THE REVOLUTIONARY (1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REMEMBER THE DAY (1941)

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

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

LAAPATAA LADIES / LOST LADIES (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

POLITICS (1931)

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

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

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

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

FEHÉR TENYÉR / WHITE PALMS (2006)

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

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

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

KISMET (1920)

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

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

EMILIA PÉREZ (2024)

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

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

THE MISSING JUROR (1944)

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

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

FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024)

Once pundits gain some perspective on the films of 2024, they’re likely to label it as the year Hollywood misread the room.  With FURIOSA as box-office under-performing bellwether for an unheralded line-up of costly misfires (100 to 200 mill budgets) that either flat-out tanked or remain longshots to recoup.  (Warners & Lionsgate hit particularly hard.)  Non-starters include a musical JOKER sequel; the vanity epic MEGALOPOLIS (a sacrificial film fest fave that fell flat); preordained tax write-off ARGYLLE; the current Yuletide dud RED ONE . . . and we’ve hardly scratched the surface.  Of the lot, George Miller’s FURIOSA perhaps the most curious and hard to explain.  This origin story for one-armed warrior Furiosa looked like a safe bet to bring in the FURY ROAD fan base, but was no better received than TOY STORY origin film LIGHTYEAR/’22.  Was it a case of: ‘‘Haven’t we seen this before’ or simply ‘Accept no substitutions.’  Anya Taylor-Joy losing not only an arm but also Charlize Theron’s charisma.  Trying too hard?  That’s the case for a lot of the film's problems, including writer/director Miller, pushing eighty and fighting to prove he’s still got the action chops needed for this post-apocalypse tale of rival survivor clans trying to reach a ravaged earth’s promised land.  It’s telling that the major set piece, a wonder to behold, concentrates on stupendous vehicles and road action rather than on hardly differentiated characters.  At least top-villain Chris Hemsworth sticks out, giving a dastardly go as he tries to locate his inner Laurence Olivier and finds he ain’t got one.  He huffs & puffs & growls.  In general, casting agents ignored for a line-up of aging WWE types.  On the other hand, those who enjoyed FURY ROAD certainly should have a look.  Though they may be disappointed to see that Miller seems to have fallen victim to CGI sweetening where he once disdained its use.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned above, FURY ROAD/’15.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/11/mad-max-fury-road-2015.html

AMBP:  The most farfetched idea in the film?  Furiosa adjusting instantly to one-armed motorcycle driving.  One hard left turn and it’s Wipe-Out.

VAAZHAI (2024)

Twelve may be on the young side for coming-of-age/sentimental education tales, especially with sex not much of a factor, but in 1999 young Sivanaindhan (M. Ponvel) must grow up awfully fast after his boyhood adventures with BFF Sekar suddenly end when village tragedy strikes in this fact-based film from Mari Selvaraj.  (NOTE: The film posts the usual fictional disclaimer, but if anything, seems closer to being true than usual for these things.)  We’re in a rural Indian village where plantain & banana groves offer the main employment opportunities, even for Sivanaindhan when he’s not excelling at school and sharing a crush with Sekar for the pretty, young teacher down the hall.  Hitching a ride on her motorcycle perhaps his top life experience till he realizes he’s lost the family cow while out riding.  These sorts of crises and his constant lying to squirm his way out of trouble & backbreaking field work his main goals within the long unchanged societal standards of 1999 India.  1999 but it might as well be decades earlier, giving this story a tone not so far from a Booth Tarkington PENROD book.  (Penrod at times quite the juvenile delinquent!)  But there’s little to prepare us for the real life U-turn from childhood pastorale (even one blinkered by rural poverty) into devastating personal loss.  Writing & directing as if it were his own story (was it, perhaps peripherally?) Selvaraj keeps a bustling tempo to match the resiliency of his leads, switching over to a metallic b&w for heightened intensity in non-linear flash-forwards, yet not ashamed to show us brilliant colors favored for even the humblest of garments.  The jumps in tone & use of Indian ‘pop’ songs give off a distinct vibe you may have to adjust to, but is both effective and affective in a very specific manner.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Mira Nair’s debut, SALAAM BOMBAY/’88 brings us an urban-India childhood experience from nearly the same period.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/02/salaam-bombay-1988.html

PERFECT STRANGERS (1950)

Before hyphenating up from Writer to Writer-Director, Billy Wilder posted this notice on his office door: ‘It’s Not Enough To Be Hungarian; You Must Also Be Talented!’  The gag refers both to the large contingent of Austro-Hungarians working in Hollywood (at a peak during the Nazi Era) and equally to the number of screenplay adaptations taken from Hungarian plays.  More often than not, the freest fantasias on just the barest of outlines.  PERFECT STRANGERS being a late example of the form.  Before moving to Hollywood, Leslie (Ladislprime aus) Bush-Fekete wrote the source play for this one, a courtroom drama about romance springing up between a pair of married jurors sequestered on a scandalous murder case.  Think proto-12 ANGRY MEN, but Co-Ed.  Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur picked up on the main idea in the late ‘30s for Helen Hayes on B’way, calling it LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.  (Hayes married to MacArthur, it’s his only stage work for her.)  After a modest run, it must have been kicked around for a decade on option before hotshot Warner producer Jerry Wald dusted it off for Ginger Rogers (her character married but separated) and Dennis Morgan (him married with kids but unfulfilled) and assigned it to Bretaigne Windust, a major B’way director not really clicking in L.A.  You can see what they were going for; unfortunately, you can also see where it’s going right from the start.  Lots of lazy stereotypes on the jury panel (the Guilty/Not-Guilty split all too obvious); the murder case something of a strawman to the illicit romance.  Perhaps this was all fresher at the time the play opened in ‘39.  Still, the short docu-prologue on how they picked jury pools back in analogue days (rows of filing cabinets; hand counted forms) is like watching a tedious circle in purgatory come to life, and there’s fun in spotting the well-known supporting cast (Thelma Ritter; Paul Ford; Alan (Fred Flintstone) Reed; along with recognizable actors in almost every speaking role), making for a reasonably engaging 90".

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:   Surely by 1950 we should have had a Black or Asian or Latino person on the jury.  (This still true in 1957's 12 ANGRY MEN, come to think of it.)  Excluding background extras, the sole Black person on screen being a silent elevator operator.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Describing the stultifying middle-class routine he dreams of breaking away from, Morgan (quite good here) bemoans the twice-a-week leg of lamb dinners at his mother’s and his mother-in-law’s homes.  Back then, lamb was the cheap meat!  Chicken was pricey.  And you thought ideas about divorce have changed.

ROADBLOCK (1951)

Loaded with potential, this R.K.O. film noir gets off to a great start right from the credits which scroll over a blacktop roadway as we speed ahead.  Most unusual for the period.  Then tops itself with a fake-out prologue you won’t guess before it’s all explained.  Alas, this first half-reel is the best part of the film.  Not a steep drop at first, that smash opening keeps you involved, as does a meet-cute which is more like a meet-dirty, but we’re running on fumes by the third act.  Pity.  Hard to assess blame, it’s a well-constructed story (co-authored by Daniel Mainwaring) following Charles McGraw’s insurance dick falling hard for femme fatale Joan Dixon (adventuress/chiseler) who leaves him for easy money as a mob mistress.  So when McGraw gets assigned to take down the mob guy, he’s more than a little conflicted, especially after Dixon confesses she loves him back, but won’t live on his puny salary.  McGraw so crazy for her, he’s tempted to play both sides of the fence for love and money.  Director Harold Daniels runs hot and cold (some of the office interiors so flat they might be from Jack Webb’s DRAGNET) and Dixon’s moll is chilly when she needs to be warm and vice versa.  But the film keeps coming back to life on plot & character twists.  Try it out with low expectations and be pleasantly surprised . . . or watch it after another tricky McGraw noir (like Richard Fleischer’s THE NARROW MARGIN/’52 https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-narrow-margin-1952.html) and you’re sure to see what’s missing.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A final car chase, leading up to the titular ROADBLOCK, may be the earliest use in film of the Los Angeles River bed.  What took so long?

LA RAGAZZA CHE SAPEVA TROPPO (THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH) (1963)

Early directing effort for horror specialist Mario Bava, often considered the first step on the road to 'giallo,' the Italian shockers with lurid color, crimes, violence, gore, sex & female nudity (the guys would screw with their pants on).  Perhaps.  Bava, D.P,-ing since the ‘40s and still working in b&w is less assured here than in BLACK SUNDAY/’60 before and the TechniColored BLACK SABBATH/’63 after.*  But here, without color, gratuitous sex & nudity (only a gratuitous beach scene), plus nearly tasteful blood & guts, it’s giallo-lite at best, its content (as the title suggests) more Hitchcock homage than anything else, if more in thought than deed.  Stylistically barely more Hitch-like than Mel Brooks’ dud attempt, HIGH ANXIETY/’77.  One sequence involving an apartment elevator, a spiral staircase and a blonde does have the feel of a Hitchcock storyboard exercise, and jokey touches, like a phallic broken index finger show intent, but little more.  (There’s even a little self-cameo.)  A shame as the film opens quite well as Letícia Román (she’s the blonde mentioned above) takes over nighttime care of a rich elderly Roman invalid from Doctor John Saxon only to watch helplessly as the old gal suffers a fatal seizure on her very first watch.  With little reason to stay in Roma, she’s accosted on a nighttime walk and witness to a murder no one believes happened.  In fact, she’s tagged as a drunk, possibly insane.  Yikes!  Fortunately, that nice Dr. Saxon knows better and gets her released before taking her on a tour of the Eternal City.  (Gratuitous beach scene coming up, but we largely stick to the remarkably tourist-free Spanish Steps.)  Somehow, they get involved in an ‘Alphabet Murder’ scenario that makes little sense and provides minimal suspense.  All in all, I’d go for later Bava, once TechniColor and more complex compositions were added to his visual M.O.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A.I.P. was releasing Bava in the States at the time, but reedited, retitled & rescored.  This one became THE EVIL EYE/’63, a few minutes longer & slightly rearranged (or so a peak suggests), more importantly, the restored picture, has a seriously compressed grey scale which robs almost every shot of the rich contrast Bava (who shot his own stuff) was going for.  Stick to the Italian original.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Bava’s next film, his rangy portmanteau BLACK SABBATH, was his move into TechniColor if not yet giallo.  An excellent pivot point in his career.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-tres-volti-della-paura-black-sabbath.html

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Vol. 3 (2023)

Even with a six-year wait to whet the appetite, the drop in quality, fresh imagination & interest from Vol. 1 in 2014* to Vol. 2 in 2017 is, if anything, exacerbated going from Vol. 2 to Vol. 3.  (Though not, it would seem, for GUARDIANS acolytes, perfectly happy with James Gunn’s repetitions and excesses in his wisecracking ‘dirty’ STAR WARS variant.)  Bigger, louder, CGI’er than ever, Gunn takes two full acts, and a bit of the third, just to get his ducks in a row watching our motley heroes (be they vegetable, animal or mineral) board the latest Death Ship and stealth-save the Galaxy (‘natch) with their familiar cooler-than-thou attitude.  Gunn overloading every shot with multi-plane action & pyro-technics, still ignoring the dictum: When anything is possible; Nothing matters.  And when the unending climax does get up & running, he adds kids (KIDS! - human & raccoon) to the final battle so they need to be rescued (er) heroically.  Weepy sentimentality not unknown to earlier volumes, but not at this level.  Even longtime villains get in the do-gooder act.  (Will Poulter packing on a conscience along with the impressive poundage.)  Meantime Chris Pratt spends much of his finale minutes breaking the longstanding movie record in valiant medical heart-pumping action as he tries to save the life of Rocket the CGI raccoon.*  Maybe he should have applied that effort to the movie.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One of Hollywood’s longest -standing records, it had previously been held for nearly 65 years (!) by Luther Adler, pounding away at Paul Muni's heart in a vain attempt to bring him back in THE LAST ANGRY MAN/’59.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *And Vol. 1 such good, smart/dumb fun.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/guardians-of-galaxy-2014.html

CONCLAVE (2024)

With three major B’way productions and a classy 1964 Hollywood embalming, Gore Vidal’s facile political potboiler THE BEST MAN, has proved remarkably durable.  And damned if it hasn’t shown up again, now at The Vatican.  The job on the line no longer POTUS but Pope (THE BEST CARDINAL?), with so many ‘borrowed’ story beats, the Vidal estate might have a case against co-scripters Peter Straughan & Robert Harris.  On the other hand, in most ways, they show up Vidal’s shallow offering with deeper characters to take the place of Vidal’s Adlai Stevenson & JFK puppets.  Instead, we have doubting Progressive candidate Stanley Tucci and glad-handing Conservative John Lithgow.  Lithgow sporting a deliciously awful toupée.  Purposefully?  (Also an ultra-strict African Cardinal in the running, something that wouldn’t have been thinkable in the ‘60s.)  But secrets and reveals all very Vidal, till a pair of twists at the end.  (One twist too many say I.)  The major change is structural with our POV and dramatic interlocutor moving to Ralph Fiennes’ ‘Dean of Cardinals,’ the guy who runs the conclave with a firm hand and quite possibly a personal agenda.  Director Edward Berger holds to a tight color pallette: Off-white, Dark Grey, Papal Red; claustrophobic and very effective.  As top nun running things behind the scenes, Isabella Rossellini looks even more like her famous mother (Ingrid Bergman) than she did in her youth, and the whole international cast is as much a treat as the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For more modern Popery, Anthony Hopkins & Jonathan Pryce in THE TWO POPES/’19.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-two-popes-2019.html

BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE (2024)

A more than acceptable continuation of the BAD BOYS franchise: cops & cartel stuff, fast, violent & goofy.  Fourth in the series that began in 1995, sequeled in 2003, rebooted in 2020 and remains a hipster’s take on LETHAL WEAPON, the Mel Gibson/Danny Glover Black/White buddy/buddy cop actioner that came out in 1987.  Though with both cops Black, the character parallels are a bit blurry.  Here, Will Smith plays Glover’s sobersided big brother to Martin Lawrence who steals the film as the Mel Gibson wild card.  Movie Mel Gibson, that is.  In real-life Mel's more in Will Smith territory after Hollywood’s most non-threatening Black ‘cool bro.’ a go-to model family man, already teetering on scandal (longtime marriage a sham?; nepo-son a personification of Hollywood entitlement) brought on his own thunderbolt when he won an Oscar® and infamously dealt a slap-heard-round-the-world, erasing three decades of sassy good will in a nano-second.  This career-redemption (BAD BOYS: THE HAIL MARY PASS?) showing up two years after a sacrificed film (EMANCIPATION), is more test drive than anything else, triumphantly proving Smith’s the smoothest PR damage-control operator in the biz.  (Compare Smith's repair job to the on-going disaster of LETHAL WEAPON’s Mel Gibson handling his damage control).  And the film, you ask?  One of those Drug Cartel insider jobs with the expected overblown pyro-technics (the finale goes on forever), but there’s a surprisingly tight house-bound battle by Smith’s military son-in-law vs. a squad of cartel-killers (it’s staged to work like a Martial Arts set piece), and welcome giggles from Lawrence’s delusions of grandeur.  With costs & grosses comparable to the last BB pic (both directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah), Smith aces a neat soft landing.

SCREWY THOJUGHT OF THE DAY:  But what happens should Smith want to play a contemptible villain?

INCIDENT (1948)

With substantial credits earlier in their careers, vet director William Beaudine (check out the late Mary Pickford silent, SPARROWS/’26, an astonishment) and writer Fred Niblo Jr, (Oscar nom’d for Howard Hawks’ THE CRIMINAL CODE/’30 ) had been working their way down the Hollywood ladder for some time when they made this typically drab looking mystery for Monogram Pictures over on Poverty Row.  Yet behind the Grade Z production values is a neat little thriller with solid comic possibilities director Beaudine has neither time nor budget to bring out properly. Easy to imagine, say, Ann Southern & Franchot Tone making this as one of her B+ MAISIE films over at M-G-M.*  Instead, we get also-rans Warren Douglas & Jane Frazee as leads in a mistaken identity mob tale that sees Douglas’s regular Joe beaten up when a two-bit mob enforcer misidentifies the lowlife Mr. Big wants punished.  Douglas, hoping to sort this out and maybe get a bit of revenge, hasn’t enough info to get the police involved so he turns amateur dick, helped by a decent looking dame (with a big secret!) who just happened to be on the scene when one of these goons spoke a bit too openly.  Together, they’ll stumble their way toward romance and a major crime bust; this time with the police around to clean up the mess.  Slightly better acting would have done wonders in covering up Monogram’s bargain-basement sins of production.  (The ‘comic relief’ wife a particular horror.  Yikes!)  But worth its running time (just over an hour) in spite of the missteps.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Ann Southern & Franchot Tone made a pair of detective & wife comedies (FAST & FURIOUS/’39 - not seen here), but no MAISIE.  Tone’s in enough classics to be remembered today (ADVISE & CONSENT; MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY), but Southern less so.  See her at her best in A LETTER TO THREE WIVES/’49.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-letter-to-three-wives-1949.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The film opens with a written prologue all about how small incidents can play a big role in our lives.  Its pseudo-seriousness giving no clue of the film’s underlying comic tone.  Did they just get a case of the giggles as they shot or purposefully add it on during pre-production?

THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION (2019)

Film Fest fodder from Lesotho (a landlocked country encircled by So. Africa) and with 31 international awards to prove it.  Writer/director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese has a strong, simple story to tell, but moves at such a glacial pace in an attempt at gravitas, he only proves Less is sometimes Less.  The late Mary Twala is all but literal Earth-Mother to her threatened village, an 80-year-old holdout in an isolated lean-to home proscribed to be under water once a new dam brings ‘progress’ to the region.  Worse, rising waters will flood the local burial grounds where generations of family remains lie.  (Including umbilical cords & placentas.)  And there’s more heartache as this respected elder awaits a son who is late to return for the traditional Christmas gatherings from his job in So. Africa.  Ordered to leave her home by company officials and the town’s mayor, Twala defiantly raises her voice (in song, no less) to arouse the rest of the docile inhabitants of their rights. ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ expected, but something to that effect in Sotho must do.  This would be fine, even moving, especially as it benefits from majestic locations shot by gifted cinematographer  Pierre de Villiers.  But even the most perfect of visuals can’t hold the screen for as long as Mosese asks.  We lose contact with the meaning of things.  It’s unimaginable the film might speak to anyone not already sympathetic to its anti-progressive messaging.  ‘Pave paradise put up a parking lot’  may be a real threat in Lesotho, but the film takes the sentiment for granted.

DEMOLITION (2015)

Never has a leading man taken so many showers in a single film as Jake Gyllenhaal soaps his way thru in DEMOLITION.  He’s in great shape so it’s no burden to look at him, but you’d be hard-pressed to see this much skin on a gym-mate you’ve been spotting for years.  Under director Jean-Marc Vallée, working off Bryan Sipe’s script, the fleshly display feels more like actor bait than the psychological profile of recent widower Gyllenhaal he going for.  Something that holds for most of his attention grabbing actions and constant narration (of his own narrative) in his character’s emotional arc.  Catatonic grief to macro-aggression, all Method Acting exercise, showy displays of obsessive-compulsive disorder, jump-started when he writes an overly confessional complaint letter to a vending machine company after his wife’s death in a car crash that left him physically without a scratch.  Psychologically a walking wreck, he’s unable to grieve, unable to resolve issues he had with his wife, unable to work normally, unable to do anything but demolish objects.  But he needs to break thru something more than a wall.  Enter the previously anonymous woman he wrote those letters to, single-mother Naomi Watts, along with her sexually confused teenage ‘emo’ son.  You know the drill on these things, push everyone away until you hit bottom, then build your way back to a new sort of balance.  But when the film’s not too obvious, it’s pushing too hard.  Having Watts show at a memorial gathering or seeing Gyllenhaal, in surrogate father mode, take up duty as target practice to the boy’s William Tell act.  Talk about irresistible actor bait!

DOUBLE-BILL/WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  A year before DEMOLITION, Vallée made another recovery from personal tragedy film in WILD/’14 (not seen here).  OR:  Similar territory covered in uneven but better fashion: FEARLESS/’93; dir. Peter Weir with Jeff Bridges.

FIVE CAME BACK (1939)

Neat-o programmer about a small passenger plane going down in a jungle near a tribe of head-hunters.  Yikes!  Everyone’s a character in this smartly plotted GRAND HOTEL on a Plane story directed by John Farrow (not bad John!), working on airless studio-bound R.K.O. sets, off an original script by Nathanael (DAY OF THE LOCUST) West a year before his premature death, along with Dalton Trumbo & Jerome Cady.  Piloted by one-time WWI ace Chester Morris, the plane carries newsworthy elopers Patrick Knowles (rich) & Wendy Barrie (pretty); a big-shot gangster’s 5-yr-old boy guarded by henchman Allen Jenkins; scheduled-to-hang prisoner Joseph Calleia escorted by John Carradine; retired couple C. Aubrey Smith & Elisabeth Risdon; plus wandering tart Lucille Ball.  (Lucy wonderful and  startlingly beautiful in the broken-dame dramatic turns she often played at the time.)  One of those films that shouldn’t work at all, but thanks to the Hollywood Factory æsthetic, is all of a piece, which makes it easy to swallow.  Also easy to watch under Nicholas Musuraca’s lighting, later R.K.O.’s go-to film noir D.P. master.  Something that can’t be said of Farrow’s less rigorously stylized remake 20 years on (BACK FROM ETERNITY/’56*) from the dying days of Howard Hughes’ moribund R.K.O.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For a more realistic take on the Downed Plane Must be Fixed to Save Survivors formula, try Robert Aldrich’s all-star THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX/’66.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/flight-of-phoenix-1966.html

HONOR AMONG LOVERS (1931)

As the only female director working regularly at the height of the old Hollywood studio system (mostly the 1930s; mostly at Paramount, R.K.O, M-G-M), Dorothy Arzner now gets more than her fair share of critical attention; too often for the ‘wrong’ films.  (A thesis behind every article.)  She was probably at her best for Paramount in (late) Early Talkies dealing with Modern Women and Romance.  That’s what we’ve got here as Claudette Colbert shows off her brains and her figure as Personal Secretary to Fredric March, an inherited Master-of-Business type sporting a dashing mustache and lording it over his stuffy Board of Directors at work, and various gals of the moment on the town.  Only Colbert refuses to join the club, stuck on rising broker Monroe Owsley, a man she could start a life with from the ground up.  March’s society pals only seeing her as a ‘working girl,’ even if her work is totally legit.  But stopping March’s constant passes with a quickie wedding to Owsley proves disastrous as he’s soon in over his head financially.  Meanwhile, March has grown up to realize he doesn’t want Colbert as just another bed-mate, but as his one-and-only.  A bit of melodrama in the last act (accidental shooting) is fun, but strains our good sense.  So too, the class-will-out plot mechanics.  Yet the film as a whole is unusually satisfying.  A Paramount paradigm of this sort of thing, especially for Colbert who’s enchanting.  (IMDb only lists a certain Caroline Putnam on wardrobe, but that form-fitting slinky silk item and the half-length fur number have got to be the work of costume designer Travis Banton, already working at Paramount.)  Nice support, too, with Charles Ruggles as a dissolute millionaire squiring a very young, very dumb, very funny Ginger Rogers amongst the East Coast elites.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Made the next year, Arzner’s MERRILY WE GO TO HELL/’32 moves from financial to artistic circles; reversing sexes with March as struggling writer & Sylvia Sidney as wealthy mentor.  It also shows how fast Talkies were getting back on their feet technically.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/01/merrily-we-go-to-hell-1932.html   

OR:  A similar situation ironed-out M-G-M style by splitting the love interest into two parts for WIFE  VS. SECRETARY/’36 - with a powerhouse cast: Gable, Harlow, Loy; James Stewart.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/wife-vs-secretary-1936.html

MUSIC BY JOHN WILLIAMS (2024)

Laurent Bouzereau, who’s been making bios & backgrounders as DVD Extras for decades, found he had to expand his format into a full-length feature to even begin to cover the prodigious 60+ year career of film & concert composer John Williams.  (Longer if you count his session work & early jazz albums as pianist.)  And if the smooth result is more broad than deep, that’s probably appropriate for Williams, a man whose output rivals a baroque workhorse composer, more Vivaldi formulaic than Bach inspirational.  A mere list of his directors: Spielberg & Lucas most famously, going back to Wyler & Hitchcock (FAMILY PLOT/’76, a particular delight), forward to Howard, Columbus & Abrams, just gives a taste.  Plenty of clips & interviews (he seems universally adored by colleagues & family), but maybe most fun for early secrets at the piano: for Henry Mancini, that’s him on keyboard for PETER GUNN; for Elmer Bernstein opening a generation’s tear ducts with the piano intro on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. And credit to Bouzereau for somehow, after all these years of familiarity, recreating the frisson in sight & sound of the BLAST OFF that opens STAR WARS/’77.  (A job Steven Spielberg, right after JAWS/’76, urged Williams to choose over the far more prestigious A BRIDGE TOO FAR/’77.)  Not covered in here is the elephant in the room: Williams’ magpie penchant for compositional suggestion.  You hear it everywhere.  STAR WARS famously glancing toward the sound world of Holst’s THE PLANETS, a love-theme that looks at Tchaikovsky and that opening fanfare that might be a fake-out from Korngold’s KINGS ROW/’42.*  To say nothing of the grab from Zoltán Kodály for the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS alien motif.   Still, if Williams can be charged with standing on the shoulders of giants, is there another composer with more themes that instantly recall specific films?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *These musical ‘suggestions’ not to be confused with the sort of wholesale quotes (orchestrations & all) of someone like M-G-M’s notorious Herbert Stothart.  Oscar’d for THE WIZARD OF OZ/’39, likely for the great Arlen/Harburg songs, his main contributions consisted of copying bleeding chunks of classical clips (from Mussorgsky to Debussy) into the background score.  Williams less in debt than influenced.  Favorites you can easily spot include SUPERMAN/’78 (listen to the music playing under the company logo in Universal films of the 1940s); E.T./’82, a hard one to spot, but the sound world is right out of the last (3rd) movement of Howard Hanson’s Third Symphony/Romantic.  Perhaps most surprising, SCHINDLER’S LIST/’93 is too close for comfort to the opening ideas in Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 2.  Far less known than Bruch’s First, the reference recording of this fine piece ironically features Itzhak Perlman.  Yep, the same soloist who plays on the SCHINDLER soundtrack.

ILLICIT (1931)

Famed for his Frank Capra collaborations (IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT; LADY FOR A DAY; MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, et al.), writer Robert Riskin came to Hollywood after this B’way ‘problem play’ was bought by Warners after a one-month run.  Trimmed, rather adapted by Harvey Thew, without input from Riskin or co-author Edith Fitzgerald, then handed to duffer director Archie Mayo.  It’s not much of a movie, but still fascinating as a look at Love, Marriage, and the mores of modern maidens circa 1930.  Barbara Stanwyck, whose reputation preceded her even in 1931 thanks to LADIES OF LEISURE/’30 and TEN CENTS A DANCE/’31 (even lower Pre-Code morals yet to come), is the free-spirited live-in lover of James Rennie, a scion of Wall Street type eager to go legit.  Not so Babs; gossip & social disgrace be damned.  Her own parents, and every marriage she knows died once the knot was tied.  Finally folding under the pressure of an Act One curtain, she proves herself right in Act Two.  The only way to keep our love alive is to live separately, illicitly visiting her lover as a playmate for ‘overnighting.’  Loads of Pre-Code types & ideas in here; plenty of drinking too with life-of-the-party Charles Butterworth continuously blitzed.  Plus both principals with a past ready to spark back to life at any moment.  (Ricardo Cortez for her/Natalie Moorhead for him).  Naturally, there’s a copout ending, but in its plainspoken way, the play’s argument remains interesting if not quite modern.  The film should be far better known, and would be if groom James Rennie were a leading man worthy of the young & vivid Stanwyck.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For a 'Mod' look at this sort of on-again/off-again romance, Stanley Donen & Frederic Raphael’s trope-breaking beauty TWO FOR THE ROAD/’67 with Audrey Hepburn & Albert Finney.  PLUS: Remade with Bette Davis two years on as EX-LADY.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/ex-lady-1933.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/06/two-for-road-1967.html

THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940)

Aware they couldn’t rely only on teen coloratura Deanna Durbin to make good on the entire studio payroll (Deanna was popular, but getting chubby-cheeked post-puberty), Universal Pictures began a second wave of their iconic early ‘30s monster movies. (Even expanded the canon with Curt Siodmak’s WOLF MAN/’41.)  Surprisingly, they included Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY/’32 in the select group.  Always an outlier amid Universal’s monstrous clan: poetic, still, more atmospheric than corporal, fatalistic rather than destructive; the Mummy maxim: Leave Me In Peace.  That idea pretty much holds in this first of four sequels.  (Not seen here, the three to follow star Lon Chaney Jr who had just joined the studio.)  In this one, jug-headed archeologist Dick Foran and comic sidekick Wallace Ford follow a lead discovered on an ancient piece of pottery to a hidden tomb where a mummy awaits his daily dose of tea for the living-dead.  Father/daughter nightclub magicians Cecil Kellaway & Peggy Moran also on board while mummy protector George Zucco (who apparently gets killed off in all four pics!) tries to stop them from disturbing the peace.  Sounds close enough to work for Universal, but nothing feels or looks right.  And they let you know it by reusing bits of footage from the original MUMMY.  Hack director Christy Cabanne and producer Ben Pivar knew which side the studio’s bread was buttered.  So where Freund’s original beauty anticipated the imaginative suggestive horror of Val Lewton @ RKO (CAT PEOPLE/’42; THE LEOPARD MAN/’43); this reboot points ahead to schlockmeister William Castle.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Stick with the dreamy nightmarish original; OR: For a more modern reboot, Hammer Films’ excellent 1959 version.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/mummy-1932.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-mummy-1959.html