THE BRIDE COMES HOME (1935)

After her 1934 annus mirabilis (IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT; CLEOPATRA; IMITATION OF LIFE), Claudette Colbert hit the top-ten list in 1935 & ‘36, more often than not in reliable (rather than inspired) romantic comedies like this, playing the default character home studio Paramount had developed for her: wealthy society type suddenly gone cash poor.  In those Depression days, it served as a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too persona, giving Colbert by design or accident a perfect excuse to look richly chic yet still relatable to the masses.  It could even, on occasion, rise to greatness (see Preston Sturges’s THE PALM BEACH STORY/’42).  Here, it’s pleasantly serviceable.  Waking up to a cut staff in the family manse, Claudette goes job hunting.  Clueless and skill-less about the workforce, her ace in the hole is longtime beau Robert Young.  He’s starting up a Men’s Magazine with a 3.5 mill. inheritance and current bodyguard/former journalist Fred MacMurray as editor.  (Baby boomers note: this ain’t your MY THREE SONS MacMurray, but a nearly unrecognizable stud.  Young also very fit & toned.  Colbert, of course, famously looked nearly the same - wonderful - over six decades on stage & screen.)  The gimmick, as if you hadn’t already guessed, is that Young has been proposing to Colbert since they were eight, but as soon as the bickering starts between MacMurray & Colbert, she only has eyes for Fred.  (And you thought Paramount would let M-G-M loan-out leading-man Young prevail over two long term contract stars?  Journeyman director Wesley Ruggles runs a smooth show, but more distinctive contributions come via cinematographer Leo Tover's dark glowing interiors and from costume designer Travis Banton.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   To see Paramount go off auto-pilot on this kind of romantic trio: Ernest Lubitsch & Ben Hecht’s reworking of Noël Coward’s DESIGN FOR LIVING/’33 with Gary Cooper, Fredric March & Miriam Hopkins.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/design-for-living-1933.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While Columbia was too cheap to splurge on Banton for Capra’s IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, Colbert did make it happen at Universal in John Stahl’s IMITATION OF LIFE.

ACT ONE (1963)

Everyone’s favorite theatrical memoir, a surprise bestseller for playwright/director Moss Hart, limps to the screen under Dore Schary’s direction.  His one attempt at megging pure self-sabotage, with his writing, casting & producing little better.  Schary, previously a major Hollywood producer who rose to M-G-M head-of-production before quickly flaming out, a lifelong friend who’d been Hart’s assistant in the ‘20s, tosses out the first half of the book, losing much of a rags-to-riches saga that goes from tenement to Tamiment (the Catskills adult camp resort/B’way incubator) that made the book so memorable.  (Streamers?  Are you listening?)  Reduced to Hart’s first B’way success on ONCE IN A LIFETIME, about Hollywood’s silent-to-sound transition, co-written with established playwright George S. Kaufman.  As Kaufman, Jason Robards Jr is a reasonable choice compared to George Hamilton’s doorstop of a Hart.  Made even worse as best pal George Segal is so obviously right for the part.  That’s the way things go here.  Only Jack Klugman, Hart’s non-pro friend, coming across as a fully lived-in character.  And with the film’s compressed grey scale and Skitch Henderson’s OTT score, things can get pretty dire.  Fortunately, the tropes of getting a play up & running nearly impossible to kill.  Other than that, screwing up nearly everything wise, warm & witty from the book.  And most likely missing your favorite moment. (For me, it’s when play producer, and general mensch, Sam Harris notices at the last minute how loud the play is.  A casual comment that helps Hart fine tune the last act and turn out a hit.)  James Lapine’s recent rewrite for B’way got closer, but still not quite there.  Maybe if Sam Harris had been around to say something sage . . . 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Lots of once well-known Algonquin Round Table celebs flit by, all unrecognizable as cast by Schary.  But look for Eli Wallach as top B’way director/producer Jed Harris, here called Warren Stone for legal reasons.  Famously awful, he’s the man Laurence Olivier modeled his Richard III on.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  A literary rite of passage for all theater nerds, ACT ONE easily lives up to its rep.  And knowing that Hart died at 57, only months after completing it (and that his last two credits were directing MY FAIR LADY and CAMELOT), makes the never written ACT TWO only more tantalizing.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Many Hart (and Hart/Kaufman) plays were adapted for film: YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38; THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER/’41; LADY IN THE DARK.’44.  But his best film work came adapting GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT/’47 and in his stunning Hollywood savvy in the rewrite of A STAR IS BORN/’54.

CONTEST:  Name two connections between this film and the Marx Brothers’ A NIGHT AT THE OPERA/’35 to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

REAL GENIUS (1985)

After Val Kilmer’s recent death, it was both touching and surprising to see how many people on social media singled out his first two films as special favorites, this rude college comedy and his spy spoof debut in TOP SECRET!/’84, wacky comedy not being the first thing that comes to mind on Kilmer.  But where TOP SECRET!, while uneven as any from those AIRPLANE!/’80 guys (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker) probably looks better now than it did on release (good fun at its worst/fall on the floor hilarious at its best), REAL GENIUS looks DOA in every department.  Basically, it’s ANIMAL HOUSE meets YOUNG SHELDON as college senior Kilmer mentors 14-yr-old genius Gabriel Jarret at the lab and in the dorm, tasked by professor William Atherton to finish a Pentagon laser-from-space war weapon.  Hormones vs. hardware; and it’s tough to know what comes off worse: dialogue; characterizations & acting (Jarret & girlfriend Patti D'Arbanville wouldn’t make it on SAVED BY THE BELL); director Martha Coolidge’s lack of comic chops, the cheap/unfunny production design, or the hideous lensing.*  And Kilmer?  Working too hard to be the cool guy, the life of the campus party, the irreverent class clown with a sackful of funny faces, comic tumbles and goofy leaps of joie de vivre.  (He’s much the same, to equally bad effect, in WILLOW/’88.)  One of the Zucker brothers is quoted as saying he tried, but failed to get Kilmer to loosen up and be silly on SECRET!, when Kilmer just wanted to bring some realism to his ridiculous character; which of course made his work there all the funnier.  But then, Coolidge seems to have given everyone, cast and crew, the same bad advice: 'be funny.'*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *My advice?  Stick to TOP SECRET!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/top-secret-1984.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Hard to believe that cinematographer is the great Vilmos Zsigmond.  The last time he’d been so out of touch with his material, he manned up, accepted defeat, and ankled the project (FUNNY LADY/’75), admitting he simply didn’t know how to light the huge interior sets.  To the rescue?  James Wong Howe, coming out of retirement to shoot one last project.

ARABIAN NIGHTS (1942)

First (and best?) of three popular escapist entertainments made at Universal for that most exotic of screen trios: Sabu as the scamp, Jon Hall as the hunk and the mysterious Maria Montez for sex appeal.  (Hall may not look exotic, but Mom was a Tahitian Princess!)  Wartime anxiety no doubt helped put these things over, but this Thousand & One Nights tale has a lot going for it.  Mostly its storybook TechniColor look, courtesy of cinematographer Milton Krasner (later first choice for directors as different as Minnelli & Mankiewicz), especially in the first act where matte shots, miniatures & painted cycloramas give this Hollywood Bagdad the quality of a child’s cherished die-cut Pop-Up Illustrated volume, the kind that barely survive a kid’s heavy hand.  Now looking wonderful in restored prints, lighter, airier than the later ones shot by Krasner’s assistants.  (Like W. Howard Greene, Oscar’d next year for his glutinous 1943 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.  He did one of the two follow-ups: WHITE SAVAGE 43 or COBRA WOMAN 44.)  The plot?  Well, you see everyone is vying for the throne that rightly belongs to Jon Hall.  He’s been reported dead, but is really in disguise (thanks to clever Sabu) to see if Montez’s crown-loving Sherazade could love him for himself.  Leif Erickson’s the usurper, Billy Gilbert’s comic relief (with a bouncing stomach punch), Shemp Howard (!) a loyal follower and John Qualen a blue-eyed Alladin on the hunt for his missing magic lamp.  At 86", this one not a moment too long.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Check out all our Montez pics here.  Note, whichever one you are watching lowers your I.Q to the point where you think that’s her best!   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=montez 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Presumably, our German poster (see above) didn’t come out till after the war.

BLACK DOG / GOUZHEN (2024)

Much deserved International award winner (including Cannes’s Un Certain Regard), Guan Hu’s site specific drama, set in a near ‘ghost town,’ part of the boom-to-bust economy of 2008's Northern China, features some of the most dramatically spectacular Wide-Screen landscapes since Chuck Jones took Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner to an animated Monument Valley.*  Here, the focus is on recent parolee Lang (a very lean/very fit Eddie Peng), home after early release on a manslaughter charge where his involvement is unclear.  That makes our Road Runner figure a skinny, possibly rabid, black dog, part of the packs running wild over what’s left of the city.  But while Hu is specific in his use of location, he’s purposefully sketchy on character & narrative.  So it feels right to have Peng communicate only with gesture & whistling.  Letting us understand just enough Hu’s modus operandi here, and we pick up on Lang’s situation obliquely.  Former musician & circus acrobat; father a recluse dying of cancer; town being cleared out, especially of those roving packs of dogs, to facilitate a new industrial development program.  And 2008 has big events guiding the few still in town: an upcoming solar eclipse, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, even the circus coming to town.  This last bringing possible employment and romance to Lang.  Hu lets us put the pieces together, like one of those glueless Asian paper constructs that magically hold together on their own.  And lenser Weizhe Gao makes it happen by giving his images the participatory vibe of silent movies.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Mid-to late ‘50s Chuck Jones’ ROAD RUNNER cartoons.  *Apparently Looney Tunes were generally shot in Academy Ratio, but Jones must have designed his preferred frame projection to work best in ultra-wide ‘scope’ ratio.  (Experts in this field are welcome to tell all in the Comments.  Thanks!)   NOTE:  This is such a weird suggestion for a film match-up, I guess it also counts as a SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY.  But, in case you didn't notice, this was posted on April 1st!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  After the completion of filming, Peng adopted his Black Dog acting partner.

WELLS FARGO (1937)

Hollywood history typically typecasts Paramount Pictures as Home of the Continental Sophisticates (and they were!; think Lubitsch, Wilder, Sturges).  Yet the studio first found footing with C.B. DeMille’s 1914 Western THE SQUAW MAN.  (You could also make a case for that production founding Hollywood itself.)  And Paramount had their biggest hit of the silent era inventing the epic Western: James Cruze’s THE COVERED WAGON/’23.  Later, when Westerns fell out of favor in the ‘30s, those same books give John Ford credit for reviving the genre as a first-class item in STAGE COACH/’39, conveniently ignoring DeMille’s bigger budget/larger grossing Western of the same year, UNION PACIFIC.  While two years before those films, double-Oscar’d producer/director Frank Lloyd made this large-scale Western to follow hard on DeMille’s blockbuster THE PLAINSMAN/’36.  Starring Hollywood’s happiest/handsomest married couple, Joel McCrea & Francis Dee, it’s one of those Great Man bio-pics, here about a Wells Fargo agent/advance man thru enough decades for both to turn gray as the finance company grows with the country in the 1800s and Dee sacrifices marital happiness to Manifest Destiny.  A little bit of everything in this one: stick-ups; family hardship; Gold Rush; Native Americans (helpful and ‘un’); Civil War conspiracies; whew!  All in 98 minutes with quality casting up & down the line, plus a few rising contract players.  Lloyd was a solid, but pretty stiff helmer by 1937, a quality that undercut next year’s IF I WERE KING, but works perfectly for this square-built vehicle.  Exceptionally well shot by Theodor Sparkuhl (check out some of his dark interiors) and scored by Victor Young, it remains good value Hollywood hokum.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Links to the Paramount Westerns mentioned above.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-covered-wagon-1923.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-plainsman-1936.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/union-pacific-1939.html  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note how young & sexy McCrea still looks.  Sparkuhl delivering ravishing close-ups that give Dee a run for her money.  Yet just two years on, in UNION PACIFIC, DeMille had McCrea hitch up his pants (now hanging above rather than below his navel) and lost half the natural sex appeal.

LES BEAUX GOSSES / FRENCH KISSERS (2009)

Best known for six autobio-graphic novels on the split Libyan/French heritage of his youth (a publishing phenomenon in France*), cartoonist Riad Sattouf also writes & directs films, beginning with this César award-winner (Best Debut Feature), a middle-school ensemble comedy, specific enough in its French working-class melieu to offset the familiarity of teen coming-of-age tropes.  Including lots of cumming of age with our two lead boys having their ‘jack-off’ socks ready at the drop of a hat, or the drop of a window shade across a high-rise courtyard.  Fourteen or fifteen, these two pals know they’re out of the loop compared to their bigger, better-looking classmates, but that hardly stops them from propositioning anyone they fancy.  And, compared to American counterparts, certainly not shy about demonstrating exactly what to do technically.  (Hopefully without Mom crashing into the room at the wrong moment.)  At one point, impulsively sticking a finger into his pal’s mouth to show whether you twirl your tongue clockwise or counterclockwise for a proper French Kiss.  The girls, equally demanding and specific in telling the boys what they need from them.  But the real surprise here is seeing how perpetually out-of-control school is among the French lower middle-class.  Nothing at all like we see in most French film depictions of their disciplined/extremely regulated education system.  (Even ruder than a typical Stateside Junior High?)  Great non-pro kids, too, with Sattouf picking a winner in lead Vincent Lacoste who’s quickly gone on to a busy, award-winning career.  But all the kids are excellent here, even the good looking Beaux Gosses.*  (NOTE: Labeled Family Friendly, but only for teens and up, preferably wiih parental units out of the room.)

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *L'ARABE DU FUTUR/THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE; four of the six available in English, the last two on the way.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The original title translates as The Beautiful Kids.  But for a change, the Stateside title is, if not an improvement, certainly more accurate.

MILLER’S CROSSING (1990)

The years have not been kind to this, the Brothers Coen move into big time moviemaking after two striking low-budget hits (BLOOD SIMPLE/’84; RAISING ARIZONA/’87).  With costs more than double the last two combined, this ‘30s gangster piece looks like a world class museum exhibit with not a dust mote in sight.  And while critically praised, it was about as well attended as a period display room on a Tuesday afternoon at that museum.  Same for the boys’ next two (BARTON FINK/’91; HUDSUCKER PROXY/’94), completing the Ethan/Joel Coen high Snark Trio before they rescued their commercial rep with FARGO/’96.  The problem not so much that the boys were always the smartest guys in the room and worked over people’s heads, but that they went out of their way to let us know they were the smartest guys in the room and condescended to their on-screen characters and their audience.  Gabriel Byrne stars (sucking almost as much energy out of scenes and mise en scène as John Shea, that era’s champ soporific), he’s the wiseguy assistant to local crime boss/political ‘fixer’ Albert Finney (exceptional, but gone for most of the second half).  Pals and competitors, both men currently getting it on with mystery lady Marcia Gay Harden.*  Complicating the situation, Jon Polito (laying it on thick as impasto) hopes to replace Finney after he uses Byrne to rub-out usurping Jew John Turturro.  (Byrne has left himself open for blackmail & temptation by gambling debts spinning out of control.)  Studded with big violent set pieces (enough ordinance for a WWI film), weirdly amateurish stunt-doubling, and poorly staged fights not even Barry Sonnenfeld’s handsome lensing can hide; no more than the narrative cracks in logic & continuity or the regrettable Coen contempt for paying customers.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Never thought of it before, but what a provocative name: Marcia Gay Harden.  Yikes!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Alongside the Coens, screenplay credit is shared with Dashiell Hammett.  And why not?  O BROTHER, WHERE ARE THOU?/’00 gives the same honor to Homer.

SLOW HORSES (2022 - )

Hype, good initial reviews, rising viewership numbers; we’ve all fallen for hot new streamer buzz.  Just beware of sophomore slump; not Season Two sophomore slump; Episode Two sophomore slump.  Not here, instead a simple but sturdy set-up as rival MI-5 spies, playing in the same league for the same team (think Major Leaguers against their own Double-A farm team) tackle the same case.  And who’s not going to root for the underpaid, underfunded, misunderstood underdogs of ‘Slough House’ (i.e. ‘Slow Horses’) to beat the toffs with their bespoke suits and perfect hair back at Main Headquarters?  That’s the drift of things in this tasty show.  With Gary Oldman perfect as gruff Papa Bear to his grumpy ill-served, poorly-dressed employees; fallen agents with major goofs in their file (whether their fault or no), transferred to the tenement office spaces of Slough House in hope of some day returning to Main Headquarters.  Only Oldman preferring the low profile/low-wattage assignments at Slough House.  (Literally low-wattage per the hall lighting.)  It's also a way to keep some distance from boss-lady Kristin Scott Thomas and her A-Team of deplorables who fumble the ball in spite of sparkling environs and every techno-advantage.  So even when Slow Horses beat them, Thomas and her team of sharks (in looks & demeanor) know how to PhotoShop any photo-finish to take credit & victory laps.  From a series of novels by Mick Herron, director James Hawes & writer Will Smith (the latter of THE THICK OF IT/VEEP) got the ball rolling and, so far, it's only going from strength to strength.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Oldman played this ‘straight’ in TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY/’11 which by rights should be called TINKER TAILOR as the film had only enough running time to suss out two of four possible traitors from the John le Carré classic.  For all four suspects, there’s the original seven-parter with Alec Guinness (1979) that in hindsight likely gave rise to the modern streamer.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-1979.html

GIANTS AND TOYS / KYOJIN TO GANGU (1958)

Yasuzô Masumura’s rat-a-tat-tat satire of Japanese Capitalism & consumerism isn’t all that different from the exaggerated vibe of Hollywood iconoclasts on the subject like Frank Tashlin in THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT/’56 or Billy Wilder in ONE, TWO, THREE/’61.  The details of Japanese corporate hierarchy and the insecurities of the company man familiar enough to land.  Here, the rivalry driving the action is candy, or rather, the specifics of declining sales on one company’s signature product: Caramels.  (And check out that labor force; a staff of hundreds still hand-wrapping the stuff.)  What to do?  Publicity stunts?  A prize in every 90th wrapper?  Contests?  New celebrity endorsements?  Better come up with something if you want to climb the corporate ladder.  Our answer lies in a goofy looking regular girl; no beauty, but a Plain Jane with bad teeth and too much enthusiasm.  (She’s a Jerry Lewis against relatively normal players . . . and just as annoying, though I hear the French adore her.)  All coming at us a mile a minute.  (Good luck keeping up with the subtitles.)  And product quality?  Unmentioned.  For Stateside viewers, more interesting for East/West comparisons than for social commentary; right down to the cool lacquered look of '50s Japanese color film stock.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT and ONE, TWO, THREE.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/girl-cant-help-it-1956.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/04/one-two-three-1961.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Check out home plate when we go to a baseball game to note that dangerous looking pole by the batter's box.  Yikes!  When did Japan get rid of this safety hazard?

THE SNORKEL (1958)

From Hammer Films, but no Monsters, no Horror, no lurid TechniColor, instead a monochrome Suspense-Thriller, adapted from a novel by character actor Anthony Dawson, best known for playing Ray Milland’s hapless accomplice in Alfred Hitchcock’s DIAL M FOR MURDER/’54.  Can you guess what story it closely resembles?  Right on the first try!  Just not the ending.  That’s straight out of tv’s ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS.  One of the ones where Hitch comes on after the action to explain that no one got away with murder after all.  No great shakes, but pretty good fun under Guy Green’s direction.  (His sole Hammer film?)  Grey fox smoothy Peter van Eyck’s the creepy husband/step-father who makes murdering his wife look like suicide, but then has to circle back when step-daughter Mandy Mlller (dreadful) gets too close to the truth.  Betta St, John is the older friend of the troubled daughter with a thing for Eyck.  Ick!*  More promised than delivered here, but okay for a second feature.  Too bad this was meant to play first on the program.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *A year or two on, French director Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock acolyte & biographer, might have improved this by getting the sub-textural sex angle up on screen.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Trimmed to 72" for Stateside release, be sure you've got the original 90" cut.

WOLF HALL (2015)

Hillary Mantel’s dense, intensely involving novels on the rise of Thomas Cromwell, the commoner son of a blacksmith who became Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain (WOLF HALL; BRING UP THE BODIES) were manna from heaven for long suffering FoTC’ers (Fans of Thomas Cromwell) who’ve always seen him get a raw deal in hagiograpics focused on Thomas More or Anne Boleyn.  (Though even as villain, Leo McKern, of RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY fame, managed to gain rooting interest against Thomas More’s principled MAN FOR ALL SEASONS/’66.)  But Mantel alone gave her spirited Tudor tutorial a Cromwellian POV.  And it’s spirit that went missing from this superior, well-received 6-parter, in spite of its obvious qualities in period detail, historical sweep, acting & art direction.*  But so somber, so sober, so measured in pace (you keep wishing someone would break out in a sprint).  Since it’s initial broadcast, the final book in Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy has come out, THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT, charting his fall.  So, with its own 6-part dramatization appearing after a decade’s wait, time’s ripe for a revisit.  And surprise, a decade on, WOLF HALL 1 - 6 plays better than when it came out.  (Better to these eyes, anyway.)  With its sense of detail, character, devious court politics and quiet bravura acting trumping the pervasive hush and sorrowful tone that had seemed to smother what worked.  It may also have been helped by unmet expectations on Mantel’s opaque plotting, non-linear jumps and lack of rooting interest in THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT.  (A surprisingly tough read.*)  With the same creative team on board, we’ll soon see how they do with less triumphant source material.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Before WOLF HALL, in A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY, Hilary Mantel did a similar revelatory rethink for the French Revolution, reversing character traits on everyone from Danton to Robespierre.  Though with scores of unfamiliar characters and historical twists, it’s an even more daunting read than THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT.  But worth the effort.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Those qualities include all the principals: Mark Rylance, Damien Lewis, Anton Lesser, Claire Foy (Cromwell, Henry, More, Boleyn);  Peter Straughan script; Peter Kosminsky direction.

THE BIG BAD FOX AND OTHER TALES / LE GRAND MÉCHANT RENARD ET AUTRES CONTES . . . (2017)

From French animators Patrick Imbert & Benjamin Renner, variously teamed as writer and/or director on ERNEST & CELESTINE/’12 (which has a similar ‘children’s book’/watercolor illustrations look) and SUMMIT OF THE GODS/’21 (which doesn’t).*  Compared to those two, this a mere bagatelle, a modest three-part portmanteau, charmingly staged as if it were a set of playlets at a community theater in the farm district, it’s low-pressure, but high quality whimsy.  And for a change, you’re not stuck with a superior French language track & subtitles for best results since the English track features a superb voice cast worthy of an Aardman film.  First up is BABY DELIVERY, with a clever Rossini-sourced score, about a lazy stork who tasks a smart pig, a dumb duck and even dumber rabbit to get the last baby of the day to its new home.  Maybe they’ll catapult it there.  Story #2 finds the Big Bad Fox on a failed chicken raid.  No chicks are caught, but he does bring back three eggs which promptly hatch and imprint the Fox on their new born brains as Mom.  Soon the growing chicks want to be just like ‘Mom,’ big, bad chicken eaters.  Yikes!  (Prokofiev’s ‘Peter & the Wolf’ supplies the music themes.*)  The finale brings back the barnyard trio from the first story, now stuck playing Father Christmas for the holidays after an unfortunate accident.  Traditional Yuletide tunes on the track.  A bit rude at times for Stateside tastes, but mostly sweet & dandy.  Plus, with each episode lasting about half an hour, a great nighttime treat that won’t keep the kids up past their bedtime if you just show one.  And it’s quality stuff that leaves space for a kid’s imagination to join in.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned: ERNST AND CELESTINE and SUMMIT OF THE GODS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/ernest-and-celestine-2012.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-summit-of-gods-le-sommet-des-dieux.html  OR:  Suzie Templeton’s bewitching stop-motion 2006 PETER AND THE WOLF rethink.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/peter-and-wolf-2006.html

BROKEN RAGE (2024)

Iconic Japanese tough guy & comic, actor/writer/director Takeshi Kitano, now in his mid-70s, is old enough to have GAMBIT in mind here.  Not the regrettable Coen Brothers redo of 2012, but the likable Shirley MacLaine/Michael Caine 1966 original, an art caper with the catchy ad copy: Go Ahead, Tell the End; But Please Don’t Tell the Beginning!  It’s referring to the film’s opening two reels where a planned heist is shown being perfectly executed before jumping back to show how it actually plays out with one fuck up after another making hash out of best laid plans.*  That’s the idea Kitano picks up on here, except this is no art caper, but the working life of veteran hit man Kitano, showing how he delivers on two hits and one undercover sting op.  The first three reels as he imagines them, perfectly executed, then as they really play out with everything going disastrously wrong.  Oops, SPOILER ALERT!!  Sorry ‘bout that . . . But not really, because knowing in advance is what makes the first half, the Things Go Right half, far, far funnier than the sporadic laughs generated in the repeated action of the second half.  Something about Kitano, with his stocky frame and impassive face, as he gracefully hits every mark perfectly in his imagination is completely hilarious, especially when you account for the physical limitations of weight & age.  The second half is okay (particularly during the repeat of the second hit job), but it needs more Inspector Clouseau slapstickery than Kitano can deliver.  (Rowan Atkinson?  Bill Hader?  How far away from BARRY are we?)  Still, pretty funny stuff, knowing & amusingly ‘meta’ when Kitano panics over his film’s short running time.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *That GAMBIT ad copy made the fake-out prologue sound fresh & new, though it was much used even then.  Going back, at least, to Preston Sturges’s UNFAITHFULLY YOURS/’48 in a waking dream sequence that sees world-famous conductor Rex Harrison imagining the perfect murder of unfaithful wife Linda Darnell before botching its . . . er . . . execution when he tries to follow thru on the idea.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/gambit-1966.html

STAND-IN (1937)

Inexplicably overlooked behind-the-scenes-of-MovieLand satire gets more right about the biz than most serious Hollywood backstagers.  (THE LAST TYCOON, anyone?)  Independently made by Walter Wanger, which may have helped, director Tay Garnett brings bona fides to the subject going back to his silent comedy beginnings, offering a nutty/anything goes verisimilitude to the usual studio denizen clichés: the talent-free diva (Maria Shelton), bribable gate guards, foreign ‘genius’ director Alan Mowbray, fatuous publicity man Jack Carson, C Henry Gordon’s studio flipping market manipulator, talented but tippling producer Humphrey Bogart, former child-star reduced to stand-in status Joan Blondell, and a studioful of recalcitrant union toughs,  Stepping into this mix is Wall Street bean counter supreme Leslie Howard, a film naïf determined to stop a liquidation sale and personally turn the studio around.  Remarkably, the story pretty much hangs together, the gags neither pushed nor stupid, with a touch of charm & well-informed affection for the industry showing thru the surface.  The Capracorn finale is unfortunate, but not fatal (blame magazine serial author Clarence Budington Kelland of MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN/’36; easy to see the same blueprint in use here), and only hurts because the ‘right’ finish is staring you in the face: Howard loses the studio, but has fallen in love . . . with moviemaking, and starts a new company with Bogart & Blondell as first hires.  (Yikes!  Development notes!!)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Leslie Howard’s rep not what it once was.  And largely because of roles he really didn’t want to play: his middle-aged Romeo of 1936; GWTW's Ashley Wilkes.  (He took the latter so he could produce INTERMEZZO/’39.)  But just look at the great three-in-a-row comedies that see STAND-IN book-ended by IT’S LOVE I’M AFTER/’37 (with Bette Davis they’re a bickering acting couple) and his fine Henry Higgins against Wendy Hiller’s legendary Eliza Doolittle in PYGMALION/’38.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/11/its-love-im-after-1937.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/pygmalion-1938.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In the film, ‘producer’ Bogart always has his Scottish terrier in his arms or by his side.  A specific reference?  Perhaps to this film’s producer Walter Wanger?

HIGHER AND HIGHER (1943)

Frank Sinatra’s acting debut had him play . . . Frank Sinatra!  And why not?  With his skinny frame swimming in suits & sport jackets no matter how they were cut, he’s mostly just ‘the entertainment’ at a servants’ ball in this silly (make that lousy) adaptation of a dud B’way musical Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart wrote just before their great leap forward with PAL JOEY.  (That musical also became a lousy film in 1957 for . . . Frank Sinatra!)  Billed below Michèle Morgan & Jack Haley (sole retainee from the B’way cast), Sinatra doesn’t sing a note by Rodgers & Hart*, R.K.O. keeping but one number from the stage show, and having new tunes written by Jimmy McHugh & Harold Adamson.  (Two of those lifted from classical music themes.  The one from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony a particular horror.  Though one original, ‘You’re On Your Own,’ has a singing ensemble for the ages what with Sinatra, Dooley Wilson, Mel Tormé, Victor Borge, Mary Wickes and others chiming in.)  The story?  Well, it seems master of the house Leon Errol is about to lose the family manse, but with help from his long unpaid staff and with connections made at the afore mentioned Annual Servant’s Ball, he’ll pass off scullery maid Morgan as a wealthy Fifth Avenue type to wed rich foreigner Victor Borge.  Problem?  She only has eyes for fellow staff servant Haley.  It plays even worse than it sounds.  Especially under Tim Whelan’s strikingly unnuanced direction, all lit as if we were in a hospital operating room.  One more like this (STEP LIVELY/’44) before Frankie was poached by M-G-M for films which, if not much better, were at least better produced.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Returning from a largely unhappy stay in Hollywood during the worst of The Depression, Rodgers & Hart went on a tear with six hits in a row on B’way (1935-1939) before missing with TOO MANY GIRLS and this.  (We’re comparing apples to oranges, but it’s still a shock to note that the output of Rodgers’ talented daughter Mary totaled four shows over three decades (only one successful), and of his even more talented grandson Adam Guettel totaling three shows over three decades.)  Even HIGHER managed one classic American Songbook standard in ‘It Never Entered My Mind.’ naturally dropped for the film in spite of being a perfect number for Frankie.  Something Sinatra was very well aware of, recording the number three separate times, including this version from what’s often listed as his greatest album, ‘In the Wee Small Hours.’    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53Z3oKVLkaM

NOMAD: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BRUCE CHATWIN (2019)

Categorizing Bruce Chatwin as a writer of travel books (books of travel a bit closer to the mark) is as inadequate as labeling M.F.K. Fisher a cookbook author.  Both sui generis in their field, with wide ranging interests and POV, Chatwin upturning the genre on his first (best?) book, IN PATAGONIA, which combines storytelling, history, science and philosophy, ranging from personal to site specific.  Werner Herzog’s tribute/memorial film does a good job introducing him*, but Chatwin died young in 1989, which limits Herzog’s personal insight to the last seven years of his life, leaving earlier details covered as a fairly standard cut-and-paste job with a few surviving talking heads (wife, subjects, fellow academics) to fill in the gaps.  It still paints a fairly complete non-hagiographic picture, but you can tell Herzog remains frustrated at getting so close to Chatwin only toward the end of his life.  What he does miss capturing is the sheer impact Chatwin must have had on travels to undeveloped lands (by Western standards) on the tribes and nomadic peoples who must have wondered who this fairy tale prince of a figure was (think David McCallum in his Illya Kuryakin days) and why he was interested in their customs and stories.  It must have opened (or closed) many doors for him.  Yet, what came out, in novels and novelistic non-fiction, has yet to find a true successor.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  Published in 1977, IN PATAGONIA is the logical starting point.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Herzog’s COBRA VERDE/’87 (not seen here) is based on Chatwin’s historical novel The Viceroy of Ouidah (not read here).

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (1967)

Always out of fashion/never out of favor, Shakespeare’s early comedy of marriage & battery has seen successive generations claim they’ve ‘solved’ its troublesome misogyny, especially the finale when a ‘tamed’ Mistress Kate grovels before her lord & master, by playing it ironically.  No doubt, it was being played thusly by its second run at The Globe.  More interesting to contemplate is whether one of the pretty boys in the company took on Kate, or if (pantomime style) a grown man in drag played her.  (Women not allowed on stage at the time.)  What matters here is that this is one of only two Franco Zeffirelli films to have aged well.  (TEA WITH MUSSOLINI/’99 the other.*)  It may even be more fun now, especially the opening, before our famous stars show, as Zeffirelli sets the period scene (1500s?) with the instincts of a great art director.  (Always his truest talent whether or not he took official credit.)  And the look of the film is what sells the rest (kudos to sophisticated lenser Oswald Morris), along with Shakespeare’s two big structural tweaks on what was, as usual with The Bard, a thrice-told tale.  One, supplying a dramatic engine by having Father-of-the-Bride Michael Hordern (reprising his Dad from A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM/’66) insist that gentle daughter #2 cannot choose from her many suitors till shrewish daughter #1 weds.  And second: having roving fortune hunter Petruchio marry Kate before he tames her.  So marriage not on the table as some sort of reward for good behavior, but strictly an affair of strong wills and knowing how to win thru retreat.  As bridegroom, Richard Burton, in spite of a frightening gray carpet on his chest (Yikes!), is in fine fettle.  He’d be even better if he didn’t laugh at all the jokes.  (So too the rest of the cast.)  As for Elizabeth Taylor’s shrew, in what proved to be her last commercial success (hard to believe, no?), she has neither the wind nor the variety to properly speak the role.  Her shrieks quickly grow tiresome.  On the other hand, helped by costumer Irene Sharaff and her character arc, she looks better scene-by-scene.  Her bridal transformation a triumph.  And she doesn’t sashay like a hooker as she did in CLEOPATRA/’63.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Not seen here in many a moon, perhaps Zeffirelli’s most acclaimed film, ROMEO AND JULIET/’68, also holds up . . . but I doubt it.  Click on the COMMENTS tab and let us know. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Since the physical look of the film is 80% of its success, look for the most recent edition.  Early DVDs look awful, but lots of good streaming options.

BLOOD DIAMOND (2006)

Known for Big Statement movies that throb to progressive ideas, Edward Zwick flirts with the irrelevance of Stanley Kramer, hanging the importance of a film on the importance of a subject.  (Fortunately, he’s a far better filmmaker than Stanley ever was.)  But in this well-received action/adventure take on the all-too-true horrors of African diamond mining practices amid sadistically waged Civil War under constant threat from rival terrorist rebels, and the international cabal it feeds, he’s hoist on his own petard of unmet noble intentions.  Leonardo DiCaprio takes what once would have been the Great White Hunter role, here demoted to wily, inconsequential Zimbabwue-born diamond smuggler.*  Djimon Hounsou has the old native guide spot, repurposed as family man torn from his home, who finds & hides a gem worth a fortune as he slaves for a particularly vicious rebel outfit and dreams of finding his family.  Jennifer Connelly, rather bizarrely cast, is the fearless journalist (as morally principled as DiCaprio is ‘un’), there to humanize (him) and inform (us) with didactic orations between some handsomely staged action set pieces.  But Zwick and his writers have the unfortunate habit of painting themselves into dramatic corners before getting out of jams by having some opposing rebel faction (or allied Western force) show up for a surprise ambush.  And with DiCaprio’s character arc leaning toward personal redemption (very Hemingway/Gary Cooper/FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS-ish), even his jittery/staccato line delivery can’t entirely rinse the stink of Good Intentions & White Man’s Burden from the film.  NOTE:  Labeled Family Friendly (on the main site, labels don't show on mobiles), but not for the kiddies, 12-ish and up due to the violence. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *DiCaprio not only nails the South African/Rhodesian accent, but also shows old-line Hollywood finesse toning it down a notch as the film goes on.  Robert Mitchum, a startlingly good mimic of tricky accents, demonstrates this to perfection in THE SUNDOWNERS/’60.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/sundowners-1960.html

SMALL TOWN GIRL (1936)

Janet Gaynor, one of the few top stars to ride the silent-to-sound transition with nary a bump (1925 - 1937) in a rare loan out from home studio FOX to M-G-M.  She’s wonderful, the film . . . not so much.  Best in its opening act as grocer’s daughter Gaynor watches in wonder as a flood of Ivy Leaguers cruise thru her town on their way to the Yale/Harvard football game.  Young, rich, beautiful, well-dressed, carefree and car endowed; she can only dream.  So when handsome young alum/brain surgeon Robert Taylor asks her for a way around the traffic jam, she’s open to an adventure with the smart set that turns into a boozy over-nighter, blessed at dawn with an unlikely spontaneous Justice of the Peace marriage and a car crash finale.  The comic drunk driving no longer looking so comic, instead, instantly curdling the tone with Taylor sobering up into a mean-spirited louse who imagines Gaynor was really taking him for a ride, and a quick annulment payoff.  Taking her to his parents’ home in Boston, Dad Lewis Stone tells his undisciplined boy the only way for him to keep his reputation and save his career in staid Bean Town is to have Gaynor agree to a nine-month sham marriage before divorcing.  Plenty of time (surprise, surprise) for Taylor to notice he’s accidentally stumbled upon a gem, especially in comparison to the status loving socialite he’d long been engaged to.  The film warming up considerably as Taylor starts to melt.  Taylor at his handsomest, but without the necessary stylized delivery to let us see the underlying charm behind his shitty behavior before his redemption.  And director William Wellman, who handles the townie opening well (Gaynor’s extended-family dinner scenes excellent), is no help at all to Taylor.  Meanwhile, the multiple scripters on M-G-M’s rewrite staff are forced to turn his old fiancée into one prime bitch so Taylor can come 'round.  On the other hand, M-G-M managed to make this a hit and knew enough to bring in legendary lenser Charles Rosher who could light Gaynor so she seemed to glow from within. At her best, in silents under Murnau, Borzage, Ford, and in sound films like STATE FAIR/’33, A STAR IS BORN/’37 or even this, you can’t miss seeing how Gaynor’s charm & gentle decency still take hold of an audience.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: With the same head-writer (John Lee Mahin) and young James Stewart in the same backup boyfriend role, it’s easy to see how this was originally envisioned for Jean Harlow to follow her underrated WIFE VS. SECRETARY out earlier the same year.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/wife-vs-secretary-1936.html   OR:  A musical remake in 1953 takes little but the title.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/12/small-town-girl-1953.html 

SATURDAY NIGHT (2024)

A funny thing happened on the way to kickstarting the seemingly endless celebration for 50 years of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: nobody gave a fuck.  At least, not for this Jason Reitman origin film depicting the countdown to the show’s first broadcast.  Turns out, SNL’s fan base is wide, but not deep.  The film itself generating less laughs than a post-Weekend Update comedy sketch and not helped by loading on show-offy all-star cameos as famous peripheral characters (i.e. J.K. Simmons as comic vulgarian Milton Berle; Willem Dafoe’s NBC program chief Davie Tebet) and using lesser-knowns as original Not Ready For Prime Time Players & staff.  And the film ultimately avoids the elephant in the room, the one question that might make this matter: Has there ever been a Pop-culture mediocrity to match SNL in long-running influence?  (JAMES BOND?  STAR TREK?)  How long has it been since Bill Hader’s Stefan or ‘The Californians’ brought consistent laughs to the program?  While its political satire has always been toothless.  Meanwhile, strictly as film, what’s with Reitman’s technique?  Mostly content to pan/scan and run after moving backstage targets, when he does back off the chase to stage a fateful/fretful scene at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, he seems unable to set up reverse-angles between three people.  Lucky for him (and the movie), this is basically a show-must-go-on fable, so the last couple of reels inevitably acquire some suspense & momentum.  Just not enough to matter.  Meanwhile, over on NBC, the celebration continues.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *As per IMDb, WorldWide grosses a pathetic 10 mill.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Strictly speaking, this ought to be labeled READ This Not That as The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison profile of Lorne Michaels (1/20/25) makes this film, if possible, even more unnecessary.

IL SUCCESSO (1963)

Exemplary, if familiar commedia all'Italiana from little known director Mauro Morassi (he died young after this, just his fourth film).  With its starry cast (Vittorio Gassman, Anouk Aimée, Jean-Louis Trintignant) and rising creatives (music: Ennio Morricone; script: Ettore Scola), it’s long been due for rediscovery outside of Italy.  Reteamed after Dino Risi’s IL SORPASSO/’62*, Gassman & Trintignant (here in a smaller role) are longtime pals who are missing out on Italy’s ‘Il Boom’ windfall.  But whereas Trintignant’s intellectual is content (financially if not romantically), Gassman, happily married to Aimée, only sees how well his less talented contemporaries are doing, catching breaks to prosperity he’s missing out on.  Unaware of the hardening Aimée sees growing in him, and at work neither as popular nor as indispensable as he thinks he is, Gassman jumps at the chance to go into debt to buy some land adjacent to a big development his company is moving on.  It’s sure to jump in value, but he’ll need to pull every string, tap every wealthy school chum & pressure every relative he’s badmouthed for years.  How low will he sink?  How much humiliation can he take?  And what past loves can his wife ‘leverage’ to help him out.  Even if he does reach his goal, what will be left of him at the other end?  Gassman tackles this with little vanity, it’s really more an Alberto Sordi role (Gassman less comically stylized), but there’s little to complain about in the cast, film technique, pacing or the coruscating portrait of winning at any cost thru abasement/loss of self.  You can have it all, but only if it means nothing.  Morassi’s death at 40 obviously a major loss; especially with the commedia all'Italiana movement not yet played out.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *IMDb lists Dino Risi as uncredited co-director, and the film could well have come from the remarkable run of films Risi was putting out at the time: IL VEDOVO/’59; IL MATTATORE/’60; UNA VITA DIFFICILE/’61; IL SORPASSO/’62.  The last now generally regarded as his masterpiece.  (You probably know Risi from the Al Pacino remake of SCENT OF A WOMAN/’74 which originally starred Vittorio Gassman.)  Plus, those three earlier Morassi features to hunt up.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/02/il-sorpasso-easy-life-1962.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/profumo-di-donna-scent-of-woman-1974.html

THE FLORENTINE DAGGER (1935)

From Warners’ ‘Clue Club’, third in a series of six mid-‘30 mystery movies, mostly adapted from novels, in hopes of starting a monthly release schedule that proved far too ambitious.  This one from a Ben Hecht genre potboiler written ‘on spec’ as a personal dare to see how fast the famously speedy journalist/playwright/scripter could write a commercial bestseller dictating to a rotating staff of typists.  Trimmed to essentials by Tom Reed and (considering the budget) stylishly directed by Robert Florey, it’s pretty good fun, boasting a super cast of second-leads & supporting contract players (Donald Woods, Margaret Lindsay, C. Aubrey Smith, Henry O’Neill & Robert Barrat; plus a superb sniff from Herman Bing) who pull our young protagonist (the last of the murdering Borgia family) from a planned suicide.  He’s helped by a suggestion from a friendly psychiatrist that rather than kill himself he should try writing it out to clear his mind.  Convert your destructive thoughts into a period play on your ancestors to release your personal demons.  Presto!, not only cured, but with the biggest theatrical hit in town!  Alas, the star actress hired as Lucretia Borgia falls into a deep depression after her father, the play’s director, is murdered.  Perhaps she’s succumbed to the Borgia family curse (method acting gone too far?).  Or has the playwright reverted to type.  Neither, says the psychiatrist who thought he was helping the lad.  Indeed, many a secret from the recent past will need to be cleared up before uncertainties can be explained.  Explained with the help of an amusingly amoral Viennese police captain.*  Everyone on set seems to be having a ball making this one (not always a good sign for the movie itself, BTW), and happily the feeling is infectious.  Just keep expectations to a reasonable level for best results.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  The Movie Database has this list of the Clue Club films.    https://www.themoviedb.org/collection/1058366-clue-club-collection?language=en-US

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Perhaps the plot also baffled the recently empowered Hollywood Production Code who allowed someone to get off scot-free with not quite justifiable homicide!

THE GREATEST QUESTION (1919)

Before heading back East for two more classics (WAY DOWN EAST/’20; ORPHANS OF THE STORM/’21), but mostly disappointment & mediocrity, D.W. Griffith, the most inconstant of our indispensable film pioneers, ended his initial California run with this slightly ridiculous grab-bag of favorite themes.  Essential viewing nonetheless, Griffith must have been trying to repeat the pastoral flow & charm of TRUE HEART SUSIE/’19* which also starred Lillian Gish & Robert Harron, his regular ingenues, in a story of marriage delayed; here without the gentle laughs, tears & tenderness.  Instead, plot & suspense relentlessly pushed at us right from the prologue where Gish’s character, six at the time, witnesses the murder of an immigrant girl; loses her parents; is taken in by Bobby Harron’s sweet/loving parents; learns of the death at sea of Harron’s brother Ralph Graves; hears how Harron’s mom spoke to Graves’ ghost before  they got the news*; gets hired as housekeeper to the odious couple who murdered that immigrant girl; is soon being whipped by the wife for breaking a dish and chased thru the house by her lust infatuated husband; and saves the Harron clan from eviction with the discovery of oil oozing from their farm land.  Yikes!  (You might say everything but the kitchen sink if only there wasn’t a kitchen sink in here!)  Also, one ‘Darkie’ for comic relief.  And will he think a thief hiding in the graveyard under a white sheet is a ghost?  Hell yes.  Will he be played by a White Guy in Black makeup?  Hell yes.  (Not stylized BlackFace either, but simply made up to play Black so he can do something comically inappropriate for a funny tag ending.)  Yet this chance to see Griffith in pastoral mode (Billy Bitzer handling the atmospherically charged cinematography) and Harron in his final film under Griffith before his early death; as well as definite intimations of Griffith’s masterful WAY DOWN EAST which had Richard Barthelmess in a role Harron could have played, shouldn't be ignored.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, the enchanting (and BlackFace free) TRUE HEART SUSIE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/02/true-heart-susie-1919.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *In case you’re wondering, that possible communication with the dead is the eponymous Question.

FESTEN / THE CELEBRATION (1998)

Strictly DOGME and strictly a dog.  A Family Reunion from Hell tale that was one of the first DOGME projects, cinematic rules you had to follow like some artistic honesty Party Line to find truth & purity by foreswearing technical embellishments that didn’t suit the barebones style.  (Or was it the budget?)  So, all natural lighting, lots of handheld camera work, only diegetic music, unity of time, place & action (wait that’s Classic Greek Plays); well, you get the idea: Back to the Basics; F/X or optical printing unwelcome.  That last a given as this film ‘captured’ rather than filmed, using an early, resolution-challenged digital system.  (You might accept the grain and low-light deficiencies, but why all the overexposure?  It’s all set into motion by the return of a Prodigal Son (long a success in Paris as a restauranteur), now come home not to praise Paterfamilias on his 60th birthday but to bury him . . . with the unvarnished truth.  That’d be eldest-born Christian, arriving just in time to miss his twin sister’s funeral.  So, with friends & relatives gathered in Denmark to toast Father at the large hotel estate the family owns, Christian waits his turn to offer a toast and drop long delayed bombshells.  They detonate, too; yet the party goes on!  Social conventions taking precedent.  But wait, more atrocities to spill: abuse/culpability.  Maybe he’s delusional, jealous of the family that stayed in town, like his abominable kid brother, who leads the tipsy throng with fist-first physical threats, and racist singalongs (a middle sister has a Black date).  With choruses and courses yet to come, probably best to toss big brother Christian out of the house.  Technically, dramatically, psychologically, the whole works hopelessly dated, even as a corrective to Hollywood excesses of the time.  And perhaps everyone in here knew it, including writer/director Thomas Vinterberg who had loosened up considerably long before his recent success with ANOTHER ROUND (DRUK)/’20.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Rinse the taste out of your mouth with the big family gatherings that open Ingmar Bergman’s FANNY & ALEXANDER (the tv cut) or in Arnaud Desplechin’s A CHRISTMAS TALE/’08.  There are of course hundreds more, though for some reason, Hollywood attempts at disastrous Thanksgiving family gatherings are best avoided.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/un-conte-de-noel-christmas-tale-2008.html

THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (2018)

With time between Tolkien Middle-Earth and late Beatles-mania projects, Peter Jackson got in the trenches with WWI vets for this remarkable documentary largely sourced from long unseen actuality footage shot (in more ways than one) at The Front - 1914 to 1918, now moldering in London’s Imperial War Museum.  Mountains of century-old film less restored than resurrected using a mix of digital enhancement techniques to clean, stabilize, pan/scan and colorize.  The efforts undeniably interventionist; the results entirely involving, especially for nonspecialists unused to watching ‘thru’ visually compromised antique elements.  Yet Jackson’s true masterstroke not visual but aural, pulling us in with the exclusive use of recorded interviews by real WWI veterans to tell their story.  No officer’s offering the broader picture, battle plans or grand strategies, but a grunt’s viewpoint, narrowly focused on getting thru the next watch or special operation.  Often brutally coarse, disinterested in the big picture, but the real thing.  Mesmerizing, and withal the gore & terrors, holding a terrible beauty in the memory of battle horrors seen clearly.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Jackson took eight hours to get thru THE HOBBIT.  (And considerably more in the extended cuts.)  Yet manages WWI in an hour and 38 minutes. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Made while memories were fresh and sound technology rapidly advancing, the 1930 version of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT/’30 remains an astonishing achievement, far superior to the much lauded, oddly unfaithful recent remake.  But since that’s the one covered on this site . . .  (Both films taken up in the post.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/01/all-quiet-on-wewstern-front-2022.html

OUT OF THE BLUE (1947)

How many good Screwball comedies are there?  How many are even Screwball?  Most might charitably be called Crazy Comedy (as here) or just farce.  No hard and fast rules to the genre; you know it when you see one.  I suppose you’ve got to have a flighty heiress (a bit nuts like Carole Lombard or just taking flight a la Claudette Colbert).  And as antagonist/object of affection a sensible square to loosen up by the end.   Most of all, you needed The Depression to ground all the craziness.  That’s why they never work anymore.  Hence, a ‘30s phenomenon.*  Here, it’s already 1947 and writer Vera Caspary (best known for LAURA/’44 and LETTER TO THREE WIVES/’47) tries a quintette, two couples and a wild card.  Apartment neighbors who bicker over a dog, tenant rights and a reappearing ‘dead’ body.  Turhan Bey’s painter uncomfortably coming on to Virginia Mayo in his uncomfortably short shorts.  Yikes!  Prissy George Brent emasculated by wife Carole Landis.  He gets Cary Grant’s hair, glasses & bow-tie from BRINGING UP BABY/’38*; she’s made-up as a Ginger Rogers clone.  And the reappearing dead body?  That’s Ann Dvorak who’s really only dead drunk.  No comic technique, perhaps, but she wears you down and gets her laughs by the end.  So too the film under journeyman director Leigh Jason; at least by the last reel and a half when everyone’s amusingly chasing their own tail and the background score finally stops acting like a musical laugh track.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *But what of the ‘40s Paramount heyday of Preston Sturges?  Doesn’t THE LADY EVE/’41 meet all Screwball criteria?  Sure, but his films are really a genre of their own: sui generis Sturges.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *BRINGING UP BABY flopped on release in ’38 and wouldn't have been known at the time.  (Broadly rediscovered in the '70s.)  Brent’s slightly fey look standard henpecked husband costume?

C’E ANCORA DOMANI / THERE’S STILL TOMORROW (2023)

Commedia all'italiana lives!  The great run of savvy Italian dramedies of the ‘50s and ‘60s that looked askant at the problematic attitudes of the day, not in despair or contempt, but with a knowing, helpless shrug. Reviving it, singer/actress Paola Cortellesi, makes a ridiculously assured debut as co-writer/director (at 50!) with this epochal drama about a working-class family in Rome (three generations in a small street level flat) during the interregnum between WWII and the Il Boom ‘50s.  With three kids, a brute of a husband, and his bedridden father, Cortellesi stars as wife & family peacekeeper, eking out a bit of extra cash with backside injections for an upperclass family and piecemeal mending for a local clothing shop after finishing wifely duties as cook, servant, nurse, bedmate, go-fer, cleaning lady, whatever her abusive husband demands.  Yet, she's more life force than drudge though her two young boys ignore her; her marriagable daughter despises her for being walked over; the invalided FIL needs constant attention, and the husband blames her for his failures and infidelity.  Her outlets?  The neighborhood gossip queens, a true friend who sells vegetables in the street market, other women who enjoy seeing someone who’s got it worse then they do.  She does find a friendly face in an American G.I., part of the occupying force who’s built up a crush on her, and in a failing auto mechanic who missed his chance thirty years back.  She’s got a crush on him.  But now, her daughter’s engaged to the wealthy boy whose parents own a prosperous café down the street.  Or is this too a facade?  And living so close to the edge, financially/emotionally, leaves little room for error.  Rich human drama: wise/touching/funny, and when it’s too unbearable, given stylized treatment in song and dance as a visual coping mechanism.  Stunningly advanced in conception & execution for a novice; and beautifully caught in period evocative monochrome.  A one-off?  Cortellesi’s made a hard act to follow.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Vittorio De Sica’s MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE/’64 the classic commedia all'italiana match for this.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/12/matrimonio-allitaliana-marriage-italian.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *This exactly the sort of quality General Audience mid-list film the major studios either won’t or can’t make anymore.   Yet it was critically and commercially, the Italian film of ‘23.  Hey, Hollywood: If you make it, they will come.

DEPARTMENT Q: THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES / KVINDEN I BURET (2013)

Cleanly-handled Cold Case procedural from Denmark plays like a pilot for a series.  And so it is; just not for Denmark.  Someone (Dick Wolf?  NetFlix?) out soon with the inevitable Stateside reboot; no doubt hoping for more episodes than the four fat-free films made a decade back.  The first two  directed by Mikkel Nørgaard, who certainly has range (see KLOWN and BORGEN) and a knack for straddling tv & features.*   A prologue shows detective Nikolaj Lie Kaasmade jumping the gun on his last case and now finding himself in recovery; if back on the force, but out of homicide, demoted downstairs to process rather than investigate low-priority/unsolved murder cases.  Aided by low-ranked assistant Fares Fares, they single out a Cold Case worth reinvestigating and soon find it's considerably warmer than expected.  A rare kick these days to be able to follow a plot that adds up.  So unlike today's typical over-stuffed crime shows that need to stretch out every ambiguous moment to fill an eight episode contract.  Seeing these two guys getting into trouble breaking rules and protocol in the name of fighting for delayed justice surprisingly satisfying.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Three more films by almost the same team followed (not seen here, all based on novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen; ABSENT ONE/’14; CONSPIRACY OF FAITH/’16; JOURNAL 64/’18) in presumably similar style.  OR: *Something completely different from Nørgaard in the rudely comic KLOWN/’10.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/06/klovn-klown-2010.html

PADDINGTON IN PERU (2024)

After major huzzahs for PADDINGTONs I and II (orphaned CGI bear finds his name at a London railway station and a loving new family nearby), a drop in quality was only to be expected.  And so it proved with PERU.  The verdict: pleasant, but no match.  But hold on.  Once past a Peruvian prologue and a slapsticky first act that’s more MR. BEAN than MR. BEAR, the film finds its footing when Paddington brings his human family down to Peru where a beloved Aunt has taken ill.  Or so he was told.  Turns out she’s not taken ill, she’s taken off!  Part of a dastardly plot to find the fabled Lost City (and gold) of El Dorado.  Now we’ve found the right path: devious plot by phony Nun, secret goals, villains in disguise/heroes in disguise, and a dangerous journey that nods at RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK/’81  (Only LAST CRUSADE/’89, third in that series, makes for a better INDY sequel than this.  Steven Spielberg pea green with envy.)  Plenty clever, plenty fun, and with a neat touch of suspenseful sentiment for the wrap.)  With most of the original players (the kids touchingly ten years grown), plus some new South American players, including a gamely deranged Antonio Banderas.  Is the film as good as PADDINGTON 2?  No.  But it’s good enough!  And boasting a great last minute cameo appearance by PADDINGTON 2 secret weapon Hugh Grant.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  PADDINGTON 1 & 2.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/08/paddington-2014.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/paddington-2.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Considering how important marmalade is to Paddington, the writers ought to know they’ve got the wrong variety of oranges for a serious marmalade.  You want bitter fruit for marmalade.  Plus a shot of Scotch Whiskey.