THE PALACE (2023)

At the Venice Film Festival, where a pretentious piece of shit will routinely get a twenty-minute Standing Ovation (good films get twenty-two), Roman Polanski’s scabrous comedy about an ultra-luxe Swiss-Alps Resort Hotel on New Year’s Eve ‘YK’ got five.  Barely enough time for all the producers & talent to get on stage.  Commercial rollout DOA.  Is it really that bad?  Well, yes and no.  There’s something to be said about Polanski biting the hand that feeds him, taking pot shots at the aging ghouls & gargoyles who populate Price-No-Object resorts & Film Fests for forced holiday fun.  And what a noxious/toxic lot they are!  Especially when catered to by impeccable hotel & personal staff while they attend to the appearance of eternal youth and the pursuit of fresh partners in bed & business.  Less Jonsonian satire than Feydeau farce; less IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD/’63 slapstick greed than the Little Foxes of Blake Edwards’ S.O.B./’81*, but with the Davos crowd & Russian mobsters in for Hollywood hypocrites.  (Note Polanski nipping Edwards’ propped up dead body gag.  Or was he thinking WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S/’89?)  Alas, we can’t recapture the air of disapproval & mortified silence of that Film Fest premiere.  (It’s like seeing Woody Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES/’81 without Manhattan Upper East Side ambience.)  But if Polanski’s comic cruelty works better in small doses within his dramatic vehicles, there’s still a decent ratio of laughs between gross gags about overindulging in caviar, plus some fine Euro-based comedians new to you.  God knows, the ones you do know not at their best.  But if ‘the prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges,’ as Philip Barry said in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY/’40, there’s little uglier than watching them indulge their tastes & fantasies.  For optimal enjoyment, pretend you’re watching a documentary.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Anything mentioned above would do, but go for S.O.B.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/02/sob-1981.html

OR:  For those who think Polanski, now pushing 90, has lost a step, see his previous film, a muscular look at the Dreyfus Affair which received little Stateside attention.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/jaccuse-officer-and-spy-2019.html

MENUS-PLAISIRS - LES TROISGROS (2024)

Still going strong at 94, documentarian Frederick Wiseman brings his now over-refined fly-on-the wall approach to Michel Troisgros’s perennial three-star Michelin restaurant, an unexpectedly informal, unexpected modern establishment in the French countryside near Roanne.   Structured around two food services, lunch & dinner, we spend the bulk of our time (a rather too generous four hours) in the hushed, clinically clean kitchen, and then on the restaurant floor where chef & staff turn maddeningly loquacious.  ‘Michel, I love your stories and philosophizing, but my food is getting cold!’)  In between Ozu-like ‘pillow shots’* of an idyllic countryside, we stop at a farmer’s market and many local sources (goat ranch, farms, vineyards, honey station, cheese ‘caves’ (these masters of maturation the most obsessed), while Michel tours and son César starts officially taking the reins at the restaurant/inn.  And while a few plates have that fussy haute cuisine look (one tasting menu offers a single asparagus stalk as a course; quite a large stalk, but still . . . ), most look devastatingly yummy.  (Who had the balls to bid for ‘craft services?’)   At times, Wiseman’s refusal to interject program info self-defeats (like a waiter who won’t explain a dish), but the sheer level of craft & detail that goes into these dishes comes across as something heroic.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The restaurant’s Zen-like calm mirrored in Wiseman’s use of those Yasujirô Ozu influenced static landscape ‘pillow shots’ in-between sequences.

LINK:  HURRY!  Free on PBS internet sites thru April 20th.  https://www.pbs.org/video/menus-plaisirs-les-troisgros-rbfnou/  

ATTENTON MUST BE PAID:  Hard to believe how many of the guests demand food substitutions or have allergy issues that put much of the menu off-limits.  You wonder why they bother to go and pay 3-star Michelin prices.  Yikes!  Better the cheese loving customer who has the cheese monger serve up six different varieties.  Mmm, cheese.

JUSTINE (1969)

For vet Hollywood helmer George Cukor, a funny thing happened on the way back from winning an Oscar® . . . five years drought between MY FAIR LADY/’64 and this salvage operation.  It was old-line producer Pandro Berman to the rescue, stung when art house director Joseph Strick failed to deliver on location in Tunisia, forcing this adaptation (just one part) of Lawrence Durrell’s ALEXANDRIAN QUARTET* to return to the 20th/Fox lot with Cukor taking over.  And while already doomed by a hard to follow script (illegal gun shipments to Palestine hidden beneath the sexually charged mutating affairs among foreigners navigating a debauched 1930s Alexandria) and uneven casting (some Hollywood ringers hopelessly inauthentic and a famously inert perf from gorgeous star Anouk Aimee), what a fascinating watch it is.  Dirk Bogarde, Anna Karina, Philippe Noiret, John Vernon, outstanding whether diplomat, whore or agent, and even Aimee able to give Michael York’s tush a run for the money.  (York’s Cubist facial planes a great help here as naïf lovestruck professor.)  With Cukor’s studio artifice far surpassing what we see of the disappointing remains of the location footage.  Leon Shamroy’s lush lensing, Irene Sharaff’s riotous costuming for orgies & social events.  The thing doesn’t add up, how could it?, but you’ll savor all the tasty bits of this curate’s egg of a film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The only comparable Cukor film is his equally compromised, equally rich BHOWANI JUNCTION/’56.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/bhowani-junction-1956.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Durrell’s four cross-pollinated novels largely untouched on film.  (So too Proust, with whom he's often compared.)  This 20th Century literary classic sounds perfect as a long-form streamer or as tony PBS fare.  Is it still read?  Or perhaps it's too politically incorrect.  (For this 1969 film, Alexandria’s infamous 1930s Child Brothel cast with veiled ‘little people.’  Actual kids only seen looking in.)

PHASE IV (1973)

‘Yes, but what I really want to do is direct.’  That old Hollywood punchline is usually tagged on ‘personality’ actors, but here, acclaimed graphic artist Saul Bass, whose posters & credit sequences for Hitchcock & Preminger are the stuff of legend, picks up the megaphone for this small-budget Sci-Fi Horror.  Even more surprising, it works!  A real creep out on an eclipse that changes the nature of all the ants on Earth, defanging their natural enemies & turning various ant species from combative to single collective.  The film a three-hander for two scientists (Nigel Davenport; Michael Murphy), sent to an isolated desert lab to work out ant communication & a plan for human survival, who wind up hosting a left-behind local (stowaway Lynne Frederick), who plays Eve to the men’s double Adam act.  Davenport the nihilist; Murphy the idealist; Frederick the author of the lab’s original sin, ruining the experiment before she's catalyst to transformation.  Not without gauche moments and all too obvious moves & motivations, but also with many memorable visuals (expected) and ideas (less expected).  One shot of rows & rows of pale poisoned ant warriors on their backs, surveyed by their black ant compatriots quite spectacular, and not only conceptually.  The end proves more than the budget (or Bass) can properly handle, but taken for what it is, this film should have led to further adventures for Bass away from his drafting table.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Why so unknown?  Best guess is that Stateside releasing company Paramount simply didn’t know how to market this sort of thing.  Pity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Scientists experimenting in an isolated lab a genre unto itself in this period.  Skipping over all those orbiting Space Station variants, you might try John Sturges THE SATAN BUG/’65 or Robert Wise THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN/’71.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-satan-bug-1965.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-andromeda-strain-1971.html

CONTEST:  Beware!  SPOILER embedded in this Contest Question.  PHASE IV’S outcome involves the evolution of a hybrid creature combining ant and human elements.  It’s not all that far from the précis of a faux trailer seen in a comic movie about the film biz.  Name the Faux Feature title and the film the trailer comes from to win our usual prize, a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

THE OUTSIDERS (1983)

The classic YA novel, converted by Francis Coppola into something of an homage to ‘50s melodrama & stylistics (think Douglas Sirk; Nicholas Ray; and a soupçon of Elia Kazan).  With a frankly amazing cast of up & comers (Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane & Patrick Swayze already fully-formed actors among Method Actor wannabes C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, et al.), its story, as if you didn’t know, very WEST SIDE STORY/REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but set in ‘60s small-town SouthWest where only teens seem to live, and wrong-side-of-the-track Greasers grumble & eventually rumble with cashmere-clad wealthy ‘Socs.’   Nowadays, the film plays as something of a parody of itself.  Heck, it did back then, too, but what’s become even more clear are the gender issues that drive the plot.  Not sexual issues; gender.  If readers & non-readers alike know one thing about author S.E. Hinton, it's that her manuscript was submitted with initials in hope that publishers would assume the author was male.  And something of the same thing is going on with the male heavy cast of protagonists: they’re really girls.  (Does that explain the gender-neutral nicknames?)  Sure they’re gross & rough, messy & ready for a fight, but also obsessed with GONE WITH THE WIND.*  (Have you ever met a teenage boy who’s read it?)  More touchy-feely than the budding ‘tween psychologists in STAND BY ME/’86, they cuddle for warmth, sleep with one head tilted on a BFF’s shoulder, and have æsthetic/philosophical heart-to-hearts on the impermanence of sunsets when not quoting Robert Frost.  (These deep feelings sure to be used as song cues in the soon-to-open B’way Musical adaptation.)  Getting out of the bath, they alluringly drape a towel on toned torsos to flaunt & flirt while sashaying thru the gang.  And does anyone have an actual, as opposed to an aspirational girlfriend?  Not gay, either.  Nor trans-anything.  Just girls in Greasers clothing.  It explains a lot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  This Write-Up based on the original 1983 1'31" cut.  Twenty years later, Coppola upped the running time by twenty minutes with previously deleted material and tossed his father’s lush score for something more ‘Pop’ oriented, no pun intended.

DOUBLE-BILL:  OUTSIDERS, a big, if brief financial help after ONE FROM THE HEART/’81 bankrupted Coppola’s ZOETROPE, was soon back in the soup when his even artier b&w Hinton followup, RUMBLE FISH/’83, did barely a tenth the business later that year.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Coppola reveling in visual GWTW aspects.  Dramatically tinted long shots with silhouettes bathed in over-saturated autumnal color, opening credits with titles sweeping across the screen and the cast listed by ‘house.’   A particularly neat touch at the time as those famous opening credits had been replaced by a still title shot as the infamous 70mm re-release of GWTW in the ‘mid-60s was forced to re-do the title optical since it no longer fit properly in the cropped image.  The original title design only restored years later.

THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER (1990)

The Anodyne Era in Disney animation began post-JUNGLE BOOK/’67 (last to have Walt’s direct participation) and was ended by THE LITTLE MERMAID/’89.  From this mild lot, THE RESCUERS/’77*, a little adventure in the Deep South for a pair of Manhattan mice, at least had a decent amount of charm, a feisty girl protagonist (still rare at the time), and an outstanding villain in Geraldine Page.  It also made a considerable pile of cash.  So, a belated sequel made sense as the new era got going.  Plus, it offered a great chance to try out game-changing digital animation techniques in the Aussie outback (note PIXAR getting its own section in the end credits), seamlessly blended in with regular hand-drawn leading characters and all those wacky Antipodean critters.  The vistas spectacularly successful; right up there with Chuck Jones’ Monument Valley canyons in those early Cinemascope ‘Road Runner’ shorts.  Now with vertiginous POVs!  If only anything else in here was nearly as good.  Lousy story construction and lazy character development as a fatherless boy tries to save a mammoth mother eagle from a rapacious poacher.  We leap from a prologue so OTT you’re convinced it’s a dream sequence, to pointless use of those two RESCUERS mice (why send them down from Manhattan?), to a villain drawn to look like Jack Palance but voiced by George C. Scott.  (This last one simply weird.  Though give credit to debuting director & producer (Mike Gabriel; Thomas Schumacher) for killing this guy off with the most gruesomely gleeful onscreen death in Disney animation since The Evil Queen went down in a blaze of deep purple in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS/’37.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For detail on the Disney animation revival (and this film’s major flop), see WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY/’09; and for this film’s back story the original RESCUERS.  http://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/03/waking-sleeping-beauty-2009.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-rescuers-1977.html

WEST INDIES (1979)

Long unavailable (its rep undoubtably helped by inaccessibility), now restored, French-Moroccan filmmaker Med Hondo built an agit-prop historical, from Daniel Boukman’s play ‘The Slavers,’ into an unlikely piece of Brechtian Epic Theater.  A big, colorful pageant play about the West Indies struggle for independence, interspersed with musical numbers, staged entirely on a former slave ship (looking incongruously spic-and-span).  It opens in the 20th century as a plebiscite is being debated in what looks like a symbolic kangaroo court of current West Indies rulers: Continue as a French Colony or Risk Independence?  We then jump back to cover episodes from a long miserable history of White domination: slavery; the sugar cane trade; forced immigration to supply cheap labor to Europe; collaboration by ambitious locals; waffling sentiments from a hypocritical Catholic Church.  All the usual suspects.  Ambitious as hell, but Hondo fails short; one more political playwright downed by following what German playwright Bertold Brecht says (intellectual distancing & didactic lessons) rather than what he does (emotional involvement & theatricality).  Here, the caricatures are as stiff in personality as Hondo is in his staging.  (He’s very big on keeping his cast seated.  Movement reserved for the chorus.)  The songs repetitive; dances out of an exotic floorshow.  And it’s not as if this were a great period in French lyric theater; mostly plotless revues for the tourist trade.  Imagine one of Roberto Rossellini’s late, arthritic ‘teaching pictures’ done as a stage musical.  Those films also well reviewed.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Richard Attenborough, a large budget and an all-star cast fall just as short taking on WWI in the form of Brechtian Epic Theater in OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR/’69.  OR:  For eye-popping Hollywood horror on the slave trade, SLAVE SHIP/’37.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/fascinating-and-appalling-this-little.html

FEMME (2023)

Writer/directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping seem weirdly unaware that their well-received debut pic (an expansion of their 2021 short) is such a catch-all of (not-so) New Queer Cinema clichés in every character arc & story beat.  Not badly handled, and very well cast, it feels like an unintentional period piece. 1980s?  (R-rated today, perhaps an X back in the day.)  With George MacKay as a heavily tattooed ‘Boy-O’ type, hanging with his gang of carousing macho bros,  but secretly cruising on the ‘DL’ for a quick lay.  Enter Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Black Drag Queen, between sets, out of ciggies and off to the corner store for a fresh pack, still in full drag.  Calling out MacKay for first ogling and now threatening him, he’s beaten up and left on the street.  Turns out the appeal is mutual, just submerged.  But before too long, domination tropes between alpha male and omega mate start to get complicated.  Dominate male grows feelings; Submissive male gets off on rough treatment.  Tucked in the relationship are the best scenes in the film with Stewart-Jarrett acting as if he’s also going on the ‘DL,’ but in the opposite direction from the opposing team.  The worst scenes involve Stewart-Jarrett’s roommates, a throwback to ‘Fag Hag’ tropes, here split between a gal roomie as confessor and a male roomie in an underhanded play to bust up the inconvenient new coupling.*  Discouraging to see something this retro get so much attention.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Sure enough, a ‘90s novel titled FAG HAG, with the same plotline, was optioned if never filmed.  A 1998 film called FAG HAG unrelated to the book.

THE TRUST (2016)

Separating the wheat from the chaff on mid-career Nicolas Cage projects will no doubt make a fit subject for a PhD thesis some day.  Till then, we’ll have to rely on hearsay to make informed choices.  This one, from a period of mostly cable films churned out six per year 2016 thru 2019, seems reasonably representational and reasonably good . . . within limits.   Playing a crooked Las Vegas cop with crooked cop partner Elijah Wood (the difference in height & width giving off a pleasing Mutt & Jeff vibe), the pair stumble across a possible cash rich drug operation moving deposits from casino to industrial district where it’s warehoused.  But what exactly are they stockpiling?  Cash?  Goods?  Checks?  Chits?  Chips?  Breaking in will require special skills & special tools; along with the filmmaking chops seen in Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI/’55, apparently  not available to writer/director brothers Alex & Benjamin Brewer.  Instead, they opt for tone & atmosphere from the 1980s Neo-Noir revival which only partially hides holes in plot, characterization & motivation.  But Cage keeps the eccentric line readings down to a minimum, Wood stands up nicely to him, and there’s a neatly constructed, decently executed triple-twist ending involving a surprise guest at the heist.  (Plus, Jerry Lewis, in a last appearance, a cameo as Cage’s slightly out-of-it Dad.  Given nothing to do, he still overplays.)  Only 23 of these things left from this period.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Did Cage buy the same brand of black hair dye Steven Seagal uses?

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned RIFIFI/’55.

A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE (1994)

Teeming with self-righteous signifiers, this modest character study of a gay middle-aged bus conductor (Albert Finney) with fixations on Oscar Wilde (he puts on amateur plays at his very conservative Catholic church) and the hunky young bus operator who drives his route, ought to be unbearable.  And we’ve not even mentioned that he regales his regular passengers with daily poetry recitations.  I know, I know, you’re already fleeing for the exits.  But director Suri Krishnamma and writer Barry Devlin consistently walk up to, then step back from the edge of embarrassment, making smart choices that keep the material a little too weird and off-kilter to drown from good intentions.  1963 Dublin (which might as well be 1923 Dublin) is caught with style & accuracy, and the petty squabbles of a little theatre group fit right into the modest epiphanies of what the film has in mind.  Most of all, the acting is outstanding on all fronts, though even Finney can’t quite pull off that Oscar Wilde transfiguration of a climax.  With Brenda Fricker (the ever hopeful sister still trying to fix up her bachelor brother); Michael Gambon (the butcher who turns on his friend when Wilde’s SALOME replaces THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST); having the scales fall from his eyes over his idealizations of a very young Rufus Sewell (the straight bus operator Finney quietly pines for) and Tara Fitzgerald as the unexpectedly impure Salome he finds riding his bus.  The rest of the cast equally fine.  So too the film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Was this originally developed as a play?  It did eventually turn into a chamber musical.  Two limited-run New York productions, first with Roger Rees and then with Jim Parsons in the Finney role. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  In THE DRESSER/’94, a far more acclaimed, though perhaps lesser film, Finney plays an old-school Shakespearean actor trying to put on a production of LEAR during the London Blitz.

THE NINTH GATE (1999)

Something of a misfiled credit for Roman Polanski & Johnny Depp, and you’ll see why.  Less miss than bunt, this proto DA VINCI CODE/’06 (not seen here) is a bibliographic thriller: religious antiquities division, that sends Depp’s rare books huckster on an international chase to locate the two other copies of a 17th Century Satanic tome owned by eccentric billionaire Frank Langella.  (Golly, why would anyone need all three exiting copies of a book published in 1666 about the Devil?)  Each stop leaves someone dead in Depp’s wake while former book owner/Devil worshipper Lena Olin tries to one-up Langella, and feral-looking Emmanuelle Seigner acts as Depp’s scary Godmother.  Presumably, Polanski was hoping for a ROSEMARY’S BABY vibe, but now seems a little embarrassed by the supernatural element.  (Even more by some unconvincing studio mockup sets for Manhattan shops & apartments.)  He’s much happier shooting handsome Euro-clubby earth-toned interiors that perfectly match all those leather book bindings.  Even better is the shabby chic costume design Anthony Powell gave Depp.  (Depp wears unstructured linen jackets like nobody’s business and generally reminds you what a pleasure he once was to encounter.)  It all leaves Polanski with just enough leeway to play Peck’s Bad Boy with a few signature touches of grotesque humor.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  No doubt, Polanski’s modest level of involvement helped him recharge for his next film, THE PIANIST/’02.  

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned, if you want Polanski Meets the Devil, it’s ROSEMARY’S BABY/’68.

THE TATTERED DRESS (1957)

When producer Albert Zugsmith (not a well-known name, but check out his stellar late ‘50s credits) offered a pre-BEN-HUR Charlton Heston the lead in what would become TOUCH OF EVIL/’58, Heston wasn’t not interested, but wanted to know who’d be directing.  With no one signed, Heston noted that Orson Welles, his probable co-star directed movies, maybe he’d bring something to this rather ordinary film noir police procedural.  Welles, persona non grata as a Hollywood director since MACBETH a decade ago, rewrote the script to heighten perversity, loaded on gothic visual bravura, and generally added filmmaking genius, crazy ‘guest star’ casting & showmanship.  The rest, as they say, is cultural history of the first order.  Or was after a botched initial release, a slowly growing cult reputation, a couple of refined edits to restore his original vision, and voila!; belated acclamation as a masterpiece.  But what might ToE have been like without Welles?  And here’s the answer!  From the year before, when Zugsmith had Welles acting in MAN IN THE SHADOW/’57, this little courtroom drama, smartly directed by Jack Arnold, plays a helluva lot like EVIL . . . without the trimmings.  Jeff Chandler, speaking with Heston’s constipated cadence, is the hotshot defense attorney in a strained marriage to Jeanne Crain between Not Guilty verdicts.  Currently stuck in a sweaty, corrupt, desert town, he quickly gets a couple of rich shits off on a murder charge only to be set up by a fat, sweaty chief of police (Jack Carson in the Welles spot) who makes documents disappear and a perjurer out of juror Gail Russell.  She claims Chandler paid five thou for her vote.  It’s not so much that the story follows EVIL, it’s all in the tone and the look.  You could easily cast one film with the other and it lets you see with remarkable clarity the difference between reasonably good filmmaking (best in the first half, some courtroom speechifying late in the day hardly convinces) and the haphazard genius Welles brought to a similar type of dramaturgy.  Lots of wicked fun, too.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above: MACBETH; ToE; MAN IN THE SHADOW.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/macbeth-1948.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/touch-of-evil-1958.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/man-in-shadow-1957.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The best bit in the whole film sees Carson send a pair of thugs to beat the crap out of Chandler before the trial.  But he’s rescued when a carload of teens rush in.  Not to save him, but to roll the poor guy for whatever’s left in his pockets.  Yikes!  More like this, please.

ANNA (2019)

Hard to know exactly when French writer/director Luc Besson became a hack, certainly long before this project brought on sexual misconduct charges against him, leading to this SPY vs SPY thriller to receive something between a dumped release and a burial.  Of course, there are hacks and there are hacks.  Besson, a technically facile filmmaker to his fingertips, reliably puts out slick watchable product, here with a neat twist to the story and a tricky time-jumping narrative that put all the punch-lines months ahead of the set ups which he jumps back to cover for us.  And the overriding twist even better as the recruitment of Russian beauty Sasha Luss for training as a Paris-based fashion model is really cover for her new life as an international double-agent assassination specialist spy.  Only none of her superiors know she’s really a KGB plant, working for Moscow.  Add bisexual action; John Wick levels of execution action; Hong Kong style Martial Arts acrobatic action sequences; and double-dealing backroom bargaining.  But there’s no kick to the carnage; clarity but no involvement.  If only Luss had a bit of chemistry with her three lovers: KGB-Luke Evans; CIA Cillian Murphy; hot haute model/gal-pal Lera Abova.  Only coming alive against mean boss-lady Helen Mirren, her Ruskie controller.  And thanks goodness for Mirren!  Hilarious playing a cross between Maria Ouspenskaya, Lotte Lenya & Fran Lebowitz.   And, to his credit, Besson knows it, giving Mirren the film’s last line.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Fair to say someone had thoughts of franchise on the brain.  The posters all but scream female James Bond.  But with a big financial loss and Luss's career now treading water, it ain’t happening.

NIGHTMARE (1942)

That generic title isn’t the only secondhand thing in this modestly effective Universal programmer; so too the plot which is largely patterned on Alfred Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS/’35.  Here, Brian Donlevy’s gets Robert Donat’s spot as a London visitor whose chance encounter with a lady in trouble leads to a dead body and his picture in the paper as the presumed murderer.  Yikes!  On the lam, he heads north to find the real culprit, reluctantly helped by a mysterious lady whose antipathy slowly warms to partnership & a love match.  The main structural change combining the two women (originally Lucie Mannheim & Madeleine Carroll) into one, with the murder victim now a different character.  Diana Barrymore, daughter of John, has her highwater film appearance at 20, playing the combined role.  (She’s good, too, but would soon be brought down by the Barrymore curse: drug and/or alcohol addiction.)  Silly stuff, of course, and a far cry from Hitchcock, but not without a bit of swing & style under journeyman director Tim Whelan who got lucky with an unusually strong supporting cast for Universal: Henry Daniell, Arthur Shields, Hans Conreid & John Abbott.  Lesser known Gavin Muir plays the main villain (the man with the missing finger in 39 STEPS, Godfrey Tearle), here running a Fifth Column for the Nazis.  Whelan also got top-tier cinematographer George Barnes and an inventive score out of busy Frank Skinner.  The two also with major Hitchcock connections; Barnes Oscar’d for REBECCA/’40, Skinner about to score SABOTEUR/’42.  If only there were a decent edition around to replace the smeary dupes available on the internet.  Much of Barnes' daringly dark lensing barely visible.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Scripter Dwight Taylor (who wrote PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET/’53 with Sam Fuller -  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/pickup-on-south-street-1953.html) was prescient, writing LONG LOST FATHER/’34 for Diana’s dad John Barrymore, about a long absent father meeting his daughter after twenty years.  Not far off their actual relationship.

LES HIRONDELLES DE KABOUL / THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL (2019)

Strong meat drawn in the style of storybook watercolors (stunningly so, often with characters simplified to little more than a slash & a dab of wash), Zabou Breitman & Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec’s animated film (from Yasmina Khadra’s novel) has a Dickensian narrative pull and structure to it, detailing the lives of a few ‘ordinary’ people in the destroyed city of Kabul under the Taliban where life is very much ‘the worst of times.’  The main characters are a young married couple (University prof; artist), chafing against zealot religious rules & regulations, living in virtual imprisonment in their empty apartment.  (For the wife, having to wear the burka to go out a particular horror.)  And the male jailer at a women’s prison, living thru the final days of his cancer ravaged wife.  An accidental death will bring the two stories together, revealing a chance for escape, but only thru unimaginable tragedy.  The climax a particular horror as a soccer game against a visiting Pakistani team gets a special opening act: political & religious motivated public executions (in a variety of methods) for your approval and entertainment.  If this sort of horror true?  Would a foreign team agree to such a thing?  Devastating stuff, even with the distancing format of a Dickensian drama, presumably straight from the novel.  Here, purposefully done in an enchantingly lovely visual style that only makes the Taliban religious madness & mania stand out in grisly relief.

DOUBLE-BILL: Surprising to see that Marjane Satrapi’s superb PERSEPOLIS/’07, a highly stylized b&w animated film about a girl’s coming-of-age under the Islamic Revolution in Iran, came out five years after Yasmina Khadra’s 2002 novel was published.

WINTER SLEEP (2014)

Winning Cannes’ Grand Jury Prize (shh - that’s second place) on ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA/’11, Iranian filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s returned after three years for the Palme d’Or (that’s first) with this fascinating, if punishing work.  Fascinating in its look at rural Anatolian terrain and people, centered around a relatively wealthy family who run a tourist lodge stunningly set in some hard to reach foothills off the vast Anatolian steppes.  Punishing in its formality, pacing, sheer length (3+ hours) and in detailing an entire culture & society stymied by passive/aggressive behavior; subtly (and not so subtly) attacking relatives, friends, employees, tenants and casual acquaintances in a manner so polite they needn’t act behind their back.  You could pull your hair out in frustration; imagine what it’s like for them!  Top dog is the lodge owner, a former actor and current pontificating bore (with the local newspaper column to prove it), patronizing to one and all in an even-handed manner that only makes it worse.  (Played by Haluk Bilginer, he’s also a James Mason lookalike.)  And with the annoying habit of mostly being right!  Hard to win sympathy when you politely dispossess poor tenants late with  the rent; deal with a disagreeable sister divorced into your household; patronize your much younger wife whose only wish is to do something on her own and play Miss Dilettante Charitable Cause with other people’s donations till it blows up in her face; just as you said it would.  All this disturbingly engrossing as long as you can lower your heartbeat to match Ceylan’s steady but slow pulse.  He certainly manages striking compositions to help get you thru all the dramatic caesurae.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  A personal pet peeve, but does anybody ever believe characters on stage & screen ripping up or burning piles of cash to prove a point?

SUNSHINE (2007)

The sun needs a jumpstart to save life on Earth in this Outer-space Techno-thriller directed by Danny Boyle, script Alex Garland.  Two guys you’d think would know better than to make a 2001 Deep-Think/Deep-Space Sci-Fi statement pic from such folderol.  Boyle,  overworking his self-regarding Mission Quest plot like a comic grabbing his one chance to play Hamlet, piles on space station paraphernalia & graphics to prop up a standard who’ll-die-next storyline (EIGHT LITTLE INDIANS?) as a motley crew of solar astronauts try to reach the drop spot for their atomic payload where a previous gang (of seven) failed to deliver and presumably died.  Cillian Murphy gets the big star push as the noblest techie on board, but had to wait on the big time when the film stalled commercially.  Perhaps because the one big surprise proves just too ridiculous; perhaps because the sun glare backing the major events is so unpleasant on the eyes.*   We don’t usually recommend sunglasses at the movies, but . . .  or maybe one of those solar eclipse safety-view boxes.  Better yet, skip the film along with the shades.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Avoided here, but isn’t this just a sober-sided ARMAGEDDON/’98?  Without the gags; without Michael Bay; without Bruce Willis and the usual blowhards.  Wait, SUNSHINE is sounding better by the minute.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The film might have come with a Migraine Alert.  And the big blunder that sets off a doomsday chain of events, is the equivalent of a man sent to investigate rainstorms, but forgetting to bring his umbrella.

KAIBUTSU / MONSTER (2023)

On the surface, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s new film shares many story & character elements with Ilker Çatak’s equally well-received THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE/’23.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-teachers-lounge-das-lehrerzimmer.html)  Young public school teacher watches helplessly as a small physical incident involving a troubled student rapidly escalates into a major career-threatening fiasco.  But compared to Çatak, Kore-eda is playing fourth-dimensional chess with a story structure of perplexing, yet entirely credible ‘reveals’ reversing how we thought things came about; whom we think is at fault; how the trouble started, who told the first lie; even what we think occurred.  Ideas more in line with Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (A SEPARATION/’11) and at times reminiscent of Kurosawa’s RASHOMON/’50 as we jump back to revisit scenes now told from someone else’s perspective with someone else’s ‘truth.’   Stellar directorial references there, yet Kore-eda retains a personality all his own while parsing out the difference between lies, exaggeration and honest misunderstandings without breaking a sweat . . . or our trust.  A bit too neat in giving everyone a secret to bounce off the main story (for example, the school principal lying about a personal tragedy* or the boy’s younger friend having a bully for a father to explain something the teacher is blamed for), but this ’perfect storm’ of missteps is laid out in such clear patterns, we can easily follow each tit-for-tat error in judgement.  The plot’s a puzzle, but a very human one.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  In spite of the great films mentioned above, what came immediately to mind was William Wyler's classic THESE THREE/’37, also about a child’s lie that blows up to destroy lives.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/these-three-1936.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Don’t Japanese teachers have a union?  They certainly need one!  Though you can't help but wonder how much could have been avoided if the culture weren’t so rigidly polite, held down by restraint.

WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY (2009)

Unexpectedly raw, honest and riveting documentary on the Disney animation renaissance of 1984 - 1994, a unique mix of corporate and artistic gamesmanship, largely told thru original source materials rather than Talking Heads and starry-eyed encomiums.  First man down is Walt Disney son-in-law Ron Miller (as clueless a production head as anyone in town since Spyros Skouras at 20th/Fox in the ‘60s), this paved the way for Roy Disney to play prodigal nephew (of Walt), bearing Frank Wells & Michael Eisner as new co-heads and portent of his return.  Still, after a bit of deadwood animation was cleared out (BLACK CAULDRON/’85 a particularly pricey loss) and the indignation of having the animators moved out of their old legendary building on the Disney lot, fresh shoots quickly generated, fully announcing itself when ‘Under the Sea’ symbolically stopped the show at preview showings of THE LITTLE MERMAID/’89.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-little-mermaid-1989.html)  And that’s when things really get interesting behind-the-scenes as two sudden deaths and the rise of Jeffrey Katzenberg threatened to upset the apple cart.*   With current Disney animation suddenly sputtering where it once hummed, the time couldn’t be better to revisit this period and see the knife’s edge they danced on.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Katzenberg, universally loathed at the studio, comes off as a real life Sammy Glick (as in Budd Schulberg’s WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN), consistently taing credit for decisions he fought against after they succeeded.  And just generally being a dick.

DRAGNET (1954)

Curiouser and curiouser.  As tv viewership rose and movie attendance sank in the ‘50s, two competing ideas fought to reignite box-office: WIDEscreen vs. DEEPscreen; CinemaScope vs. 3D.  And, much like a later battle between Blu-Ray and HD, the fight all but over before it began.  About a year after it started, films shot in 3D were being released ‘flat.’  Whereas WideScreen formats took off in a multitude of aspect ratios & systems.  Which gets us to this feature-length edition of Jack Webb’s popular half-hour tv police procedural; the one with his odd staccato speaking style and underdressed sets.  (Webb never met a wall he didn’t want to strip bare and paint over in matte gray or green.)  The film is soporific, neither a 2-part tv episode reedited to feature length (see DAVY CROCKETT or THE MAN FROM UNCLE/THE SPY WITH MY FACE); nor a free-standing story using little but the tv title (Don Siegel’s THE LINEUP*).  Instead, typical DRAGNET thirty-minute content (a mob murder to solve) drawn out to fill 88" in WarnerColor.  To all intents & purposes, shot as if they were making a 3D film when they ain't.*  Why else action scenes with multiple items directed straight at the camera?  Why else knockout blows delivered right at the audience?  Why else an eighty-eight minute running time? (Due to technical limitations having to do with only two film projectors in most projection booths, those 3D films ran in two 45-minute chunks with an intermission.)  Was director Jack Webb too lazy . . . er, cost-conscious/efficient, to bother restaging for 2D, without gimmicky 3D POV camera positioning, after finding out Warners not only weren’t releasing in 3D anymore, but weren’t shooting in 3D?  Instead, merely cropping the usual 35mm Academy Ratio Aspect (1.37:1) down to 1.85:1?  Webb’s lack of response almost as weird as his mannered ideas on filmmaking & acting.  On the positive side, a fair amount of L.A. location shooting, cool ‘50s men’s ware for the police detectives and a high gloss on the lacquered up/latest model cars to keep interest up in the first act.  But things quickly turn sleepy when 30 minutes of plot get stretched over an hour & a half.  Early views of Dennis Weaver and Richard Boone help, just not enough.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a look at Jack Webb stylistics, try his next, PETE KELLY’S BLUES/’55 in WarnerColor and CinemaScope (2.55:1).  OR: *For something considerably better, Don Siegel’s eye-popping THE LINEUP/’58, mentioned above.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/08/pete-kellys-blues-1955.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-lineup-1958.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *This is largely supposition, but was there another Hollywood production planned & designed for 3D only to have the rug pulled out on them when the format was dropped by their studio, then continued in 2D as if nothing had changed?

MR. BASEBALL (1993)

After famously missing out on Indiana Jones/RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK/’81 when CBS held him to his MAGNUM, P.I. contract, Tom Selleck continued to flirt with, but just miss, the big time on the big screen.*  With the exception of THE LOVE LETTER/’99 (a Kate Capeshaw vanity project), this was his last try to crack feature film as leading man.  And, like his other attempts, much better than its rep or box-office would have you think.  Under imaginative direction from Fred Schepisi (and regular D.P.  Ian Baker), finding new angles on an old game (and no Slo-Mo crap), Selleck’s slumping Yankee gets demoted to Japan for a tune-up and star rehabilitation.  You’ll guess the rest (though a triple twist at the end faked me out), but the fun’s in how West Baseball is West and East Baseball is East and somehow the twain do meet.  Some of the Ugly American cultural clichés probably a bit moldy even in ‘93 (why not make Selleck hip to sushi; ultra-smooth handling chopsticks; slurping noodles to beat the band before his new girl’s relatives noisily join him?).  But having Selleck as self-centered asshole (with a terrific clout at bat) pushes him so far out of his comfort zone, he becomes more interesting to watch than usual.  Elsewise: Japanese manager Ken Takakura* teaches him discipline; Selleck responds by getting him and his team to loosen up.  And about halfway thru, those lessons start showing up, not only on the characters, but in the film DNA.  Fun!  (*And look who dominates the Japanese poster.) 

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Selleck was like a ball player trying to get out of the Minors and join ‘The Show.’  It’s nearly the plot of this pic. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Pace A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN's 'No crying in baseball' rule, this must be the only baseball pic in decades without a tear in sight.

THE SNAKE PIT (1948)

Even progressive films on social issues age better than movies about psychiatry and depictions of theory & treatment.  The latest ‘couch-side’ manner and trendy terminology sure to get ‘bad laughs’ before the first-run engagement ends.*   So credit all involved in this once shocking look at then current Insane Asylum practices for holding up as well as it does, at least up to some easy Freudian explanations laying out the initial causes of Olivia de Havilland’s mental deterioration.  It all goes back to infant issues and bad parenting . . . don’t it always.  Not that this need be wrong, but so neat & tidy; six minutes of flashbacks & narration does the trick.*  But before that, Anatole Litvak’s film remains unsettling & effective (especially when it’s not trying to explain the reasons for her breakdown) and in its eye-popping look at what such public mental facilities were like at the time.  (The film changed laws but decades would pass before many were shut down.)  Leo Genn is solid & sympathetic as a forward-thinking doctor; Mark Stevens is understanding itself as the confused husband; and there’s an unusually strong cast of character actors as patients, all slightly batty/decidedly scary.  Stand-outs include Betsy Blair (Mrs. Gene Kelly at the time), silent & prone to violence; Ann Doran as the toughest ward nurse; Jan Clayton, B’way’s original Julie Jordan in CAROUSEL, singing Dvorák’s ‘Going Home’ toward the end.  But it’s de Havilland’s make-up free honesty & terror along with Litvak’s fearless imagination (the visualization of the title one of the great pull-back shots), that make the film and keep you watching thru missteps.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Generally considered the first Hollywood movie to deal with psychiatric issues in a sanatorium environment, Gregory La Cava’s PRIVATE WORLDS/’35 seems laughably naive when it speaks to causes & treatment, but shows real sophistication in setting up the various hang-ups and relationship crises.  It makes a fascinating watch between laughs, random insight and simplistic advice.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *More than a decade on, Alfred Hitchcock still felt this sort of explanatory summary needed by audiences to end PSYCHO/’60, though he undercuts patness with a final doubting closeup.

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (2003)

Thom Andersens’s superior essay film on Los Angeles and the Movies: How it’s been used; How it’s been seen; How it’s been altered over the years.  Skewing somewhat toward ‘80s and ‘90s pics, but covering most of the last century, he’s held back a bit from the lack of real location shooting in the old studios days (though with exceptions and with studio sets in the mix).  Exceptionally, Andersen’s treatise doesn’t cherry-pick to make predetermined points, he just seems to have seen everything; and seems to show half of it via rapid clips!  (Keep your finger on PAUSE as you’ll want to write down titles for further inquiry.)  He creates a sort of double history/double vision of the town, just don’t call it L.A., Andersen disapproves of the contraction.  And you know he’s on the right path early on with a lovely stop to check on the interior of the much used/much loved Bradbury office building; a wonder of exposed grids; cubicles; cross-hatch gates & walkways.  Another cool section covers L.A. Destroyed.  Many more.  Nice stuff on the different views from locals, adoptees & visitors.  And when he does boil things down to top picks, he chooses well, with extended looks at CHINATOWN; L.A. CONFIDENTIAL; KILLER OF SHEEP; smartly opting for Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE over SHORT CUTS.  Of course, many you’ll decide not to revisit no matter how architecturally, culturally, sociologically interesting.  On the other hand, Bob Hope & Lana Turner in BACHELOR IN PARADISE/’61, directed by INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN’s Jack Arnold?  Count me in!  Andersen’s film a triumph.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Surprised he missed Richard Quine’s STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET/’60 which fits all his criteria and then some.

 DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Many titles mentioned by Andersen can be found right here.  Try using our Search Box, top left corner on the Main Site Full View Web page.  Here’s a LINK to get you started:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/02/killer-of-sheep-1973released-in-77.html

THE HURRICANE (1999)

Producer/director Norman Jewison and his writers must have known the basic material in this largely true Miscarriage-of-Justice story about middle-weight boxer Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, falsely charged with a triple homicide in the ‘60s, would play to an audience two & a half steps ahead of every legal setback, prison humiliation and racial dig.  Worse, without careful handling, the tropes of Black civil impotence and White Savior syndrome (by well-meaning Canadians, no less!) could tarnish even the noblest sentiments.  It explains why the first two acts are tricked out in non-linear fashion, with mini-flashbacks within discrete sequences in the film’s hopscotch timeline; action in the ring shot in b&w; a secondary story involving those Canadians taking in a Black inner-city kid who’ll come to idolize Carter and draw the two stories together for a third act.  Here, the film restarts itself in straightforward fashion as a more traditional detective yarn, a sort of anti-police procedural to uncover the truth.  This turns out to need three acts of its own.  But with everyone now on the same page, the film stops having to reinvent the wheel, Jewison even comfortable enough to toss in a bit of showmanship bringing back his old IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT/’67 star Rod Steiger to act as Fairy Godfather.  Not exactly light on its feet, especially when Denzel Washington’s Carter is asked to over-verbalize his thaw from prison toughness to flawed human grace.  But it works; even when its aim is no higher than (Junior) High School civics class.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Though not Jewish, Jewison’s name helped get him FIDDLER ON THE ROOF/’71.  Perhaps being Canadian (for real this time) landed this one.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Denzel Washington worked himself into fantastic shape to play Carter, but at just over 6', he’s a heavy-weight compared to Carter’s 5'8"/160 lb. frame, something that helps explain the boxer’s fierce personality.

LATIN QUARTER / FRENZY (1945)

Remarkably effective little chiller from British B-pic megger Vernon Sewell, expanding on his debut short, THE MEDIUM/’34, an early Michael Powell writing effort.  Impossibly lux-looking for its budget, like a sumptuous Quota Quickie, with cardboard sets & trick shots creating a turn-of-the-last century Paris in the artist-friendly Latin Quarter.  It opens with a spectacular traveling shot sailing past Notre Dame gargoyles, o’er a miniature model Paree, swooping down to narrow cobblestone streets and tenement life, cafés & hovels.  (Modeled on a famous animated multi-plane shot from PINOCCHIO/’40?)  It soon settles down to a starving artists story as poor young dancer Joan Greenwood (not yet famous, but already purring her lines) becomes eccentric Artist’s model; eccentric Artist’s wife (a marriage of mutual convenience: he gets a model/she gets room & board); then another artist’s mistress; and finally a Missing Model.  And on the very day she’d planned to run off with her lover.*  Months later, some amateur detective work and a couple of terrified psychics will help figure it all out.  No real surprises in the solution, but atmosphere & style play out as if Val Lewton (Hollywood’s Prince of the suggestive psychological paranormal creep-out  -  think CAT PEOPLE/’42) had teamed up with Poverty Row stylist Edgar G. Ulmer.*  If only there were decent prints instead of tv-sourced Public Domain dupes to up the visual ante and give this the presentation it deserves.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That’s Derrick De Marney as Greenwood’s lover, best known for Alfred Hitchcock’s YOUNG AND INNOCENT/’37.  Excellent in a dud-free cast.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *DETOUR/’45, Ulmer’s zero-budget existential masterpiece, was out the same year, but the better Ulmer match is BLUEBEARD/’44, from the year before. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/05/bluebeard-1944.html

THE UNKNOWN (1927) THE MYSTIC (1925)

To the extent that he’s known at all, director Tod Browning is known by his DRACULA, the 1931 Bela Lugosi original, creakyist of Universal’s foundation monster pics.  Truth is, Browning never did become comfortable or find a working rhythm in sound film to match the weird wonders of what survives of his silents.  And that makes this Criterion double-feature doubly appreciated.  UNKNOWN, restored with ten extra minutes to something near its initial release length (10" from a 68" running time no small deal), possibly his best/certainly his sickest film, stars frequent collaborator Lon Chaney in a typically masochistic turn that goes farther than even Chaney dared before or after.  He’s Alonzo the Armless Wonder, a circus performer who specializes in throwing knives with his feet at lovely teenage assistant Joan Crawford.  Naturally he’s in love with her, but there’s a problem: she can’t bear to have a man’s hands touch her.  An unexplained neurosis, but likely stemming from past sexual abuse; perhaps raped by her circus owner father.  But wait, there’s also a solution . . . with a catch: Chaney’s armless wonder ought to be a perfect match, but he has a deep dark secret . . . ARMS!  His merely strapped down for the act, and to hide the telltale double-thumb on his left hand, proof of his guilt in some unspecified, but undoubtedly dreadful crime.  Yet Chaney would do anything (repeat, anything) to have the girl.  And it only grows more perverse from there, taking in the girl’s father, the circus strong man who hopes to overcome her aversion, a medical surgeon who can be blackmailed into performing an unnecessary amputation by a double-thumb.  Yikes!  (And you thought SAW was OTT.)  Utterly extraordinary stuff, which is more than can be said for MYSTIC, it settles for the merely extraordinary.  This one, featuring a favorite Browning trope of a small confidence gang of hustlers ripping off the rich, features a Gypsy psychic (Aileen Pringle, delightful), her Pop, her would-be lover, and American huckster Conway Tearle (excellent!) who brings them Stateside to fleece New York Society with fake spiritual readings and messages from dead loved ones.*  More well-made scenario than UNKNOWN, with twists & reverses, sacred & profane love, even a change-of-heart redemption for a tag ending.  Both silent films as dynamic as Browning’s sound work is lethargic, and with no less atmosphere.  MYSTIC also features truly splendid costumes for Pringle designed by none other than Art Deco specialist Erte.*  (Double-Bill self-explanatory.) 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Dean Hurley’s new soundtrack for THE MYSTIC is designed to mimic the style & even the audio frequency limitations of silent-to-sound transition era synched audio, with basic ‘Foley’ sound effects (steps, closing doors, gun shots) alongside music cues & lacquer disc surface noise from the playback record.  And in THE UNKNOWN, note the visually poetic use of see-thru scrim curtains on many of Crawford’s scenes.  Not a new technique (D.W. Griffith used it to fine effect when The Mountain Girl died in INTOLERANCE/’16 and tableau became tapestry), but it's unexpected lyric visual finesse from Browning. 

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Pringle’s high society act hilariously close to one of those baffling museum-ready Performance Art experiences from world-renowned Marina Abramovic.

FLAMING STAR (1960)

Envisioned as a prestige item for Marlon Brando, this Settlers vs. Indians Western caught a break when writer Nunnally Johnson opted out of directing and these major players were replaced with Elvis Presley and Don Siegel.  I know, sounds unpromising: a Pop music sensation and an action oriented/tough-minded B-pic helmer.  But maybe the gods were smiling or maybe the dramatic possibilities of Presley/Siegel were underrated.  In any event, hard to imagine Brando & Johnson doing as well with this material at the time.  (Brando directing himself in the navel-gazing Western ONE-EYED JACKS soon after helps make the point (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/one-eyed-jacks-1961.html); while Johnson, only an occasional director, never did have much of a visual identity.)  No doubt, many script changes (by whom?) were made to help fit Presley into the role (he’s shockingly good), but Johnson’s basic set-up remains very strong with Presley’s half-breed (White dad/Indian mom) having to choose sides between Kiowas and Settlers; nicely complicated by his White half-brother (a very good Steve Forrest) who’s all but engaged to the White gal (Barbara Eden) whom Elvis has long secretly loved. Siegel’s direction is almost frighteningly assured, his ability to place people to let us follow events uncanny.  Much helped by cinematographer Charles Clarke, pulling in the scrubby landscape as a major character.  Siegel fought to keep the songs down to two, and even these are placed into a fake-out prologue before the film pivots to uncompromising action drama.*  Yet Presley manager Col. Parker only had to compare grosses with the money-churning song-fest travelogue feature films and it was VIVA LAS VEGAS/’64 from then on out.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY (I & II):  *Alas, uncompromising does not include Native Americans of any tribe cast in speaking roles.  Instead, the usual ringers, here, mostly actors of Italian descent.  *On the other hand, easy to imagine other actors in this excellent role, but impossible to think of any one of them blasting out ‘Viva, Viva, Viva Las Vegas.’  No small thing!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  This really is a tough little (resolution-free) story; more people die than you’ll find at the end of HAMLET.

ÇA COMMENCE AUJOURD'HUI / IT ALL STARTS TODAY (1998)

Superbly realized/documentary-like look at a semester in a French public kindergarten in a haggard coal district town (Zola’s model for GERMINAL) from co-writer/director Bertrand Tavernier, working in his loose, late style.  Philippe Torreton, who ran the award circuit on his previous film with Tavernier (CAPTAINE CONAN/’96, his debut lead), earned more top-honors on an utterly different characterization, director of an elsewise all-female staffed school.  At first glance, the children so unruly, so unsocialized, so behind in developmental skills, you imagine it’s a Special Needs facility.  But no, what we see playing out are the largely foreseeable consequences of deprivation (health, food, income, employment, government services), an overworked staff and an under-financed facility.  One long-term teacher spelling out for us the decline in student attitude, behavior, even hygiene.*  Tavernier, helped by his son-in-law co-writer’s twenty -years experience in the system, has a wealth of material to work with, organizing a roundelay of missed opportunities, small triumphs and major tragedies, while not ignoring personal challenges at home with the supervisor’s artistic live-in girlfriend and her teen son, currently acting out in dangerous ways.  Torreton’s character obviously born for the job, even something of a saint in the classrooms he oversees, if much less so at home.   Some of the administrative fights he takes up with an overburdened system feel a little pat, but mostly this is both impressive and often extremely moving.  The film all but entirely missed Stateside, but try to find it on a service, perhaps under its French title.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, CAPITAINE CONAN, a WWI masterpiece from Tavernier & Torreton.  OR:  *See what that vet teacher was talking about in François Truffaut’s idealized portrait of school kids in SMALL CHANGE/’76.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/small-change-1976.html

THE AVENGERS (1998)

Lots of rumors on what the hell happened on this expensive dud, a wrong-headed attempt to get a James Bond franchise out the stylishly ‘Mod’ British spy series of the ‘60s.  (Hence all the pricey, Oscar-bait below-the-line talent and top-flight supporting cast.)  The original script was defanged; the original cut slashed by 5 reels after a DOA preview; the original release date moved to cover an open mass-market late summer release.  All likely excuses; all likely true; none would have made a difference: the film misconceived at inception.  As Mr. Steed, unflappable British agent for paranormal threats, Ralph Fiennes demonstrates (not for the first or last time) he’s less wide-release leading man than prestige actor.  As new partner, Uma Thurman, lamely coifed & costumed, completely misses the frisson of constrained sexuality and leather-clad dominatrix styling that made Diana Rigg the face that launched a thousand Baby Boomer . . . er, ships.  As main villain, Sean Connery (sporting a decent toupée for a change) gets to play something like his old nemesis, Goldfinger, controlling the weather as head of The Prospero Project.  (If only he was playing Prospero, the Shakespeare role he was born to play.*)  Connery even gets a pair of scenes lifted straight out of GOLDFINGER: the underground board room meeting; the laser castration table.  (One would have been enough.)  Cut down to 89", this plays not like ‘60s BOND, not like The Avengers in its b&w ‘60s prime, but like campy ‘60s BATMAN.   (Though composer Joel McNeely gets all the way up to the ‘70s with a John Barry like score.)  Director Jeremiah Chechik & writer Don MacPherson caught most of the grief from the tens of millions lost; Fiennes & Thurman found more appropriate things to do; Connery started to plan retirement; while ultra-connected producer Jerry Weintraub was back on top as quick as you can say OCEAN’S ELEVEN/’01.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Speaking of The Bard, the script has Connery quote Richard III’s ‘Now is the winter of our discontent,’ without understanding the line.  ‘Now’ in this context doesn’t mean it’s now winter, but that winter has just now been 'made (turned into) glorious summer.’

LE DIABLE AU CORPS / DEVIL IN THE FLESH (1947)

Best known of Micheline Presle films (recently dead at 101, last of that generation of post-WWII/pre-Nouveau Vague stars) still makes its mark, but no longer seems as important (or accomplished) as it once did.  Quite le scandale at the time, author Raymond Radiguet was only 20 when he died in 1923, the story something of a male amour fou, set toward the end of WWI when 17-yr-old schoolboy Gérard Philipe falls for the older Presle, already engaged to a soldier; beds her after she goes thru with the wedding; then father’s her child to set up a tragic, if weirdly neat ending.  Once a very famous film indeed, now only nine comments on IMDb.com.  Well paced and cleverly shot within a studio æsthetic (cinematographer Michel Kelber doing nifty moves in tight spaces), director Claude Autant-Lara able to coast on off-the-charts sexual chemistry from his equally beautiful leads.  What a shock to realize Philipe, meant to be about ten years younger than Presle, was actually a year older and that he died 65 years ago.  Their age difference, barely visible on screen, a real problem since it triggers nearly as much of the dramatic tension as her infidelity.  Crucial details something of a lost cause with Autant-Lara.  (Compare him with Jacques Becker.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Choose your desire with dueling posters for our starry-eyed leads.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Even with 186 acting credits, Presle's only other well-known title outside of France (not seen here) is BOULE DE SUIF/’45, an adaptation of the same Guy de Maupassant story John Ford used in STAGECOACH/’39.

CONTEST/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Post-WWII, every country with a film industry seemed to find their own angst-ridden new generation (often tragic) star.  James Dean over here, in Poland Zbigniew Cybulski, but Gérard Philipe was first out of the starting gate.  Did the U.K. have one?  Surely it can’t be Dirk Bogarde!  Best suggestion wins a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of their choosing.