and acknowledgment of loss in a minute or two that films running two-and-a-half hours fail to match.

INTERLUDE (1957)

Second (and least) of three 1930s John M. Stahl films remade in the ‘50s by Douglas Sirk for Universal producer Ross Hunter.  (Hunter likely brought all three to Sirk’s attention.)  The other two much better known and all four films hold interest: MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION/’35 ‘54 and IMITATION OF LIFE/’34; ‘59; but INTERLUDE (WHEN TOMORROW COMES in 1939) doesn’t take nearly as well to Sirk stylistics with its light romance & CinemaScope travelogue elements in & around Salzburg reacting negatively once it receives a Gothic blood transfusion right out of JANE EYRE.  Plain Jane (or rather June) Allyson is an American in Germany who drops the nice all-American doctor everyone assumes she’s going to marry when Rossano Brazzi’s famous symphonic conductor sets eyes on her.  But all ain’t smooth sailing because . . . he’s already married.  (Of course.)  Worse, his wife is rapidly going insane.  (Does that make it okay?)  And as there’s no castle tower to lock her up in, furtive romance is the best Brazzi can offer.  Stahl was luckier with his leads: Irene Dunne & Charles Boyer, just off LOVE AFFAIR/’39, are far more comfortable & charming together; and somehow making Boyer a classical pianist rather than a conductor, adds intimacy to Stahl’s straightforward style on b&w studio sets rather than TechniColor overseas locations.  And Dunne, a waitress who happens to sing Schubert, brings common-sense & common-sensibility to the impossible situation.  Allyson weirdly overdressed all thru the film even feels physically uncomfortable.  To their credit, both films aim for adult tones with unresolved endings, but it sure worked better in ‘39.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Brazzi is better than most actors who pretend to conduct, but why do they all signal on the beat, rather than lead/anticipate?  European conductors in particular almost comically ahead of the musicians response.  (Maybe that’s why they do it this way in film.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  James Cain’s novel was used yet again (INTERLUDE/’68) with Oskar Werner as the conductor (not seen here), but stick to Boyer/Dunne in WHEN TOMORROW COMES.  (Use the MAKSQUIBS Search Box to find the other Stahl/Sirk originals & remakes.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/10/when-tomorrow-comes-1939.html

FIREWORKS / STRANIZZA D'AMURI (2023)

Well-reviewed ‘Coming-of-Gay’ story, fictional but apparently inspired (initiated might be a better word) by a real incident of gay bashing (and worse) that took place in 1980 Sicily*, near a town that still feels like it’s 1950.  Giuseppe Fiorello, who’s been acting for decades, makes a directing debut at 52, and it shows, the film going on for two-and-a quarter hours, repeating points two or three times.  No doubt his heart is in the right place, but story beats & visual memories feel borrowed from other films and stock photos, piggybacked on a real event to add gravitas.  The leads are late teen boys; one from a happy family of fireworks specialists; the other from a miserable home where he’s recently returned from reformatory and is living with his mom and her lover, a bullying garage owner.  Labeled as the town ‘faggot’ by locals, he (and a moped he’s delivering) meets-cute by crashing into the kid from that happy fireworks family who's on his moped, and a quick friendship flares into flirtation before Fiorello closes the door on us (literally) from viewing further activities.  Busy with fireworks jobs over the holiday season, intimacy grows when Dad becomes too ill to work.  (Dramatically convenient emphysema/asthma.)  But as word of the teen’s relationship leaks out, guilt, denial, a humbling return to past living quarters, physical blows*, and finally a short-lived reunion.  As political call to action, the film’s about four decades late; as drama it feels about four carbon copies away from the original.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *There’s a lost subplot/character who might have made this film work, a straight local who tries to sexually abuse the kid.  Later, when toughs come in to beat the kid up, he seems to be seething.  As if thinking, he’s not your faggot; he’s my faggot.  Nothing nearly as dramatically dangerous is touched on here.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Note the film takes place in 1982.

MEN OF THE FIGHING LADY (1954)

With major hostilities coming to an end in 1953, Hollywood must have felt it time (or just commercially viable) to bring its big guns to the Korean War.  Hence Paramount releasing a starry adaptation of a James Michener’s bestseller, THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI/’54.*  A hot ticket item that likely explains this far more modest rush job (in theaters months before BRIDGES) with less starry M-G-M contract leads in an adaptation of a James Michener magazine article.  They do however put Michener himself in the film (played by Louis Calhern) as a visiting journalist even though the film’s main story about a blinded pilot being talked down to try and land on an aircraft carrier isn’t by Michener but Commander Harry Burns.  Elsewise, it’s one of those Portrait of a Ship films, heavily larded with actual war footage (some pretty hair-raising) in unmatched stock.  Painfully out of shape Frank Lovejoy leads his unit (Van Johnson, Keenan Wynn*, Robert Horton, et al.) in frustrating multiple air runs to take out Korean supply routes.  Legendary second-unit director Andrew Marton (see BEN-HUR/’59) handles first-unit efficiently (he even keeps comic relief to a minimum), but the real reason to listen in is for the full reel of music Miklós Rózsa wrote to accompany the ‘blind’ flight back to ship.  There’s no vocal component, but it’s basically a cantata for aircraft and wounded pilot that outdoes anything else in here.  It’d make a knockout symphonic piece on any program.  And as to Korean War follow-ups?  Never quite happened in a big way on what’s often called the Forgotten War.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Look quick for an early appearance of Jerry Mathers (later The ‘Beaver’) as Wynn’s 6-yr-old kid sending Christmas Greetings by film. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *As mentioned, BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI, not without a pretentious philosophic angle, but awfully well-crafted in its last couple of reels.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/07/bridges-at-toko-ri-1954.html

OUT OF MY MIND (2024)

Though hardly shy on the predigested dramatic components that plagued After-School Specials of year’s past, this adaptation of Sharon M. Draper’s novel about a sixth-grader with Cerebral Palsy (wheelchair-bound; iffy muscle control; nonverbal) is largely effective, touching and blissfully free of worthiness.  The narrative moving forward on two parallel tracks as real-life CP lead Phoebe-Rae Taylor ('speaking' with the imagined voice of Jennifer Aniston) leaves her unchallenging Special Ed program to ‘mainstream’ once a week in a ‘regular’ sixth-grade classroom with natural peers; then dares herself to try and win a spot as one of her school’s Whiz Kids and compete for the State Championship on a televised event.  Winner goes on the Nationals in D.C.  And while most dramatic turns can be seen coming (there’s even a race to the finish line), a neat touch shows up when her success adversely affects the one friend she’s made in her new school.  Well handled by cast & crew, though on this kind of film, with so many formulaic elements, the real creative force isn't necessarily the director (Amber Sealey), but often a hands-on producer.  But how to award credit when there are TWELVE of them?  Regardless, the essence of the film can be seen in its strongest scene, driven by the film’s strongest perf, when Taylor gets a fancy, very costly speech-assist device and for the first time in her life is able to verbally welcome ‘Daddy’ home .  That’s busy journeyman actor Luke Kirby* taking over the film for the moment as he quietly breaks down hearing his daughter ‘speak’ for the first time.*  You may, too.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Kirby earns instant empathy even with lots of competition surrounding him.  Hard to see why he doesn’t have a higher profile.  Too much the chameleon?  He won an EMMY playing Lenny Bruce on THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL  (not seen here).  Or is it that he looks a bit like too many other better known, more established actors?

DOUBLE-BILL:  *When the equivalent moment comes to Helen Keller in THE MIRACLE WORKER/’62 (it’s when deaf-blind Helen verbalizes ‘Wa-wa’ and we know her teacher has finally reached her intellectually), it’s the climax of the story.  Here, verbalization is more teeing-off point for ginned up dramatic moments & competition at school.

LA FORTUNA DI ESSERE DONNA / WHAT A WOMAN! (1956)

Italian director Alessandro Blasetti had already paired Sophia Loren & Marcello Mastroianni in a couple of films when they squeezed in this third, made on the cusp of Loren’s upcoming Hollywood debut.  Maybe that explains why this one feels like a rush job.*   Mastroianni’s something of a free-lance paparazzo (the term not actually in use before another Mastroianni film, LA DOLCE VITA/’60) who happens to snap a shot of Loren fixing her stockings after grabbing a ride with an all too grabby driver.  And when the sexy pic lands on a Rome magazine cover, her life goes topsy-turvy with offers for representation, publicity shoots, modeling, movie roles . . . the works.  Does Marcello stand a chance against a smooth operator like Charles Boyer, a classy agent rep who happens to be a Count.*  (Secret: he also happens to be married.)  That’s about it for plot, but the stars are good company, Blasetti has a way with big party scenes (check out the Maria Callas lookalike at Loren’s first fancy reception), and also has an amusing way of tackling Sophia as a character by treating her as if she weren’t on location, but was the location.  ‘Where are we shooting tomorrow?  Oh, yeah, Loren . . . bring all the lenses.’   Inconsequential, but fun.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *One of the previous films, TOO BAD SHE’S BAD/’54, with taxi-driver Marcello joining Sophia’s trio of grifters just to be near her, is darn good.  OR:  To see Blasetti at his best, try the heartfelt pre-Neo-Realist FOUR STEP IN THE CLOUDS/4 PASSI FRA LE NUVOLE/’42 which was remade to reasonable effect as A WALK IN THE CLOUDS/’95 with Keanu Reeves & Anthony Quinn.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *In standard Cinecittà Studio style, all dialogue dubbed/looped in post-production, largely with their own voices.  But alas, not Boyer so we don’t get to hear if his Italian is as indecipherable as his English.

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL (2024)

In 1973, the trick for director Fred Zinnemann was to build suspense on an international thriller where you knew going in that cold-blooded hitman the Jackal would fail to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle.  In 2024, the trick for this reboot is that these big-ticket streaming items only go into profit if you get a second season so you can’t kill your lead.  Zinnemann triumphantly solved his problem; this rethink ignores its, but still finds plenty of ways to stumble thru nearly eight extra hours where every expansion is a diminution of the original’s cool precision.  Here, hitman Eddie Redmayne is no man without a shadow, but a (wait for it) loving family man!  With idiots for in-laws and (as an actor) zero chemistry with wife & child.  (The only emotional note comes when Jackal seems to connect in the ‘gay cover’ subplot, an elaboration from the earlier film.)  The hunters, British MI6 (?) replacing the amusingly drab methodical deskmen & bureaucrats of 1973, seem to come from other streaming series with a lead investigator who somehow manages to needlessly lose four or five people early on (including two agents) and not only isn’t instantly removed from the case, but gets what amounts to a vote of confidence.  Jackal’s target a Master-of-the-Universe technology geek (think Elon Musk/Steve Jobs), a laughably inadequate substitute for de Gaulle.  Meanwhile director Paul Wilmshurst (or someone - the series has multiple helmers) blows the filming on three or four pivotal assassination attempts before failing (twice!) to sell the ridiculous idea that you can get off a precision shot while riding sea waves on a small boat a couple of miles away from your target.  (Heck, my weather forecaster can’t tell me if it’s going to rain tomorrow.)  Credit for running a few action set pieces with flair, some military flashbacks meant to give Jackal psychological background are decent enough (if exactly the sort of Freudian explanation Jackal should not have) along with some neatly turned car chase scenes.  I know, car chase scenes, not what made the book and subsequent feature film such original thrillers back in the day.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  No surprise: THE DAY OF THE JACKAL/’73  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/06/day-of-jackal-1973.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID;  With freckles you could see from outer space, Redmayne’s Jackal must be the most spotable fugitive on the planet, even in disguise.  I had more trouble locating corporate villain Charles Dance in the first couple of episodes.   (BTW - He’s the Jackal’s likely Season Two target.)

CRAIG'S WIFE (1936)

George Kelly’s 1926 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the one about an over-controlling wife who cares only about her home and meticulous housekeeping, is now written off as hopelessly dated (it’s not) and all too obvious (it is), but was popular enough to run the season.  Filmed three times: a 1928 silent version now lost; from Dorothy Arzner with Rosalind Russell; then remade in 1950 by Vincent Sherman for Joan Crawford.  This one is opened up thru traditional means by filming incidents only spoken of in the play, which keeps a lot of melodrama (murder/suicide; deathbed hospital meeting; fiancé’s cab ride to the rescue) dropped in 1950.  Yet the real difference comes not from different backstories, but in their approach to the self-delusional Mrs. Craig as she hugs her home close to her breast, sucking the air out of everything else.  One plays neurotic; the other psychotic.  The surprise is Crawford goes for neurotic while Russell’s all in on psychotic.  Not at all what you’d expect.  Born only a year apart, it makes Russell a full 15 years younger when she played the role; and she's as stylishly dressed & handsome as she ever was on film.  (For Crawford, it was 1950.)  And while they’re both painfully transparent (so too both husbands - 1936 John Boles; 1950 Wendell Corey -  and each thick enough on film to sell it), presumably it’s what playwright Kelly wanted.  But only Azner celebrates this artificiality, and in doing so, elevates the film to fable so that even when you laugh at it, the laugh just may stick in your throat.  All in all, with the silent lost to Hollywood’s bottomless oceanic archive, this is surely the best version of the story.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: You’ll find the Crawford version, HARRIET CRAIG, covered here:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/harriet-craig-1950.html    OR: The love-withholding clean-freak character Mary Tyler Moore played in ORDINARY PEOPLE/’80 might well be the child Craig’s Wife never had.

SHARK (1969)

Director Samuel Fuller, the Man with the Tabloid Touch, hadn’t made a feature in five years when he took on this lowball assignment, a water-logged thriller designed for quick payoff in the international market.  It’s got a pretty lousy rep, Fuller disassociated himself from it after the producers wanted to use footage of a stunt diver who died on the shoot, while journeyman Mexican director Rafael Portillo did some scenes.  (Which?)  Yet no pall of crumminess hangs over the film, it’s all bright energy and probably exactly what everyone involved must have expected.  A pre-stardom Burt Reynold (working under his own thinning hair) looks like Brando and sounds like Sinatra as a cocky gunrunner caught with his pants down when his cargo blows up (his truck explodes a fraction of a second before impact) leaving him to wander the desert until he stumbles into a corrupt town and a new gig  helping sunken ship salvagers Barry Sullivan & Mexican diva Silvia Pinal.  And Fuller loads on all the usual filler: Cute local kid to show Reynolds the ropes and get under his skin?  √  Alcoholic doc to get the DTs just when he needs to operate?  √  (Arthur Kennedy: weirdly good.)  A shark attack when the men dive for the underwater bars of gold?  √  Pinal needlessly exposing her breasts for Euro-sales?  ☒  Oh, well, you can’t have everything.  Fuller (or his stunt coordinator) goes overboard on the fights (see Reynolds needlessly screw up his knees), plus lousy stock shots, bad sound and a post-Code super ‘60s cynical ending.  For a bad film, what’s not to like?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Eleven years would pass before Fuller directed another feature.

ADIEU LES CONS / BYE BYE MORONS (2020)

Easy to see why this shaggy dog of a movie earned big bucks & major awards in France.  The film, from writer/director/lead actor Albert Dupontel, is rude, silly, fun & appalling in the rough manner of sophisticated French slapstick.  (Did I mention rude?)  And it’s just as easy to see why it didn’t get Stateside distribution.  That cruelly goofy tone lost at the Old & New World border on a story that opens with a fatal diagnosis for salon owner Virginia Efira, doomed to die from some auto-immune disease after decades of breathing in toxic fumes at work.  And she has unfinished personal business to attend to: a ‘lost’ son given up in a teenage adoption.  After a complicated bit of narrative obfuscation, Efira is joined on the hunt by middle-aged A.I. whiz Dupontel, himself about to be replaced at work by younger/cheaper hires, and by blind company researcher Nicolas Marié, styled to look like Dr. Strangelove.  Together, these three will follow an unlikely path to a successful finish, but cause enough damage & suspicion along the way to have the entire city police force hunt them down.  Best when Marié revels in blind-man’s-bluff gags where he’s the butt of painful disability slapstick rarely seen since the heyday of W.C. Fields.*  Dupontel won Best Director awards on this, but, no Blake Edwards he, he’s forced to chop up too many gags that beg to be played in one.*  The first half of the film, setting up the situation and inter-personal relationships, a bit of an over-edited mess.  But you tumble to it.  And the leads are all so damn likable you hope for them to have their fondest hopes fulfilled.  It makes the left-hand turn toward THELMA AND LOUISE at the end feel particularly desperate & unearned.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Fields & the blind customer is in IT’S A GIFT/’33.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-gift-1933.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The rule is, write-up the film at hand, not the film you wish you were watching.  Nevertheless, the ‘fix’ to the ending is too obvious not to offer.  Mom’s auto-immune illness?  Only possible cure a bone marrow transplant.  But since she has no relatives . . . Wait!  What about that ‘lost’ son.  Voila!  Now we’re Hollywood remake ready.

THE KING (2019)

Back in the late 1930s, Orson Welles rejiggered Shakespeare’s lineup of British historical plays into something he called FIVE KINGS.  Eventually reduced, refined & filmed in 1966 to legendary effect as FALSTAFF/CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, whittled largely out of HENRY IV: Parts One & Two.  But his original mash-up proved extremely influential, not only in subtle expansions to HENRY V/’44;’89 for Laurence Olivier & Kenneth Branagh (both stars making  smash film directing debuts), but also in THE HOLLOW CROWN/’12, an all-star prestige mini for Richard Eyre.  And now we can see it used again, just minus the Shakespeare!*  The template remains, Elizabethan structure don’tcha know, and with one significant character elevated from Hi-Lo Comic Mentor to Noblest Lollard of them all!  But the actual words we hear are from David Michôd who also directs and Joel Edgerton who also plays the elevated character just mentioned: Falstaff.  (Why they didn’t go back to the fellow’s real name, Oldcastle, beyond me.)  And while this remains a whale of a tale (young Henry V matures overnight once Dad dies and puts down conspiracies before taking his small army into France exposing his ruthless heroism), this well-received NetFlix release seems to have been quickly forgotten in spite of a cast rife with hot stars like Timothée Chalamet and Robert Pattinson.  Pattinson, by far the best thing in here, is also the sole member of the cast not to get completely caught up speaking all his lines in fashionable croaky whispers meant to connote modern naturalism.  (It’s Steppenwolf meets The Method, as strained thru RADA technique.)   Fortunately, the production improves in the last act when we go outside for battles in sunlight and fields boggy from last night’s rain.  But you’ll still spend too much time wondering how lanky King Chalamet can lift those heavy broad swords in battle or why he puts up with Lily-Rose Depp’s laughably Woman-of-Today Princess Catherine.  Unhappy fact, Henry dead at 33, only two years after his marriage.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The script’s version of events possibly more inaccurate than Shakespeare.  A first!

HER TWELVE MEN. (1954)

Stately British beauty Greer Garson, red of hair/long of vowel, never fully recaptured the prestige & popularity of her war year films (1939 - 1945), but carried on to diminishing returns till this final film under her M-G-M contract.  (She made only two features as leading lady after this.)  Still, someone had the graceful idea of having her finish as she started; debuting as beloved teacher’s wife in GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS/’39, she’d make a farewell playing a sort of beloved Mrs. Chips.  It’s nearly the only good idea in here.  Technically a widow (she’d already been separated), she’s hired as the first female teacher at The Oaks, a snooty private school for boys.  Inexperienced, she’s condescended to by fellow faculty member Robert Ryan and wooed by rich benefactor Barry Sullivan after she manages to get thru to his troubled son.  The film’s real problem not that you guess all the outcomes, but that it’s all so dull.  Running jokes include having her coffee always boil over and having her charges always call her ‘Sir.”  (The latter rather endearing,)  But typically stolid direction by Robert Z. Leonard doesn’t help, nor disinterest from producer John Houseman, stuck with this studio assignment between passion projects JULIUS CAESAR /’53 (the one with Brando as Marc Antony) and the excellent EXECUTIVE SUITE/’54.  On a happier note, the inevitable warmup between Ryan & Garson as they belt out ’The Twelve Days of Christmas’ with the ‘holdover’ school boys, gives us a break by starting at Day Five and clearing the hell out at Day Eight.  Close call.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Some of the kids obviously ‘parked’ at the school by disinterested parents (now there's a subject for a film!), but in a rather appalling attempt to help one of these lonely kids, Garson’s character is shown faking letters to him which she mails as if they came from his mother.  Imagine the psychiatric bills of the future when he finds out who actually wrote them.  Yikes!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Thanks to Robert Donat’s miraculously clean playing as Mr. Chips, Garson’s initial appeal is hard to miss; and she comes thru even more strongly against Ronald Colman in her other James Hilton project, RANDOM HARVEST/’42.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/goodbye-mr-chips-1939.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/random-harvest-1942.html

THE TEACHER / UCITELKA (2016)

Hard not to see allegorical aspects to 1983 Czechoslovakian society at large in this darkly comic fable about a new High School teacher with strong Communist Party ideas and even stronger Communist Party connections back in Communist Block days, pre-Czech Republic.  But the film works even better without linking it to anything other than its main players, the individually affected students, parents & teachers playing out deadly serious games of teenage Realpolitik advancement.  (BTW - the film ends with titles indicating futures for the three main kids, so perhaps fact based?)  You know where you stand right from the start as teacher Zuzana Mauréry introduces herself to her new class before having each student stand up one-by-one and let her know what their parents do for a living.  How else to call in favors in exchange for preferential treatment?  Too poor to buy your way in?  Household chores are an option: an apartment to clean, appliances to fix, errands to run for Teacher or a Soviet era shop queue to stand in and wait.  ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to her needs.’  What could be more proper!  And as butter wouldn’t melt in Teacher’s mouth, not only does she get away with it, she gains considerable approval among many parents.  Something we discover when she goes too far in ‘disciplining’ students with failed exam scores, bringing on complaints and a parent/principal conference.  Writer Petr Jarchovský and director Jan Hrebejk use the meeting as a perfect structural device to break up the timeline by visualizing recent events at home and at school, then going back to the pivotal meeting.  Beautifully handled by all.  And for those who find some of the teacher’s monstrous actions too transparent to imagine they’d work, you may be underestimating how blitheringly awful & obvious someone in power can be in a micro-society like secondary school.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Plenty of opportunities to see how Stateside schools fail their students.  Try going back to a classic that appeared just about the time the U.S. system started falling apart in UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE/’67.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/up-down-staircase-1967.html

LADY L (1965)

Another over-produced dud for Sophia Loren from movie-mogul husband Carlo Ponti.  (His creative energies must have been going into DOCTOR ZHIVAGO that year.)  Adapted as a lux romp by Peter Ustinov (he writes, directs, dubs & cameos), Romain Gary’s bestseller on exuberant turn-of-the-last-century laundress Loren who gets in over her head in political affairs (much like her MADAME SANS GÊNE/’61) when she’s mistaken for a bawd at a bawdy house by anarchist-on-the-run Paul Newman.  Hiding from authorities; bombing theaters; getting the current ‘Party Line’ at clandestine cell meetings; it might just play if only there were some romantic spark between Loren & Newman.  (Per Ustinov, instant antipathy on and off set.)  Fortunately, halfway in, David Niven appears as a Duke on the hunt for spouse & heir; finds both in Loren (literally, she’s already pregnant); and helps Newman escape to gain Loren’s hand in marriage.  Niven can’t do much for Ustinov’s epigrammatic clunkers or clear out the extras clogging the frame in yards of fabric, but at least he knows how to play the dialogue, tossing wise counsel & witticisms over his shoulder like spilt salt while Newman stomps on them and Sophia covers with a one-size-fits-all smile.  ( . . . and that size is LARGE.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One truly funny line to savor.  Upon hearing of a morning duel between the Prime Minister and a cabinet member: ‘Well, it is a coalition government.’ 

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Ustinov directed only a handful of features.  Best by far, the one he’d made most recently: BILLY BUDD/’62.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/billy-budd-1962.html

CONTEST:  Newman repeats a suspenseful set piece from this film in next year’s TORN CURTAIN/’66.  Name the situation to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choice.

AU NOM DE MA FILLE / IN HER NAME (2016)

Writer/director Vincent Garenq doesn’t let anyone off the hook in this fact-based story of a father’s 30-year search for justice after losing a daughter.  The viewer left not with a sense of triumph at justice served, but with a bitter aftertaste on the whole affair.  Daniel Auteuil refuses to court pity as the father, a real-life Inspector Javert finding obstacle after obstacle (legal, logistical, international) in building his case not against some saintly Jean Valjean figure, but to bring down a slick, psychopathic doctor (Sebastian Koch) who lured his wife into an affair (stalking’s more like it) then, years later, took advantage of the daughter, Kalinka, during a summer visit.  Auteuil’s father admirable in dogged pursuit, but hardly likable, quickly sees thru the doctor’s lies after the girl mysteriously dies, but that’s the only quick action he’ll have in his pursuit of justice, burning thru 30 years of his life living up to a promise made to his late daughter.  In doing so, running out the patience of a son and a sympathetic new partner he might have had a second family with.  His monomania using up all his energy.  Just as troubling, his ex-wife’s denial in the face of mounting evidence, unwilling to admit to a role in events even after she’s left the doctor.  Garenq lets this play out in short sharp shocks, jumping back in a year or two later.  It’s very effective, with power games played behind the scenes by legal systems working at cross-purposes to defend international border integrity.  A well-told, but most distressing story.

DB/LINK:  And now for something completely different . . .  While Auteuil’s serious roles get more attention (or is it just better international distribution?), his range is impressive as seen in a much earlier, wild & goofy swashbuckler in a tradition long thought unrecoverable.  Yet with an old director and an old tale, this 1997 version of LE BOSSU puts it across with panache.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/le-bossuon-guard-1997.html

JUROR #2 (2024)

Currently 94, Clint Eastwood’s cinematic swansonging continues.  Fortunately, for the most part, the projects have been darn interesting.  (THE MULE/’18 probably strongest of this late flourishing: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-mule-2018.html.)  This time he stays off-screen to direct an original script by Jonathan A. Abrams.  Original if you don’t know the jury-room dramatics of 12 ANGRY MEN/’57 or the guilty man charged with solving a crime he likely committed.  (See THE BIG CLOCK/’48 with Ray Milland or NO WAY OUT/’87 with Kevin Costner which share source material.)  Here, the ‘guilty’ juror is Nicholas Hoult, trying to thread the needle between letting off a defendant he knows didn’t kill his own wife and keeping himself far from suspicion.  Cleanly handled by Eastwood & well cast (in addition to Hoult; D.A. Toni Collette; J.K. Simmons a jurist with background issues; Kiefer Sutherland in a bit because he always wanted to work with Eastwood; and a very good Chris Messina as Public Defender.*)  If only the first act and last half of the third were as good as the middle section, where Eastwood loosens up a bit and lets natural consequences turn the screws of the twisty plot.  But glaringly convenient loopholes in the first act, to say nothing of a voir dire so cursory it would have had both lawyers barred for life, needlessly stumble.  (Has anyone ever been empaneled on a jury without being asked if they knew anyone, let alone were employed on a police force?)  Then, they chose the ‘wrong’ ending, bringing back Collette when it’s Simmons who ought to be knocking at the door.  You’d think someone was in a rush to wrap this up before fixing the script.  Oh yeah . . . 94.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Regardless of quality, the shabby treatment from Warner Bros. in releasing the film, little publicity, shortened theatrical window in spite of excellent notices, was a disgraceful way to treat a loyal filmmaker who’s done so much (and made so much) for the industry and particularly Warners where he’s long parked his production company shingle after moving from Universal decades ago.  Shame on Warners CEO David Zaslav.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *On the debit side, some of the ‘ethnic’ characterizations might charitably be called ‘retro.’

LA PISCINE / THE SWIMMING POOL (1969)

Writer/director Jacques Deray, little seen Stateside (this, BORSALINO/’70, anything else?), known for slick crime flicks, must have been jonesing for art house caché when he went all Michelangelo Antonioni on this one-off nihilistic tease of a thriller.  Even getting Alain Delon (real deal Antonioni from L’ECLISSE/’62) to star with real-life ex Romy Schneider as house-sitting lovers whose delicately balanced carefree existence is shattered when longtime bosom-buddy Maurice Ronet stops by and becomes the hedonist who came to dinner, along with his recently found late-teen daughter.  That’s Mod-Brit icon Jane Birkin, who proves a bosom-buddy of a different sort.  What could go wrong?  But if Antonioni’s modus operandi turned ‘No Man is an Island’ on its head into All Men are Islands (and just might vanish on one), Deray finds little more than gracefully proportioned volume in couture bathing suits to hang a tale on.  Unquestionably yummy to look at in restored EastmanColor, but sporting borrowed style, philosophies and general ennui.  Not commentary on man’s vanishing point, but merely fashionable appliqué.  Deray, lost in his own artsy contrivance, eventually copitulating to wan police procedural in a post-murder third act, played in slow motion.  It feels closer to Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN/’66* than anything by Antonioni.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Though on record as disliking this film, Luca Guadagnino’s remake, A BIGGER SPLASH/’15, beefs up backstories, but largely keeps story beats.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/10/a-bigger-splash-2015.html

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Unlike Deray, breaking into the art house market by suppressing his genre instincts, Jean-Pierre Melville digs deeper into genre to refine his rep, also with Alain Delon on board in LE SAMOURAÏ/’67.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/le-samourai-1967.html 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *With the Michel Legrand soundtrack (and disconcertingly flat vocals by Ruth Price) to prove it.

THELMA. (2024)

Likable at best, this overpraised/over-hyped comic number gets by on audience goodwill for its two geriatric leads and misplaced enthusiasm (make that chutzpah) from all-thumbs writer/director Josh Margolin, leaping from the ranks of production assistant on this debut.  Ninety-something June Squibb, bubbe to layabout slacker Fred Hechinger (characterization applied like impasto on canvas), has just been scammed out of ten grand by father/son lowlifes (Malcolm MacDowell/Aidan Fiske), but determined to get it back with an assist from fellow senior Richard Roundtree and his motor-scooter.  The film at its best when avoiding its plot and just hanging out with fading foggies (barely holding on to homes or in assisted living units), detailing the war against physical & mental decline.  Touching, clear-eyed and  funny.  But Margolin turns cuddly cute at the mere thought of narrative action as well as making the middle generation (i.e. Squibb’s kids/Hechinger’s parents) dumbest of all.  Squibb is fun to watch.  What a late bloomer!  B’way debut as a replacement in GYPSY when she was thirty; film debut at 63; Oscar nom’d at 86.  But even she must yield to Roundtree, in his last role, stealing every moment he’s on-screen.  Why was he so little used in his last decades?  (Looking great, too.)  To judge from this, the loss was considerable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  To see what’s missing, David Lynch at his considerable best, most sympathetic and least quirky, dealing with some of the same issues is warm, witty and, at times, honestly wretched in THE STRAIGHT STORY/’99.

‘TIS THE SEASON: CHRISTMAS MOVIES OFF THE ALGORITHM

Like Thanksgiving Dinner, holiday movies the whole family will watch together are few and fixed in concrete.  A loop of maybe a dozen films that run from IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE to ELF.  But since even green bean casserole needs the occasional swap out (actually, it needs to go permanently), and as recent efforts at cracking the Christmas Movie Code either try too hard or go all Hallmarky on you, here’s a modest mini-sampler from our site to your home viewing station.  Movie mavens can simply type CHRISTMAS in the MAKSQUIBS Search Box (Main Site/Top Left Corner -- SmartPhoners scroll down to find the Main Site LINK) to bring up scores of Posts that at least mention Christmas - about half will be Christmas movies.  But here’s a starter pack of four to get you past the usual algorithmic suggestions.  All fully explained when you Click on the Film Post LINKS.  

For A CHRISTMAS CAROL look to MR. MAGOO/’62.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/05/mr-magoos-christmas-carol-1962.html   

For an epilogue that's loaded with Christmas cheer, COMFORT AND JOY/’84  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/comfort-and-joy-1984.html   

For buried treasure in Golden Age Hollywood (script by Preston Sturges): REMEMBER THE NIGHT/’40.  Why isn’t this beauty on everyone’s list?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/remember-night-1940.html    

For Continental Family Crisis, A CHRISTMAS TALE/’08.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/un-conte-de-noel-christmas-tale-2008.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Add your fave in the COMMENTS.  But try and keep to films you think are perennially overlooked.

THE REVOLUTIONARY (1970)

Left-wing counter-culture & Revolution in the air; ah, the late ‘60s - early ‘70s political shift among the so-called youth generation.  Old-school movie studios furious to find they’re out of the Zeitgeist; worse, missing their cut.  EASY RIDER/’69 caught the wave, at least at the box-office.  More typical was old Hollywood showing clueless response with duds like Stanley Kramer’s RPM/’70; those post M*A*S*H*/’70 Elliott Gould flops; or this inept Dostoevski wannabe that more justly could have been called THE HORNY ANARCHIST.  Jon Voight (MIDNIGHT COWBOY behind; DELIVERANCE just ahead, so at his peak) 32 and already a decade too old (as is the whole cast) plays a college dropout subletting Raskolnikov’s hovel while putting out flyers for the university radical left.  That is when he’s not propositioning any equally horny female in the cell.  But a letter from the draft board offers a quick tour of duty and that leads to info on an upcoming raid.  Going AWOL to pass on the word, he ends up joining an even more radical gang (Robert Duvall seems involved) and becomes the man of choice to play backup on an actual bomb attack against an unsympathetic judge.  Director Paul Williams (not the singer/songwriter) shooting in England, can’t catch the spirit of the times (or anything else come to think of it*) then wimps out with a ‘Lady or the Tiger’ ending guaranteed to satisfy no one.  Who was Voight’s agent at the time?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Looking for a 1970 film on Revolution?  How about subbing in The French Revolution and the knockabout silliness/delight of START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT ME.  Still hilarious, sadly half forgotten.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/02/start-revolution-without-me-1970.html 

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *One of those films where unpolished amateurism in acting & production is meant to be read as naturalism and ‘keeping it real.’

MAGICIAN: THE ASTONISHING LIFE AND WORK OF ORSON WELLES (2014)

Master editor Chuck Workman’s workmanlike documentary on Orson Welles gets the basics more or less right, and makes a perfectly fair & reasonable intro for neophyte Wellesians looking for the quick tour.  But regrettably conventional for such an iconoclast, a man who blew up all the performing arts except for acting where he’d rumble away using his natural talent (and weight) at being what he called a 'King Player.'  But after his prodigal teen years (that’d be before he was officially dubbed Boy Wonder), Workman can’t convey the seismic before-and-after shift he brought to stints in theater, radio and film; all popular media remade by his imagination by the time he was 25.  And, in spite of what’s usually written about his early fade-out (true enough if you swallow the idea that Hollywood is the sole measurement of achievement), actually peaking when he hit 50, not really such an unusual age for an artist to stop fresh growth.  And while Workman manages to hit on a few useful Talking Heads to interview (or just let blather), the ratio of wheat to chaff is the standard 50%.  (Note that Steven Spielberg, who largely repeats expected encomiums, could have really made a difference for Welles in the year before his death, when Welles came tantalizingly close to setting up an autobiographical drama about the 1937 staging of Marc Blitzstein's agit-prop musical play THE CRADLE WILL ROCK with Rupert Everett playing the 21-yr-old Welles, co-starring the then Mrs. Steven Spielberg, Amy Irving.  Imagine if Spielberg, rather than saving up platitudes for a future documentary on Welles had just put up the 2 mill to complete the film’s financing.  Instead, Tim Robbins made that film (CRADLE WILL ROCK/’99) with a starry cast, his own script and a budget ten times what Welles had asked for.  Told with unearned snarky tone, Robbins’ unlikable ode lost what Welles’ film would have cost ten times over.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  In the decade since this appeared, two major Welles resurrections: The twisted legal rights to both CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT/’65 and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND/’18 have been solved, making the first available in a superb restoration (with good audio!), and the later, at long last, finished.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-other-side-of-wind-2018-1970-75.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/chimes-at-midnight-aka-falstaff-1965.html

DOUBLE-BILL:  Richard Linklater’s ME AND ORSON WELLES/’08 is best of the Welles’ bio-pics.

REMEMBER THE DAY (1941)

While Sentimental Education stories never go out of fashion (especially in youth-obsessed Hollywood where producers all think they must have been the first person to ever get wised-up), tales of Sentimental Educators wax & wane.  But after GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS hit big (1934 book/1939 film), they started to come out of the woodwork.  This effective number, based on a B’way play that had a modest run a year after CHIPS was published, is a female driven variant.  Claudette Colbert plays the now elderly teacher, in D.C. to hear a speech by a former favored pupil, now the likely next President.  She thinks back to her beginnings as a young substitute at a small town grammar school; of the fellow instructor she stumbled into love & marriage with; and of currying a student’s potential, the future Presidential hopeful, while gently tamping down on his schoolboy crush for her that threatened to spiral into paralyzing self-pity & depression.  The film really ought to be a giant pile of mush.  Yet, even more than CHIPS, it never bogs down in spite of splashing in every possible puddle of genre sentiment & tropes.  Credit sec playing by the cast in keeping things under control: Colbert, brisk & enchanting at all ages; a surprisingly hunky John Payne; an OTT turn that thaws from Anne Revere as the spinster teacher Colbert is on track to become; and a spunky turn from Master Douglas Croft as the boy who’ll grow up to be a great man.*  But will he remember his beloved teacher after all these years?  (Whadda you think?)  All of this steadied by director Henry King who had a gift for getting away with three-hanky weepies by not having anyone press too hard.  Always at his best in small town Americana (as opposed to the prestige items production chief Darryl F. Zanuck forced on him), this one right in his sweet-spot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Croft never got his career back in gear after returning from WWII service.  But in his early teens, he was briefly the go-to kid to play the film's star 'as a boy' in the opening reel: Gary Cooper (PRIDE OF THE YANKEES), James Cagney (YANKEE DOODLE DANDY), Glenn Ford (FLIGHT LIEUTENANT) and Ronald Reagan (KING’S ROW).

LAAPATAA LADIES / LOST LADIES (2023)

Crowd-pleasing hit with a light feminist slant, it’s India’s official Oscar submission for 'Best International Feature Film’ and you’ll see why as director Kiran Rai hits nothing but net in just her second feature after an inexplicable 13-yr gap.  The basic plot description makes it sound like a painfully broad rural comedy of ill-manners (something on Telemundo?; a special HEE-HAW episode?) as two just-married brides, veiled & similarly dressed, escorted by husbands they hardly know, get mixed up in a crowded train and wind up being hurriedly dragged off by the ‘wrong’ husband to different cities.  Cue laughtrack & screwball sound effects.  But no!  Nothing of the sort.  Instead, a smart, touching, funny, forward looking story of morbidly unassertive ladies in 2001, too reticent or depressed by their arranged marriages to speak up for themselves.  Then slowly finding their bearings thru unexpectedly caring communities and the empowerment of individual purpose while nearly a week races by before their increasingly frustrated husbands and the seemingly incompetent police force start to connect the dots.  The film beautifully caught by director Rai as a Northern India rural time capsule and commentary on changing social attitudes & conventions, focused on the possibility of reinvention or perhaps just reintroduction.  The tidy ending too neat by half as male authority reasserts in a positive way, but it’s that kind of semi-serious dramedy and, in its way, awfully satisfying.  With a bewitchingly eccentric supporting cast, lovely leads and catchy songs to link the episodic nature of what turns out to be more than a guilty pleasure.

THE BOY AND THE HERON / KIMITACHI WA DÔ IKIRU KA (2023)

At 80+, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki is hardly the first master artist to unretire once too often.  He even called himself out in advance: ‘There’s nothing more pathetic than telling the world you’ll retire because of your age, then making yet another comeback.  Is it truly possible to accept how pathetic that is, and do it anyway?’  Well, credit Miyazaki on honesty.  Or something near it since this new film proves that in his case the spirit is weak while the flesh is willing.  Ready, willing & able as HERON proves technically fresh, even thrilling.  Especially in kinetic set pieces of fire & destruction during WWII firebombing, and in just about anything seen dashing across the screen.  (Innovative backwash motion behind the fore-figures jarring in a good way.)  It’s the memory & imaginative aspects that pall in this Japanese post-war story as ‘the boy’ deals with the loss of his mother and the replacement wife his father plans to marry that confuse, smothered under fantastic beasts (‘the heron’ and others), a time tunnel and an overstuffed narrative.  Also a wise old conjuror worried no one will continue his meta-physical labors to keep the world safe.  (Who might that old man be?)  The dreamworld, which takes up most of the film, not only an æsthetic mess, but revealing of how Miyazaki often overloads his plate (and pallette), it’s his Achilles’s heel.  Oh for the days of restraint and repose shown in past glories like TOTORO/’88 and PORCO ROSSO/’92.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/porco-rosso-1992.html)  An aspect of his best work perfectly recaptured in his previous swansong THE WIND RISES/’13.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/12/kaze-tachinu-wind-rises-2013.html)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  While hardly fixing the problems, the film is better in Japanese than in its English dub.  If you’re too young to handle subtitles, you’re probably too young for the film.

DOUBLE-BILL:  BORO THE CATERPILLAR/’18; a presumptive suggestion as this late Miyazaki short (not seen here) only shows at the Ghibli Museum in Japan.

POLITICS (1931)

Second and best of the three jerry-rigged comic/dramatic vehicles built for the great Marie Dressler and the not-so-great Polly Moran.  (REDUCING/’31 and PROSPERITY/’32 the other two.)  Best because it’s the most serious; Dressler’s better comic instincts fed off of serious, even tragic issues.  It’s a LYSISTRATA variation, here with small town ladies withholding all wifely services until reform candidate Dressler is voted in as Mayor.  Specifically, to close the illegal Speak Easy/private liquor club where a gangland shooting has just killed a local girl who was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Dressler daughter Karen Morley was there too, secretly meeting her fiancé who was ‘winged’ in the incident and is now hiding in the Dressler attic.  Yikes!  (Dressler a widow who rents rooms to Moran and stuttering husband Roscoe Ates.)  If word got out, Dressler’s run as Clean-Up candidate would be fatally compromised.  Exactly what local booze lord John Miljan is hoping for.*  Very uneven stuff under Charles Reisner’s hit-or-miss direction*, plus a BlackFace gag from a soot-filled chimney to cringe your way past.  But it hardly matters when Dressler is on form, as she very much is here.  What she does is so far removed from what we now consider acting, it can take a bit to find your way to her.  Pulling faces, physically maulng her own flesh (there’s a lot of it!), yet impossible to put up resistance.  She’ll eventually find your empathetic weak spot and pounce.  Along the way, adding an extra comic ‘take.’  (Usually some grotesque second or third look.  Topped by two or three scenes of utter seriousness, where she’ll be grounded & still as a pedestal (not a statue, a pedestal).  Watch her in discussion with her daughter once the romance comes out in the open.  At times, you wonder: ‘What the hell is she doing . . . and who else could possibly get away with it?’  With anyone else, it’d be just an actor’s trick.  Except with Dressler, it’s no trick at all, but a slice of truth.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The other two Dressler/Moran pics: REDUCING/’31; PROSPERITY/’32.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/06/reducing-1931.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/prosperity-1932.html   

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The political rumor-mongering Miljan plans against Dressler hardly different than the underhanded campaigning M-G-M production head Irving Thalberg used for real to stop Upton Sinclair & the EPIC Party (End Poverty In California) during the 1934 California Gubernatorial race.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *If you ever needed hard evidence that Buster Keaton was fully responsible for directing his silent classics regardless of what the billing says, note this film’s Charles Reisner is ‘listed’ as co-director with Keaton on STEAMBOAT BILL, JR./’28.

FEHÉR TENYÉR / WHITE PALMS (2006)

Implausibility be damned!*  Or it better be if you’re going to watch this winning Hungarian film about a boy gymnast who runs away to join the circus.  Really, that’s the story; Cirque du Soleil in on the production, and it’s damn involving all the way.  Told largely in hop, skip & jump continuity between early 2000s and early 1980s (as if we were on a trampoline which indeed we often are!), we first meet 30-ish Dongó Miklós (Zoltán Miklós Hajdu) in Canada for his new high school athletic coaching job; and then the 12-ish Dongó Miklós of twenty years ago (Orion Radies), the best gymnastic talent in a group being trained by strict/sadistic Coach Puma, a man who disciplines with a razor sharp fencing foil.  His team showing multiple swounds from his punishments.  And no relief at home as parents second his methods because they like the results.  Back in the Canadian present, Dongó slips up on the job, thwacking a teen player when the boy screws up and is immediately called on it by students and parents.  Twenty years on and his old coach hasn’t fully left him.  Back to his own youth where he finally escapes when an opportunity to be an emergency fill-in at a circus trapeze act comes up.  Here’s where plausibility hits the breaking point: making a trapeze debut without rehearsal, in the toughest trick at the Big Top and losing the safety net mid-act.  Yikes!  All this intercut with a present day gymnastic contest where Dongó is competing against the 19-yr-old he’s been assigned to work with after his slap got him all but fired.  It doesn’t all work, but still impossible not to get involved in the dramas & super-fit cast, the circus vs ‘pure’ gymnastics ethos, and the sheer athleticism of a grown Dongó, still in incredible shape.

DOUBLE BILL/LINK: Did someone mention Trapeze Act?  TRAPEZE/’56.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/trapeze-1956.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Though nothing implausible about the 1980s disciplinarian gym coach in Hungarian Communist Block days.

KISMET (1920)

With Otis Skinner as Hajj, the wily Baghdad beggar seeking revenge for himself & marriage for his motherless daughter over the course of one eventful day, Edward Knoblock’s KISMET was for decades one of the great barnstorming companies crisscrossing America’s theaters.  Surprisingly, the play (and for that matter the even more successful musical version in the ‘50s) was never revived on Broadway.  Equally bad for its rep, all four film versions pricey disappointments: this stiff 1920 silent; 1930 in 70mm; 1944 with Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich and TechniColor; 1956 with CinemaScope, Vic Damone (!) and hit tunes deftly lifted from Russian classical composer Borodin.  And while the 1930 spectacular (still with Skinner after two decades in the role) is now lost, the three extant versions make for fascinating comparison as the old play gets progressively defanged of its bloodthirst and nasty tone.  Hajj, beggar/magician in 1920 has mellowed into beggar/poet/philosopher by 1956; his daughter no longer threatened with rape by an enormous half-dressed Black bodyguard; hand amputation for theft not repeated four times for comic effect, but merely serving as a song cue, and so on.  The unbowdlerized 1920 version, directed by Louis J. Gasnier (its surviving physical elements in poor shape) must have been seen as a high ticket item with elaborate trompe-l'œil backdrops and handsome practical sets.  But Gasnier, who shoots & edits in reasonable fashion for the period, gets stuck filming a lot of actors ‘mouthing’ play dialogue and sawing the air with wild hand gesticulation, like a parody of bad silent cinema mime.  Standards in screen naturalism had risen quite a lot by 1920 once Mary Pickford taught everyone how to act with your eyes rather than your hands.  A bit of stage history, but not much of a film.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  You can easily see what this ought to be by screening Douglas Fairbanks’ THE THIEF OF BAGDAD/’24 and future Hajj Ronald Colman in IF I WERE KING/’38.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/thief-of-bagdad-1924.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/if-i-were-king-1938.html

EMILIA PÉREZ (2024)

Jacques Audiard’s audacious new film is probably more great achievement than great moviemaking, but definitely something you’ll want to see.  Best known Stateside for UN PROPHETE/’09 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/un-prophete-prophet-2009.html), Audiard continues his interest in drug underworld stories with this wild take on a Mexican drug lord running a powerful cartel of vicious enforcers with an unusual request for rising young mob lawyer Zoe Saldana.  Give up her current position and take him on exclusively.  All he wants is to keep his power and assets while he ‘disappears,’ transitioning to female before seamlessly returning to wife, kids, assets and power as the ‘dead man’s‘ cousin.  (Or is it sister?  I got a little confused.  His/her children eventually call her Auntie.)  But wait!  Audiard tells the whole tall tale as an ‘integrated’ Mexicali Musical, tunes ranging from Mariachi to Salsa.  ¿Sounds mad, impossible, si¿  It’s enthralling.  Beautifully detailed, staged and acted, even if half the numbers run together melodically.  Best is a serious lament for all the victims, the ’disappeared,’ which ends with a sort of star-filled sky effect of the grieving faces.  (Very Busby Berkeley!)  Told with the structure & style of a ‘40 film musical, but in a world more like ‘50s TechniColored melodrama.  It makes other pastiche cinemaniacs (like, say, Todd Haynes or Canada’s Guy Maddin) look like pikers.  Karla Sofía Gascón is a revelation as Perez, but everyone is superbly cast.  And should you get a case of the giggles at some inappropriate moment, don’t worry, happens regularly with ‘50s melodrama auteurs Sirk, Ray & Minnelli.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL:  Stylistically, this is the EVITA/’96 of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s dreams.

THE MISSING JUROR (1944)

Bargain-basement Columbia Pictures programmer wastes a dandy idea, not in execution (not bad at all), but in development (what does a pencil cost?).  Worth a look anyhoo as an early Budd Boetticher pic.  Known for his lean ‘50s Westerns with Randolph Scott, Boetticher only had two assists and a formulaic BOSTON BLACKIE behind him at the time.  Here’s that dandy idea: George Macready, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife gets a last-minute reprieve from Death Row when nonconformist reporter Jim Bannon uncovers the real murderer.  Yet just a few months later, jurors who’d voted to hang the former prisoner start turning up dead.  Five out of twelve so far and the police still think it’s coincidence.  Meantime, with the reprieved killer having gone mad in jail, and hanging himself before being burnt to a crisp in a fire, who could be out for revenge?  More importantly, who’s next to go of the seven remaining jurors?  Yikes!  Reporter Bannon gets rehired to interview the surviving jurors, but the hits just keep on coming.  Boetticher does a more than decent job with what he’s given, but the film is all but entirely bare-faced exposition, especially the first half, and Macready, with one of the most distinctive voices in Hollywood history, a poor choice for a double role.  (And that stock library music track also not much help.)  Onward Boetticher, onward!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The hangout for reporters and the paper’s editor is a little joint called Wally’s Grotto, a spot where you can get morning ham & eggs for 30¢ and a drink late at night.  Do places like that exist?  When does poor Wally get to sleep?