BAD ROADS / POHANI DOROHY (2020)

From Ukraine during the Donbas conflict (the current war not yet started), a well-received directing debut for writer Natalya Vorozhbit in this portmanteau film of four lightly interlocked stories.  The promising opening a 'three-hander' absurdist miniature at a military checkpoint where a high school headmaster, weary, tipsy, out of it, gets a routine stop by the bored soldier on duty whose trigger-finger perks up due to the driver’s slow responses and missing I.D. or driver’s license.   (He mistakenly took his wife’s passport instead of his own.)  General suspicions & nerves threaten to escalate into something more serious when the grunt calls his superior officer for help.  The driver suggests calling his wife (or a military acquaintance) to vouch for him, while the officer does a slow burn worthy of Laurel & Hardy.  (Or is this more Samuel Beckett territory?)  Using mostly long, still takes, Vorozhbit has everyone play their cards close to the vest, which works equally well on the next story (without the comic undertone) as three girls (one of them possibly a student at the headmaster’s school) debate boys, sex & cigarettes in wartime before the youngest girl is met by her anxious grandmother.  This too is excellent, beautifully caught and cast; it’s the last two stories that drop the ball.  The third, longest of the four, takes us thru the brutalization (psychological/sexual) of an all but imprisoned girl near the front, more or less tortured by a Russian soldier with a nihilistic bent.  She, at times, seems to be getting off at the mistreatment.  But after a long night, she’s woken in the abandoned warehouse she’s been confined to, by a decent young Ukrainian soldier whose gentler manner only brings out the beast in this degraded woman.  Compare with her younger self as seen in the fourth story as she tries to make things right after accidentally running over some farm family’s chicken only to be taken to the cleaners by these wily rurals.  The last two stories as deterministic as the first two felt spontaneous, though technically they all have impressive things in them.  Hopefully. Vorozhbit’s recently wrapped second feature (currently titled DEMONS) will expand on her better instincts.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a better look at Ukraine at war (putatively made in 2019), try ATLANTIS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/07/atlantis-2019.html

SAMSON AND THE 7 MIRACLES OF THE WORLD / MACISTE ALLA CORTE DEL GRAN KHAN (1961)

Double-dipping on sets, props & extras leftover from low-budget Italian epic MARCO POLO/’62, this typical ‘Peplum’ (i.e. Sword-and-Sandal actioner) ought to be a step or two up from similar HERCULES or SAMSON films of the period.  (In Italy, the hero always called MACISTE.)  Alas, it’s one of the weaker entries.  (Note that whereas MARCO paid for TechniColor & CinemaScope, SAMSON gets by on EastmanColor & SupercineScope.)  Beefy Gordon Scott, after six Tarzan films, is a new Samson, fighting alongside a Chinese Prince & Princess against Mongol usurpers and their warrior hordes.  (And the titular 7 Miracles?  Do they even show up?)  Mostly we get fleshly Mr. Scott (a surprisingly placid presence), forgoing Asian attire for his simple red loincloth.  Guess he travels light.  Like the biblical Samson, which has nothing to do with Maciste, the big guy makes his mark pushing on columns to crashing effect, even giving rise to an earthquake.  (An amusing special effect,)  The American cut lopped off a couple of reels to keep the Kiddie Matinee crowd from tossing JuJuBees at the screen during court entertainments, and the KINO DVD gives us both versions.  Much better image on the Euro-cut, but the bad dubbing is equally poor in both.  If only they dubbed in different actors and a decent plot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Made so quickly, SAMSON beat MARCO POLO to theaters.

EL 7º DÍA / THE 7th DAY (2004)

Vet Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura (1932-2023), whose films often feel like officially sanctioned gateways into modern (post-Franco) Spanish culture, ready for some putative World’s Fair exhibit, tossed his dog-eared Iberian Baudecker away to good effect for one of his strongest films, a ghastly true-crime inspired tale of family feuds in the isolated town of Extremadura.  (Per Saura, the characters and situations fictionalized, the crimes all too accurate.)  More Hatfield & McCoy than Capulet & Montague, the conflict began a few generations back with contested land rights, but heated up in the 1990s with the seduction (and quick abandonment) of a girl across family lines.  Poached by a handsome young stud, it proved mere appetizer to tit-for-tat stabbings, arson, and shootings.  Horrifically believable escalation, beautifully organized by Saura in a take-no-prisoners cascade of folly, madness & pointless death grudges.  And in a sleepy town peopled with tourist friendly archetypes.  But a closer look shows the country clan failing on the land and the village family now anxious to move to a big city after the father survives a stabbing and his jailed attacker slips toward insanity.  The end, when it comes, seven times worse than expected.  The film, twice as good.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Saura stylishly opens with museum-quality monochrome stills of the countryside before bringing in color.  It gives a timeless quality that makes you wonder how this might have played if he’d stuck to b&w.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Since this plays like a modern Greek Tragedy, do like the Greeks and have a comic chaser, something farcical on the same subject.  Another Hatfields & McCoys tale?  Buster Keaton’s feature debut, OUR HOSPITALITY/’23, just the thing.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/our-hospitality-1923.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The two murdering brothers look a lot like Eli Wallach (but thicker) and Anthony Quinn (but leaner).  Act like them, too.

13 MINUTES / ELSER (2015)

An internet search reveals over 40 documented assassination plots against Adolph Hitler.  This one, a largely true telling of George Elser’s single-handed bombing attempt, exceptionally well-handled by director Oliver Hirschbiegel, straightforward and fascinating.   Set in a backwater town in Swaibia, Christian Friedel’s award-winning Elser making this rather enigmatic man understandable, both common and exemplary.  Opening on the pivotal 1939 bombing that missed Hitler by minutes, we move in two directions to cover Elser’s youthful, idealistic past, before his quick arrest and torturous interrogation adds more past episodes in a failed sadistic exercise from Nazi authorities unwilling to accept that one man could have done this alone.  A chain of disbelief that reaches all the way up to Hitler.  Recent past revelations show his leftist political leanings, but not the Communist Membership the authorities are hoping to find.  In fact, Elser more pacifist than communist, and more musician & woodworking craftsman than pacifist.  Stoic under horrific ‘truth’ techniques, he’s not wily, but honest.  Only talking at all when the married woman he’d been involved with is threatened by the officers in charge of his brutal interrogation.  Particularly strong period detail add verisimilitude to the late ‘30s/early ‘40s atmosphere, color, style, physicality, even posture truly caught for a change.  No modern gym bodies, either, you’d swear they were wearing period undergarments.  Hopefully Friedel's recent breakthru in ZONE OF INTEREST/’23 will send viewers back to see him in this quietly heroic role.

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned, ZONE OF INTEREST, not seen here yet, but on our list.

FAREWELL AMOR (2020)

Perhaps the most familiar of all immigrant stories (Old World/New World division) sends Dad off to America to work hard and bring the wife & kid over as soon as he can.  Only here the Old World isn’t Europe, but Africa; the holdup isn’t cash but visas & red tape; and the wait lasts 17 long years.  Yet, the main problem remains unchanged: Dad’s become an American while the family are now foreigners.  Hardly knowing if they still love (or even like) each other, can the family unit be revived?  Should it be?  Fortunately writer director Ekwa Msangi (African descent/born in Oakland, CA), brings a patient, elegant touch to things and a cast equally patient & elegant: Dad working extra shifts as a taxi driver to support everyone in the small one-bedroom flat where he's parked the tall handsome daughter who’s unwilling to open up or get past feelings of abandonment and a wife who now substitutes evangelical devotion (and donations!) to Jesus for her long missing husband.  His substitution a bit more corporeal, something that brings about a crisis when discovered.  Just in time, too, as the film needs a pick-me-up by the third act to jump start a resolution to family issues.  It’s still on the modest side of things, but Msangi has an excellent eye for detail, an openness toward her players, and knows when to stop.  NOTE: Our Family Friendly label comes with some (tasteful) nudity.

VIVA VILLA! (1934)

Perhaps if more people knew Howard Hawks directed about half of this bio-pic on Pancho Villa, Mexico’s Revolutionary peasant general (M-G-M contract director Jack Conway got sole screen credit), the film might be as well known as it deserves to be.  Not the usual admiring Hollywood bio-pic*, indeed hardly ‘bio’ in Ben Hecht’s fabulist telling.  Here, Wallace Berry’s Pancho is just as interested in P.R. from American newsman Stuart Erwin as he is in killing old guard soldiers & politicians and returning land to the people.  This crude, effective Villa well matched to Berry’s crude, effective acting.  Often very funny, too.  The film reaching heights of weirdness as generals & politicians on both sides sabotage each other with Villa never too busy to miss a sexual opportunity.  Especially a sadistic evening with Far Wray’s stunning society socialist. (The film beat strict Hollywood Production Code enforcement by weeks.)  Best of all, the dazzling Mexicali look of the thing, with on-location atmosphere stunningly caught by cinematographer James Wong Howe.  If only Lee Tracy, replaced by Erwin as the reporter who not only prints the legend, but makes it up, hadn’t peed his way out of the pic and given Hawks (or was it the studio?) a chance to ankle this David O. Selznick production.  (Wray also a replacement, though a good one.)  Messy as it is, inaccurate as it is, sentimental as it is, this remains an often staggering achievement, the opening reel on young Pancho particularly masterful, along with sweeping battles & mass movement action.  Hecht’s punchy arguments and attitudes decades ahead of their time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Visual transitions and battle montages by effects specialist Slavko Vorkapich at his best.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Over at Warners, a more traditional hagiographic Mexican bio-pic in JUAREZ/’39.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/01/juarez-1939.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Hecht’s idea of a Journalist-to-General relationship heavily influenced by his own experience in Germany where he was reporting on the brief rise of the Socialist Party, not long before the Nazis started to thrive as the Weimar Government collapsed.  One of the many highlights in his wildly uneven auto-bio, A CHILD OF THE CENTURY.

WISH (2023)

To celebrate their One-Hundredth Anniversary, Disney ordered up something uncomfortably close to an Occasional Piece, one of those forgettable public commissions designed to commemorate an important event.  Beethoven’s noisy Wellington’s Victory a famous example of the form.  (And when’s the last time you heard that?)  Here, hiding under a generic title, proven animator Chris Buck & debuting Fawn Veerasunthorn treat their assignment in paint-by-numbers fashion.  (Then again, I guess digital animation by definition is all paint-by-numbers.)  Misconceived on nearly every level, even technically, it features incessant nods toward past-Disneyana right from the git with Olde Timey storybook opening credits in Disney’s 1940s font.  You see, once upon a time a mighty island overlord promised contentment with a trade-off: Give me your deepest wish for safekeeping and I’ll give you prosperous safety.  A life of diminished expectations visualized in such a restricted, vibrant-free matte-finish, you’ll think your picture settings need adjusting.  (On the plus side, Chris Pine’s dictatorial Magnifico gets the chance to cut loose with previously unused vocal chops on the film’s best song, ‘This is the Thanks I Get?!’)   Naturally, there’s a feisty young girl to stand up to him, wish upon a star, and make the walls come tumblin’ down: Ariana DeBose, overselling sass with every inflection and condescending to her outlier gang of mutts.  Considering the extended development pipeline Disney puts these projects thru, you wonder if they skipped development hell to hit that 100th anniversary release date.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: With the slow, but steady success of ELEMENTAL/’23 just before this, and the rocket out of the gate performance of Pixar’s INSIDE OUT 2/’24 quickly following, WISH at least has the luck of being as quickly forgotten as most occasional pieces.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/12/elemental-2023.html

CALIGULA: THE ULTIMATE CUT (1979; 2023)

Hoping to class up his act at Penthouse Magazine, owner/publisher Bob Guccione took a page out of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy playbook and tried Quality Cinema on for size; just as Hef did with Roman Polanski on Shakespeare’s MACBETH/’71.  Going all the way back to ancient Rome for a conveniently sex mad Caligula, Guccione loaded on A-Listers (Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud), an original Gore Vidal script and artsy Italian director Tinto Brass.  Sadly disappointed with the results, Guccione knew just what was missing . . . Sex!  Straight & Lesbian scenes to balance all the perversion & gay action.)  Releasing his own cut to general derision (and surprisingly decent box-office), his fling with the movies all but over.  Twenty-four years on, Thomas Negovan located original elements in the Guccione estate and, voila!, that long missing first cut now available.  Don’t worry, still lots of sex, now mostly with characters in the story, with McDowell offering a ‘floppy’ dance and lots of tush (excellent tush Malcolm!), Mirren specializing in pendulous side bosom shots, and various supporting players ‘supporting' each other.  If only Brass weren’t such a deadweight to any dramatic push.  A tableaux vivant for every occasion as Caligula declines from blue-eyed bad boy to bottom-seeking bitch boy to inventively insane sadist.  Designed to look like an enormous SPQR floorshow for the tourist trade,*  Brass’s approach half Federico Fellini (think SATRYRICON/’69)/half Ken Russell (think THE DEVILS/’71), but the worst half of each.  You can see what this might have been during Gielgud’s brief screen time before dying with unsettling serenity.  Elsewise, the large production seems prepped for next month’s exclusive fuck-of-the-month layout.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *What did ancient Rome look like?  One of the few convincing recreations can be found in, of all places, the otherwise only intermittently satisfying Richard Lester adaptation of A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM/’66; all thanks to art director Tony Walton (Julie Andrews’ first husband), whose down-at-the-heels urban neighborhood convinces in a way more serious films don’t.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/a-funny-thing-happened-on-way-to-forum.html

WITHOUT LIMITS (1998)

Like Oscar Wilde, Jean Harlow & Truman Capote, among others before him, Steve Prefontaine had the bad postmortem luck to have a pair of bio-pics released at nearly the same time and cancel each other out.  From Disney 1997, PREFONTAINE (D.O.A. - cost 8 mill against a half mill gross), and from 1998 this mid-budget Warners pic (D.O.A. - cost 25 mill against 3/4 mill gross).  Who was Steve Prefontaine, you ask?  Exactly.  (You now beat most film studio execs in perspicacity.)  Top amateur long-distance runner of the ‘70s, he died young & unfulfilled, but was an intriguing free-spirit with his own ideas on sport & life philosophy that butted up against his college coach.  An unknown Jared Leto played him in ‘97 (not seen here), and in ‘98 the better physically matched Billy Crudup.  Written & directed by Robert Towne, whose PERSONAL BEST/’82 has this film’s proper title, while no spent creative force, had definitely left his personal best on screen in the ‘70s.  Still, on paper, something of a catch to newbie producers Tom Cruise and past agent Paula Wagner, their second film, first without Cruise as star.  (Towne had previously worked on Cruise starrer THE FIRM/’93, a film best not revisited.)  And with Cruise & Wagner hot off the first MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE/’96, Warners eager to do business with them.  And the film?  Very Cruise, it feels written for him.  Very ‘80s in style.  Lenser Conrad L. Hall, with a mystique to equal Prefontaine, nifty during multi-plane racing compositions, less distinctive elsewhere.  On the debit side: grimly obvious soundtrack (brass fanfares, rock drumbeats); chemistry-free romance; little period flavor (not even at the 1972 Munich Olympics; attempts to integrate uplift & philosophy starved for oxygen.  All of it, the good and the bad, unable to hold focus against Donald Sutherland's brilliantly eccentric coach.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Why not the little seen PREFONTAINE?  From Steve James, fresh off HOOP DREAMS/’94 and making his first feature film.  Let us know what we’re missing in the Comments box.

LE CONVOYEUR / CASH TRUCK (2004)

From French writer/director Nicolas Boukhrief, a well-drawn middle-weight revenge thriller, structured like a workplace sit-com that keeps erupting into savagery.  The workplace an Armored Truck company on the verge of new American ownership, so the staff doesn’t know who’ll still be around next month.  And what a collection of loafers & wingnuts they are, cast strongly enough to support their own spin-off series.  Imagine the writers of THE OFFICE having the urge to script a violent actioner.  Not that you’d know this from the prologue, a straight curtain-raising heist: danger, violence & death as an armored truck explodes in the field.  The main story starts as Albert Dupontel, a man with no discernable past to explain his loner attitude & sudden debilitating seizures, joins the company on a one-month probation period.  Reticent and introverted in the midst of bored drivers pranking each other (booze, drugs, socializing), his true reason for being there and for requesting the most dangerous routes, only coming into focus at mid-point when we get just enough info to know what, or rather whom he’s looking for . . . possibly one of the employees within the company.  Loaded with excellent perfs, Jean Dujardin exceptional as the kind of quick pal a less constrained personality might confide in.  The eventual explanations truly satisfying for a change, the violence coming in clean, take-no-prisoners style, the outcomes sentiment-free.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Guy Ritchie, Jason Statham and an extra half-hour’s running time remade this as WRATH OF MAN/’21.  (not seen here)

THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS / L'ALBERO DEGLI ZOCCOLI (1978)

Written, directed, shot & edited by Ermanno Olmi, his best known/most acclaimed title (if perhaps not his finest), it swept the Italian & International award circuits, follows a year in the life of four peasant families on an estate farm in turn-of-the-last century Lombardy, Northern Italy.  Feeling like a documentary miraculously made at the time, you might think Frederick Wiseman was making his fly-on-the-wall portrait films in the late 1800s, no wonder it won BAFTA’s Flaherty Documentary Award.  Closely following farm laborers & their families living under the ‘protection’ of their lord/landowner, their homes, furnishings and three fourths of any yearly profits all property of the master, they might be American sharecroppers.  A three-hour length makes it sound like a worthy slog, but Olmi keeps it involving all the way along with his perfectly chosen amateur cast.  Details in work, play, school and courtship completely fascinating and utterly convincing.*  The film’s chef d'oeuvre may be the annual fall slaughter of a pig (end credits should read: ‘One pig definitely injured in the making of this film’), but an even greater set piece involves that enigmatic title as a father makes a replacement wooden clog overnight so his young son can get back to school the next morning.  A thrilling set piece for one, smaller but not dissimilar to Tarkovsky’s casting of the great church bell in ANDREI RUBLEV/’66.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *A rare moment that doesn’t convince sees Olmi drop the ball historically when one of the managers plays an old acoustic recording (the workers never having heard a recording before are amazed), but Olmi jumps more than a decade ahead of late 1800s technique by having its Verdi baritone aria accompanied by a full symphony orchestra rather than a piano reduction.  Something that wouldn’t be attempted for more than a decade.

OH . . . ROSALINDA!! (1956)

Off the screen for four years, the return of The Archers, writer/producer Emeric Pressburger - director/producer Michael Powell, in this stillborn operetta adaptation only showed how much the tide had turned against their kind of filmmaking.  (Even with a final success on their next, PURSUIT OF THE GRAF SPEE/’56, The Archers were no longer ‘untouchable.’*)  Pressburger’s original idea was a great one: Modern day DIE FLEDERMAUS, Johann Strauss’s ultra-Viennese operetta (social/sexual roundelay with poet, peasant & prince types getting their wires crossed at a fancy Russian ball), hopscotching across the borders of the Four Allied Powers (France, Russia, Britain, USA) in charge of a divided post-WWII Vienna in Powell’s CinemaScope debut.*  Alas, the initial impetus the only good idea Pressburger had.  The script a mess of stalled dialogue, uneven cast (but TALL, all leading men over 6 foot!), and the format of operetta (where numbers largely comment on rather than move the plot) inimical to cinematic attention spans.  (Note how the plot-heavy concerted finale sees the film finally come to life.)  Yet in spite of its shortcomings, what utter delight comes in every shot.  The use of color & stylized artificiality in the sets (lenser Christopher Challis in TechiColor) with watercolor backgrounds & perspective via trompe l’oeil, hand-in-hand with eccentric staging and that Strauss score.  (Though why drop the countess’s Czárdás?)  Easy to see how the film didn’t get a Stateside release till the ‘90s!  But, Oh, Rosalinda, what a loss for the senses.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *And the Archers knew they missed.  Note the credits with the famous Archers’ logo (Target and Arrow) doesn’t get the bull’s eye shot signifying success, but has arrows all over the place, none dead center.  A self-confessed miss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Powell did have a Scope test-run filming a WideScreen two-reel ballet version of THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE/’55.  (Not with the famous Dukas score.)  Hideous, poorly composed, unable to get the story across without incessant voice-over narration.  He certainly learned fast!

MÉLODIE EN SOUS-SOL / ANY NUMBER CAN WIN (1963)

This standard issue casino caper from dependably mediocre French director Henri Verneuil likely got an undeserved critical bump from having Old Guard cinematic royalty meet New in co-stars Jean Gabin and Alain Delon.  Gabin, as fat & reserved as he ever got, is a just released recidivist, home after twenty years to a world he doesn’t recognize and a long-planned robbery he plans to retire on.  But with his old partner in dicey health, he needs a young replacement to act as ‘inside’ man.  Enter fellow jailbird Delon (punked out in leather motorcycle jacket), joined by his brother-in-law, who’ll act as driver.  Paint-by-numbers stuff (in tone, if not plot, it’s close to Jean-Pierre Melville’s superior breakthru caper pic BOB LE FLAMBEUR/’56 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/08/bob-le-flambeur-1956.html); in detail & silent set piece robbery, filched, as usual, from Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI/’55.  That’s all fine, if only it generated the suspense it thinks it is.  Verneuil’s helming nearly as impassive as Gabin at rest.  

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  In addition to the titles mentioned above, Gabin, Delon &  Verneuil, now with Lino Venturi, reunited to better effect (Gabin positively mobile) in THE SICILIAN CLAN/’69.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-sicilian-clan-le-clan-des-siciliens.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The ironic ending (it’s NOT have your cake and NOT eat it, too), popular back when you had to punish thieves to get a film released, and a particular favorite of John Huston.

THE EX-MRS. BRADFORD (1936)

1936 was William Powell’s peak year: THE GREAT ZIEGFELD, MY MAN GODFREY, AFTER THE THIN MAN, LIBELED LADY, all hot Oscar contenders.*  But home studio M-G-M had an opening in his sched and loaned him out to R.K.O. for this middling murder mystery.  Co-star Jean Arthur just as busy/just as hot (Frank Capra and C.B. DeMille directing two of her five films that year) also onboard.  Let’s face it, this one something of an afterthought for both stars, a sort of Screwball Murder Mystery, and with that forced tone you get in second-tier Screwball comedy.  In brief: Jockey falls dead in the middle of a big race and crime novelist Arthur gets ex-husband Powell, who’s a doctor, to help investigate in hope of getting back together.  Director Stephen Roberts, who died young, this his last film, takes a while to find his form, but at least keeps from using one of those cutsey comic scores, the ones that function as a laughtrack.  So, no waa-waa trombone slides.  In fact, no score at all, most unusual for a pricey 1936 A-list comedy, yet finding real pace as the mystery starts to come together.  Fun once you get past the first act.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Powell & Arthur two of the most delightful players in Golden Age Hollywood though Arthur’s Achilles’ Heel is on display right at the start.  Simply put, the more you glam her up, the worse she looks.  Being a great beauty the one thing she can’t get away with.  Note how uncomfortable she seems all dolled up in the opening scenes compared to how smashing she looks once they stop trying so hard.  Especially at the end where she looks simply lovely.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Though officially a doctor here, Powell largely acts as a detective, one of many he played over the years.  Try him as Philo Vance in THE KENNEL MURDER CASE/’33.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-kennel-murder-case-1933.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Only Thomas Mitchell in 1939 topped Powell with five rather than a mere four Oscar contenders in a single year.  But Mitchell was a supporting character actor in all five.

DUNE Part Two (2023)

Another three hours with those feudin’ Spice Seekers.  Sounds ominous; and sure enough, the first act of Part Two is Part One Redux: Body Fluids, Baffling Battles, and a Baby Swap, while our Princely (possibly messianic) young hero (Jesus or Siegfried?) rises thru various tribes on a foreign planet to ever grander management positions as Spice Defender & Comptroller.  Or something like that.  But once he hooks onto the Moby Dick of killer sand worms and sews up a victory, something unexpected happens.  Ultra-literalist director Denis Villeneuve, always an odd choice for this foul & fantastic material, sticks in a tiny joke.  (The first in four hours!)   It comes during a love scene for warrior leads Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, a first kiss made clumsy by sand filtering nose plugs.  The glam pair as awkward as teens negotiating a smooch thru dental braces.  Soon, another gag as Villeneuve slips in an unmistakable nod toward Marlon Brando, vocally & visually thru main villains Stellan Skarsgård (Old Marlon) and grandson Austin Butler (Young Brando).   Skarsgård getting what amounts to a visual quote from APOCALYPSE NOW/’79.)  More comic Easter Eggs to come*, along with far more fluid (no pun intended) action footage with far better integration on some tricks tried in Part One.  And though he can’t keep it up (this is self-serving/serious Denis Villeneuve), we do get some stylization & dazzle that helps us get thru the wallow of Act Three.  (Which includes that hoariest of tropes, the misdirected coup de grâce in a duel to the death.)   Before that, Bread & Circuses stuff during a Gladiatorial contest composed with slashing diagonals in ultra-stylized high-contrast monochrome.  Then back to battles, politics & intimations of clay feet, before we’re threatened with a possible Part Three.  Indeed, between fan base, awards & box-office, inevitable.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Naturally, the retroactively retitled DUNE: Part One.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/04/dune-2021.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A particular favorite may be unintentional, but whenever Chalamet calls to old fighting pal Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) his little boy blue voice makes ‘Gurney’ sound like ‘Bernie.’  Something positively endearing in this massive space epic to have anyone named Bernie.  How’d a guy from Brooklyn get in here?.

TO BE DESTROYED (2024)

Recently in the New York Times: ‘Over the past few weeks, new laws or regulations have gone into effect in Utah, Idaho, South Carolina and Tennessee that will make it more difficult for young people to access books and library materials that could be considered obscene or harmful.’*   You couldn’t find a more timely moment to watch this short documentary on the subject from the MSNBC series THE TURNING POINT.  (Stream @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8AECXju6yc)  The story instigated when newly elected  conservative school board members in Rapid City, SD (you know, Mt. Rushmore), where pizza looks surprisingly decent, voted to ban a handful of books with ‘inappropriate’ sexual content (straight or LGBTQ+) from school libraries, but made the tactical error of including a work by bestselling author Dave Eggers who had the contacts, popularity, finances and chutzpah to not only get plenty pissed, but do something about it.  Specifically, offer to have any of the pulled books given away free to students unable to check them out.  Sweet response; sweet revenge.  Visiting Rapid City, Eggers and his small book tour team about as non-threatening & encouraging a group of activists as you could imagine; and without any personal agenda.  So, it’s more than a bit disappointing that this short film (30") is so inadequate to its task of exposing a horrific, growing situation, only a hair’s breath shy of book burning.  And barely a documentary, either; more extended tv news magazine segment.  Hard to imagine it changing anyone’s mind on the subject.  As with never-say-die conservative activists on Creationism, Climate Change, Masks, Pollution, the Gold Standard, you name it, you can’t slay the Dragon with milk & cookies . . . or fairness, for that matter.  You have to do more than report.  Not with goal lines repositioned to their advantage after every play.  Indignation, passion, anger, all gone missing in the final edit.  Hard not to wonder just how many school board elections these busy filmmakers have bothered to voted in.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Not really a good film, but fascinating to see so many of these same issues addressed (and in the McCarthy Witch Hunt era) in the middling Bette Davis film, STORM CENTER/’56.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/05/storm-center-1956.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  One student manages to diss Shakespeare (ROMEO & JULIET; TAMING OF THE SHREW) for being out of touch compared to contemporary YA titles.  Do they really have SHREW on the curriculum?  Lots of Women’s issues, I guess.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  *Find the complete NYTimes article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/books/book-banning-south-carolina-tennesse-idaho-utah.html

CLEOPATRA JONES (1973)

Answering a question no one asked, CLEOPATRA JONES proves even a 1970s Blaxploitation pic can be too broad, too coarse, too incompetent to be much fun.  Fashion model Tamara Dobson, a statuesque beauty with a handful of acting credits (her special weapon a high-velocity spinning kick . . . and not much more*) is Jones, a Special Government Agent who firebombs poppy fields in the MidEast before coming home to L.A. when her pet anti-drug charity comes under attack.  On the side of villainy, Shelley Winters pulls faces and all the strings in comic bloat mode.  She’s hard to top, even for Tamara, six foot-two, and not an inch of acting ability in any of those 74 inches.  KOJAK fans get to see Telly Savalas's old boss Dan Frazer as Jones’s new boss.  Series tv director Jack Starrett so pleased he gives Frazer, an old White guy, the film’s freeze-frame final shot.  Did anyone involved in this one know how these things are supposed to work?  Somehow they squeezed out a sequel, but otherwise, generally left these things to Pam Grier.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Even the best Blaxploitation pics now require serious period allowances.  (Less for violence than for sexism.)  But with a bio-pic’s historical perspective, Eddie Murphy’s DOLEMITE IS MY NAME/’19 needs no apology.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/08/dolemite-is-my-name-2019.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That high kick descended from stage vaudevillian Joseph Keaton, father of Buster, by way of musical comedy battle-ax Charlotte Greenwood. 

BRANNIGAN (1975)

Understandably overlooked late-career John Wayne film, a contemporary fish-out-of-water policier, sends Wayne’s NYPD Lieutenant detective to London to bring mob man John Vernon back across the pond to stand trial.  (Saying things like ‘across the pond’ this film’s idea of witticisms.)  The story hook is that Vernon is kidnapped before Wayne gets to him, but by whom?  Or did he kidnap himself as part of an escape plan?  The film’s running gag is, of course, bull-in-a-china shop Wayne amid British teacups, civility and Scotland Yard.  Director Gordon Hickox is competent, if faceless (only sinking badly during a Pub donnybrook that might be the work of regular Wayne megger Andrew McLaglen - see poster).  But a professional shine from lenser Gerry Fisher and a decent cast (Richard Atttenborough, Judy Geeson, slimy Mel Ferrer) give 68 yr-old Wayne something solid to bounce against.  No great shakes, but the first half works pretty well.  Still, you’d think the last film from one of Hollywood's greatest careers would get more attention.  What’s that, you say?   Two more films left in the Wayne quiver?  Technically, yes.  But ROOSTER COGBURN/’75 is less film than farewell tour for three.  Wayne reviving TRUE GRIT/’69 to little effect; Katharine Hepburn embarrassingly revisiting THE AFRICAN QUEEN/’51, and producer Hal Wallis calling it a day.  While that self-regarding disappointment THE SHOOTIST/’76, more memorial than memorable.  As a working actor, something Wayne gloried in and at (the man spent a full decade making program Westerns before being rescued by John Ford with STAGECOACH), this very ordinary film makes a spot-on swan-song.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  The best of Wayne’s late films, THE COWBOYS/’72.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-cowboys-1972.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Fun fact, co-writer Christopher Trumbo was the son of legendary blacklisted scripter Dalton Trumbo who Wayne helped keep off the screen for a decade . . . or rather, helped keep his name off the screen since Dalton continued to write under various aliases.

WIDE OPEN (1930)

Silly, squarely staged Early Talkie from solidly unimaginative contract hack Archie Mayo is, paradoxically, full of modest surprises and real laughs.  It even has a background score, rare for a 1930 comic programmer, and holds to something of a rat-a-tat pace for the dialogue.  Edward Everett Horton, ubiquitous supporting player for decades, usually as ‘the nance,’ the slightly effeminate (or sexually neutral) pal or escort, often used as decoy, but never getting the girl.  Here, playing the lead, he does.  Backup manager at a phonograph company*, he’s doubly frustrated since his best office ideas get shutout by the boss and by having Louise Fazenda’s Plain Jane office clerk in lusty pursuit.  So when Horton is followed home by pretty Patsy Ruth Miller who compromises herself and spends the night, he doesn’t know what to think . . . or what to do!  Even in those Pre-Code days.  Turns out there’s method to her madness and to his future at the company, but not before Horton gets one-on-one comedy time with most of the cast.  Especially delightful with domestic Louise Beavers.  Stereotypical stuff, but with some really sharp dialogue for Beavers when she thinks Horton is proposing.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A little Warner Brothers’ ‘in joke’ has the recording session feature an Eddie Cantor imitator rather than an Al Jolson type.  Cantor being exclusive to Sam Goldwyn while rival Jolson was the big star at Warners in 1930.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Beavers in excelsis yet staying within Hollywood race guidelines in IMITATION OF LIFE/’34.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/08/imitation-of-life-1934-1959.html

KONVOI / THE ARCTIC CONVOY (2023)

Superior fact-inspired WWII sea thriller, not overblown, not for Michael Bay enthusiasts (see PEARL HARBOR/'01), highlights a too little known episode from 1942 when Moscow had only recently joined the Allies and were desperate for the weapons & supplies coming via sea convoy by civilian Norwegian merchant sailors running modest-sized ships thru German-controlled waters, escorted by British ships.  But when the escort fleet is ordered to drop out, the ships are left on their own and unprotected.  Should they quickly turn back or risk being taken down one-by-one?  In this case, the Captain, mixing patriotism with fatalism, holds course, even without the unanimous support of his crew.  Darkly compelling stuff from director Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken, smartly seasoned, rather than submerged with decent CGI effects, and finding the kind of claustrophobic filming techniques you’d expect in a submarine pic.  A faultless cast of Norwegians (there’s even a female navigator) seem to be putting themselves at risk for real, along with a volunteer Swede as chief gunner.  (A magnificent beast!  Somebody get this actor a Hollywood contract.)  There’s a serious wrong turn at the climax, something of a Hail Mary pass too impossible to hang a suspense finale on.  But this hurts less than you might imagine as the film winds down in touching fashion, beautifully handled.

DB/LINK:  For this sort of action from the POV of an escort ship: THE CRUEL SEA/’53.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-cruel-sea-1953.html

WACKERSDORF (2018)

Award-winning true-events pic of the effect on a dying Bavarian mining town in the 1980s when they’re chosen as the site for a lucrative/jobs-rich nuclear recycling facility (hurrah!), but soon have second thoughts (nuclear recycling!!).  Oliver Haffner co-writes & directs this entirely acceptable conscience-raising film, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, well, yes.   Ibsen’s ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, it ain’t.  Johannes Zeiler does an honest job as a concerned town Commissioner who rather quickly (the evidence is ruthlessly clear) moves from project champion to skeptic, and then naysayer while his political pals bury their heads in the sands of denial.  Surprisingly, the Commissioner alone in holding to the Party Line on the issue.*  The more interesting character is Fabian Hinrichs’s smooth young bureaucrat, aware of his easily disprovable lies on atomic safety and assurances of local say in decisions, yet fully able to split any differences into self-justifying moral stances in his fast calculating mind.  Even when being practical about the futility of sticking to principles, he’s actually still playing the odds.  Just the sort of morally disingenuous fellow you could make a movie about.  And when the center-right government in Bonn starts to play hardball, his is the reaction that might have led to real moral conflict and personal drama. 

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Upton Sinclair put it best: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

PUBLIC COWBOY No. 1 (1937)

Unlike Gene Autry, the top singing-cowboy star of the ‘30s (he also introduced ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’), Roy Rogers, who took over Autry’s star spot at Republic Pictures in the ‘40s, retains a lot more name recognition, probably from all the ‘camp’ elements attached to him: Stuffed Trigger!; Waxy, unchanging face; Improbable first-rate vocal chops; Dale!*  The kiddie matinee fare both made not so different, much the same Republic team on board.  (Contract cinematographer Jack Marta stayed at Republic to the bitter end.)  But to get back to Autry, this typical outing sees Gene as deputy to an aging sheriff when high tech cattle rustlers start using airplane spotters and short-wave radio to keep ahead of the law.  Gene’s opposites-attract gal is 20-yr-old Ann Rutherford, recently seen dating Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy, she's the local newspaper editor; and Smiley Burnette does comic relief, dressing in a cow-suit at the climax.  (Yes, not cowboy, cow.)  Director Joseph Kane, who probably did a hundred of these things, knows how to shoot a horse chase and shows no shame stopping everything for Autry’s no more than pleasant voice in a few throwaway songs.  What makes Autry different from Rogers, and worth a look, is how he seems to be in on the joke whether singing, fighting or riding to the rescue.  Almost a ‘meta’ self-regard.  Or would be if you could only SEE it.  Unfortunately, Republic trimmed their one-hour films down to about 50" to fit tv syndication time slots and tossed the trims.  Yikes!  Nowadays, hard to find anything but those subfusc tv edits.  Boo!  A few of the Roy Rogers have been restored from surviving original elements (and look a wow - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/sunset-in-west-1950.html), but Autry a lost cause for now.  Pity.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The more you learn about Dale Evans (third Mrs. Roy Rogers, BTW), the weirder she seems.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Releasing later films thru Columbia, MULE TRAIN/’50 is the best Autry seen here.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/07/mule-train-1950.html

ADIEU BONAPARTE (1985)

Youssef Chahine, the rare Egyptian filmmaker with an international reputation (this film in competition at Cannes), had an unusually large budget for this French/Egyptian production on Napoleon Bonaparte’s Cairo campaign, the invasion a major fiasco that Nappy ‘sold’ as a great success.  Even then, P.R. able to manipulate world opinion.  The film is big, and looks it, with the clean saturated colors of a Hollywood 1960s epic, its pacing controlled by alternating personal stories of the locals with big public gestures of ingratiation or blunt force by the French military.  A jarring look at the means & ends of Bonaparte’s political cynicism.  It opens daringly with an interrupted assignation for a pair of young lovers (a literal roll in the hay) as public excitement builds upon spotting the French Fleet sailing in.  There’s a mixed reception, street fighting giving way to capitulation & collaboration before failed compromise leads back to street battles.  As for Napoleon, when not practicing pithy phrases to ‘spontaneously’ use, he’s open to Egyptian customs, religious preferences and local-governance . . . but only on his terms.  That’s avant-garde director Patrice Chéreau as Bonaparte, but the main character is his close, but argumentative aide Michel Piccoli as Caffarelli, an intellectual with a limp and a yen for the three handsome sons of a local baker who only wants to make bread for anyone with money to buy.  Needless to say, this is going to end badly, but while it’s sometimes confusing, it’s always fascinating.

WARGAMES (1983)

Of two major High Concept/teen-oriented nuclear war thrillers made in the mid-‘80s, Marshall Brickman’s THE MANHATTAN PROJECT had a more perfect pitch (My High School Science Fair Project - a Nuclear Bomb) than WARGAMES’ High School tech nerd accidentally hacks into the military’s super computer not realizing he’s playing THERMONUCLEAR GLOBAL WAR not as a game, but for real.  Yikes!  But MANHATTAN’s director couldn’t hold the mixed tone of threat & schoolboy comic adventure and the film tanked.  (Stopping Brickman’s promising directing career in its tracks.)  WARGAMES, a bit more diffuse, it’s YA DR. STRANGELOVE meets AI cautionary, and under director John Badham, also has trouble maintaining its varied tone.  But here it hardly matters since Matthew Broderick, in only his second feature (and first top-billed), hits every tricky move & mood, micro-tuning between guileless youth, techo nerd comedy, misunderstood son, terrified gameboy and romance apprentice.  Though even he can’t quite pull off an ending that drops Kubrickian satire for Dr. Suess’s THE BUTTER BATTLE platitudes.  (He also can’t pull off wanting to spend his last night on Earth learning to swim rather than learning to fuck plucky girlfriend Ally Sheedy.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Even younger viewers will have little trouble recognizing the film’s ‘ancient’ digital technology.  (What are those huge removable data platters, soon replaced by floppy discs, called?)  But they may be flummoxed when Broderick ‘hot wires’ a pay phone using one of those now outlawed throwaway tear-off soda can pull tabs.

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned, THE MANHATTAN PROJECT/'86.

ADIEU L'AMI / FAREWELL, FRIEND (1968)

Unlikely co-stars Alain Delon & Charles Bronson work a likely story that thankfully turns a bit unlikely once past midpoint.  This odd couple are strangers, just out of the military with an opposites attract vibe that leads to doing a good deed for the girlfriend of a pal Delon says he doesn’t know.  The good deed?  Return a stash of stolen cash certificates to the basement safe of a Paris office building.  But the job only looks interesting to Bronson when Delon mentions two mill in cash being held in the same vault over the long Christmas break.   Standard commercial fare from director Jean Herman (a bit ZOOM happy and falling for that back-of-the-safe POV shot - boo!) if not without a few perverse touches from scripter Sébastien Japrisot.  But the film really comes to life after the robbery goes wrong and they have to sweat their way (much torso flaunting by the boys) only to find a dead guard they didn’t kill and not find the girlfriend.  Turns out it was all a set up . . . but for whom?  And who’s to say the guys will stick to their story if caught.  Give Japrisot credit for making this come off, along with those charismatic stars: Delon often calling Bronson ‘Pop;’ Bronson apparently doing his own French dialogue; content to fake us out with a few mid-scenario twists, along with a neat turn from Bernard Fresson as the intuitive Inspector who tries to play fair on his own terms.  Conventional stuff, but fun if you stick with it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For the perennially underrated Bronson, 1968 was the year of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST; for Delon, the underrated Edgar Allen Poe portmanteau SPIRITS OF THE DEAD.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/spirits-of-dead-histoires.html

BEAU TRAVAIL (1999)

The French Foreign Legionnaires serving on a sea of sand in sun-baked Djibouti, might well be Calvin Klein underwear models in writer/director Claire Denis’s moody/much-acclaimed homoerotic memory piece.  (Its critical rep only rising over the years.)  As for what it’s about, as much as anything, it's BILLY BUDD-lite, refracting on Herman Melville’s novella about ‘impressed’ seaman Budd, a charismatic Holy Fool type who acts as catalyst to good & evil on a British war ship; here presented as if we're voyeurs at the shooting of a photo layout for some vaguely threatening oversized ‘living’ fashion magazine.  No one dies in this contemporary take, but Denis tags it with bits of Benjamin Britten’s BILLY BUDD opera on the soundtrack so we can’t miss the connection.  (Naturally, she avoids an Officers’ Ensemble where they sing ‘Don’t like the French!’ as they wait for an encounter that never comes.)  Grégoire Colin is new recruit Gilles Sentain, the Billy Budd blank force of grace; Denis Lavant is Galoup, implacable villain Claggart in the Melville.  The rest only tangentially mirroring the book, and with far lower stakes (no murder; no hanging), all fashionable rather than dramatic even when charting near death on a salt reservoir or when it ends with the most unlikely bit of break-dancing e’er caught on film.  At heart, it’s Paris Vogue Hommes, and just as easy to pick up or put down at any page it happens to open to.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Compare to BILLY BUDD/’62, Peter Ustinov’s unexpectedly fine try at the Melville original.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/billy-budd-1962.html

SECRETS (1933)

Mary Pickford was a decidedly stubborn person.  After basically inventing what it meant to be an artist in commercial silent cinema (actress, producer, studio founder), she certainly wasn’t about to let Talkies get the better of her.  Sure, she won an Oscar and earned those big early grosses silent film stars got when they first spoke on screen, but she must have known her two attempts were well below her best silent work.*  (Her last silent, MY BEST GIRL/’27, as delightful as her 1912 breakthru in D.W. Griffith’s THE NEW YORK HAT, so age not the issue.)  Third time 'round also not the charm as a remake of silent diva Norma Talmadge’s SECRETS/’24 (retitled FOREVER YOURS/’30) abandoned; replaced by another Talmadge vehicle, KIKI/’31 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kiki-1926.html), an overcooked disaster.  So, back to SECRETS, now with its original title and original silent director Frank Borzage.  Francis Marion, Pickford’s old pal & top Hollywood scripter, who’d adapted the silent, also came on to revamp the script.  Moved from England to New England, the running time lost twenty minutes (and the prologue) from the superbly produced*, if slightly overstuffed silent version; still at heart an actress showcase in sub-Edna Ferber style.  ACT ONE: Social Comedy as wealthy daughter falls for Dad’s ambitious office assistant.  ACT TWO: Cattle ranch dramatics Out West with infant lost amid a cattle rustlers’ shootout.  (No match for the silent’s stunning set piece.*)  ACT THREE: Middle-aged infidelity confronted & conquered before a quick old-age epilogue so our long married couple can morph into their past selves in an unexpectedly emotional farewell.  Mary in excelsis riding off with Leslie.  It’s good, rather than great Pickford, partially as Borzage had yet to hit his past silent form.  But Mary makes it work.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *With then-husband Douglas Fairbanks, Shakespeare’s TAMING OF THE SHREW/’29 was so unsatisfactory to Mary, she reedited & rescored it decades later before allowing it to be re-released. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Alas, the stunning physical production and near-mint condition of Tony Gaudio’s showcase cinematography highlighting the possibilities available to panchromatic stock in the 1924 version is currently unavailable in any home or streaming edition.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Just not at the box-office as everything came to a dead stop the week this came out when FDR declared the first of his Depression Era Bank Holidays.  The film never recovered any momentum.

I.S.S.

Why this perfectly doable Outer Space Cautionary doesn’t come off is something of a puzzle.  With background in nature-oriented documentary & fiction, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite ought to be just the thing for Nick Shafir’s original screenplay aboard an International Space Station ‘manned’ by six science-techie astronauts: three Americans (two guys/one gal) and three Russians (dva malchicks/odin devochka).  Busy with station maintenance; personal bonding (there’s an international affair); medical experiments including a radiation antidote; and tension relief via group singalongs.  Pop tastes and off-key renditions enough to restart the Cold War.  This proves unneeded when their unobstructed view of Earth changes from Big Blue Marble to flaming-red nuclear incident.  It’s war back home and the shipmates are not only on different sides but under secret instructions to ‘take over’ the craft using 'whatever force necessary.'  Yikes!  Pluses come from a limited budget that keep things human-scaled; from acting more reliable than hysterical; secret alliances & changing loyalties offering dramatic possibilities; even an implied moral: Never travel in space with an even number of astronauts!  As the American commander, Chris Messina stands out simply by having a facial bone structures that takes the light, but that’s about the only thing that stands out here.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Tired of self-serious spacedom?  Lighten up with John Carpenter’s low-budget/low-tech student project, DARK STAR/’74.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/dark-star-1974.html

A GIRL IN EVERY PORT (1928)

Of the seven silents Howard Hawks made before synch-sound came in (and what a visual edge that training gave directors - image first!), this modest audience-pleaser was both the best and most characteristically Hawksian.  In hindsight, first in what he called ‘love stories between two men,’* at the time it would have been spotted as copycat WHAT PRICE GLORY/’26 (see poster), one of the top-grossing of all silent pics.  Hawks' twist on the theme is to make the buddy-buddy rivalry over a series of girls before finding the one that counts (Louise Brooks); and to drop WWI and its serious notes from the story.  Victor McLaglen, largely repeating his characterization from GLORY, now a sailor with a girl in every port (natch), but unable to connect because his little black book has gone out of date (old flames now married with kids) or worse, sporting ‘tags’ from Merchant Marine Robert Armstrong who got there before him.  So when these alpha males finally meet, look out!  Only mutual enemies or the police could get them together.  Which, between other waterfront toughs & the local force, is exactly what happens.  Now the two so joined at the hip, Armstrong’s jealousy flares up when McLaglen starts a flirtation.  And when McLaglen thinks of marrying Brooks’ sideshow diver, Armstrong has to come to the rescue and stop the tempting gold-digger by reminding her of their mutual past when he knew her as Tessie back in her Coney Island days.  Heck, she’s even got his ‘tag’ tattooed on her arm.  Great fun, and somehow the sexist behavior isn’t as threatening as it sounds on paper.  And what a fine figure of a man ex-prize fighter McLaglen was in his younger days.  He must be a foot taller than anyone else on screen here.  According to Brooks, he basically directed her while Hawks simply stood in the background looking impossibly handsome and distanced.  Perfect for a director, she thought.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DB:  *The main rivalry usually concerned who got to fuck the girl.  So . . . pure platonic love for the guys?  But look at the intimacy of the final shot here, when the boys get back together.  If that last two-shot ain’t Prelude to Kiss, I don’t know what is.  Of Hawks’ two-guy love tales, only Kirk Douglas & Dewey Martin in THE BIG SKY/’52 seems more on the nose.