THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND (1956)

Tone-deaf and unpleasant, this misconceived service comedy might well be titled THE GIRL THE FILM LEFT BEHIND as co-star Natalie Wood largely drops out of the picture after the first act.  That’s when boyfriend Tab Hunter flunks out of college, loses military deferment and reluctantly kisses Natalie goodbye to join this man’s Army.  Spoiled by wealthy, politically connected Mom (Jessie Royce Landis), Tab’s a closet Mama's boy, rich, lazy, self-centered & arrogant, a prick for all seasons with an overblown sense of entitlement about class, classes, his girl, and now army life.  Naturally, he’ll fuck up (on purpose, mind you), trying to get out till wising up to himself and coming thru at the finish.*  Did the writers know just how unlikeable they made this guy?  He even let’s a couple of kids (and their dogs!) wander onto a live-ammo training exercise area.  A bit of fun to be had debating who’s cuter: Natalie with her hair bobbed and no makeup or Tab with those chiseled . . . well everything.  (Even his hair chiseled.)  Plus, what a load of up-and-comers in the cast: James Garner, David Janssen, Murray Hamilton, Alan King (!), alongside Jim Backus and Henry Jones.  Vet director David Butler, who made light vehicles and Fox musicals, unable to make Hunter worth the trouble.  Leave this one in the brig.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Silent star William Haines, like Hunter, more or less out as gay within the industry, based his entire career, and rose to the top in the late-silent/early Talkie transition period, on this same jerk of a character.  His careless, carefree cruelty almost shocking to watch today.  But it can work on screen.  See him under director George W. Hill in TELL IT TO THE MARINES/’26.  OR: Haines at his very best the one time he stepped away from that character for John M. Stahl in MEMORY LANE/’26.  Long unavailable except in an out-of-order tinting-lab print, it’s finally been restored and is getting a MoMA premiere on August 5th.  The film, a minor masterpiece, hopefully getting a video release in the near future.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  With the army racially integrated on paper for nearly a decade, and effectively so on the field starting in Korea, this 1956 film tries to keep up with changing times by having a few Black soldiers appear in every group shot.  That is, every group shot but one: there’s no Black presence when Hunter beats everyone playing craps.  In 1956, keeping Blacks out of this game would have been considered socially progressive.

CLOUD / KURAUDO (2024)

A sense of dread and menace can be felt from the start of the latest film from writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.  On the margins at first, it leaks toward the core of story and character, gaining prominence until it erupts in overcooked violence at the climax.  (Followed by a brief coda that promises ‘the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’)  Meticulously constructed for a ping-pong effect of on/off disassociation, Ryôsuke Yoshii is the emotionally distanced Masaki Suda, an unenthusiastic factory man and, at home, an enthusiastic ‘reseller’ who pre-buys entire runs of consumer goods at low price, then posts the whole supply on-line at a huge mark-up and waits for orders to flow in from the vacuum he’s created.  Pure speculation, but it generally pays off.  He ought to be getting rich; he ought to be thriving with his new girlfriend; he ought to be sharing the wealth with his partner.  But he’s only more addicted to finding the next deal.  Perhaps a new start in a fancy county home would clear a pathway forward.  Instead, exposure, poisoning the well on bad faith transactions, fake designer goods and dud electronics.  Worse, his I.D. and location hacked, then passed to threatening online threads where disgruntled customers and anonymous hate players join.  Suddenly, home, property, life under attack.  Looking for help from non-existent friends, live-in girl or authorities?  Not likely.  Only a local, hired as an assistant (Amane Okayama, excellent), before being poorly treated, shows loyalty.  Resolute, resourceful, and what a skill-set in the violent arts.  Haunting and absurd, this psychological suspenser might be A Don Siegel Film from a Michael Haneke script.  Yet it’s 100% Kurosawa.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Directing since the ‘70s, Kurosawa broke thru internationally in 1997 with CURE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/10/cure-1997.html

MOON OF ISRAEL / DIE SKLAVENKÖNIGIN (2024)

Most versatile of Golden Age Hollywood helmers (ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, THE SEA HAWK, THE SEA WOLF, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, CASABLANCA, a mere sampling of just his ‘38 to ‘42 output), Hungarian director Michael Curtiz was already well-known in Europe when he went to Austria for this quasi-Biblical epic, a gloss on THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/EXODUS story from adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard.  For Curtiz, the film became his American calling-card, in spite of suppression by Paramount who were protecting C.B. DeMille’s TEN COMMANDMENTS/’23.  But widely viewed within the industry, it made his rep.  Astounding & ridiculous in equal measure, the impressive physical production is technically similar to DeMille, but with a more sophisticated design and a style that's more D.W. Griffith than DeMille, specifically the Babylonian sections of INTOLERANCE/’16.  In Haggard’s telling, Egyptian Prince Sethi (Adelqui Migliar), fairminded heir apparent to the 80-yr-old Pharaoh, goes to Goshen to quash a Jewish slave revolt where he meets and falls for Merapi, The Moon of Israel (María Corda) in spite of being engaged to Pharaoh’s daughter.  As things play out, Pharaoh dies at the news; Sethi’s cousin takes his place next to Throne and Royal Daughter; those pesky plagues run their course; first born die (Sethi’s, too!); the Princess will demand extermination of the freed Israelites; and everybody races to pass thru the temporarily parted Red Sea.  Curtiz  brings his usual vigor to the proceedings. But much has to be taken on faith as film elements are . . . uneven.  (The best youtube edition isn’t so bad, but it’s been mastered as a small window within a letterbox, so sit close. –   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db94nsNHCyE), it’s worth squinting thru.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  It was a no-brainer for Warners to assign Curtiz to NOAH’S ARK/’28.  OR: See the DeMille take on THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/’23 where the Biblical tale of Moses gives way to a parallel modern story.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/noahs-ark-1928.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/ten-commandments-1923.html

JAWS @ 50: THE DEFINITIVE INSIDE STORY (2025)

Laurent Bouzereau had a great run turning out behind-the-scenes special features as Extras on premium DVD editions of classic Hollywood films.  Not the academically inclined essays or close-readings of directorial style found in Criterion Commentaries, but gossipy backstory featurettes.  A Value Added Bonus from pre-streaming days.  With less call for such offerings in today’s market, Bouzereau has moved on to feature-length studies, like a recent bio on film composer John Williams.  Now, this Golden-Anniversary look at a single film, and not just any film, Steven Spielberg’s JAWS.  Good stuff as far as it goes: archival clips, talking-head encomium from fellow directors, plenty from Spielberg himself.  (Though why Emily Blunt in here a mystery.)  But heck, who doesn’t like JAWS?  Well, other than the NY’er film critic Penelope Gilliat, who used to split the year with Paulina Kael and whose squib review on JAWS read, in its entirety, ‘Don't bite.’ and ran for years.  We do get a couple of little known surprises about some post-location work in a water tank and even a pick-up shot in a backyard swimming pool.  But this is really no more and no less than a Super-Sized version of the DVD Extras Bouzereau used to make.  And he's always careful to avoid tough issues.  For Williams, not a peep about his many musical ‘borrowings,'  (see here: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/11/music-by-john-williams-2024.html), and now in not mentioning the rift that later developed between Spielberg and one-time film alter-ego Richard Dreyfuss who is only seen in archival material.  (Best guess is that Spielberg blames Dreyfuss for the failure of passion project ALWAYS/’89, but who knows.)  Worth a look, but also a missed opportunity.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  JAWS co-scripter Carl Gottlieb’s original paperback, THE JAWS LOG/’75, often credited as the first bio on a movie production.  But that ‘honor’ should go to Walter Wanger whose My Life with Cleopatra came out in 1963, or perhaps 1973's The Magic Factory: How MGM Made An American in Paris.

ROMA, ORE 11 / ROME 11:00 (1952)

Writer/director Giuseppe De Santis, best known for BITTER RICE/’49 (the sexy Neo-Realist film) rounds up the usual creative suspects from the movement (co-writer Cesare Zavattini, D.P. Otello Martelli many others) for this mixed message of a drama that, by the time it’s done, seems to smell Il Boom, the mid-‘50s/’60s Italian economic miracle, in the air.  But just now, even a modest ad in the newspaper for a low-wage secretarial position gets hundreds of in-person applicants.  Fleshed out with formulaic story beats & character development, it uses a real-life tragic incident as narrative pivot after a first act that leans on Neo-Realism as an army of unemployed women show up, starting at dawn, for the company gate to unlock so they can grab an early interview.  Two hundred before the boss shows.  Plenty of time to fill us in on employment & family histories; sob stories and sacrifice.*  But can they type?  Act Two moves past Neo-Realism to disaster movie tropes as the building’s old staircase unable to support all those eager women determined to beat a line jumper to the office.  Crash!  With buried bodies; crushed bones; missing people and property; instant top-of-the-news notoriety.  Act Three swings portmanteau as we follow a handful of survivors who pick themselves up and find the jolt has altered their view of life’s goals . . . and not for the worse.  Proposals, packed bags and a prostitute’s pledge; goodbye city-life/hello country town for others.  A welcome shock to the system for many.  Lightly sketched, with all the depth of a chalk boundary line on a grass field, but neatly served.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Plus, nearly half the women groomed to look like the next Ingrid Bergman (it’s during her Roberto Rossellini period), but none as compelling on screen as the young Raf Vallone, a struggling artist who gets the girl after she's all shook up on that staircase.  Those Rossellini/Bergman films poorly received at the time.  De Sica fared better with his off-beat Neo-Realist fantasy MIRACLE IN MILAN/’51, out between BICYCLE THIEVES/’48 and UMBERTO D/’52.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/10/miracolo-milano-miracle-in-milan-1951.htm

THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS (2021)

(NOTE:  I know this Write-Up makes less sense than usual, but hey!, it's The Matrix.)  In an attempt at resurrecting their cash-cow/calling-card franchise, the Wachowskis, or rather Lana, who takes sole credit, tries to have her cake and eat it too on their signature Gordian Knot fable of multi-layered realities.*  Playing both sides of The Emperor’s New Clothes fence, the main debate asks if message & meaning exists within these MATRIX films, or can empty pyrotechnics serve as both surface display and subject?  From there, we go ‘meta’ as Keanu Reeves’ Neo, living the corporal corporate life as video game designer Thomas Anderson, suffers thru company conference meetings on the public’s reaction to previous gaming editions of The Matrix.  All this coming after a zoomy prologue that sees digital entities in human form battling for their lives in, on and over skyscrapers.  Though technically, are they alive or merely lithium charged data?  One piece of the puzzle Neo will have to solve while renewing his feelings for Carrie-Anne Moss and his sessions with quirky analyst Neil Patrick Harris on fear control.  Parsing all this well-nigh impossible though subtitles help, if not for gal fighter Jessica Henwick whose diction is so indistinct, you can’t make out two words for every ten with or without the sub-titles.  Lots of famous faces to spot between CGI overkill, and a moral to contemplate: never trust your analyst.  Alas, the cool which sold the original MATRIX in 1999 a thing of the past; subsumed by a new emotion for one of these films: Pity.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Stick with the first in the series . . . only the first.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The ending also a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ cop-out.

CAPTAIN SCARFACE (1953)

Dreary bargain-basement product (for a Grind House triple-bill?) produced by Hal Roach Jr (on Pop’s studio lot) has supporting actor Paul Guilfoyle debuting as director from Charles Lang’s original script.  (Not Lang the cinematographer, BTW.)  Third-billed Leif Erickson takes the lead as a So. American based foreman on the run from his boss and taking the first ship out of port.  That’s how he ends up on Los Baños, mad Captain Barton MacLane’s doomsday vessel.  (Longtime Warners character heavy MacLane failing to pull off his Russian accent.)  Seems the captain has kidnapped an explosives expert and plans on taking down the whole Panama Canal along with everyone on board.  Yikes!  This ought to be a bit more fun than it is, but so flatly lit, written, staged and acted, there’s little to redeem it.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Adding insult to injury, most Public Domain and Free Streaming copies in excellent physical shape.  In the history of film preservation: the good die young, while crap endures.  If you’re looking for a man-on-the-run meets Evil Ship’s Captain story, tough to beat THE SEA WOLF/’42.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-sea-wolf-1941.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Well, maybe just one thing.  Somebody managed to get away with naming the ship ‘Los Banos,’ Spanish for The Bathroom.  Flush away!

JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX (2024)

Destined to go down as the most disappointing high profile sequel since EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC/’77 (out four years after the game-changing original), Todd Phillips’ D.O.A. semi-musical continuation of what had been Hollywood’s all-time top grossing R-rated pic (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/04/joker-2019.html) wouldn’t have come as a surprise to many in the biz.*  The story’s simple enough: while in looney prison awaiting trial on past murders & mayhem, Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) buds up with fellow psychopath Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) to bill & coo . . . in song.  Mostly American Songbook classics and ‘60s ‘Pop,’ delivered in what might be called ‘half-integrated’ style.  It’s like a cross between what worked so well in PENNIES FROM HEAVEN/’81 with lip-synched period recordings, and even better this same year with vocalized transgender mob story EMILIA PÉREZ, which gets almost everything right this film gets wrong.  A triumph of execution.  This was the stylistic choice everyone (including upset audiences) jumped on as the key to this film tanking.  But it’s not.  The problem was that the ultra-violence that sold five years back was happening ‘for real’ within the framework of that story.  Not so here, where, with the exception of an explosive finale, all the gory thrills occur in dream sequences Joker wakes up from.  Nothing happened, folks.  It’s as if Phillips didn’t understand his own concept.    . . . oh.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:   As mentioned above, PENNIES and EMILIA PÉREZ/’24.  OR: Play movie sleuth since while Martin Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER/’76 was the obvious takeoff point for JOKER, hard to say what Phillips was riffing on here.  Perhaps Brian De Palma’s crazy-fun freak show PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE/’74, where there's actually a Batman-worthy villain made with the help of a vinyl L.P. press machine.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/11/emilia-perez-2024.html    

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *More likely, the dismal reception was welcomed as a control lever against Phillips (and others), returning balance of power to the studios.  Pricey, but worth it.

ANIKI BÓBÓ (1942)

Honored Portugese master Manoel de Oliveira, who lived to be 106 and never stopped turning out films (take that Clint Eastwood), a critical darling, especially at film fests toward the end of his long career, never broke thru Stateside, even in an auteurist manner.  And, to go by his late work, easy to see why.  Overloaded with grand themes: obvious, weighty, pretentious, in spite of some tantalizing international casts eager to have worked with the old man.  Could a better encounter be had by going to his beginnings rather than his end?  Say, this very first feature from 1942?  Nope.  It’s no more satisfying then the late works, and a bit rough technically.  Editing particularly bumpy.  Meant as a modest charmer about the games kids play on the streets of Porto, this episodic film best for its location work on the narrow alleys, stairways, roofs and tenement apartment buildings of this seaside city.  If only the kids weren’t a mass of worn clichés and schoolyard casting calls that didn’t pay off.  The storyline, beside all the roughhousing and urban games, follows a couple of rivals for a little girl's favor, a doll stolen from a store display window, and the store owner developing an interest in the kids.  (He proves something of a behind-the-counter child psychologist/philosopher.)  The main action, which opens the film before we flash back, showing a dangerous fall by one of those rivals down a slope toward an onrushing rain.  Will the boy be crushed?   Was he pushed?  And while you won’t be chewing your nails for the next 80 minutes, the film’s pleasant enough and there’s a nice set piece set on dangerously unstable ceramic rooftop tiles.  Next time, maybe something from de Oliveira’s middle period.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  François Truffaut’s SMALL CHANGE/’76 is the go-to pic for this sort of thing.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/small-change-1976.html

DIABLO (2025)

Apparently, this is the third teaming of Good Guy Scott Adkins and Bad Guy Marco Zaror as adversaries in a Martial Arts ‘slayathon.’  Who knew?  Standard issue genre stuff (okay, slightly substandard), but with enough offbeat perversity to keep you from tuning out.  Adkins, a big handsome guy with big handsome fists and a big handsome suckerpunch kick, is just out of prison after 15 years and on a mission to grab (and protect) the daughter he left behind with the mother and the Latino mob boss who married her.  Hard to imagine these three were ever a trio of bank robbers, but when she died, her final wish was for Adkins to save the girl from the man the girl thinks of as her father.  Now, with a huge reward out to find the girl, death-master Zaror enters to kill anyone who gets in his way.  (Often with a curved knife hidden inside his prosthetic metal hand.  Dozens slaughtered along the way by Adkins and Zaror, but hard to get too worked up since our teenage victim is such a willfully blind pain in the ass, it’s tough not to root against her.  And we’re also constantly pulled out of the action by Adkins remarkable resemblance to Ryan Reynolds.  (Check out the left side in three-quarter profile.)  Reynolds & Adkins' striking resemblance might be put to better use remaking some doppelgänger classics: THE IRON MASK?  THE COMEDY OF ERRORS?  THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER?  It couldn’t be sillier than this.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Technically, director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza liberally moves to slo-mo on the fights (to show balletic grace?), more effective are the digital stutter effects he adds here and there, pixilating the image into a sort of living poster.

IO CAPITANO

Writer/director Matteo Garrone (GOMORRAH/’08) has a major work here; awards, Oscar nom., yet not much seen.  A tough watch, but superb, raw, timely, deeply moving.  The story is old and currently unpopular, immigrants leaving their homes for something better, in this case Africans going to Europe.  A touchy topic these days.  Senegalese cousins Seydou & Mousa, 16, but looking like young men, ignore all advice and risk a journey north that proves violent and terrifying, heading thru Africa to Libya and the Mediterranean, then across the sea for Italy to find work and send money home where their families live in flimsy lean-tos hardly better than migrant camps.  Moussa the natural alpha-male, urging on less impulsive Seydou.  But as horrors & brutalities pile on (bribery at every juncture; desert transport by truck and foot more like a death march; outlaw shakedowns and torture; senseless military arrests), it’s Seydou who turns leader and caretaker; though he too will need the kindness of strangers to survive.  Harrowing stuff, yet Seydou’s biggest fear still to come when he’s given charge of the boat taking nearly a hundred refugees on the last leg over the Mediterranean to Italy after a couple of minutes instruction on how to captain a ship.  Stunningly realized by Garrone, technically the film is immaculate, with one location topping the last, a cast filled with unmatchable non-professionals, with incidents of sweeping action and escalating terror seemingly caught on the fly.  International anti-immigration sentiment no doubt held this back, but the film demands to be seen and understood.  Its terrible beauty beautifully captured.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The Greeks in their wisdom would follow tragedy with Farce or Physical Comedy to clear the air with laughter.  Is such a thing even thinkable today?  Could we watch a lightly sentimental cartoon on fresh immigrants coming to America like Spielberg’s AN AMERICAN TAIL/’86 or Rodgers & Hammerstein’s corny musical FLOWER DRUM SONG/'61?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/01/an-american-tail-1986.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/flower-drum-song-1961.html

ALL FALL DOWN (1962)

Always in the shadow of Tennessee Williams (who he was unfavorably compared to in spite of successes COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA; PICNIC; BUS STOP), playwright William Inge died long before his current (if partial) critical reclamation.  But easy to see why he was seen as a backup Williams in Inge's adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s overwrought novel about a dysfunctional family down South.  Warren Beatty, in his arrogant pretty-boy prime, repeats the Angel of Death* he’d just played in Williams’ THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/the-roman-spring-of-mrs-stone-1961.html), but sans suspect Italian accent, as irresponsible prodigal son to suffocating mom Angela Lansbury (very Shelley Winters here) and libido-free dipso dad Karl Malden.  Brandon De Wilde (remarkably good considering) is the worshipful kid brother/family peacemaker who finally spots the feet of clay, and Eva Marie Saint is a visiting cousin who brings out a new leaf on Beatty only to discover the new growth is no different than the old.  While director John Frankenheimer, only his third feature after much tv work, can’t find a level of artifice everyone can work in, so the acting is something of a free-for-all.  For the film, hysterical playing and physically drab presentation prove a bad combination.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Next year, next big brother with feet of clay as De Wilde sees Paul Newman plain in the far superior HUD/’63.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Something our foreign poster picks right up on.  (see above)

CONTEST/LINK:  Wildly misrepresentative trailer, even for Hollywood.  Plus a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up on a streamable film of your choice if you can name the tune & the film the trailer uses as playout.  https://www.tcm.com/video/61703/all-fall-down-original-trailer

THE HIGH COMMISSIONER (1968)

For a while in the 1960s, tv networks like ABC and CBS briefly tried to be major players in the movies*, but they rarely got ‘First Look’ at the best material.  Dog-eared scripts working their way down from established Hollywood studios was more like it.  Something that helps explain this, a political thriller, not without potential, but showing fingerprints and coffee cup stains from rival development execs who’d rejected it months ago.  Fortunately, star Rod Taylor is such a darn likable chap, even weathered and a bit thick, as the Aussie detective plucked from the Outback to pick up Australian High Commissioner Christopher Plummer in London on an old, trumped up murder charge, you swallow the narrative bait.  It’s really political payback (from an uncredited Leo McKern), but Plummer gets a short stay to finish up his international conference.  Taylor agrees, but the shit hits the fan when a series of assassination attempts breaks out.  (One at Wimbledon, very MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, a hoot, especially when they go right back to tennis action post-shooting.)  But then, the lighter tone of the first half tries but fails to turn dark in the second.  Lili Palmer looks elegant as Plummer’s mature wife (15 yrs older and dying of cancer); Camilla Sparv is his loyal/sexy assistant; Daliah Lavi is a spy with a shifty nature and shifting skin tone; Calvin Lockhart is the cool dude/foreign diplomat; and a delightful Clive Revill is both comic relief in the first half and dead serious business in the second where he's even funnier.  Plus Franchot Tone, dying of lung cancer at the time, playing an American Ambassador dying of lung cancer.  Director Ralph Thomas is all thumbs at action, but gets his laughs, even the unwanted ones.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *ABC’s initial film production unit ran from 1965 to 1972.  This British RANK product a probable pick-up to meet a release quota guarantee.  Nowadays, Disney owns the joint.

THE GUNS OF TIMBERLAND (1960)

Two years after THE PROUD REBEL/’58, Alan Ladd looks ten years worse.  Not older; worse.  In five years (and five films), he’d be dead, 51, mostly from alcohol.  (Something traumatic post-REBEL?:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-proud-rebel-1958.html)  But while this is a lesser film, and has the rep to match, it’s a bit of a sleeper.  Mostly, I suspect, from what’s left of the Louis L’Amour novel it comes from.  Unusually nuanced character development, lots of gray areas on all sides, the good, the bad, the conflicted.  A shame director Robert D. Webb so coarse & cavalier in all areas.  Ladd, partner Gilbert Roland and his hearty crew of singing lumberjacks invade a town to strip the forest that protects the watershed of a robust farming community where Jeanne Crain owns a major spread .  Why it’s that old standby plot: Open Range Ranchers vs Crop Growing Homesteaders, just like SHANE/’53, Ladd’s best-known film.  Only Ladd’s on the ‘wrong’ side of the issues yet structurally still the hero.  If only Webb knew how to finesse the film’s dramatic road blocks: two anachronistic Pop songs for a debuting Frankie Avalon; a jolly, heavily scored donnybrook (a lumberjacks vs. farm owners free-for-all hackiest of big-time Western directors Andrew McLaglen couldn’t have made worse); a feisty old bitty as comic relief; a happy ending pulled out of a hat.  Worst of all, putting Ladd next to Gilbert Roland, a working actor from the 1920s to the 1980s who never seemed to age.  Fortunately, cinematographer John F. Sietz, who shot almost all of Ladd’s late films, figured out how to acceptably light him as the film goes on.  Or do we just get used to the decline?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note the DVD is non-anamorphic and plays best left in Academy ratio without bumping up to fill a 1.85 : 1 frame.  Look out for falsely ‘corrected’ aspect ratios on some streaming services.

THE INFORMER (1929)

Not the 1935 John Ford classic (Dudley Nichols script; Joseph August D.P.; Victor McLaglen lead), but an earlier British version of Liam O’Flaherty’s very Irish novel on ‘The Troubles,’ shot silent before gaining a primitive soundtrack with Talkie elements.  Luckily, all original silent negatives surviving for this fine BFI restoration.  American-born German director Arthur Robinson (his only British production?) pulls off superb atmosphere, re-creating a stylistically believable, studio-bound 1920s Dublin.*  Check out the painted chimney shadows when we hit the rooftops of the city, an illusion all-of-a-piece with the film’s two international leads Lars Hanson (Gypo) and Lya De Putti (Katie).  He’s the jealous Irish Republican National who informs on his best pal when he thinks his girl (De Putti) is steppin’ out with him.  She’ll mirror the mistake in the third act, believing he’s been unfaithful with a girl he’s barely met.  These matching jealousies the main motivating difference between the two film versions.  In Ford/Nichols, motivation lies more with the ‘forty pieces of silver’ (actually £20)  Gypo is paid to inform on his BFF, the man who shot & killed the British Police Chief.  Just as big a difference comes in casting: Hanson’s Gypo no hanger-on, but falling down when he misreads the romantic situation; McLaglen more a tough enforcer, and thick as a brick.  Equally surprising, it’s Ford, not Robinson, who piles on UFA-style German Expressionism.  (A holdover from working at FOX when F.W. Murnau came to town?)  Both films now look a bit deliberately paced, afraid we’ll lose the thread of the story, but in their own way both significant achievements.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  While the basic plot has inspired many films, official remakes come from Ford in ‘35 and, in Jules Dassin’s intriguing, if uneven, Black take in UPTIGHT/’68.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/uptight-1968.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *No doubt, the superb, and very un-British, ‘finish’ to the photography due to Robinson bringing in German cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl.  Sparkuhl soon off to Hollywood, with great credits, mostly at Paramount, in the ‘30 and ‘40s.

RUST (2024)

Yes, you have to address the elephant in the room (see below), but first the film.  Something of a missed opportunity here, as this æsthetically up-to-date post-modern Western (nihilistic in tone, dark & brooding) has the look, feel & texture of the new ‘Old West’ sagas inundating streaming services, thanks mostly to the untiring (yet somehow tiring) efforts of fertile writer/director Taylor Sheridan.  His default manner a studied ultra-realist approach that in its own way is as stylistically ‘curated’ as a Natalie Kalmus-certified 1940s TechniColor epic.  Tastes change, artistic blather is eternal.  This one, jonesing for that Cormac McCarthy vibe, follows teen orphan Lucas Hollister (an overparted Patrick Scott McDermott) as he awaits hanging on an accidental killing of a hostile neighbor.  Rescued by the grandfather he didn’t know he had (Alec Baldwin), the two slowly work up a relationship as they ride South toward freedom in Mexico, hoping to outrun the attention a $1000 reward has brought them, and a veritable gold rush of ornery bounty hunters on the chase for it.  Majestic scenery alternates with dusty trails, scrub-land, forbidden Indian territory, and homestead interiors with single-source lighting that turns everyone into backlit silhouettes.  (And who thought it wise to repeatedly copy the famous opening/closing doorway shot from John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS/’56?)  Baldwin, who co-wrote with director Joel Souza, mostly lets his inner George C. Scott out (he’s got the rasp if not the gravitas), but somehow misses the deadly serious joke on the consequences of setting a Dead or Alive reward too high.  No need to fend off professional bounty  hunters when they’re doing the job for you, killing each other off to earn the prize!  Just stay out of harms way and watch them annihilate each other.  Eventually, you and the boy will outnumber the surviving tracker.  Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah would have loved it.  Burt Kennedy probably stuck the unproduced script in some forgotten drawer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention paid to the very real tragedy of ‘live’ ammo getting mixed with blanks in Baldwin’s rifle, leading to a practice shot killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.  Sad to say, this is anything but unknown on film sets.  From drowned extras in NOAH’S ARK/’28 to Jean Harlow’s ‘double’ (filmed from the back & dubbed) to finish SARATOGA/’37 after her death at 26; to the plane you never see land at the end of FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX/’65 because the stunt flyer crashed it; or another ‘live’ ammo incident, the self-inflicted gunshot that killed Brandon Lee on THE CROW/’94.  Many, many, many more such stories.  The common element?  If there’s any way at all to finish the film it’s always released.  They don't call it show business for nothing.

COMPLÈTEMENT CRAMÉ! / WELL DONE! (2023)

Wealthy, but depressed, a recent widower takes a sentimental journey to the French estate where he’d met his late wife.  But it’s closed!  Or rather, being redeveloped as a sort of luxury B&B and the ad he saw wasn’t for guests but for a British butler.  Ahead of the plot already?  (Ahead by about seven or eight decades, yes?  Good Lord, what was debuting writer/director Gilles Legardinier thinking?)  And whom to get to play the charming Brit who plays butler so he can rekindle some personal memories while fixing up the lives & loves of the staff along with the grounds & plumbing?  Why Mister Charm himself: John Malkovich; speaking his own weirdly uninflected French.*  Fanny Ardant, owner of this pile, appears in brief flashes under the odd staccato editing Legardinier favors when he’s not pointlessly circling chess games on the grass, hélas.  Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert and a good score under Ernst Lubitsch couldn’t have made this work in 1931.  Released in France as COMPLÈTEMENT CRAMÉ!/’23; later in selected English-speaking territories as WELL DONE!; now scheduled for Stateside showings (in near empty bijoux) as MR. BLAKE AT YOUR SERVICE!  Best avoided under any name.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *On a positive note: if your French is as bad as mine, Malkovich’s flat non-idiomatic delivery is understandable in a manner not possible when native French speakers rattle on.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Is it possible the inspiration for this came from something as wonderful as MY MAN GODFREY/’36?

THE RUNNER / DAVANDEH (1984)

Draw a line from the boys in Vittorio De Sica’s mid-‘40s Neo-Realist classics to Antoine Doinel of François Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS/’59, then thru Ken Loach’s KES/’69 and you could well land on the orphaned urchin in Amir Naderi’s THE RUNNER . . . and not be the poorer for it.  This semi-autobiographical work one of the few mature projects Naderi completed before leaving Post-Shah Revolutionary Iran.  Ten-yr-old Madjid Niroumand is Amiro (Naderi’s alter-ego), a street kid living in a Southern port town of oil refineries and a constant flow of international traffic, freighters, planes, trains, Amiro longs to join.  Yelling for attention when they pass, as if to say take me along or at the least SEE ME!  Odd-jobbing to survive (garbage picking, shoeshines for foreigners, collecting bottles gathered by the tide), then fighting to keep what’s his from older boys.  He gets some help from the local guys he plays fierce competitive games with.  (Stamina his secret weapon.)  But while they have homes/families of some sort, Amiro lives on an abandoned ship with little but magazines for company.  Just for the pictures since he can’t read.  Industrious, honest and determined to improve himself, his serious, square face occasionally breaking into a smile so big you could walk inside it.  And the expected movement  toward self-improvement in the third act doesn’t spoil the film with sentiment and good intentions, but does raise the stakes as Amiro finds a program that teaches him to read those magazines, and to see a way forward beyond his mad dashes in the deadly serious games he plays to win.  Remarkable stuff, acclaimed in its day, now too little seen.

DOUBLE-BILL:  The Criterion disc (and presumably their site) has a double-bill from Naderi included, WAITING/’74, a five-reeler made a decade earlier, also with autobiographical elements, but here in dreamlike code.  Again, a young boy (this one as striking as a fashion model - YA PARIS VOGUE?) living with elderly relatives in a perfectly preserved ancient city with little water.  His daily task to fill a large pressed glass bowl with ice he receives from a mysterious house after finding his way thru a maze of streets.  All mood & texture, where RUNNER is rough & solid, this is poetic poverty and utterly bewitching.

KIDNAPPED: THE ABDUCTION OF EDGARDO MORTARA / RAPITO (2023)

Fine as film, even more fascinating as a slice of Italian history, Marco Bellocchio ‘brings to the screen’ (as film trailers used to say on hard-to-sell period historicals) the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a six-yr-old Jew from a large wealthy family in 1850s Bologna who is kidnapped by the Pope.  At heart, that’s the story: call it PIUS IX AND THE BAPTIZED JEW.  Casually baptized in secret as an infant by a house servant, this act proves enough for the church to gather the boy and ‘orphanize’ him when his parents refuse to convert.  Held with other ‘removed’ boys, Edgardo's fate sealed by his finer qualities: exceptionally bright, well-behaved, observant, obedient, eager to please & be praised; a perfect candidate for Catholic indoctrination in ecumenical schooling.  Remarkably, international opinions & repercussions go entirely with the family, an event fed by press and public opinion which only hardens Pharaoh’s heart, so to speak.  And when the parents finally get to see their son, it’s less emotional reunion than ritualized abandonment.  Even an outburst with Mother only pushes Catholic authorities further against her for needlessly upsetting the boy.  Eventually, the case will be taken up as a liberal lever in the Italian Risorgimento, the progressive movement to unify the State under a figurehead King.  (Yes, Italian politics were counterintuitive even then.  For Freedom; Vote Royalty!)  Bellocchio is especially good at setting time & place (the Order of the Inquisition still active in the 1850s!), as well as keeping a lot of family & religious characters sorted, never sensaltionalizing the maddening facts.  Perhaps the film could use a bit of sensationalizing; it grows too tasteful at times.  It also runs a bit long (too many dream sequences?) along with a few odd musical choices  (Rachmaninoff?; Shostakovich?)  But this is nitpicking on a film that got lost in COVID days and deserves more views.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  With a name like Bellocchio, how could Marco not be a filmmaking natural?  Yet the brilliance of his debut with FISTS IN THE POCKET/’65 proved a mixed blessing, placing too much good work in the shade or taken for granted.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/fists-in-pocket-1965.html

POT O’ GOLD (1941)

James Stewart made three Frank Capra films; many more simply Capra-esque.  This is one of them.  His last release before WWII took him off the screen ‘for the duration.’  Five years later, he’d return with his final actual Capra film, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46 playing a small-town family business owner who dreams of leaving for bigger things.  So it’s a prescient surprise to have 1941 Stewart as a small town family business owner hoping to stay put.  That big job in the big city?; no thank you.  What is this, Bizarro IAWL?  And why so little known?  But one reel in, Stewart gives in to the biddings of crusty Uncle Charles Winninger to be heir apparent to the other family business, a big health food factory in the big, unhealthy city.  Once there, he soon stumbles upon a happy clan of musicians living the tenement commune life (it’s Paulette Goddard and her happy band, literally a happy band), and just like that, GOLD leaves IAWL behind and becomes a sort of ‘almost-musical’ variation on the first Stewart/Capra film, YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38.  (That’s the Crazy family meets Capitalism; George Kaufman/Moss Hart stage classic.)  This idea far less interesting; and not much helped by director George Marshall*, a script, that lays it on thick (Mary Gordon’s Irish Dear a particular horror), and lots of bouncy, but generic tunes.  Musicals are hard enough to pull off.  Screwball semi-musicals, jumping in & out of stage conventions to allow people to break into song, way beyond the abilities of this crew.  Including the lousy vocal mismatch dubbing Goddard’s singing.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *The Hollywood director who might have pulled this off is Leo McCarey.  See him do it in THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’46.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/11/bells-of-st-marys-1945.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Yes, producer James Roosevelt, in his sole feature credit, was FDR’s eldest boy.  No doubt, the guy who forgot to renew copyright which flooded the market with subfusc Public Domain copies.  Decent ones easy to find if you look around.

BARDEJOV (2024)

From the personal memories of its producer, Emil A. Fish, seven when he witnessed the events shown (now in his 80s, this his sole involvement with film), a modestly-scaled Holocaust story from Bardejov, Slovakia that plays like a local folk tale of cunning and hope.  It might be a superior After School Special about a roundup within the relatively well-to-do Jewish  community of Bardejov in the early 1940s, trying to survive under the constantly growing restrictions put on them as local officials & the Slovakian military follow Nazi orders passed along by their own government.  But in a small town where ethnic/religious lines are often crossed between friendly neighbors, so too are lines of command and loyalties.  An attitude that makes a daring life or death rescue just possible.  Robert Davi plays successful businessman Rafuel Lowy  head of what’s left of the Jewish Committees within the Town Council, his authority now little more than a front he maintains thru force of personality.  And when the latest edict comes down to send most of the young Jewish girls to work in a shoe factory hundreds of miles away he’s naturally suspicious.  Powerless, but with a few connections he can still call on, he learns their true destination, along with Jewish girls from all over the country is the Death Camps of Auschwitz.  The theme and storyline by now overly familiar, but there’s something to be said about a straightforward, uncomplicated telling.  And director Danny A. Abeckaser, shooting mostly in Israel, puts up a convincing Slovakian environment.  Or does once you adjust to accented English-language dialogue and filming technique/production values out of the 1950s.  Survivor Emil Fish was determined to get his story on film, not to chase humanitarian awards.  And that he does.  Just remember to set expectations at a reasonable level.  And to have a tolerance for a score that goes heavy on klezmer-like clarinet stylings.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The go-to orchestral tinta on Jewish stories used to be ‘cello heavy, now, it’s all swooping/squealing klezmer clarinet.

SISTERS (1972)

Perhaps we’ll hold off on revisiting early Brian De Palma for a bit.  Not doing him (or me) any favors.*  This jokey horror number about a paranoid serial killer, loaded with obvious talent and snarky overreach, not improving with age.  And with his signature reflexive nods at Alfred Hitchcock looking more than ever like product placement.  (Or is it some drinking game De Palma plays with himself?  PSYCHO, SPELLBOUND, REAR WINDOW, many more if you listen as well as look; plus a self-quoting Bernard Herrmann score.  You can all but hear De Palma laughing up his sleeve when he puts Charles Durning in as Grace Kelly.)  The story, a creepy little thriller with Margot Kidder as the serial killer half of separated Siamese twins . . . or is it the sister?  (Watch for a brief news docu on the subject, the film’s comic highlight.)  With sick gags that grow wearisome faster than Kidder’s French accent, misdirection and gore galore.  And that worst of all ‘70s tropes, the early slaughter of a disposable Black character.  Eventfully, De Palma gets to his twist ending, but not before showing off with unnecessary split-screen parallel action.  Later, he’d improve on his model, but you only have to compare early De Palma to early David Cronenberg, a near contemporary, to see how some vintages age into complexity while others simple sour.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Same-O on De Palma’s much-admired BLOW OUT/’81.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/fiercely-admired-fiercely-reviled-brian.html

STREET OF CHANCE (1930)

Debonaire & ironic, perfect in any mode, mood or genre (comedy, period drama, romance, even villainy in his early silents), William Powell is now mostly remembered for the 13 films he made at M-G-M with Myrna Loy (‘34 - ‘47), nearly half of those Nick & Nora/THIN MAN pics.  Less celebrated are the six with his other major screen partner, Kay Francis at Paramount & then Warners.  The two sets actually have similar batting averages (and best of the lot team Francis*), but crucially, the first four with Francis are Early Talkies, which can be slow, stiff, technically challenged, something of an acquired taste.  Well, here’s a chance to acquire it.  A superior example of its kind, reasonably lively direction from John Cromwell, plenty of Pre-Code Paramount sophistication, in a milieu familiar from Damon Runyon’s GUYS AND DOLLS with Powell as a combo Nathan Detroit/Sky Masterson.  But no Musical Comedy, this one leaning toward dead serious underworld melodrama.  Powell’s ‘Natural’ Davis, real name James Marsden, a bond trader whose wife (Kay Francis) is done waiting for him to quit the gambling racket.  And he would, but finds he’s stuck for one more epic match when cocky kid brother Regis Toomey comes to town (with new wife Jean Arthur), eager to take on this ‘Natural’ Davis character, unaware it’s his very own big brother.  Yikes!  Can Powell take him to the cleaners and get the gambling bug permanently out of his system?  Even if someone has to die trying?  The final game, after thousands of variations, still damn suspenseful.  And the film not afraid to let the ‘wrong’ people lose.  Watch Cromwell on a wild tracking shot that moves all around Francis’s apartment; so pleased at pulling off this technically tricky shot he repeats it near the end.   A properly restored edition would make this an even easier sell.

DOUBLE/LINK:  *That’d be the heavenly romance of ONE WAY PASSAGE/’32.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/02/one-way-passage-1932.html

DEPARTMENT Q THE ABSENT ONE / FASANDRÆBERNE (2016)

Currently streaming on NetFlix as DEPT. Q, the Scots-set/English-language redo of this series has a glamorously distressed Matthew Goode leading a motley squad thru Cold Case files; this is the second of the four Danish films it came out of.  (First one covered here:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/03/department-q-keeper-of-lost-causes.html.)  Mikkel Nørgaard again directs Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the intense, self-destructive lead detective and Fares Fares is his relatively cool-headed second second.  This case pulls up a twenty year old double murder involving a cover-up by rich & powerful types, a posh private school for the entitled where everyone met & mingled, sexual blackmail, a fallen woman with secrets to hide (if she can just stay alive), and of course that school days double murder.  A nasty piece of business compared to the first case, but effective in its darker manner.  It does lay things on pretty thick; the bad guys don’t exactly kick a dog, but they do bring a zebra to their sporting club for the annual hunt.  Not seen here, but apparently 3 and 4 are stronger entries in the series.  Still, this will do in a pinch.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Elsewhere on the internet, this time from Sweden,  DET SOM GÖMS I SNÖ  /  THE TRUTH WILL OUT/’18; ‘21 might be another version of the same Cold Case set-up.  Pretty good, though without the glam lead.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Just once, it’d be nice to see one of these over-obsessive types keep a promise to show for a family event: a school recital, Mom’s birthday dinner, Grandpa’s operation, a child’s hockey game, church choir practice!  In spite of beeps, buzzers & texts invading our screens, they can't set an alarm on their smart phone?

DERSU UZALA (1975)

After a career threatening triple blow (latest film on Tokyo have-nots, DODES'KA-DEN/’70, not just rejected, but killing his new Directors’ Commune with their first release, then an apparent suicide attempt), Akira Kurosawa returned to active filmmaking with this Russian-Japanese production.  A straightforward, intensely moving tale of Man, Nature & Friendship, epic and intimate, more importantly, beautifully realized.  Dersu Uzala (Maksim Munzuk), a solitary hunter in the uncharted Russian East (his family lost years ago to smallpox), he’s both aging & ageless, when he comes across a military surveying unit, led by Captain Vladimir Arsenev* (Yuriy Solomin).  With cunning awareness and superior knowledge of the ways, whys & wheres of the forest, Uzala soon becomes invaluable guide & guru, ready for almost any situation, even as the men tease him for his honesty & innocence.  But it’s the fast-developing bond with the Captain that leads the film thru a series of adventures and close calls.  Captured in immaculate scenes that have the rapture of early silent cinema, of something caught in the moment.  (We might be watching Lumière Brothers' ‘actualités’ from 1895 or an early D.W. Griffith California short made near the time of this story.)  The film structured in two halves and an epilogue, matching the two expeditions Captain Arsenev had with Uzala as guide, and the failed attempt to bring the now truly aging woodsman into the comfort of city civilization.  Fitted with one life-scaled, yet majestic set piece after another, though nothing (perhaps in all film) tops the storm sequence in the first half when last year’s stiff stalks of grass, are gathered at a frenzied pace by the two exhausted men to create a sort of grass igloo as overnight protection from a fast-coming blizzard and certain death.  The sort of patient excitement thrillingly realized thru-out the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Kurosawa’s return to form lasted thru his next film, KAGEMUSHA/’80.  After that, overreach and a great man’s scrappings.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kagemusha-1980.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *The story adapted from Arsenev’s memoirs about his expeditions, including his time with Uzala, while military surveyor to the Czar.  Editions in English available online.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention to the aspect ratio.  Shot on 70mm (though mostly seen in 35mm anamorphic transfers), some video sources stretch the image wider than the than the 2.2 (or 2.35) : 1 Kurosawa used.  (This problem not always apparent in the framing of the opening credits,)

FIRST TO FIGHT (1967)

Useful in showing just how cluelessly out-of-touch major studios had become by the 1960s (especially on mid-list releases), not good for much else.  This formulaic WWII tale (very loosely fact-based) was made for an audience that no longer existed.  It follows a Guadalcanal survivor, now a Medal of Honor Marine, sent home after battle on a bond-selling/morale-boosting tour across American where he finds love & marriage before returning on active duty to discover he’s lost his nerve.  Chad Everett, one of the last old-school studio contract players, blows any shot at movie stardom (he’d settle comfortably into series tv*) proving charmless in love & war as he aggressively courts chilly tour organizer Marilyn Devin, a ‘Tippi’ Hedren type who’s sex-wary after losing her husband at Pearl Harbor.  Directed with zero flair by Howard Hawks protégé Christian Nyby, this Warner Bros. release apes the bright, cheap-looking ‘60s Universal house style (underdressed interior sets, flat lighting, soundstage exteriors that look like Revell scale-models).  The film briefly livens up when sixth-billed Gene Hackman comes on in the third act to witness Everett’s battlefield collapse.  Lots of noisy ordinance exploded, but you can still hear old Hollywood dying not with a bang, but with a whimper.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Chad Everett hit big on tv with MEDICAL CENTER, but he’s mostly remembered for a testy appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, guest #2 after Lily Tomlin.  Women’s Rights in the air at the time (1972) and Everett, talking about all the animals he owns on his farm, includes the wife.  Yikes!  She’s the most important one he owns!  Ha ha.  Tomlin jumps up; walks out; big media the next day.  (See many clips on youtube.)  Few remember there’s even worse to come.  Post Tomlin, the show goes on with guest #3: World Famous poet, Mr. Age of Anxiety W.H. Auden, who hasn’t the slightest idea who any of these people are.  Or that Everett has just read a poem about his wife he had in a magazine.  Instead, Auden goes into benign entertainment mode, delighting all with a few of the short ditties he wrote for fun. ‘John Milton; Never stayed at a Hilton; Hotel; Which is just as well.’  At which point, Everett leans in to mention his literary output, saying  ‘We poets’ as he gestures toward Auden.  This is why people miss the ‘Seventies.  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That ‘whimper’ would include the film’s soundtrack, loaded with replays of ‘As Time Goes By’ from CASABLANCA/’42, seen in an extended clip in the wrong frame ratio.

REMEMBER (2015)

Effective, gimmicky, clever (too clever?), Atom Egoyan’s Holocaust-haunted movie, from an original screenplay by Benjamin August, plays like the Auschwitz revenge mystery Agatha Christie never got around to.*  And if that idea offends, perhaps not a film for you.  (Maybe even if you’re not offended.)  But on its own terms, with an ending O. Henry might have worked up for THE TWILIGHT ZONE, not without interest and a unique point-of-view.  In a modern Jewish assisted-living/Old Age home, Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau are the only survivors from the Auschwitz death camps, last to remember the block warden who murdered their families.  A man both have sworn to kill in revenge if they ever find him.  Landau now too frail to take on the mission/Plummer still physically able, but with his wife recently dead, rapidly sinking into dementia.  But with four possible matches scattered out West, his mission is also a race against time.  The best parts of the film come in simply watching Plummer navigate travel obstacles and his own cognitive decline.  (A great ironic bit reveals he’s crossed the border back from Canada when a security guard finds his gun, but its no big deal since this is America, where any feeble confused gentleman can carry a ‘glock.’  Here, the film’s grand lack of subtlety works like a charm, elsewhere, as he keeps finding the ‘’wrong’ fellow with the right name on his hunt, the basic gag wears thin.  Then there’s the big triple lutz twist ending (it’s a ‘Luke, I am your father’ moment) too neatly explains inconsistencies in Plummer’s character, and lands us in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS denouement territory.  I don’t mind that it’s cheap dramatics, I mind that Egoyan & August think they’re being profound.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Plummer, Landau and Bruno Ganz have all died since this came out.  But not before giving us another 27 credits.  Add on the still active Jürgen Prochnow and that number jumps to an impressive 39.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Or perhaps HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY.

SMART GIRLS DON’T TALK (1948)

Other than Virginia Mayo (and lenser Ted McCord), everyone in this tough little crime film were standard B-pic Hollywood journeymen.  Director Richard Bare largely did shorts before moving to tv series; scripter William Sackheim penned Bs before his decades as tv-movie producer; plus a cast of also-rans.  Happily, a lot of these folks underappreciated journeymen.  Particularly leading man  Bruce Bennett, consistently interesting as an expendable third-wheel, here getting a showcase assignment as the operator of a classy Manhattan boité with a posh gambling room in the back.  Seeing his place robbed in the opening scene, he can hardly go to the  police (they’d shut him down), instead, swallowing his loses, and paying off his guests, he’s the cool head in the room, sending his gang out to get even.  Enter Mayo, overstating her losses, she's a society type in decline.  These two quickly ‘see each other plain’ and immediately hit it off.  And what makes the film work is that Bennett is far from the nice ‘bad guy’ he seems to be, he’s a BAD bad guy.  And when Mayo’s kid brother, doctor-in-training Robert Hutton, shows up in town and becomes involved in a revenge murder, everyone’s true colors spill out in deadly fashion.  The film’s biggest problem is that Sackheim’s structure needs a strong fourth lead and the film only comes up with three.  It makes the ending pretty unsatisfying.  Pity.  Still worth a look.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Next year, M-G-M producer Arthur Freed made one of his rare non-musicals, an A-list example of this sort of thing with very big stars and an all too tidy Richard Brooks script in ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY/’49.

THE BLACK PHONE (2021)

Call it ABDUCTION OF A WIMPY KID: Paranormal Edition.  Designed for a new generation of DONNIE DARKO/’01 fans*, it probably works for them; elsewise, not so much.  Talented teen actor Mason Thames, currently training a dragon on screen, is the best thing about this indifferently played serial killer number about a man wearing a Hallowe’en fright mask and tempting boys off the street with black balloons.  Nothing peculiar or suspicious there for neighbors to notice, right?.  But the ruse works on Thames, led astray when he’s already in trouble at home: drunk, violent single-dad; tough customer little sister; and Thames the family wuss in spite of his talent as a baseball pitcher.  That’s how he met an earlier victim, a star batter he almost struck out.  Fortunately, li’l sister’s nightmares detail fresh leads for the police, and his creepy holding cell has a working phone with a direct line to dead previous victims.  But can this Hansel ‘grow a pair’ and trick Ethan Hawke’s Wicked Witch?  More moody than scary; with a 1978 setting that looks right, but feels wrong.  Something director Scott Derrickson, who would have been 12 at the time, ought to know.

ATTENTION MUST BE PATD/LINK:  *Bear in mind, this site is DARKO agnostic.  Underwhelmed at first sight, just as that film, a sizable flop on initial release, was building a formidable cult following.  A trajectory PHONE seems likely to reverse.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/donnie-darko-2001.html

SHANGHAI BLUES / SHANG HAI ZHI YEN (1984)

Hark Tsui’s popular slapstick-romance (rom-slap?), in many ways a typical ‘80s Hong Kong comedy (very bright/very breezy/loud & overplayed – now restored; see poster), opens in sweet & sour fashion, as real tragic events (the late ‘30s invasion of Shanghai by Japan) set up a meet-cute for two lost souls taking shelter under a bridge during the bombardment.  Promising to return to the spot after the war, the two are soon lost in the city’s confusion.  Eight years pass before they return to Shanghai, where they separately discover the bridge underpass now taken over by disabled war vets & vagrants.  Instead, they unknowingly find apartments in the same crumbling tenement building.  She’s on the third floor; he’s just above on the fourth. But will they even recognize each other, or find others before reuniting.  That’s the basic setup which Tsui rings his slapstick variations and chases on; with all sorts of comic characters (most with nightclub connections) missed meetings; misunderstandings, missed clues, etc.  But it’s the madcap milieu of bustling, fast recovering Shanghai and the constant flow of comic action amid street events, pedicab chases, parades, shopping & meals, close calls in apartments that function as mazes, pushed to their limits thru Tsui’s use of compound slapstick gags that recklessly pile up.  The mayhem more Frank Tashlin anarchy than Blake Edwards elegant precision.  Put together piecemeal style via matched edits that rely on concept rather than execution to make their mark.  At times you wish he’d slow down to better introduce his mixed up farcical plot and mismatched friends & lovers.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Around the same time, Jackie Chan was bringing this sort of Hong Kong action slapstick (minus the romance) to world cinema.  He’s still at it.  But the one that makes me laugh the most is KUNG FU HUSTLE/04.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/04/kung-fu-hustle-2004.html

LOOK-OUT SISTER (1947) BIG TIMERS (1945)

Back in the mid-‘40s, these two ‘race pictures’ (one a short feature/one a long short) would have been booked at segregated big-city theaters.  Think Harlem.  Conveniently coupled on an Alpha DVD (subfusc in sound & image here & on various internet sites), both come from the short-lived/Fort Lee-based All-American News, and both from (white) journeyman director Bud Pollard.  BIG takes first-billing on the DVD since it stars slow-talkin’ comedian Stepin Fetchit, the once wildly popular shufflin’ ‘Darkie’ character who tended to slip tiny victories past ‘the man’ to get his way thru what might generously be called ornery mock stupidity.*  Here he’s porter at an upscale Sugar Hill apartment that’s been ‘borrowed’ for the day to host an engagement party for the daughter of a working-class mom trying to impress the wealthy family the girl’s marrying into.  It’s really an excuse for a series of novelty acts, jazz bands and singers off the ‘chittlin’ circuit.’  And like the light-skinned/relaxed hair All-Girl Jazz Band playing in support, this one might ‘pass’ if the talent were better.  (The last solo singer best of the lot, with a bit of Pearl Bailey about her.)

Best skip this one; instead, enjoy the hour-long SISTER, where a fabulous Louis Jordan (sax-man/singer) and his swingin’ band work thru a passel of jump-jivin’ numbers, each better than the last, all while saving the Black-owned dude ranch/health spa where Jordan dreams he’s taking a cure and living a Western adventure.  Yippy-ki-yi-yay!  Popcorn junk, of course, but darn entertaining, worth booking at any theater.  If only someone could work up a decent restored print. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Hollywood put out All Colored pics, especially if they were musicals with a spot for Lena Horne.  See STORMY WEATHER, a mediocrity, but what a line-up of talent!  Or the truly wonderful CABIN IN THE SKY, both 1943.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/stormy-weather-1943.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/cabin-in-sky-1943.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One plus for BIG, the numbers appear to have been recorded ‘live,’ LOOK-OUT mostly pre-recorded.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Fetchit’s act needed a straight man he could toy with, someone who nearly catches on to how he's being duped.  Best seen in some mid-‘30s Will Rogers films.  Especially when these two start singing duets, often not even in the same room together.  There’s racial commentary and brothers-united-under-the-skin knowingness to these routines.