EL SUR / THE SOUTH (1983)

Spanish writer/director Víctor Erice, whose debut in SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE/’73 is credited with jump-starting the post-Franco cinema generation (and before Franco had even died)*, went on to a curtailed career of shorts & documentaries, finally releasing a new feature film last year with CLOSE YOUR EYES/’23 (not seen here).  Yet there’s an unaccountably ignored feature made between those two, hiding in plain sight (now out on Criterion, but largely a Film Fest prisoner in its day) and it's something of a wonder.  EL SUR’s lack of visibility outside of Spain is possibly caused by Erice’s displeasure at not being allowed to finish.  A ‘missing’ third act was supposed to follow the title and ‘go south,’ but either the producer felt it complete as is, or (more mundanely) he simply ran of cash.  It’s a chamber piece, but large in emotion and spirit, a haunting story of a 12-yr-old girl growing up in a sort of limbo, trying to puzzle out the mystery of her parents’ marriage while stuck between city & the countryside in a rambling house known locally s The Seagull.  The parents warily unhappy with their lives and what remains of their goals (father a doctor, mother unemployed teacher) apparently held back by their anti-Franco sentiments.  (It’s the ‘50s/’60s; Franco still in charge.)  Crucially, Erice gives the young daughter POV in his construction, so this coming-of-age set-up covers the emotional breakage of others as well.  Shot with the dense texture and pallette of prime Gordon Willis, the lighting as extraordinary as the interiors of the first GODFATHER film (from José Luis Alcaine, preferred D.P. for Pedro Almodóvar among other top directors), the pace contemplative, with hopes, desires & regrets muted to the point of extinction.  The missing third act, not at all a problem.  Maybe preferable.  For once, a producer may have been right to stop before the film ‘went South.’

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Erice’s SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE sounds like it couldn’t live up to its rep, but comes pretty damn close.

A DRY WHITE SEASON (1989)

Martinique-born filmmaker Euzhan Palcy hit something of a critical/commercial jackpot on her first two films, SUGAR CANE ALLEY/’83 and this So. African anti-apartheid drama, made when that policy was still in effect.  And while she wasn’t able to maintain her early status (only a handful of further releases), this now overlooked sophomore effort lands nearly all its punches.  (Or does till she missteps with a couple of unforced melodramatic errors right at the end.)  It’s a tale of one BLACK family and one WHITE family from ‘70s Soweto where tensions are already high and injustice rains down unequally.  As we quickly see when the teenage son of the Black family gets caught up in a riot he’s running away from.  No matter for the authorities, he was on the scene, yes?  Seeking answers (alive?; injured?; dead and buried?), the boy’s father asks his employer (he’s gardener to Donald Sutherland’s Afrikaner prep-school teacher) for help.  And the film becomes a series of tests on Sutherland’s beliefs in his government & personal values as he becomes civilly radicalized by what he sees, the tragic consequences and watching his own family split in two over the question of equal justice.  The cast is unusually strong (Ronald Pickup, Michael Gambon, Susan Sarandon, among them), with Janet Suzman as Sutherland’s wife (witheringly disdainful as an apartheid true-believer); the great Zakes Mokae as a civil-rights lawyer with his hands tied; Sutherland’s two kids who take opposing sides.  And then there’s a phenomenal turn by Marlon Brando, returning to work after a decade’s early retirement, as the White lawyer (not an Afrikaner) who knows he’s tilting at the windmills of So. African courts.*  It’s tough to find nuanced drama when sides and issues are so clear-cut, not a lot of wiggle room for anyone’s conscience.  But Sutherland’s personal guilt at his own willful blindness till choices are forced upon him  does a lot of that work all on his own.  The film holding up better than you may have thought.  (NOTE:  Another Family Friendly label on a film definitely NOT for the Kiddies.  There are difficult/bloody scenes of torture.  But hard to imagine a better intro to this topic for teen discussion.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Palcy works hard to keep her script from being too focused on Noble White Guy helps Impotent Black. Family tropes.  But they’re built into the storyline.  (Would this story get financed today?)  So, government police and military forces are well-stocked with Black members alongside their White superior officers, and in the village the Black cast is just as well characterized as the Whites living in restricted nabs.  But the split in footage remains a stubborn 60/40 tilt toward White screen time in dialogue & action. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *It’s a bit of a shock to realize that Brando, only 64 and big as a house, had been off the screen for a decade.  Yet even in a supporting role, he’s really working here.  Sadly, immediately after this, he sunk to phoning it in or parodies of earlier work.  Entertaining, but a waste compared to what he might have done.  His circle of advisors and confidants less friends than enablers.

QUERELLE (1982)

Ever since QUERELLE inadvertently turned out to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film (dead at 37 from a drug overdose), advocates & apologists for the wildly prolific/wildly uneven German filmmaker have bent over backwards (symbolically!) to configure it into something worthy of a high position in the Fassbinder canon.  But it doesn’t stick.  Conceived to look like a theatrical living-puppet adaptation of the Jean Genet novel (less PUNCH & JUDY than PUNCH & PUNCH), it plays out on highly artificial unit stage sets (lit to glow in eternal ‘Golden Hour’ tones more crepuscular orange than gold), as it parses a passel of passes from sailors in port, visiting brothels & bars in search of sex, booze and drug deals.  (Well, less sex than available orifice, any port in a storm.)  Brad Davis, physically very ‘Tom of Finland’, is Querelle, object of desire/bringer of death, who ought to be the leading figure (see title), but somehow is less interesting than everyone else hanging around.  Jeanne Moreau is the moody ballad singing wife of the bar owner who deflowers Querelle; and Franco Nero, in a remarkably wilt-free, crisp white Lieutenant’s suit, longs for unavailable sailors.  Plus frequent stops for on-screen quotes from Genet.  You keep expecting (hoping?) the whole show will morph into a Second Viennese School lyric drama by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg or Anton Webern.  Though with Fassbinder’s limited pallette and texture he’d never make it past three or four of the 12-tones needed to complete a serial row.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Considering the quality of films Fassbinder made immediately preceding this (VERONIKA VOSS/’82; LOLA/’81; LILI MARLEEN/’81), you have to go back to DESPAIR/’78 to find him similarly off-form.  And as that was his most recent attempt at an English-language project, perhaps he was one of the many European directors who floundered when away from his native tongue.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/despair-1978.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *This is getting close to the idea of Thomas Mann’s DOCTOR FAUSTUS, material that might have been a perfect fit for some imagined Fassbinder project.

CONTE D'HIVER / A TALE OF WINTER (1992)

Like the folk-art painter Grandma Moses, Nouveau Vague director Éric Rohmer produced in batches.  There were Six Contes Moraux (six moral tales); Comedies et Proverbs; and this is one of his ‘Four Seasons.’  But unlike Grandma Moses, who was primitive/naive, Rohmer was worldly & sophisticated, even in comparison to his fellow Vaguers; an acquired taste not everyone acquires.  This typically talky/philosophical look at love found/love lost follows Félicie, a young woman who found and lost her perfect match on holiday five years ago when she met Charles.  But a bad address kept the pair (plus an ensuing child, now five) permanently separated.  Back in Paris, she’s courted by two men now in her life, Maxence, a hair dresser about to open a salon in Nevers, and Loic, a literary bookshop owner staying in Paris.  Both men aware of her past affair and the child’s parentage, but they’ll take the chance.  What are the odds of his reappearance?  She probably wouldn’t admit it, but she’s been trying them on for size.  And things might never have come to a head had she not been able to clarify her thoughts while watching a production of Shakespeare’s THE WINTER’S TALE with its climatic scene of a dead wife returning to life in front of her family.  That, and a commuter bus change everything.  One of Rohmer’s best, there’s an enchantment to the series of events and personal revelations.  Félicie proving difficult to know, difficult to hold, rather less difficult to love.  The film, masterfully simple and complex at one and the same time.  It’s also beautiful to look at, with shot choices out of some unwritten textbook on how to shoot and edit conversations.   (It’s what Richard Linklater kept getting further away from in his much admired BEFORE SUNRISE trilogy/‘95; ‘04; ‘13.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Our personal Rohmer favorite, FULL MOON IN PARIS/’84.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/les-nuits-de-la-pleine-lune-full-moon.html

INSIDE OUT 2 (2024)

After nearly a decade’s wait, the sequel to Pete Docter’s brainy animated hit delineating the havoc of warring ‘humors’ inside a suburban girl’s head, retains its smarts & emotional weight while making a few vocal and creative replacements as they up the panicking cast of needs & desires fighting for the ‘mood control board’ (they look like they’re playing foosball for one) by sending 13-yr-old Riley thru puberty.  Fortunately, no shaving as yet needed!  Still, plenty of angst as she and her two ‘besties’ go thru an intense hockey workshop program.  Amy Poehler holds first-position as ‘Joy,’ now challenged for top-spot by ‘Anxiety.’  The film an immediate classic if you go by box-office numbers (by run’s end it will more than double the original), with the effect of the film perfectly mirroring the plot (Docter now one of many producers, director/co-writer Kelsey Mann the main creative) which sees Riley discovering that after a summer vacation, ‘besties’ are still really good friends, but not quite the essential/eternal pals they were only a couple of months ago.  Precisely the feeling you get out of the film.  Don’t expect the exponential emotional increase found in a TOY STORY 3 and you’ll be more than satisfied.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  You’ll certainly want to revisit the original, but unless you’ve not seen it before, watch ‘2' first, as the original is good enough to make this look like the less sharp carbon copy it largely is.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/03/inside-out-2015.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  With so many new emoji-like characters for Riley’s new hard-to-control feelings, the film is just as jam-packed & busy as it looks on our poster.  (Bet they overstuff on purpose to encourage multiple viewings from kids who’ll demand parental units pony up for some kind of multiple viewing option.)

THE FALL GUY (2024)

Since on some level all Hollywood films exist mainly to make money, when one solely made for that purpose seriously underperforms, that becomes the sole thing the film is about: commercial disappointment.  So it goes for director David Leitch whose last film, BULLET TRAIN/’22, also didn't deliver, but with that film's Brad Pitt, rather than this film's Ryan Gosling suffering the damage.  Gosling, fresh off BARBIE, lowers himself from subversive satirist to pandering audience-pleaser as the designated stunt man to cinema’s top action star.  He's doubly wounded on the job: Professionally when a stunt goes badly wrong; and Romantically when his injuries cause hm to be separated from the film’s D.P. & new lady love Emily Blunt (weirdly wooden).  A year and a half later, he’s called back to action by the star’s producer/manager (Hannah Waddingham, wildly overplaying) to stunt again for his longtime employer, moody, and currently missing Aaron Taylor-Johnson who's starring in Blunt’s directing debut.  The story gimmick is that he’s not just The Fall Guy (as in stunt double), but also The Fall Guy (as in being setup to take the fall on a murder rap).  With near constant stunting, you can see how this could work.  And from the hyper-active prologue thru the first act, it largely does.  But once the film’s ‘70s style Black wingman (Winston Duke) gets bumped into a mysterious shoot-‘em-up/inner-city car chase against him & Gosling, everything goes into terminal overdrive.  It’s also impossible to follow.  (Which one assumes is meant to be the film's overriding meta-joke.)  One of those films where cast & crew seem to have had a much better time making it than you will watching it.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a better stunt man movie, try HOOPER/’78 (with Burt Reynolds on good form) or, even better, Richard Rush’s seriously deranged wonder THE STUNTMAN/’80 with Peter O’Toole and the unlucky Steve Railsback.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/hooper-1978.html

CONTEST:  The film-within-the-film Blunt is directing looks like Space Cowboys on a DUNE-like alien planet, but is summed up for us as HIGH NOON at the Edge of the Universe.  Oddly, a film fitting that exact description was made some time back.  Name it to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streaming film of your choice.

A BIGGER SPLASH (2015)

For the five or six people still agog over the personal travails of the rich, thin and entitled, Luca Guadagnino unlocks no big splash, but lesser ripples of interest compared to films he made before and after this pas de quatre of a rock star queen, silent from a vocal crisis; a younger, hunky, mentally fragile lover; her former music producer/fuck-mate, a self-invited guest at the isolated Italian villa they’re at; and the producer’s putative sex-pot daughter, quietly insolent and demanding.  (Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts*, Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson, respectively.)  Worst of the lot, at first, seems to be Fiennes, a motormouth hedonist & self-centered braggart who even brings in two unwanted guests of his choosing while jabbing away at the fabric of everyone’s lives till they start to collapse.  Guadagnino etches in little flashbacks to explain relationships, but in spite of the visual control, it doesn’t take long to notice he’s dishing out second-hand Bertolucci out of some imagined third-rate Tennessee Williams play.  NIGHT OF THE IGUANA translated into SIROCCO OF THE GECKO?  (Note: Guadagnino just off a Bertolucci documentary when he made this, but that doesn’t explain the purple-prose plot.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Matthias Schoenaerts’ showcase film this year was DISORDER. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/09/disorder-maryland-2015.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  While this title was quickly forgotten, the film it sprang from, Jacques Deray’s THE SWIMMING POOL / LA PISCINE/’69 (not seen here, yet) did gain new interest and the full Criterion re-release treatment.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  In addition to diegetic use of pop karaoke & classic rock on classy vinyl, Guadagnino puts a fair amount of Verdi’s FALSTAFF on the soundtrack.  Why?  Because Falstaff, the butt of all jokes, also a life force who makes the world go ‘round?  Perhaps.  Or an inside joke referring to a two o’clock appointment at the local police station which matches the time Falstaff & Dame Quickly make for his romantic assignation: Dalle due alla tre.

THE VERDICT (1982)

Easy to forget that between THE STING/’73 and his late career reboot via FORT APACHE THE BRONX/’81, Paul Newman suffered a near decade of duds.  Only SLAP SHOT/’77 breaking a steady decline that included two of Robert Altman’s worst, and a pair of Irwin Allen stinkers.  (THE TOWERING INFERNO/’74 made a lot of cash, but have you seen it?)  An unprecedented personal renaissance followed, finally getting Newman Oscar’d, alas for Martin Scorsese’s pointless HUSTLER update, THE COLOR OF MONEY/’86, and even more acclaim for this dirge-like prestige item from Sidney Lumet.  A Perry Mason episode with iron-poor blood, Newman’s an exhausted drunk of a lawyer with one active case: Medical Malpractice against a Catholic-owned hospital on a birth gone wrong.  Tossing aside a generous settlement; he knows he’s got a case he can win and, more importantly, find personal redemption with.  Putting himself above his grieving clients somehow the honorable thing to do.  And he’d lose the works if it weren’t for an Irish colleen of a deus ex machina, lit brilliantly by the sun (the only brightly lit thing in the pic), the role a gift (?) from scripter David Mamet (making like Arthur Miller in judgmental righteousness) to then wife Lindsay Crouse.  Now living in NYC, she’d been Admitting Nurse on delivery day.  If Mamet only knew how to plant last-minute ‘reveals’ and plot points without making such a thud on the soundtrack.  A lot of good acting went into this thing; Newman fine, of course, and both Jack Warden (Team Underdog) and James Mason (Team Wealthy Defense) standouts in sheer professionalism.  How this ever got taken seriously beyond me.  (Novelist Barry Reed never had another movie credit.)  Overriding all this courtroom stuff and Boston Catholic diocese skulldruggery is a mysterious romance between Charlotte Rampling (working her Lauren Bacall look to beat the band) and Newman whose exhaustion presumably turns her on, but is a dead giveaway that something fishy is going on.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  So many more worthy late Newman gigs; beginning, as mentioned, with SLAP SHOT and FORT APACHE, ending with NOBODY’S FOOL/’94.  Try one of those.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/slap-shot-1977.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/fort-apache-bronx-1981.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/10/nobodys-fool-1994.html

TREASURE ISLAND (1990)

A melancholy rule of The Movies says that when it comes to literary adaptations, most faithful isn’t necessarily best.  (See Warner Bros.’ freely adapted 1945 MILDRED PIERCE vs. HBO’s MILDRED PIERCE of 2011.)  But in 1990, this Robert Lewis Stevenson classic (young Jim Hawkins swags a treasure map and follows it to its logical conclusion) managed to have its cake & eat it too; most faithful and likely best.*  (Hard to be sure with so many TREASURE choices out there.)  An unlikely success for other reasons, too.  Lead Charlton Heston something of a spent force by 1990, and hardly a natural for growly Long John Silver.  He tones down the humor and plays the likable one-legged villain straight, which suits him.*  Hired by writer, producer, director, son, Fraser Heston, it sounds like a vanity project, set up at Turner Classics as a prestige tv item (released theatrically abroad).  Yet it turned out splendidly, with a grand cast: Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee, Pete Postlethwaite and Christian Bale, a slightly older than usual Jim Hawkins.  (Sixteen at the time, he sells the physical derring-do more believably.)  With fine production values; even Joe Canutt, son of the legendary Yakima, handling Second Unit.  Did he also do the quite frighteningly good, violently bloody battles?)   Generally a serious film, not just for the kiddies, and not the romp you recall.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Though less well-remembered than Disney’s OTT version with Robert Newton, M-G-M’s 1934 film with Wallace Beery is as remarkable as you’d expect from master Golden Age Hollywood director Victor Fleming.  It’s the only version to give this one a run for its money.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/treasure-island-1934.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/treasure-island-1950.html   

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Heston’s relative lack of humor doesn’t unbalance the film, but does rebalance it.

THE WILD ROBOT (2024)

Made at a non-astronomical price and already a big international hit, co-writer/director Chris Sanders’ cleverly worked out survival fable starts when an all-in-one Artificial Intelligence Robot (Roz) crash-lands on an island populated with everything but the humans she’s been programmed to assist.  Working closely with a foxy fox and the island’s top duck, she first locates her new main mission: prep the orphaned gosling (who thinks Roz is his mother) teaching him to eat, swim & fly before it’s time to migrate south.  In true DreamWorks fashion, the film is far too busy for its own good, but it eventually finds focus and concentrates on story, character (a Noah’s Ark of species, all with laughable/loveable personality tics) and (to a lesser extent) style & settings.  By the end (and there’s four or five endings!), our runt of a goose has grown into a hero.  On the other hand, you can’t help but feel there’s a lot of magpie in this goose as he filches story beats from a dazzling array of children’s classics.*  Mostly THE IRON GIANT/’99, WALL-E/’08 and E.T./’82.  (Lifting plot points out of E.T. in a DreamWorks film?  Pretty cheeky with a company that has an E.T. moment as its company logo.)  Hold your nose during the obvious 'homages'  (did we mention that Roz is basically a Tin Man who grows a heart?) and you’ll be fine.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Disney’s WISH/’23 may have been designed to touch base with one hundred years of Disney magic, but it’s got nothing on this film.  OR:  For a more Euro-styled all-animal survival fable, more Noah’s Ark than personal growth/self-empowerment, and withoout DreamWorks' cheerleading, try FLOW/’24.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/08/wish-2023.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/10/flow-2024.html

THE WORKING MAN (1933)

Distinguished, but little remembered British stage actor George Arliss suffers the double burden of having his two highest profile films show him at something less than his best.  DISRAELI, filmed twice (a lost silent in ‘21, an Early Talkie in ‘29) stiff as a board; THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD/’32, mostly known for saving Bette Davis’s career at Warners before she broke out in OF HUMAN BONDAGE/’33.  Arliss looks slow & hammy in both; 'distinguished' in all the wrong ways.  Here's a much better place to start: Playing a shoe manufacturing titan, he's still hammy, but also forceful & funny when his work ethic gets thrown for a loop after his main competitor dies.  With no rival to best, what’s the point?  Now’s the time to take that long delayed fishing trip, which is where he bumps into his late rival’s kids, entitled nincompoops Bette Davis & Theodore Newton who’d rather drink & socialize than run a shoe factory.  The way they’re going, they’ll soon lose the company.  Now Arliss has his new mission: anonymously save his competitor’s company; even at the expense of his own.  The film turns into something of a Depression Era pep talk and has a lot of fun keeping the deceptions & romantic roundelays spinning with Arliss functioning as secret Godfather.  Less pushy than most Warners’ comedies, the two male ingenues (Newton and Hardie Albright as Arliss’s workaholic nephew) both hilarious.  (Davis, BTW, at her most fetching.)  John G. Adolfi, something of a specialist directing Arliss, keeps it moving without the usual panicking flop-sweat of a typical Warners comedy.  Modest, but fun.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Arliss would have even better vehicles to show himself off when he followed Warners exec Darryl F. Zanuck to his new company, 20th Century.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/cardinal-richelieu-1935.html

CONTEST:  Even if you never warm up to Arliss’s old-fashioned stage technique (he was born in 1868), you can still appreciate his longest lasting achievement . . . if you like salad.  Touring in San Francisco, a brand new salad dressing was named for the play he led.  Name the play (and the dressing!) to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

EL LUGAR DE LA OTRA / IN HER PLACE (2024)

From Chile, an excellent choice to compete for upcoming Foreign Language Oscar® honors.  No safe, government-sanctioned mediocrity, but a fascinating barrier-crossing take on an infamous murder trial from the 1950s.  (Well-known writer murders her lover in a public space and receives a Presidential Pardon after serving a fraction of her sentence, mostly because she’s a popular/talented author.)  But in the hands of adaptor/director Maite Alberdi (herself twice Oscar-nom’d for documentary), this somewhat familiar tale becomes something else entirely.  A study of Haves-and-Have-Nots from the perspective of a peripheral figure, a legal assistant on staff (Elisa Zulueta). part of a large office under the judge in the case.  Whether at home in a two sizes too small apartment with a barely working husband* and her two late teen boys (pervasive male entitlement and an insistence on being served overwhelming her); or on the job where she works far beyond her official duties and work schedule, it’s a wonder she can stand up straight let alone over-perform at every function.  But something snaps as she learns more of the socialite murder suspect and realizes she has the key to this glamorous woman’s apartment.  Shyly at first, then boldly, even recklessly, she begins to live the other woman’s suspended life.  Her clothes, her taste, her literary habits, her bed & favorite fragrance.  But after tasting how the other half lives, how to go back?  None of this feels pushed or in need of chewy explanation; she just falls into it.  But how to fall out?  Superbly realized by everyone, and fully developed at an hour and a half.  Great period detail, too, with perfectly lit interiors, though exteriors a bit too yellow-tinged and weathered.  An appeal to modern æthestic standards of ‘the past remembered?’  Some unfiltered TechniColor film stock would have made this re-imagining even better.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *But give the husband credit for being observant.  He may misread the situation (no doubt the green-eyed monster coming out), but at least he's paying attention.

SAMMY GOING SOUTH / A BOY TEN FEET TALL (1963)

While British director Alexander Mackendrick completed less than ten features in his career, nearly half are indelible.  (WHISKEY GALORE!/’49; THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT/’51; THE LADYKILLERS/’55; SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS/’57.)  Good stuff in his other films, too, including ones he left for some reason during production.  This one, a boy’s own adventure (though it’s much more than that) probably best of the others he did finish.  Fergus McClelland debuts as a suddenly orphaned 10-yr-old boy in Port Said, a stunningly well-realized set piece right at the top as an air raid opens hostilities in the 1956 Egyptian Suez Canal crisis.  The boy, blond of hair/blue of eye, stands out everywhere other than his just destroyed British apartment block, now guided only by the knowledge that his Aunt Jane runs a guest house/hotel in South Africa, a mere 5000 miles south.  His only path a series of close escapes from would-be helpers, reward hunters, local gangs out for vengeance on any European, police & military search parties, all entirely believable in Mackendrick’s hands as the boy walks or catches rides till he eventually stumbles into the orbit of illegal diamond trader Edward G. Robinson living in a jungle colony of his own making about 500 miles south of Port Said.  (The film set in the ‘50s & made in the’60s, and with attitudes of those times: wild game not off limit/Robinson very much the Great White Father figure, means Family Viewing will need escorting.)  Robinson, quickly trusted by the boy, largely because he doesn’t pander and takes him seriously, soon has him under his wing as pupil and surrogate grandson.  (NOTE: Robinson suffered a heart attack in the middle of production, which likely accounts for some of his process work.  Most exteriors made on location, the film very well shot by Erwin Hillier.)  This camp refuge may even beat finding Aunt Jane.  But story dictates a crisis, and once Robinson’s lair is found out, the story goes into overdrive to find a satisfying wrap.  And they pretty much do.  The film, not particularly well received critically or commercially, well deserves a fresh look.*  So too young Fergus, a stoic trooper who refuses to cuddle into our hearts, and earns our respect all the more for it.  The film, went thru too many edits (including in the States where it was released with forty minutes missing as A BOY TEN FEET TALL), look for a cut running about 2'.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Mackendrick’s other child’s own adventure film, A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA/’65 may be the better story, but never finds its groove.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-high-wind-in-jamaica-1965.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *But it was the year's Royal Film Performance!  (see poster)

THE VELVET TOUCH (1948)

Playing a big B’way star longing to pivot from stylish society comedy to heavy-weight Ibsen drama (HEDDA GABLER), Rosalind Russell was mirroring her current film trajectory; leaving behind her signature career-gal romantic comedies for heroines like polio crusader SISTER KENNY/’46 or Eugene O’Neill’s repurposed Greek Tragedy MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA/’47.  This film opens with the accidental death of lover/producer Leon Ames (very good here) then a long flashback fills us in on cast & motive.  The setup’s fine, but execution on this independent enterprise, led by hands-on manager Frederick Brisson (it’s okay, he was married to Russell*), plays like one of those Summer Stock touring plays popular at the time (witty lines, glam couture, supposedly pre-B’way) long gone from the scene.  The only feature from debuting director Jack Gage (he shifted to tv), it was lucky to get regular Frank Capra’s lenser Joseph Walker along with a strong supporting cast.  Claire Trevor as an aging rival; Leo Genn as a take-charge replacement lover; Frank McHugh & Theresa Harris backstage; Leigh Harline to write a ridiculous theme song and a quip-filled script from Leo Rosten to give the cast opportunities to land a laugh.  Or would if they didn’t stomp on the witticisms even harder than Russell does on the drama.  Look for two surprises: a plot twist that doesn’t happen (Roz thinks she’s left Ames dead, but someone else finishes him off) and for a third act morph into CRIME & PUNISHMENT; Roz as a female Raskolnikov and Sydney Greenstreet a chuckling NYPD Inspector Porify.  Greenstreet, even in this silly piece, makes a fabulous Porify.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Brisson, who mainly stuck to B’way, produced five more films for Russell, all comedies/all flops.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  We get to see just a bit of one of the ‘smart’ comedies with Russell.  It looks both hilarious and hilariously awful.  We also get the end of GABLER, but without the famous last line: ‘People don’t do such things.’  Best guess, it’s cut because Ibsen didn't/couldn’t give Hedda the last line.

RUMBLE FISH (1983)

With his self-financed studio on the line after ONE FROM THE HEART/’81 tanked, Francis Coppola (Ford-less at the time) got a welcome cash reprieve adapting S.E. Hinton’s THE OUTSIDERS/’83 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-outsiders-1983.html).  A credit lifeline he immediately blew on this art-house project, a second Hinton ‘troubled youth’ YA.  (Coppola’s like a character from Dostoevsky’s THE GAMBLER, going back to the tables with borrowed money to lose again.)  Arty as hell, with shimmering b&w shots so self-consciously angled they cancel out the last one, or read as parodies of films from the ‘50s.  (Stylized to death, was the film designed to be a musical just as Coppola’s TUCKER/’88 was before he got cold feet?)  Here, kid brother Matt Dilllon, wearing the clingiest of muscle ‘Ts,’* runs hot-and-cold about the return of big brother Mickey Rourke and the Oklahoma boy gangs he used to run.  Like OUTSIDERS, there’s another amazing cast to violently wile away the days – Nicolas Cage, Diane Ladd, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Vincent Spano (excellent), Tom Waits Chris Penn – all artfully posed in the dramatic valleys between a few overly choreographed fight scenes.  Plus a died-and-floated-to-heaven shot for Dillon . . . till he comes back down.  (You’ll find a similarly hilarious shot at the end of FAR AND AWAY/’92 where Ron Howard lets the camera do all the work.)  Fun just to look at for two or three reels, then . . .  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: With all the publicity for Coppola’s latest (last?) non-starter, MEGALOPOLIS/’24, he’s yet again trotted out RUMBLE FISH as his favorite amongst his films.  Like a mother favoring her weakest child.  Yeah, I know, weaker examples from FFC abound, but you get the idea.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Was Matt Dillon purposely groomed to look like Brooks Shields in a trouser role?  Everything but the chest.  And here’s a drinking game you can play.  Every time someone calls Dillon by his full name, Rusty James, take a shot.  Warning:  Everyone uses the whole name every time.

RIPLEY (2024)

Steven Zaillian doesn’t put a foot wrong in this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley origin story.  Maybe that’s the problem.  Meticulous to the point of being finicky, this third version of the amoral avatar’s beginnings feels less about Ripley, a malleable con-man who subsumes his victims, than by Ripley.  No doubt, Zaillian’s intention.  But there’s a difference between the chill Zaillian is aiming for in cast, story and red-filtered b&w image and the vacuum-sealed freeze-dried results, micro-managed less for involvement than for admiration.  This eight-part series not so much composed as laid out.  Filmed two times before, Zaillian covers most of the narrative used in previous attempts in the first three episodes.*  (Cash poor drudge, getting by on low-level scams, finds a missing scion living la dolce vita to milk while stealthily taking over his life.)  Mid-way along, the pattern can only repeat in different photogenic locations, as the story recedes into a detective yarn to set up the got’cha ending from THE USUAL SUSPECTS/’95.  (Perhaps Highsmith got there first.)  Oddly, everything seems most believable as more dialogue switches to Italian.  Along with the period detail, it brings just the right amount of distancing to the characters’ opaque qualities.  Undoubtedly an achievement (13 Emmy noms with 4 wins), but, as the stand-up comics like to say, a long walk to the payoff.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  All sorts of similarities in plot and amorality in the under-seen MASQUERADE/’88.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/11/masquerade-1988.html  OR:  John Malkovich, who gets a late cameo role here, plays Ripley in RIPLEY’S GAME/’02.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/ripleys-game-2004.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *PURPLE NOON/’60 gave its Ripley Alain Delon’s unsettling beauty; THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY/’99 with Matt Damon uncovered traces of vulnerability; here, Andrew Scott’s considerably older Ripley plays cool intellect against time’s wingéd chariot.

THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES (1940)

One of the higher profile UFA directors to leave Nazi Germany for L.A. in the ‘Thirties, Joe May never got the break needed to maintain top-tier status after MUSIC IN THE AIR/’34, his first Hollywood film, underperformed.*  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/music-in-air-1934.html).  Relegated to B-pics for the rest of a truncated career, he still managed to make a few good ones, including this discount Universal Pictures period piece taken from the Nathaniel Hawthorne classic about a haunted family in a haunted house.  Streamlined to work on a tight budget, we pick up the story after a few generations of Pyncheons have gone thru a family fortune cursed by deceit and theft.  That’s their deceit and theft.  Now, it’s brother vs. brother as apparently wealthy (secretly bankrupt) George Sanders accuses artist brother Vincent Price of their father’s murder.  Instead of marrying cousin Margaret Lindsay, Price is off to jail for a crime he didn’t commit.  Sanders was already a past master in the cad department, but Price was new to this strain of Gothic guilt that would largely define his career after this.  And Lindsay, just released from Warners where she was the blandest of leading ladies, comes thru for once when she drops the ingenue act and gets to play sorrowful spinster.  With better than average supporting players (for Universal, that is), decent art direction and Milton Krasner’s atmospheric b&w lensing, the film is something of an undiscovered treat.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  May’s UFA best probably ASPHALT/’29.  (Most of his silent works hard to find or long lost.)  His Hollywood best probably CONFESSION/’37.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/asphalt-1929.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/confession-1937.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *As is still the custom, Hollywood execs, looking at his film’s grosses rather than his films, gave May short shrift on better assignments.  OR: it may have been May’s officious on-set demeanor which gave Fritz Lang a run for his money.

THE SCARLET LETTER (1934)

Among the most popular & acclaimed of late silent comediennes*, Colleen Moore should at the very least be remembered for ‘bobbing’ her hair to set the style as the epitome of a modern ‘flapper.’  The legendary look of Louise Brooks copied her.  Unlike Brooks, Moore no great beauty, but with a witty demeanor, sensible ‘can-do’ spirt and devil-may-care attitude to carry all, including that unfortunate nose, before it.  (She was also incredibly smart and later was a best-selling author of How-To books on business & finance for women.)  Was she too ‘Roaring ‘Twenties’ to transition to Talkies?  A couple of false starts in 1929 took her off the screen for four years, returning with the prestige flop THE POWER AND THE GLORY/'33, with its highly praised, if overrated, Preston Sturges script.  Just three more pics and done at 35.  This last an unlikely remake of the Nathaniel Hawthorne classic, made at Poverty Row’s Majestic Pictures.  Ignore the bits of comic relief with Alan Hale and the film isn’t despicable, more than can be said of the infamous 1995 Demi Moore/Roland Joffé travesty.  Robert G. Vignola directs stiffly (his career trajectory mirrored Moore’s), but he does get the story across.  (Unwed ‘widow’ in Puritan New England hides the true father from public shame just as her long lost husband shows up in disguise to complicate things.)  And it boasts a remarkably good physical production for a little outfit like Majestic.   Moore quite good too.*  The film, all but written off on release, now restored from UCLA and almost worth a look.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *For Colleen Moore, her WWI romance LILAC TIME/28 with luscious, if barely known Gary Cooper.  Excellent picture elements exist, but has anyone put them out?  Only subfusc public domain dupes around.  Wait for something better.  For THE SCARLET LETTER, Victor Seastrom’s superb 1926 silent with Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson and Henry B. Walthall who repeats here as the long-missing husband.

ATTENTON MUST BE PAID:  Note our poster boasts of 'A New and Surprising Colleen Moore.'

SUGAR (2008)

Writing/directing partners Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck tackle the lower fringes of Major League Baseball by following the early career moves (professional & personal) of hot Dominican pitching prospect ‘Sugar' as he tries to ride a newly acquired split-fingered curveball from his local Dominican Minor League team thru ‘A,’ ‘Double A.’ and ‘Triple A’ ball.  Odds are against him; much as the odds are against a film that has so many hackneyed tropes it needs to touch base on.  And that’s where this little film cuts itself loose, giving us all the stranger-in-a-strange land, fast American learning curve, sophomore slump, fish-out-of-water, Dominican Catholic goes Farm Belt Presbyterian (terrifying/hilarious) clichés you could want.  But freshened not only by the film’s big open heart, but even more by sliding into third (that’s Third Act not third base) with a shift in focus from Baseball Experience to Immigrant Experience.  And because Boden/Fleck take inspiration less from Hollywood payoffs than from outlier reality independents like Mike Leigh and even the Dardenne Brothers, that third act turn from perfect grass on a professional diamond to inner-city loneliness & hustle proves the best part of a remarkably satisfying film.  Wonderfully acted by a bunch of non-pros & first-timers, plus a lump-in-your-throat curtain call (or is it a line-up?) to wrap things up on a positive note.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Ron Shelton’s BULL DURHAM/’88 still the film to beat for a slick Hollywood effort on the Minors.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  A Personal Story.  The very first joke I can recall is (re)used in this film!  Eastern European immigrant with no English comes to America.  He eventually learns two words: Apple Pie.  At last he can order something at the local diner!  But as man cannot live on apple pie alone, he soon learns to say ‘Ham Sandwich.’  Screwing his courage to the sticking place, he asks the waitress for ‘Ham Sandwich.’  ‘White or Rye?’ she asks.  At a loss, he shrugs his shoulders, sighs and says, ‘Apple Pie.’  Here, it’s French Toast and Eggs Scrambled, Over-Easy or Sunny Side Up, but elsewise the exact same joke.

FLOW (2024)

Exceptional animation (many awards; in the bag/yet to come), officially from Latvia, but more generally European-Union, is best described as a chamber-scaled Noah’s Ark story . . . sans Noah.  Indeed without any humans or dialogue.  Just a handful of different species all in their own voice, awkwardly figuring out how to share the small Asian-style boat (a ‘junk’) and outlast the fast rising waters covering the earth.  Led by a smart, sleek cat who opens things by outrunning adversaries, if not those rising tides.  Leaping aboard a junk in the nick of time, our feline finds a sleepy capybara as companion and before long they are joined by considerably more wary beasts: dog, lemur, and a long-legged bird.  Floating toward a series of striking adventures in survival (neither cute nor jokey), they discover something like a protective friendship of inconvenience as they learn the ropes (literally; with Big Bird at the till) and bump their way thru this brave new watery world.  Then, just as mysteriously, the waters recede even faster than they rose.  A switch that proves equally challenging.  Lead animator/director/writer Gints Zilbalodis (he’s the Latvian) handles the somewhat limited CGI animation with real artistry.  With about a four mill budget, this isn’t the kind of ultra-detailed look of a Hollywood studio release (their fur coats have a modeled look, like suede over clay that works surprisingly well.  (The dog not quite as successful.)  But backgrounds and nature’s terrifying beauty wonderfully caught.  And with an ending that might just lead to the next chapter (10?) in this animated Genesis.  An enchantment, it’s the rare film that truly is for all ages.

LINK:  See the trailer.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=OY0DsUNNbFE

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For another look at animated world destruction, The Rite of Spring section from Disney’s FANTASIA/’40.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/10/fantasia-1940.html

MAD ABOUT THE BOY: THE NOËL COWARD STORY (2023)

Brisk, appealing documentary on British playwright, composer, actor, director (etc.) Noël Coward comes without a fresh POV (or really any particular POV), but does give ‘The Master’ his due.  That’s more than you’ll often get from a Brit’s perspective where they still seem miffed that he split from England when taxes hit 90%, his pre-War style went out of fashion in the ‘50s (little but WAITING IN THE WINGS revived from this period), and he found better weather in Jamaica along with freedom from sexual threat as a homosexual.  Ironically, he had but to wait a few years before early ‘60s revivals of his best stage pieces (HAY FEVER, BLITHE SPIRIT, DESIGN FOR LIVING, PRIVATE LIVES, PRESENT LAUGHTER*), along with theatrical & cabaret revues of his songbook (is there another Brit who can stand comparison with the American Songbook?) and revivals of his films made with David Lean (IN WHICH WE SERVE, BRIEF ENCOUNTER, THIS HAPPY BREED) showed a resiliency no one expected.  Before that, with finances at low ebb, he’d risked playing nightclub entertainer and had a huge and completely unexpected success in Las Vegas.  (This episode in his life once announced as a project for Colin Firth.  Still in development?)  Coward may have come across on film as effete and effeminate, but perhaps his impoverished youth made him tougher than he looked.  (Lean didn’t offer him the Alec Guinness part in BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI for nothing.)  Excluding some rare home movie clips, this film is no more than a smooth cut-and-paste job, and it misses a lot about his productivity to rehash old news.  But it does give an honest sense of the man many won’t know.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The song ‘Mad About the Boy’ rumored to have been written in tribute to (surprise) James Cagney circa 1932.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  PRESENT LAUGHTER has been a star vehicle for an amazingly varied list of actors: Coward and Clifton Webb seem obvious, but also succeeding were George C. Scott, Frank Langella, Peter O’Toole, Kevin Kline and most recently Andrew Scott.

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT (1996)

In this high-concept pitch passing for an original movie idea, Geena Davis plays the action figure passing for an original character: an amnesiac mom whose violent super-agent past comes to town to assassinate her!  (Standard doings in 1996.)  Of course, Hollywood’s always made high-concept ideas into movies good and bad, still does.  But there was something of a mania for them after DIE HARD/’88 hit big.  (Now, the hunt is for interwoven comic book super-hero franchises.)  But from the late ‘80s thru the ‘90s, you could not only ‘take a meeting’ via HCFP (high concept/fast pitch), but raise actual development cash with a lot of Hollywood studio execs by calling your project ‘DIE HARD on a Bus . . . on an Ocean Liner . . . on a plane . . . in a Cabaña . . . at a Putt-Putt.’  (The only thing Hollywood story execs like better than a five-minute pitch is a canceled lunch date.)  The heyday for these things only ending when pitches went full-circle as DIE HARD IN A SKYSCRAPER.’*  Pure coincidence that this period perfectly mirrored Major League Baseball’s Steroid Era (1994 - 2004)?  Pumped up mediocrities soon forgotten.  With even the truly talented ones quickly expunged from the record books.  That’s what we’ve got here, from masters of the debased form writer Shane Black and director Renny Harlin.  Reheating their hot plate dinner for Davis whose amnesiac mom tries to remember what in her past has suddenly put her in harm’s way.  Helped by private investigator Samuel L. Jackson (his character in over his head, but vamping to good effect), they work their way up to a vast conspiracy from her real past.  A few character turns still pay off (David Morse perfect as a possible past romantic interest) and the eventual plot uncovered weirdly prescient of 9/11.  (Yikes!  In 1996?)  But the bloat for bloat’s sake undeniable.  So too a lack of facility with intimate kinetic action when the steroids aren’t pumping up and destabilizing the bigger things.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The joke, for the three readers who don’t get it, is that DIE HARD was in a skyscraper.

LET'S MAKE LOVE (1960)

In a funny way, Marilyn Monroe’s posthumous rep never recovered after Norman Mailer’s deep-think coffee-table monograph (MARILYN) took pains to celebrate what was least special about her work.  Worse, his attempts to take her seriously largely when she was trying to be serious have now hardened into critical dogma, a sort academic Party Line on Monroe.  So, what a relief to read this film’s director George Cukor’s take on what was special, unique and impossible about her, seeing Marilyn Monroe plain.*  ‘There’s been an awful lot of crap written about Marilyn Monroe and there may be an exact psychiatric term for what was wrong with her.  I don’t know  - but truth to tell, I think she was quite mad . . . I know people say, “Hollywood broke her heart,” and all that, but I don’t believe it.  She was very observant and tough-minded and appealing, but she had this bad judgement about things.  She adored and trusted the wrong people . . . I knew that she was reckless.  I knew that she was willful.  She was very sweet, but I had no real communication with her at all.  You couldn’t get at her.  She was very concerned about a lot of pretentious things (she’d done a lot of shit-ass studying), and I’d say, ‘But Marilyn, you’re so accomplished, you do things that are frightfully difficult to do.’  She had this absolute , unerring touch with comedy.  In real life she didn’t seem funny, but she had this touch.  She acted as if she didn’t quite understand why it was funny, which is what made it so funny.  She could also do low comedy - pratfalls and things like that - but I think her friends told her it wasn’t worthy of her.’  And this, her penultimate film, is the last in the line of sexy comic Marilyn (with a hint of melancholy) that Cukor was talking about.  It’s no more than adequate, at best, and wasn't particularly well received critically or commercially at the time.  But the years have improved it, and Cukor, working off a Norman Krasna/Hal Katnter script, refuses to push too hard.  The basic idea (a variation on three previous 20th/Fox films: FOLIES BERGÈRE DE PARIS/’35; THAT NIGHT IN RIO/’41; ON THE RIVIERA/’51) all deal with an ultra-rich womanizing Frenchman being parodied in a musical revue.  Here, Yves Montand’s the billionaire manufacturing mogul taken by public relations man Tony Randall (effortlessly sly & funny) to a show making fun of him.  Mistaken for an actor auditioning to play . . . himself (!), he’s gets the part on looks (naturellement) and signs a run of the play contract after he spots Monroe in the cast.  If only she didn’t already have the star of the show as a boyfriend.  Yet rather than bringing out the womanizer in him, the situation brings out sincerity.  She’s the first sympathetic woman he’s met who doesn’t know his finances!  Desperate to enlarge his skill set and his chances for doing a number with Monroe, he hires Milton Berle, Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly as coaches.*  Trusting in the situation rather thsn the gags, Cukor wisely sticks to low-stakes charm and a relaxed tone.  No more than pleasant piffle, but so elegantly laid out by Cukor and cast.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Taken from a short chapter about working with Monroe in Gavin Lambert’s interview book ON CUKOR.  Out a year before Mailer’s game changing photo book.

DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Stateside, Montand known if at all for tough guy movie roles.  Back in France, he was a huge Music Hall/nightclub singer, often accompanying himself on guitar, with a mature style of his own.  He’d have needed little help from this stellar trio.  His only other Hollywood musical, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER/‘70, against Barbra Streisand (against is the word) gives him even less to do.  Why he never got a shot at playing Emile De Becque in SOUTH PACIFIC; a real lost opportunity.

SECRET WINDOW (2004)

In PREMIUM RUSH/’12, Hollywood superstar writer and occasional director David Koepp has his bike messenger hero totally unaware that Manhattan has a subway system.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/premium-rush-2012.html)  Here, in an earlier directing effort, Koepp has his pulp fiction author, desperate to locate a copy of an old short story he wrote, totally unaware that libraries and magazine publishers would keep back issues he could check on.  Guess you gotta keep the story moving, no?  (It’s why the Indians never shoot the lead stagecoach horses.)  Johnny Depp, hot off his first PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, plays the pulp fiction author, suffering from writer’s block (natch) and depressed after wife Maria Bello leaves him for Timothy Hutton.  Now he’s confronted by unpublished Hillbilly author John Turturro claiming plagiarism.  That’s why he needs to get a copy of that old short story.  What follows is a series of escalating murders committed by the crazed Hillbilly, but designed to look like Depp dunnit.  Koepp adapts this Stephen King story, something of a companion piece to THE SHINING, and padded past its TWILIGHT ZONE possibilities.  (It’s actually more like ZONE’s fun forgotten tv ripoff ONE STEP BEYOND.)  Filled with dumb plot & character turns (plus one dreadful cornpone Southern accent from Turturro), seasoned with metaphysical tricks, all ‘explained’ in the film’s double-helix of a coda.*  The problem not that you won’t believe a minute of it, but that you won’t enjoy a minute.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *On the other hand, the twisty reveal does explain away that lousy Hillbilly accent.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Stephen King often writes himself into a metaphysical corner and needs a trick (or a dodge) to get out.  This one pretty old/pretty limp.  And while we’re not unqualified fans of either CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI/’19 or SHUTTER ISLAND/’10, they do demonstrate how old and limp can work.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/cabinet-of-dr-caligari-1919.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/07/shutter-island-2010.html

THE BELOVED ROGUE (1927)

Popularized in plays, operetta, silent and sound film as something of a Robin Hood figure*, 15th century French poet François Villon, only 32 when history loses sight of him, was likely more precursor to post-Renaissance ruffian artist Caravaggio than to the Sherwood Forest outlaw.  But facts don’t really enter into this John Barrymore silent which was meant to revisit the romance & adventure of his DON JUAN/’26, a hit at Warners, for this first project on a three picture deal at United Artists.  DON JUAN director Alan Crosland came along (the third of their four films together*), but the key figure is art director William Cameron Menzies who gives it lighter, more fantastical settings.  Villon is still the lovable scamp, a vagabond poet whose japes get him in trouble with Louis XI (Conrad Veidt)  before he saves Louis from the usurping Duke of Burgundy.  Villon also saves his own life in the process and wins the hand of Lady Marceline Day.  Picture quality not what it might be, at best rising to no more than acceptable, but enough to get the enchanting visual ideas across.  Barrymore overplays the first act, gamboling to beat the band with his (three) Merry Men.  But once he takes off his clown makeup (literally), he tones down and brings touching vulnerability and grace to the role.  (Veidt happy to pick up the ham acting crown which leaves Barrymore free to show off what tremendous physical shape he’s still in at 45 during his all but bare torture scenes.  If only the film elements were equally well preserved!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Best of the lot, IF I WERE KING/’38 with Ronald Colman & Basil Rathbone working off a Preston Sturges script.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/if-i-were-king-1938.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *DON JUAN, Crosland’s first film with Barrymore, was also the main calling-card for Warner’s VitaPhone synch-sound system.  Showcasing various ‘Talkie’ shorts and a recorded symphonic score for the silent feature.  Next year’s THE JAZZ SINGER/’27, also from Crosland immediately after ROGUE, then jump started the Talkie revolution.

CANDYMAN (1992)

Iconic, influential Urban Legend horror from a Clive Barker story opens with a striking credit sequence that promises more visual pizzaz than the film manages to deliver.  The idea’s a good one: mythical creature with a deadly hook for a hand haunts the notorious (now long gone) Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago.  This scary being serving as thesis for a couple of rising asst. professors: one Black and wisely wary; one White and emboldened by Caucasian cultural class entitlement.  The white prof actually living in an apartment built flush against a Cabrini Green wall.  Naturally, once past a fierce gang of teens, they reach even more intimidating areas inside where the fable (say his name five times and he'll appear) proves all too real.  Easy to see how the concept ought to work.  (Applause on the sharp dichotomy between threateningly graffitied halls and welcoming apartment interiors.)   Alas, we don’t much feel it as director Bernard Rose, working off his own script, does far better with the White Entitlement aspects (both concrete and allegorical) than he does with the technical aspects needed to bring off the horror tropes.*  Well, other than the bees.  Bees always make their creepy mark.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Not seen here, but there are various sequels and a 2021 remake shepherded, but not directed, by Jordan Peele.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Little surprise, Rose's later career skewed toward Tolstoy and bio-pics on First Viennese School classical composers.

JULIETA (2016)

From his own adaptation of Alice Munro short stories (which ones?), Pedro Almodóvar honors her nonlinear story organization (the film in flashback before a coda moves forward) painted in a lush retro style (very ‘50s VistaVision/TechniColor) charting the visually lux course taken by glamorous hard-luck Julieta (double cast: Adriana Ugarte; Emma Suárez).  Almodóvar somehow presents it straight and crooked with a lead character Lana Turner would have killed to play.*  (Though in looks, the younger Julieta more Kim Novak - see picture.) 

The narrative has Julieta alternately leaving or losing lovers, relatives and significant others over the course of decades; her daughter topping the list of past regrets.  That daughter the outcome of a one-night stand (make that a one-night-on-a-train stand) that later becomes a long-term relation with handsome, fresh widower Xoan (Daniel Grao).  He too will be lost, with Julieta partially culpable, or so her daughter believes after hearing secrets passed along by Xoan’s long-time female friend-with-benefits who in turn will also succumb to the story’s fatal demands.  Almodóvar plays this all completely straight and, more importantly, gets away with it not coming across as campy or OTT thanks to unity of style in acting and even more in stunning visuals.  Movie compositions worth hanging on a wall can kill momentum in most films, but not here.  Cakes, arranged window views, a staggering high angle shot of a RED car traveling thru a GREEN woods, unforgettable and dramatically engaging.  Over the last decade or two, Almodóvar has made deeper more mature films, but this one throbs thru passion and sheer surface appeal.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *But Turner would have insisted on playing Julieta at both ages.

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