CRAIG'S WIFE (1936)

George Kelly’s 1926 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the one about an over-controlling wife who cares only about her home and meticulous housekeeping, is now written off as hopelessly dated (it’s not) and all too obvious (it is), but was popular enough to run the season.  Filmed three times: a 1928 silent version now lost; from Dorothy Arzner with Rosalind Russell; then remade in 1950 by Vincent Sherman for Joan Crawford.  This one is opened up thru traditional means by filming incidents only spoken of in the play, which keeps a lot of melodrama (murder/suicide; deathbed hospital meeting; fiancé’s cab ride to the rescue) dropped in 1950.  Yet the real difference comes not from different backstories, but in their approach to the self-delusional Mrs. Craig as she hugs her home close to her breast, sucking the air out of everything else.  One plays neurotic; the other psychotic.  The surprise is Crawford goes for neurotic while Russell’s all in on psychotic.  Not at all what you’d expect.  Born only a year apart, it makes Russell a full 15 years younger when she played the role; and she's as stylishly dressed & handsome as she ever was on film.  (For Crawford, it was 1950.)  And while they’re both painfully transparent (so too both husbands - 1936 John Boles; 1950 Wendell Corey -  and each thick enough on film to sell it), presumably it’s what playwright Kelly wanted.  But only Azner celebrates this artificiality, and in doing so, elevates the film to fable so that even when you laugh at it, the laugh just may stick in your throat.  All in all, with the silent lost to Hollywood’s bottomless oceanic archive, this is surely the best version of the story.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: You’ll find the Crawford version, HARRIET CRAIG, covered here:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/harriet-craig-1950.html    OR: The love-withholding clean-freak character Mary Tyler Moore played in ORDINARY PEOPLE/’80 might well be the child Craig’s Wife never had.

SHARK (1969)

Director Samuel Fuller, the Man with the Tabloid Touch, hadn’t made a feature in five years when he took on this lowball assignment, a water-logged thriller designed for quick payoff in the international market.  It’s got a pretty lousy rep, Fuller disassociated himself from it after the producers wanted to use footage of a stunt diver who died on the shoot, while journeyman Mexican director Rafael Portillo did some scenes.  (Which?)  Yet no pall of crumminess hangs over the film, it’s all bright energy and probably exactly what everyone involved must have expected.  A pre-stardom Burt Reynold (working under his own thinning hair) looks like Brando and sounds like Sinatra as a cocky gunrunner caught with his pants down when his cargo blows up (his truck explodes a fraction of a second before impact) leaving him to wander the desert until he stumbles into a corrupt town and a new gig  helping sunken ship salvagers Barry Sullivan & Mexican diva Silvia Pinal.  And Fuller loads on all the usual filler: Cute local kid to show Reynolds the ropes and get under his skin?  √  Alcoholic doc to get the DTs just when he needs to operate?  √  (Arthur Kennedy: weirdly good.)  A shark attack when the men dive for the underwater bars of gold?  √  Pinal needlessly exposing her breasts for Euro-sales?  ☒  Oh, well, you can’t have everything.  Fuller (or his stunt coordinator) goes overboard on the fights (see Reynolds needlessly screw up his knees), plus lousy stock shots, bad sound and a post-Code super ‘60s cynical ending.  For a bad film, what’s not to like?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Eleven years would pass before Fuller directed another feature.

ADIEU LES CONS / BYE BYE MORONS (2020)

Easy to see why this shaggy dog of a movie earned big bucks & major awards in France.  The film, from writer/director/lead actor Albert Dupontel, is rude, silly, fun & appalling in the rough manner of sophisticated French slapstick.  (Did I mention rude?)  And it’s just as easy to see why it didn’t get Stateside distribution.  That cruelly goofy tone lost at the Old & New World border on a story that opens with a fatal diagnosis for salon owner Virginia Efira, doomed to die from some auto-immune disease after decades of breathing in toxic fumes at work.  And she has unfinished personal business to attend to: a ‘lost’ son given up in a teenage adoption.  After a complicated bit of narrative obfuscation, Efira is joined on the hunt by middle-aged A.I. whiz Dupontel, himself about to be replaced at work by younger/cheaper hires, and by blind company researcher Nicolas Marié, styled to look like Dr. Strangelove.  Together, these three will follow an unlikely path to a successful finish, but cause enough damage & suspicion along the way to have the entire city police force hunt them down.  Best when Marié revels in blind-man’s-bluff gags where he’s the butt of painful disability slapstick rarely seen since the heyday of W.C. Fields.*  Dupontel won Best Director awards on this, but, no Blake Edwards he, he’s forced to chop up too many gags that beg to be played in one.*  The first half of the film, setting up the situation and inter-personal relationships, a bit of an over-edited mess.  But you tumble to it.  And the leads are all so damn likable you hope for them to have their fondest hopes fulfilled.  It makes the left-hand turn toward THELMA AND LOUISE at the end feel particularly desperate & unearned.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Fields & the blind customer is in IT’S A GIFT/’33.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-gift-1933.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The rule is, write-up the film at hand, not the film you wish you were watching.  Nevertheless, the ‘fix’ to the ending is too obvious not to offer.  Mom’s auto-immune illness?  Only possible cure a bone marrow transplant.  But since she has no relatives . . . Wait!  What about that ‘lost’ son.  Voila!  Now we’re Hollywood remake ready.

THE KING (2019)

Back in the late 1930s, Orson Welles rejiggered Shakespeare’s lineup of British historical plays into something he called FIVE KINGS.  Eventually reduced, refined & filmed in 1966 to legendary effect as FALSTAFF/CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, whittled largely out of HENRY IV: Parts One & Two.  But his original mash-up proved extremely influential, not only in subtle expansions to HENRY V/’44;’89 for Laurence Olivier & Kenneth Branagh (both stars making  smash film directing debuts), but also in THE HOLLOW CROWN/’12, an all-star prestige mini for Richard Eyre.  And now we can see it used again, just minus the Shakespeare!*  The template remains, Elizabethan structure don’tcha know, and with one significant character elevated from Hi-Lo Comic Mentor to Noblest Lollard of them all!  But the actual words we hear are from David Michôd who also directs and Joel Edgerton who also plays the elevated character just mentioned: Falstaff.  (Why they didn’t go back to the fellow’s real name, Oldcastle, beyond me.)  And while this remains a whale of a tale (young Henry V matures overnight once Dad dies and puts down conspiracies before taking his small army into France exposing his ruthless heroism), this well-received NetFlix release seems to have been quickly forgotten in spite of a cast rife with hot stars like Timothée Chalamet and Robert Pattinson.  Pattinson, by far the best thing in here, is also the sole member of the cast not to get completely caught up speaking all his lines in fashionable croaky whispers meant to connote modern naturalism.  (It’s Steppenwolf meets The Method, as strained thru RADA technique.)   Fortunately, the production improves in the last act when we go outside for battles in sunlight and fields boggy from last night’s rain.  But you’ll still spend too much time wondering how lanky King Chalamet can lift those heavy broad swords in battle or why he puts up with Lily-Rose Depp’s laughably Woman-of-Today Princess Catherine.  Unhappy fact, Henry dead at 33, only two years after his marriage.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The script’s version of events possibly more inaccurate than Shakespeare.  A first!

HER TWELVE MEN. (1954)

Stately British beauty Greer Garson, red of hair/long of vowel, never fully recaptured the prestige & popularity of her war year films (1939 - 1945), but carried on to diminishing returns till this final film under her M-G-M contract.  (She made only two features as leading lady after this.)  Still, someone had the graceful idea of having her finish as she started; debuting as beloved teacher’s wife in GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS/’39, she’d make a farewell playing a sort of beloved Mrs. Chips.  It’s nearly the only good idea in here.  Technically a widow (she’d already been separated), she’s hired as the first female teacher at The Oaks, a snooty private school for boys.  Inexperienced, she’s condescended to by fellow faculty member Robert Ryan and wooed by rich benefactor Barry Sullivan after she manages to get thru to his troubled son.  The film’s real problem not that you guess all the outcomes, but that it’s all so dull.  Running jokes include having her coffee always boil over and having her charges always call her ‘Sir.”  (The latter rather endearing,)  But typically stolid direction by Robert Z. Leonard doesn’t help, nor disinterest from producer John Houseman, stuck with this studio assignment between passion projects JULIUS CAESAR /’53 (the one with Brando as Marc Antony) and the excellent EXECUTIVE SUITE/’54.  On a happier note, the inevitable warmup between Ryan & Garson as they belt out ’The Twelve Days of Christmas’ with the ‘holdover’ school boys, gives us a break by starting at Day Five and clearing the hell out at Day Eight.  Close call.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Some of the kids obviously ‘parked’ at the school by disinterested parents (now there's a subject for a film!), but in a rather appalling attempt to help one of these lonely kids, Garson’s character is shown faking letters to him which she mails as if they came from his mother.  Imagine the psychiatric bills of the future when he finds out who actually wrote them.  Yikes!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Thanks to Robert Donat’s miraculously clean playing as Mr. Chips, Garson’s initial appeal is hard to miss; and she comes thru even more strongly against Ronald Colman in her other James Hilton project, RANDOM HARVEST/’42.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/goodbye-mr-chips-1939.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/random-harvest-1942.html

THE TEACHER / UCITELKA (2016)

Hard not to see allegorical aspects to 1983 Czechoslovakian society at large in this darkly comic fable about a new High School teacher with strong Communist Party ideas and even stronger Communist Party connections back in Communist Block days, pre-Czech Republic.  But the film works even better without linking it to anything other than its main players, the individually affected students, parents & teachers playing out deadly serious games of teenage Realpolitik advancement.  (BTW - the film ends with titles indicating futures for the three main kids, so perhaps fact based?)  You know where you stand right from the start as teacher Zuzana Mauréry introduces herself to her new class before having each student stand up one-by-one and let her know what their parents do for a living.  How else to call in favors in exchange for preferential treatment?  Too poor to buy your way in?  Household chores are an option: an apartment to clean, appliances to fix, errands to run for Teacher or a Soviet era shop queue to stand in and wait.  ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to her needs.’  What could be more proper!  And as butter wouldn’t melt in Teacher’s mouth, not only does she get away with it, she gains considerable approval among many parents.  Something we discover when she goes too far in ‘disciplining’ students with failed exam scores, bringing on complaints and a parent/principal conference.  Writer Petr Jarchovský and director Jan Hrebejk use the meeting as a perfect structural device to break up the timeline by visualizing recent events at home and at school, then going back to the pivotal meeting.  Beautifully handled by all.  And for those who find some of the teacher’s monstrous actions too transparent to imagine they’d work, you may be underestimating how blitheringly awful & obvious someone in power can be in a micro-society like secondary school.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Plenty of opportunities to see how Stateside schools fail their students.  Try going back to a classic that appeared just about the time the U.S. system started falling apart in UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE/’67.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/up-down-staircase-1967.html

LADY L (1965)

Another over-produced dud for Sophia Loren from movie-mogul husband Carlo Ponti.  (His creative energies must have been going into DOCTOR ZHIVAGO that year.)  Adapted as a lux romp by Peter Ustinov (he writes, directs, dubs & cameos), Romain Gary’s bestseller on exuberant turn-of-the-last-century laundress Loren who gets in over her head in political affairs (much like her MADAME SANS GÊNE/’61) when she’s mistaken for a bawd at a bawdy house by anarchist-on-the-run Paul Newman.  Hiding from authorities; bombing theaters; getting the current ‘Party Line’ at clandestine cell meetings; it might just play if only there were some romantic spark between Loren & Newman.  (Per Ustinov, instant antipathy on and off set.)  Fortunately, halfway in, David Niven appears as a Duke on the hunt for spouse & heir; finds both in Loren (literally, she’s already pregnant); and helps Newman escape to gain Loren’s hand in marriage.  Niven can’t do much for Ustinov’s epigrammatic clunkers or clear out the extras clogging the frame in yards of fabric, but at least he knows how to play the dialogue, tossing wise counsel & witticisms over his shoulder like spilt salt while Newman stomps on them and Sophia covers with a one-size-fits-all smile.  ( . . . and that size is LARGE.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One truly funny line to savor.  Upon hearing of a morning duel between the Prime Minister and a cabinet member: ‘Well, it is a coalition government.’ 

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Ustinov directed only a handful of features.  Best by far, the one he’d made most recently: BILLY BUDD/’62.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/billy-budd-1962.html

CONTEST:  Newman repeats a suspenseful set piece from this film in next year’s TORN CURTAIN/’66.  Name the situation to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choice.

AU NOM DE MA FILLE / IN HER NAME (2016)

Writer/director Vincent Garenq doesn’t let anyone off the hook in this fact-based story of a father’s 30-year search for justice after losing a daughter.  The viewer left not with a sense of triumph at justice served, but with a bitter aftertaste on the whole affair.  Daniel Auteuil refuses to court pity as the father, a real-life Inspector Javert finding obstacle after obstacle (legal, logistical, international) in building his case not against some saintly Jean Valjean figure, but to bring down a slick, psychopathic doctor (Sebastian Koch) who lured his wife into an affair (stalking’s more like it) then, years later, took advantage of the daughter, Kalinka, during a summer visit.  Auteuil’s father admirable in dogged pursuit, but hardly likable, quickly sees thru the doctor’s lies after the girl mysteriously dies, but that’s the only quick action he’ll have in his pursuit of justice, burning thru 30 years of his life living up to a promise made to his late daughter.  In doing so, running out the patience of a son and a sympathetic new partner he might have had a second family with.  His monomania using up all his energy.  Just as troubling, his ex-wife’s denial in the face of mounting evidence, unwilling to admit to a role in events even after she’s left the doctor.  Garenq lets this play out in short sharp shocks, jumping back in a year or two later.  It’s very effective, with power games played behind the scenes by legal systems working at cross-purposes to defend international border integrity.  A well-told, but most distressing story.

DB/LINK:  And now for something completely different . . .  While Auteuil’s serious roles get more attention (or is it just better international distribution?), his range is impressive as seen in a much earlier, wild & goofy swashbuckler in a tradition long thought unrecoverable.  Yet with an old director and an old tale, this 1997 version of LE BOSSU puts it across with panache.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/le-bossuon-guard-1997.html

JUROR #2 (2024)

Currently 94, Clint Eastwood’s cinematic swansonging continues.  Fortunately, for the most part, the projects have been darn interesting.  (THE MULE/’18 probably strongest of this late flourishing: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-mule-2018.html.)  This time he stays off-screen to direct an original script by Jonathan A. Abrams.  Original if you don’t know the jury-room dramatics of 12 ANGRY MEN/’57 or the guilty man charged with solving a crime he likely committed.  (See THE BIG CLOCK/’48 with Ray Milland or NO WAY OUT/’87 with Kevin Costner which share source material.)  Here, the ‘guilty’ juror is Nicholas Hoult, trying to thread the needle between letting off a defendant he knows didn’t kill his own wife and keeping himself far from suspicion.  Cleanly handled by Eastwood & well cast (in addition to Hoult; D.A. Toni Collette; J.K. Simmons a jurist with background issues; Kiefer Sutherland in a bit because he always wanted to work with Eastwood; and a very good Chris Messina as Public Defender.*)  If only the first act and last half of the third were as good as the middle section, where Eastwood loosens up a bit and lets natural consequences turn the screws of the twisty plot.  But glaringly convenient loopholes in the first act, to say nothing of a voir dire so cursory it would have had both lawyers barred for life, needlessly stumble.  (Has anyone ever been empaneled on a jury without being asked if they knew anyone, let alone were employed on a police force?)  Then, they chose the ‘wrong’ ending, bringing back Collette when it’s Simmons who ought to be knocking at the door.  You’d think someone was in a rush to wrap this up before fixing the script.  Oh yeah . . . 94.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Regardless of quality, the shabby treatment from Warner Bros. in releasing the film, little publicity, shortened theatrical window in spite of excellent notices, was a disgraceful way to treat a loyal filmmaker who’s done so much (and made so much) for the industry and particularly Warners where he’s long parked his production company shingle after moving from Universal decades ago.  Shame on Warners CEO David Zaslav.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *On the debit side, some of the ‘ethnic’ characterizations might charitably be called ‘retro.’

LA PISCINE / THE SWIMMING POOL (1969)

Writer/director Jacques Deray, little seen Stateside (this, BORSALINO/’70, anything else?), known for slick crime flicks, must have been jonesing for art house caché when he went all Michelangelo Antonioni on this one-off nihilistic tease of a thriller.  Even getting Alain Delon (real deal Antonioni from L’ECLISSE/’62) to star with real-life ex Romy Schneider as house-sitting lovers whose delicately balanced carefree existence is shattered when longtime bosom-buddy Maurice Ronet stops by and becomes the hedonist who came to dinner, along with his recently found late-teen daughter.  That’s Mod-Brit icon Jane Birkin, who proves a bosom-buddy of a different sort.  What could go wrong?  But if Antonioni’s modus operandi turned ‘No Man is an Island’ on its head into All Men are Islands (and just might vanish on one), Deray finds little more than gracefully proportioned volume in couture bathing suits to hang a tale on.  Unquestionably yummy to look at in restored EastmanColor, but sporting borrowed style, philosophies and general ennui.  Not commentary on man’s vanishing point, but merely fashionable appliqué.  Deray, lost in his own artsy contrivance, eventually copitulating to wan police procedural in a post-murder third act, played in slow motion.  It feels closer to Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN/’66* than anything by Antonioni.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Though on record as disliking this film, Luca Guadagnino’s remake, A BIGGER SPLASH/’15, beefs up backstories, but largely keeps story beats.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/10/a-bigger-splash-2015.html

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Unlike Deray, breaking into the art house market by suppressing his genre instincts, Jean-Pierre Melville digs deeper into genre to refine his rep, also with Alain Delon on board in LE SAMOURAÏ/’67.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/le-samourai-1967.html 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *With the Michel Legrand soundtrack (and disconcertingly flat vocals by Ruth Price) to prove it.

THELMA. (2024)

Likable at best, this overpraised/over-hyped comic number gets by on audience goodwill for its two geriatric leads and misplaced enthusiasm (make that chutzpah) from all-thumbs writer/director Josh Margolin, leaping from the ranks of production assistant on this debut.  Ninety-something June Squibb, bubbe to layabout slacker Fred Hechinger (characterization applied like impasto on canvas), has just been scammed out of ten grand by father/son lowlifes (Malcolm MacDowell/Aidan Fiske), but determined to get it back with an assist from fellow senior Richard Roundtree and his motor-scooter.  The film at its best when avoiding its plot and just hanging out with fading foggies (barely holding on to homes or in assisted living units), detailing the war against physical & mental decline.  Touching, clear-eyed and  funny.  But Margolin turns cuddly cute at the mere thought of narrative action as well as making the middle generation (i.e. Squibb’s kids/Hechinger’s parents) dumbest of all.  Squibb is fun to watch.  What a late bloomer!  B’way debut as a replacement in GYPSY when she was thirty; film debut at 63; Oscar nom’d at 86.  But even she must yield to Roundtree, in his last role, stealing every moment he’s on-screen.  Why was he so little used in his last decades?  (Looking great, too.)  To judge from this, the loss was considerable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  To see what’s missing, David Lynch at his considerable best, most sympathetic and least quirky, dealing with some of the same issues is warm, witty and, at times, honestly wretched in THE STRAIGHT STORY/’99.

‘TIS THE SEASON: CHRISTMAS MOVIES OFF THE ALGORITHM

Like Thanksgiving Dinner, holiday movies the whole family will watch together are few and fixed in concrete.  A loop of maybe a dozen films that run from IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE to ELF.  But since even green bean casserole needs the occasional swap out (actually, it needs to go permanently), and as recent efforts at cracking the Christmas Movie Code either try too hard or go all Hallmarky on you, here’s a modest mini-sampler from our site to your home viewing station.  Movie mavens can simply type CHRISTMAS in the MAKSQUIBS Search Box (Main Site/Top Left Corner -- SmartPhoners scroll down to find the Main Site LINK) to bring up scores of Posts that at least mention Christmas - about half will be Christmas movies.  But here’s a starter pack of four to get you past the usual algorithmic suggestions.  All fully explained when you Click on the Film Post LINKS.  

For A CHRISTMAS CAROL look to MR. MAGOO/’62.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/05/mr-magoos-christmas-carol-1962.html   

For an epilogue that's loaded with Christmas cheer, COMFORT AND JOY/’84  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/comfort-and-joy-1984.html   

For buried treasure in Golden Age Hollywood (script by Preston Sturges): REMEMBER THE NIGHT/’40.  Why isn’t this beauty on everyone’s list?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/remember-night-1940.html    

For Continental Family Crisis, A CHRISTMAS TALE/’08.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/un-conte-de-noel-christmas-tale-2008.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Add your fave in the COMMENTS.  But try and keep to films you think are perennially overlooked.