BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (2024)

Mystifyingly well-reviewed character study from indie filmmaker Nathan Silver lost whatever appeal it may have had after the early buzz cleared.  Seen plain, this soggy mid-life crisis story fails on nearly every level.  Forty-something Jewish Cantor Jason Schwartzman has recently lost his wife and then his voice.  Feeling useless, his two Moms (birth mother and religious convert Latin spouse) are eager to help get him back on his feet, setting him up with dates & psychologists.  Sometimes in one & the same package.  But the only comfort he finds is when he meets-cute with seventy-something gadfly Carol Kane, his former music teacher.  (She doesn’t recognize the boy he was, but then, Schwartzman has recently packed on about thirty pounds, you might not recognize him.)  Maybe this odd couple can help each other: she’ll give him voice lessons/he’ll help her with her fondest wish, getting the bat mitzvah she never had.  Meantime, he’s started dating the Rabbi’s daughter who joins him near his late wife’s grave where they listen to old erotic phone messages he’s saved from his wife.  Less gross than it sounds, a talented comic director might mine squeamishly uncomfortable sub-Philip Roth fun from it.  Alas, Silver anything but a great comic director, egging on his cast to overplay (Kane’s ditz all but unwatchable, especially when stuffing burgers in her mouth), unable to stage or pace comic action or dialogue.  Even these problems might be forgivable if Silver would occasionally put the camera in the right place . . . and leave it there.  Usually it's way too close.  And when he does pull back, the composition goes dead.  So too the film.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a funny/touching late-in-life bar mitzvah, try this gem from the old DICK VAN DYKE show where staff writer Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) become a man.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m54VraF-1PM

CONTEST:  The congregation looks to be what might be called Jewish Conservative Lite which makes nonsense of a late ‘reveal’ in Kane’s character.  Name the unlikely plot twist to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streamable movie of your choice.

BLACKMAIL (1929)

Generally considered the first British ‘Talkie,’ Alfred Hitchcock must have seen which way the wind was blowing filming the silent version of BLACKMAIL with easy sound conversion in mind.  So this story of attempted date rape/murder doesn’t play as if it were a silent film with a few dialogue scenes added late in the game, but like a (technically primitive) real synch-sound movie.  More than that, where others were trying to use sound in completely natural ways, Hitch immediately goes experimental, with non-realistic effects on the soundtrack working with (and sometimes against) normal speech.  It means that even when things miss their mark, the film remains a fascinating watch.  Clerking at her father’s drug store, Anna Ondra (a Czech who had to be ‘live-dubbed’) walks out on her detective boyfriend to sneak off on a date with soigné artist Cyril Ritchard.  The evening ends with an invite to come up and see my sketches.  Forcing himself on the girl, Ondra finds a handy knife on the bedside table and . . .  Honor intact, but now a murderer, she tidies up and gets out of there unaware a witness to the crime may try to blackmail her and her detective boyfriend who’s just been assigned to the case.  Worse, he’s taken a piece of incriminating evidence pointing to Ondra that he found in the man’s garret.  Yikes!  (Not too believable, but Yikes just the same.)  Confrontation; runaway villain; chase thru famous landmark The British Museum; spectacular fall to the death . . . the film is chockablock with elements Hitchcock would refine over his career, here in embryonic form.  And all the way thru, clever solutions to Early Talkie inadequacies in sound recording that give rise to an extremely winning let’s-give-this-a-try/expressionistic kind of filmmaking.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  A big success in both silent and sound release, BLACKMAIL makes the series of misfires that followed puzzling.  The films not without interest (MURDER/’30 opens well), but Hitchcock is often weirdly off his form.  And it took five long years before he found it again, this time for keeps, with major assists from Charles Bennett (he also wrote the play BLACKMAIL is taken from) and producer/savior Michael Balcon who got Hitch on THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH/'34.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-man-who-knew-too-much-1934.html

THE BEGINNING OR THE END (1947)

OPPENHEIMER FOR DUMMIES.  Early Manhattan Project docu-drama (just two years after events) is less kitschy than you’d expect.  Generally straightforward & well-produced (some atomic lab work & bomb blast tests remain suspenseful & visually impressive), but hard to work up much enthusiasm for a film with the flair of a Jack Webb DRAGNET episode.  A big commercial flop for director Norman Taurog (cute kids & Elvis Presley more his thing), this comes off as an ‘important’ subject fit for High School auditorium showings: Current Events & Civics @ 24 frames per second.  Best for cast comparisons: Brian Donlevy & Hume Cronyn as Matt Damon & Cillian Murphy . . . er, Gen. Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer.  With Tom Drake as the main made up character, a pacifist-leaning/fatalistic scientist.  The film’s emphasis on the inherent dangers of Atomic Energy as a modern Pandora’s Box surprising for 1947.  With loads of well-known Hollywood character actors to spot as the scientists.  (Make it a drinking game!)  Our personal fave, Joseph Calleia as Enrico Fermi with his atomic chain reaction test lab under the basketball court at U of Chicago.  (This is true!)  Sex interest courtesy of film noir stalwart Audrey Totter for Robert Walker’s Colonel, and someone named Beverly Tyler as Drake’s insipid new wife.  And the trailer’s fake test screening comments are a hoot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Godfrey Tearle, the FDR lookalike villain in Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS/’35 (he’s the country squire with the incriminating missing digit), finally gets to play FDR.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Better films to use as a tune-up for OPPENHEIMER/'23 listed in that film’s Write-Up.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/11/oppenheimer-2023.html