THE SCARLET BLADE (aka THE CRIMSON BLADE) (1963)

Diversifying from their signature color-drenched horror reboots, Hammer Films pivots from Dracula, Frankenstein & the Mummy to swashbuckling period historical.  Alas, they chose poorly as, for one reason or another*, when it comes to British Dynastic & Civil wars, the Stuart/Cromwell conflict never caught the world’s imagination as those Roses & Tudors still do.  Even their opposing nicknames are duds: Roundheads vs Cavaliers.  Given low-wattage production & cast, this one plows ahead with Lionel Jeffries (a fine comic actor working in villainous mode) leading Cromwellian forces into the 1648 countryside to hunt down loyal Royalists who’ve fled to the forest to gather and wait their opportunity.  (The set-up more William Tell than Robin Hood.)  Jack Hedley makes a singularly unheroic presence (no Errol Flynn, he’s hardly Louis Hayward) while Jeffries’ daughter June Thorburn goes rogue and sides against his Cromwell Parliamentarians.  Only young Oliver Reed brings something dramatic to the mix, already dangerous at 25, he’s a brooding, scary sideman to Jeffries and might be a turncoat.  Might be; you truly don’t know where he stands which brings unexpected vibrancy to writer/director John Gilling’s otherwise uninvolving work.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  To see what all the fighting’s about you might try CROMWELL/’70.  Though it’s largely unsatisfying as film and as history.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/cromwell-1970.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Interest hardly peaked by the unflattering fashions of the day or by Cromwell’s veneer of righteousness.  Only spoken of here, he’s a hard man to get behind.

THE MANXMAN (1929)

Solidly made/location shot (coastal Cornwall subbing for The Isle of Man), Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate silent (BLACKMAIL/’29 was both a final silent and a first Talkie) was assigned rather than chosen; no doubt explaining Hitch’s lack of interest in discussing the film much in his many interviews.  (The classic conversation book, HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT, ticks it off in cursory fashion.)  Yet what a neat piece of filmmaking it is, showing Hitch working to great effect on the kind of romantic triangle story he was rarely drawn to (the unsatisfactory UNDER CAPRICORN/’49 may come closest) and a delicate subject matter (out-of-wedlock pregnancy) that often has to be indicated rather than confronted.   With situations only moving to melodrama near the end when the Hall Caine novel it’s adapted from goes all SCARLET LETTER on us.  Anny Ondra (Czech actress famous for being ‘live’ dubbed in BLACKMAIL) is the local beauty with a fiercely protective father being wooed by rough, manly fisherman Carl Brisson (a Lars Hanson/Charles Farrell type) and his upper-crust childhood pal Malcolm Keen, now on the fast track for county judge.  Affianced before his latest voyage, Brisson charges Keen to watch over Ondra, but she falls for the guy when Brisson is mistakenly reported killed at sea.  Returning very much alive, Brisson accepts the child as his own; it’s Ondra who wants out . . . permanently.  Charged with attempted suicide; brought before Judge Keen’s court; the secret of the child’s parentage revealed to a disbelieving Brisson; Hitchcock plays most of ths very close to the vest, helped by his regular cinematographer at the time Jack Cox.  All this drama successfully brought off with minimal surtitles which helps to hold down the temperature.  Hitch should have been proud of this road-not-taken effort.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Hitch’s previous film with Brisson, THE RING/’27, and his following one with Ondra, BLACKMAIL, both excellent.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-ring-1927.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/10/blackmail-1929.html   

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One of Hitchcock’s greatest shots is hiding in here, but lasts only half a second.  (About 10 frames at silent speed.)  It’s when Ondra returns to take her child back from Brisson and their actions are watched by a crowd of faces looking thru a large window of many panes; one gossiping head in every pane.

MONKEY MAN (2024)

When it comes to self-mythologizing vanity projects: Action Movie Division, even Sylvester Stallone takes a back seat to Dev Patel who not only stars, but writes, directs, produces and sweats his way thru loads of ‘wife-beater tees.  (First ripping them apart to expose a fit hirsute bod for ladies in the film to ogle.)  With government & military goons oppressing ‘the people’ (we know they’re bad since they mow down kids at a puppet show . . . they even mow down the puppets!), Patel lives out tales his mother read to him as a child about the legendary monkey-man of justice Hanuman in his own one-against-a-thousand martial arts battles; fashioned in the usual ‘Macbeth Action sequence’ style (full of sound and fury, signifying nothing*).  Eventually confronting the officer he witnessed raping, then murdering his mother; and then in face-to-face conflict against the philosophically inclined Head of State.  He takes a nail to the palm just in case you haven’t caught on to Patel’s Chosen One indulgences.  Or whatever he’d be called in the Indian folkloric elements the film uses.  Credit Patel with bringing this in at a price (he works cheap when it’s his own project!) and then finding an audience for it.  But a depressing success.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One odd touch in his fights possibly counts as original with Patel regularly using his mighty choppers (big, white, strong) not only to bite off facial features, but to twist short-bladed knives into the jugular.  Yikes!

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG (2020)

Live-action/computer-animation mix of yet one more popular videogame must have seemed something of a risky/expensive joke while in development.*  But with SONIC 3 rocking the current Holiday Box-Office, who’s laughing now?  A deserved hit from the start, it’s only gotten bigger.  (2 and 3 not seen here.)  Gags & action very ADHD, which fits Sonic, stuck on earth where he’s trying to stop Jim Carrey’s diabolical intergalactic strongman from taking over the world.  Fortunately he carries gold ring Black Hole portals with him.  (Doesn’t everyone?)  And, after sorting out their new relationship, gets help from new human pal James Marsden to reestablish order.  Fun, if a little relentless in the manner of the first DEADPOOL/’17, it’s really more reminiscent (make that prescient), unexpectedly so, of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE/’22 (and not just stylistically).  Even more unexpectedly, it’s a lot more engaging (and certainly less pretentious) than that seriously taken award winner.  Zippy, light-hearted, technically savvy direction by Jeff Fowler (okay, also exhausting) and without a weak link in the cast.  Sonic voiced by Ben Schwartz with James Marsden as his winning pal (crazy young looking at 47), while Jim Carrey is only slightly held back by having to sit for much of the film in a space vehicle.  (A good thing?  Or does it make him play more broadly to make up for the immobility?)  Easy to see why this took off; easy to tell whether or not you’d want try 2 & 3.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, more free association in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-2022.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Though no joke to its fan base who were appalled at early renderings of Sonic and waged a successful campaign to redesign the character closer to the little computer beastie.

BLITZ (2024)

From British writer/director Steve McQueen, a look at London during the worst of the WWII blitz, with the city being systematically bombed during overnight waves of air attacks by German planes.  The film seen & told largely from the POV of a biracial runaway boy via Dickensian adventures as he tries to find his way home after leaping from an evacuation train, and from his mom, searching the city to find him.  As filmmaking, surprising only in not being surprising, some McQueen fans unhappy with its relative conventionality, but that turns out to be a clever move by McQueen, allowing him to progressively complicate events & situations while neatly upsetting the usual we’re-all-in-this-pulling-together tropes of past tellings, without losing his audience or making social politics the main point of the film.  Agenda-free, it tells the truth before printing the legend.  Technically, some of the CGI effects fail to convince, and a couple of noble characters feel too saintly (they gum up the brisk tone), but McQueen keeps it moving with strikingly fine set pieces (a nightclub sequence & one in an UnderGround station are dillies) and two or three brilliant narrative ellipses that cut out when you don’t expect them to, leaving just enough unsaid to make us participants rather than onlookers.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Double-billing this with John Boorman’s HOPE AND GLORY/’87, his untouchable WWII memoir, is probably unfair.  But it does demonstrate the unique advantage in having your own skin in the game on a child’s POV memory piece.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/hope-and-glory-1987.html

THE SILENT HOUR (2024)

Bypassed thriller was perhaps a little too familiar to break out commercially (suggested ad copy: Just When You Thought Variations On DIE HARD Were Over!), but it’s well-handled by director Brad Anderson and writer Dan Hall along with . . . well, by just about everyone.  (Other than the main villain who’s a lousy actor.)  But the main reason to have a look is for lead actor Joel Kinnaman who’s upped his game in gravitas and empathy to new levels.  A police detective in crisis after being injured in the prologue (an excitingly staged chase between parked & crisscrossing trucks), Kinnaman is told his manageable hearing loss will soon plunge at unexpected moments in & out of complete deafness.  On medical leave, he’s called back to work by his ex-partner to act as interpreter for a deaf witness in a murder case with his admittedly barely adequate deaf ‘signing.’  Young, pretty, an obvious romantic set-up (nicely played by Sandra Mae Frank , the leads perfectly paired),what no one yet knows is that the killers are bent cops with a leak into the investigation.  After that, it’s all hide and seek on ten floors in a building that’s already being cleared out for demolition.  Close calls; elevator shaft getaways; window ledges for quick switches; you get the idea.  With tension exponentially raised by communication problems (phones & hearing problems) as well as the expected gunplay; most twists staying within the bounds of believability.  But the main pleasure comes watching this Joel play with the assured dignity and modest heroism of another Joel, that underrated Golden Age Hollywood star Joel McCrea.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  McCrea was at his peak around WWII, but for a comparison here, try his superior remake of the Walsh/Bogart classic HIGH SIERRA/’40; Westernized as COLORADO TERRITORY/’49, also with Walsh calling the shots.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/colorado-territory-1949.html

MIKEY AND NICKY (1976)

Anywhere he went, Mike Nichols was always the smartest guy in the room.  Or was if past comedy partner Elaine May didn’t show up.  Then he’d settle for Silver.  And this may help explain their inflated film reputations, especially among New York-centric cognoscenti.   But if Nichols kept up appearances by sweeping duds under the rug (see: DAY OF THE DOLPHIN; THE FORTUNE; CATCH-22, et al.), May has but four titles and no wiggle room.  Instead, her champions must elevate the last two flame-outs, infamous ISHTAR/’87 and this low-level mob internecine hit job, a crude long-night-of-the-soul affair, into unheralded masterpieces.  Wasn’t it made by the smartest person in the room?  Truth is, inarticulate (even dumb) people have been known to make good films . . . and vice versa.  Here, John Cassavetes, acting loud enough so you can’t miss him, is the mob ‘rat’ roaming New York in hopes of avoiding (or at last delaying) a hit that’s been put on him.  Peter Falk, fellow mid-level mob associate and his only friend, wants to help him . . . maybe.  Falk really wants to help set him up at some obscure location to facilitate the hit.  Claims of realism dissolve in the heavy-handed Method acting seen in so many Cassavetes projects.  (If everyone you know is a Method actor, especially ones hoping to be called on stage for a class critique, I suppose it may ring true.)  And with May shooting 100 feet of film for every 1 used, no surprise to find the film doesn't cut together.  More like cleaning out the fridge and calling the result boeuf bourguignon.  ISHTAR may have been dissed (in spite of a few seriously funny set pieces), but M&N was simply dismissed.  Still around, still utterly hilarious at testimonial speech-making (a niche market to be sure, but Ms. May a genius at it), but Academic dogma now sticks M&N right up there with the usual set of auteur reclamations.  And this time, we can’t even blame the French.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For this sort of mob rubout/best-friend turncoat story, one that’s deservedly been raised into the canon, try the originally dismissed THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE/’73.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-friends-of-eddie-coyle-1973.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Cassavetes, under the impression he’s not doing enough to steal focus, adds a snort to his laughs, a snort!  Falk quickly spots what Cassavetes is doing and quickly copies it.

RAAT AKELI HAI (2020)

Handsomely mounted murder mystery/police procedural from India (the tone half CHINATOWN/half Agatha Christie whodunnit) is a bit like watching one of those BritBox crime shows where you’re not quite sure who everyone is or why the maid did it, but liked it anyway.  (As if playing a game of CLUE with twice the usual suspects, double the rooms and three lead pipes.)  It starts particularly well as a semi-truck runs a car off the road before finishing off the crawling victims.  It’s followed by a big wedding party where the mother of police detective Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) hunts up possible brides for her middle-aged boy.  (Typical blunt response: ‘Your son is much too dark for me!’)  But the main story (which eventually ties in with the double prologue)  involves the murder of a rich politician, possibly by the youthful bride who slept her way into his heart for cash.  Now she’ll inherit all.  Naturally she’s innocent; naturally Siddiqui interested, even protective; naturally the rest of the family want to pin the murder on this interloper and save the family fortune.  But his boss at Police Headquarters wants the case quickly taken care of, the sex worker wife charged and local political grumbling smoothed over.  But with his lead officer being shot at as he digs deeper and that officer's junior partner working against him, the truth may end up buried with the innocent.  The whole family seems involved in the murder either directly or tangentially as class, caste & cultural lines of demarcation come into play.  A fun watch even when you’re a bit lost, and with one of those train station farewell sequences that turns into a romantic epiphany.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *While it does feature a Private Investigator, no one is murdered in Billy Wilder’s LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON/’57.  But its train station finale might have been the model here.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/love-in-afternoon-1957.html

G.I. BLUES (1960)

For Elvis Presley, returning to film after completing his two-years military service, it was that old Hollywood story: The Catastrophe of Success.  Quickly signed by producer Hal Wallis after his national tv breakthru, Presley made three films fast enough to beat the draft (one on loan, two very good) that caught a raw side of Presley never to be seen again.  Once back from Germany, the rough edges were largely gone, he now played ‘The King,’ no longer dangerous but safe enough for this film’s babysitting climax.  No wonder Wallis assigned him to child specialist Norman Taurog as his regular director.  And no wonder the films became all pablum.*  They made pots of money, but let the creative tank run dry.  Some at least had tempting song lists; not here.  In this reintroduction, even the classical crossovers he regularly put in the mix were no match for ‘It’s Now Or Never’ (‘O Sole Mio’) nor ‘I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’ (‘Plaisir d’Amour’), but the instantly forgettable ‘Tonight Is So Right For Love,’ wrenched out of Jacques Offenbach's TALES OF HOFFMAN bacarolle.  And the plot is an old standby, the date (a misused Juliet Prowse) that starts as a sordid bet between soldier boys that turns into tru-love.*  With two years to develop something, this is what Wallis & Co. came up with?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The exception to Presley’s financially successful  buncombe was the film he made, almost by accident, right after this, FLAMING STAR/’60.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/03/flaming-star-1960.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A walk in the park with Prowse does provide the only visually arresting moment in the pic when the pair stop to watch a Punch & Judy show and Elvis pops up in the puppet proscenium.

A CIELO ABIERTO / UPON OPEN SKY (2023)

Best known for scripting early Road Movies for Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, here Guillermo Arriaga switches gears to write a Road Movie for his two kids, Mariana Arriaga & Santiago Arriaga in a joint directing debut.  And nepo-darlings or no, they all take to the screen in a perfectly natural manner.  Same for a cast of newcomers on this modest revenge saga on a case of unpunished vehicular manslaughter and its aftermath.  It’s 1995, two years after a semi-truck plowed into a car carrying father & 12-yr-old son heading North on a hunting trip.  The older son stayed home, not doing well enough in school to come along, and now obsessed with the accident (if it was an accident) and a kind of survivor’s guilt.  For two years he’s been haunting ‘junker’ lots looking for clues or some connection to follow and now has come up with a name & an address.  Heading North, he’s without much of a plan other than to confront the man.  He’s got the recovered younger brother in tow, as well as a new step-sister they barely know.  He’s also got a gun to back him up, but barely enough cash to get there and back.  For the film, the big problem is that you can guess exactly how the third act is going to play out, but the trip, along with the solid film technique keep you watching.  And while it’s fairly common to shoot a period film in matching period style, the Arriagas skip past the ‘90s indie scene and head farther back stylistically to what you might expect from an ‘70s indies pic.  A decision that pans out for them, perfectly dovetailing with the material and the flat land they pass thru.  A bleak beauty pervading the film’s look.  And if it’s all a bit generous in running time and goes overboard in giving youthful folly the benefit of the doubt, the film doesn’t plead for sympathy and delivers enough eccentric bumps along the way to more than merely hold attention.  (Though you wish they’d take that extra shot to show the food the kids order at diners along the way!)  And when the younger brother, now two years older and nearly a foot taller than he was before the crash, revisits some of the places he'd been, revealing how much he’s grown in two years, it packs an emotional wallop and acknowledgment of loss in a minute or two that films running two-and-a-half hours fail to match.

INTERLUDE (1957)

Second (and least) of three 1930s John M. Stahl films remade in the ‘50s by Douglas Sirk for Universal producer Ross Hunter.  (Hunter likely brought all three to Sirk’s attention.)  The other two much better known and all four films hold interest: MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION/’35 ‘54 and IMITATION OF LIFE/’34; ‘59; but INTERLUDE (WHEN TOMORROW COMES in 1939) doesn’t take nearly as well to Sirk stylistics with its light romance & CinemaScope travelogue elements in & around Salzburg reacting negatively once it receives a Gothic blood transfusion right out of JANE EYRE.  Plain Jane (or rather June) Allyson is an American in Germany who drops the nice all-American doctor everyone assumes she’s going to marry when Rossano Brazzi’s famous symphonic conductor sets eyes on her.  But all ain’t smooth sailing because . . . he’s already married.  (Of course.)  Worse, his wife is rapidly going insane.  (Does that make it okay?)  And as there’s no castle tower to lock her up in, furtive romance is the best Brazzi can offer.  Stahl was luckier with his leads: Irene Dunne & Charles Boyer, just off LOVE AFFAIR/’39, are far more comfortable & charming together; and somehow making Boyer a classical pianist rather than a conductor, adds intimacy to Stahl’s straightforward style on b&w studio sets rather than TechniColor overseas locations.  And Dunne, a waitress who happens to sing Schubert, brings common-sense & common-sensibility to the impossible situation.  Allyson weirdly overdressed all thru the film even feels physically uncomfortable.  To their credit, both films aim for adult tones with unresolved endings, but it sure worked better in ‘39.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Brazzi is better than most actors who pretend to conduct, but why do they all signal on the beat, rather than lead/anticipate?  European conductors in particular almost comically ahead of the musicians response.  (Maybe that’s why they do it this way in film.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  James Cain’s novel was used yet again (INTERLUDE/’68) with Oskar Werner as the conductor (not seen here), but stick to Boyer/Dunne in WHEN TOMORROW COMES.  (Use the MAKSQUIBS Search Box to find the other Stahl/Sirk originals & remakes.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/10/when-tomorrow-comes-1939.html

FIREWORKS / STRANIZZA D'AMURI (2023)

Well-reviewed ‘Coming-of-Gay’ story, fictional but apparently inspired (initiated might be a better word) by a real incident of gay bashing (and worse) that took place in 1980 Sicily*, near a town that still feels like it’s 1950.  Giuseppe Fiorello, who’s been acting for decades, makes a directing debut at 52, and it shows, the film going on for two-and-a quarter hours, repeating points two or three times.  No doubt his heart is in the right place, but story beats & visual memories feel borrowed from other films and stock photos, piggybacked on a real event to add gravitas.  The leads are late teen boys; one from a happy family of fireworks specialists; the other from a miserable home where he’s recently returned from reformatory and is living with his mom and her lover, a bullying garage owner.  Labeled as the town ‘faggot’ by locals, he (and a moped he’s delivering) meets-cute by crashing into the kid from that happy fireworks family who's on his moped, and a quick friendship flares into flirtation before Fiorello closes the door on us (literally) from viewing further activities.  Busy with fireworks jobs over the holiday season, intimacy grows when Dad becomes too ill to work.  (Dramatically convenient emphysema/asthma.)  But as word of the teen’s relationship leaks out, guilt, denial, a humbling return to past living quarters, physical blows*, and finally a short-lived reunion.  As political call to action, the film’s about four decades late; as drama it feels about four carbon copies away from the original.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *There’s a lost subplot/character who might have made this film work, a straight local who tries to sexually abuse the kid.  Later, when toughs come in to beat the kid up, he seems to be seething.  As if thinking, he’s not your faggot; he’s my faggot.  Nothing nearly as dramatically dangerous is touched on here.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Note the film takes place in 1982.

MEN OF THE FIGHING LADY (1954)

With major hostilities coming to an end in 1953, Hollywood must have felt it time (or just commercially viable) to bring its big guns to the Korean War.  Hence Paramount releasing a starry adaptation of a James Michener’s bestseller, THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI/’54.*  A hot ticket item that likely explains this far more modest rush job (in theaters months before BRIDGES) with less starry M-G-M contract leads in an adaptation of a James Michener magazine article.  They do however put Michener himself in the film (played by Louis Calhern) as a visiting journalist even though the film’s main story about a blinded pilot being talked down to try and land on an aircraft carrier isn’t by Michener but Commander Harry Burns.  Elsewise, it’s one of those Portrait of a Ship films, heavily larded with actual war footage (some pretty hair-raising) in unmatched stock.  Painfully out of shape Frank Lovejoy leads his unit (Van Johnson, Keenan Wynn*, Robert Horton, et al.) in frustrating multiple air runs to take out Korean supply routes.  Legendary second-unit director Andrew Marton (see BEN-HUR/’59) handles first-unit efficiently (he even keeps comic relief to a minimum), but the real reason to listen in is for the full reel of music Miklós Rózsa wrote to accompany the ‘blind’ flight back to ship.  There’s no vocal component, but it’s basically a cantata for aircraft and wounded pilot that outdoes anything else in here.  It’d make a knockout symphonic piece on any program.  And as to Korean War follow-ups?  Never quite happened in a big way on what’s often called the Forgotten War.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Look quick for an early appearance of Jerry Mathers (later The ‘Beaver’) as Wynn’s 6-yr-old kid sending Christmas Greetings by film. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *As mentioned, BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI, not without a pretentious philosophic angle, but awfully well-crafted in its last couple of reels.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/07/bridges-at-toko-ri-1954.html

OUT OF MY MIND (2024)

Though hardly shy on the predigested dramatic components that plagued After-School Specials of year’s past, this adaptation of Sharon M. Draper’s novel about a sixth-grader with Cerebral Palsy (wheelchair-bound; iffy muscle control; nonverbal) is largely effective, touching and blissfully free of worthiness.  The narrative moving forward on two parallel tracks as real-life CP lead Phoebe-Rae Taylor ('speaking' with the imagined voice of Jennifer Aniston) leaves her unchallenging Special Ed program to ‘mainstream’ once a week in a ‘regular’ sixth-grade classroom with natural peers; then dares herself to try and win a spot as one of her school’s Whiz Kids and compete for the State Championship on a televised event.  Winner goes on the Nationals in D.C.  And while most dramatic turns can be seen coming (there’s even a race to the finish line), a neat touch shows up when her success adversely affects the one friend she’s made in her new school.  Well handled by cast & crew, though on this kind of film, with so many formulaic elements, the real creative force isn't necessarily the director (Amber Sealey), but often a hands-on producer.  But how to award credit when there are TWELVE of them?  Regardless, the essence of the film can be seen in its strongest scene, driven by the film’s strongest perf, when Taylor gets a fancy, very costly speech-assist device and for the first time in her life is able to verbally welcome ‘Daddy’ home .  That’s busy journeyman actor Luke Kirby* taking over the film for the moment as he quietly breaks down hearing his daughter ‘speak’ for the first time.*  You may, too.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Kirby earns instant empathy even with lots of competition surrounding him.  Hard to see why he doesn’t have a higher profile.  Too much the chameleon?  He won an EMMY playing Lenny Bruce on THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL  (not seen here).  Or is it that he looks a bit like too many other better known, more established actors?

DOUBLE-BILL:  *When the equivalent moment comes to Helen Keller in THE MIRACLE WORKER/’62 (it’s when deaf-blind Helen verbalizes ‘Wa-wa’ and we know her teacher has finally reached her intellectually), it’s the climax of the story.  Here, verbalization is more teeing-off point for ginned up dramatic moments & competition at school.

LA FORTUNA DI ESSERE DONNA / WHAT A WOMAN! (1956)

Italian director Alessandro Blasetti had already paired Sophia Loren & Marcello Mastroianni in a couple of films when they squeezed in this third, made on the cusp of Loren’s upcoming Hollywood debut.  Maybe that explains why this one feels like a rush job.*   Mastroianni’s something of a free-lance paparazzo (the term not actually in use before another Mastroianni film, LA DOLCE VITA/’60) who happens to snap a shot of Loren fixing her stockings after grabbing a ride with an all too grabby driver.  And when the sexy pic lands on a Rome magazine cover, her life goes topsy-turvy with offers for representation, publicity shoots, modeling, movie roles . . . the works.  Does Marcello stand a chance against a smooth operator like Charles Boyer, a classy agent rep who happens to be a Count.*  (Secret: he also happens to be married.)  That’s about it for plot, but the stars are good company, Blasetti has a way with big party scenes (check out the Maria Callas lookalike at Loren’s first fancy reception), and also has an amusing way of tackling Sophia as a character by treating her as if she weren’t on location, but was the location.  ‘Where are we shooting tomorrow?  Oh, yeah, Loren . . . bring all the lenses.’   Inconsequential, but fun.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *One of the previous films, TOO BAD SHE’S BAD/’54, with taxi-driver Marcello joining Sophia’s trio of grifters just to be near her, is darn good.  OR:  To see Blasetti at his best, try the heartfelt pre-Neo-Realist FOUR STEP IN THE CLOUDS/4 PASSI FRA LE NUVOLE/’42 which was remade to reasonable effect as A WALK IN THE CLOUDS/’95 with Keanu Reeves & Anthony Quinn.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *In standard Cinecittà Studio style, all dialogue dubbed/looped in post-production, largely with their own voices.  But alas, not Boyer so we don’t get to hear if his Italian is as indecipherable as his English.

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL (2024)

In 1973, the trick for director Fred Zinnemann was to build suspense on an international thriller where you knew going in that cold-blooded hitman the Jackal would fail to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle.  In 2024, the trick for this reboot is that these big-ticket streaming items only go into profit if you get a second season so you can’t kill your lead.  Zinnemann triumphantly solved his problem; this rethink ignores its, but still finds plenty of ways to stumble thru nearly eight extra hours where every expansion is a diminution of the original’s cool precision.  Here, hitman Eddie Redmayne is no man without a shadow, but a (wait for it) loving family man!  With idiots for in-laws and (as an actor) zero chemistry with wife & child.  (The only emotional note comes when Jackal seems to connect in the ‘gay cover’ subplot, an elaboration from the earlier film.)  The hunters, British MI6 (?) replacing the amusingly drab methodical deskmen & bureaucrats of 1973, seem to come from other streaming series with a lead investigator who somehow manages to needlessly lose four or five people early on (including two agents) and not only isn’t instantly removed from the case, but gets what amounts to a vote of confidence.  Jackal’s target a Master-of-the-Universe technology geek (think Elon Musk/Steve Jobs), a laughably inadequate substitute for de Gaulle.  Meanwhile director Paul Wilmshurst (or someone - the series has multiple helmers) blows the filming on three or four pivotal assassination attempts before failing (twice!) to sell the ridiculous idea that you can get off a precision shot while riding sea waves on a small boat a couple of miles away from your target.  (Heck, my weather forecaster can’t tell me if it’s going to rain tomorrow.)  Credit for running a few action set pieces with flair, some military flashbacks meant to give Jackal psychological background are decent enough (if exactly the sort of Freudian explanation Jackal should not have) along with some neatly turned car chase scenes.  I know, car chase scenes, not what made the book and subsequent feature film such original thrillers back in the day.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  No surprise: THE DAY OF THE JACKAL/’73  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/06/day-of-jackal-1973.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID;  With freckles you could see from outer space, Redmayne’s Jackal must be the most spotable fugitive on the planet, even in disguise.  I had more trouble locating corporate villain Charles Dance in the first couple of episodes.   (BTW - He’s the Jackal’s likely Season Two target.)

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.