LADIES’ MAN (1931)

Now remembered almost exclusively for co-writing CITIZEN KANE/'41 with Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz was at his most productive and his most influential during the early ‘30s at Paramount, writing, producing, and most importantly setting a sophisticated/adult tone.  This rather disagreeable romantic dramedy a perfect example of his imperfect efforts.*  William Powell, still shaded with the darker characters he started out playing back in the silents, is this year’s ‘ladies’ man’ to upper-crust business ‘widows,’ their husbands alive, but always at work.  Something of an unannounced gigolo, Powell’s a Manhattan flaneur, threading a needle of romance-with-benefits to ‘baste’ together a living with the trinkets of love.  Currently working a mother/daughter act, Mom’s a 400 Society snob (Olive Tell), unaware her main rival is her own daughter (Carole Lombard).  (Off the set, Lombard & Powell just engaged.)  These two are matched by father/scion: Bank prez Dad aware of the useful ‘escort’ service; son horrified at ‘the benefits.’  But once Powell is gob-smacked by ‘the real thing,’ a just visiting Kay Francis, he suddenly sees himself plainly and wants a fresh start.  Is he in too deep to change?  This is at least the third time Mank used this light start to set up a swerve toward the depths (it worked better for him in LAUGHTER/’30), but under Lothar Mendes’s direction, there’s less Early Talkie longueurs, at least by the younger cast members.  Though Paramount, like M-G-M had yet to come up to speed.  Very watchable if viewed with a bit of patience and a yen to see Powell’s lounge lizard go all Rake’s Progress.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See David Fincher’s unconvincing case for the defense (or is it the offense?) in MANK/'20.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/01/mank-2020.html   OR: By 1939, Francis’s star had slipped to B-pics, so Lombard, who was riding high, gave her a big juicy role in her Cary Grant co-starrer, IN NAME ONLY.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/08/in-name-only-1939.html

ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023)

Effective, affective and a bit overpraised, writer/director Andrew Haigh, working from a piece by Taichi Yamada, charts a fast-evolving/erotically-charged affair between two men, apparently the only tenants in their large apartment complex.  The main interest lies in the surprising gap between what might be called Generation Gay, sadder but wiser forty-something Andrew Scott*; and Generation Queer, late twenty-something, demonstrative Paul Mescal.  A cultural shift in attitude that doesn’t put a wall between them, but moves the relationship toward bridge building.  As in a noisy club scene, where expectations of rupture instead only deepen excitement.  But Haigh proves more concerned with relations between the living and the dead; specifically the need for emotional closure for Scott.  An unfulfilled screenwriter, his current project (if it is a project) has him visiting his childhood home for conversations with the parents he lost when he was an unhappy twelve year old.  The parents, now younger than he is, appear corporal, interacting with him as he is now, the gay adult man he grew up to be.  Played self-consciously in hushed tones, the fantasy relationship tender, touching and rather sentimental.  (Asked about his life after they died, there’s a superb line for Scott, noting how he hid his true self at school to keep from being bullied: ‘I made sure I did.’)  And at the end, we discover Mescal has his own ‘Mommy issues.’  Now we’ve jumped five generations back!  Very ‘40s Freudian.*  Missteps and all, it’s well acted (Claire Foy & Jamie Bell play the parents) and involving.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Scott’s recent roles have called on him to buff up a bit, but the real change is in the contours of his face.  As if at 48, he suddenly acquired the look of a movie star.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The influence of 1940s memory piece plays very strong here.  On purpose?

WRECKING CREW (!942)

Typical bare-budget fare from the Williams, Pine & Thomas (known collectively as the Dollar Bills), this bargain-basement blockbuster pits old rivals at work & romance in competition.  One a naturally talented fuckup/braggart; the other more worker bee/butter-and-egg man.  Made at M-G-M with 10X the budget, the guys would be Clark Gable & Spencer Tracy; at 20th/Fox Tyrone Power & Don Ameche; Warners with Cagney & Pat O’Brien.  For the Dollar Bills?  You get Chester Morris (late of M-G-M) & Richard Arlen (late of Paramount).*  Credit the Bills with finding a good target for the action (a motley wrecking crew who specialize in tearing down dangerously dilapidated skyscrapers), and in finding the unknown Alex Widlicska, in his sole film credit, to work up special-effects that help director Frank McDonald give those cracking facades a reasonable sense of weight and volume.  Even real suspense in some simply accomplished trick shots.  (They’d look even better if a decent print could be found.)  Jean Parker no more than efficient as the girl with a past who must choose between the men, but kudos to someone for casting middle-aged character actress Esther Dale as ‘Mike,’ a senior woman in a man’s job (she inherited the biz from her husband) who’s both sentimental (the reckless Morris gets break after break because he reminds her of her husband) as well as tough.  And check out how they set up the corny sacrifice at the end.  Play ball!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Arlen always looked a bit glum at having fallen off the A-list, whereas Morris’s joie de vivre at just being an actor could come across as prime ham.  Arlen probably at his best in late silents like BEGGARS OF LIFE/’28.  For Morris, it’s his early M-G-M Talkies, see THE BIG HOUSE/’30.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/01/beggars-of-life-1928.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-big-house-1930.html

AWAY (2019)

Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis, whose FLOW/’24 is a well deserved global phenomenon, had only one previous feature to his credit.  And while it’s not as original an idea as FLOW’s flood (a dystopian adventure for a young survivor looking for life on earth . . . or whatever dangerous planet he’s found himself on), it’s FLOW’s near equal in visual imagination and is even more of a personal achievement because Zilbalodis apparently did the whole thing himself.  Don’t look for fifteen minutes of end credits; THE ENTIRE FILM: animated, directed, edited, scored by Zilbalodis; whom I hear also brewed the coffee.  Of course, this would be meaningless if the film weren’t as good as it is, but it’s positively loaded with interesting ideas on fate, luck, companionship, philosophy, trust, misplaced fear, opiate for the ‘people,’ hope, pluck . . . you get the idea.  Beautifully paced as a series of challenges & obstacles overcome to get to the next step on his journey against an enigmatic demon who may be as much friend as fiend.  And what character development animation for the lead and the little animals who come & go.  (Where does this talent come from?!)  Plus, for anyone who wants to know how somewhat limited CGI can blossom under the eye (and hand) of a single artist rather than a committee, here’s your chance.  Heck, he’s even managed to get a shade of GREEN on screen that doesn't slightly nauseate.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, FLOW.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/10/flow-2024.html

SHADOW OF DOUBT (1935)

Bereft of the snazzy production values & star wattage that kept M-G-M commercially atop Golden Age Hollywood, the studio’s programmers had to rely on just the sort of independent moviemaking moxie and quick-witted invention officially discouraged (even punished) on the lot.  A safe, dulled response in contrast to studios where B-pics could loosen up a bit with so little at stake.*  Ergo this sub-par M-G-M murder mystery, slackly directed by George B. Seitz, amid Society toffs and nightclub toughs where every Manhattanite is a Man-About-Town, even the gals, and all is fodder for tomorrow’s gossip columns.*  Our murder victim is Bradkey Page, a ‘handsy’ producer with too many girlfriends and too many enemies.  Beginning with an insulted Ricardo Cortez who publicly punched him at the club for leaving putative fiancée Virginia Bruce in the lurch for golddigger Betty Furness.  The usual list of shady characters, chorines and market manipulators fill in a long list of suspects and . . .  Ho-hum.  But halfway along, something unusual happens.  The script pivots almost entirely to Constance Collier, Cortez’s ultra-rich/eccentric Aunt, getting her out of the manse for the first time in decades to take the lead as amateur detective, solving the case along with antagonistic ‘help’ from detective Edward Brophy.  Collier, a near legendary stage performer in pre-’20s Britain making an unlikely Hollywood debut at 57 (she’d go on to a series of character turns as a fallen dowager in films like STAGE DOOR/’37 and ROPE/’48) walks off with the film. (Presumably, Collier and Brophy were test-running a possible series along the lines of what Edna May Oliver & James Gleason were doing over at Universal starting with THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER/’32.)  Collier proved too rich a taste for anything but the smallest of parts, but she’s certainly something to see in this, her sole lead role.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Actually, there's one nice bit of movement when a taxi getaway ride gets stuck in city traffic and becomes a foot chase.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Warners had just shown how these things are done in WONDER BAR/’34, exposing how crude & backward M-G-M’s default house style was at the time by comparison.  Just be warned, WONDER BAR may be the best of Al Jolson’s films, but racially it’s the most appalling.  (And BlackFace the least of it.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/01/wonder-bar-1933.html

GREEN BORDER / ZIELONA GRANICA (2023)

Coming Soon to an International Border near you . . .  No, not the movie, the events.  A tough watch from Polish-born, but borderless writer/director Agnieszka Holland on today’s Les Misérables: foreign refugees (legal, illegal, semi-legal migrants) leaving home & country for something better, only to find a road not paved in gold, but no road at all; merely a dirt path to hell.  In this case, a No-man’s-land between the Poland-Belarus border.  Arranged in chapters: the Border; the Guards; the Activists, etc., Holland, with but one truly horrible exception, puts the worst of it in section one, after a hopeful plane ride devolves into pure terror and venality from everyone they meet, beginning with a connecting van ride gone purposefully wrong, military terrorism, a forced border crossing where they discover they are pawns of international politics, hustled back and forth (with significant collateral damage in each direction) like a deadly game of Red Rover/Red Rover where sadistic Border Guards control the barbed-wire barrier.  (Among the many portraits of horrific behavior toward the migrants, the Belarus Border Guards stand out for general inhumanity and whimsical enjoyment of cruelty.)   Holland hardly needs to push to earn her effects, and she’s scrupulously fair, not turning starry-eyed toward the sympathetic, and occasionally effective activists, more hard-headed legal aides than saints, and not without their own assholes and entitled show-offs.  Not to say there aren’t a few rounded portraits of border guards showing their own stricken consciences, influences and peer pressures.  And if some storylines wrap in expected ways (most of them tragically), it’s impossible not to be freshly moved before the inevitable coda shows how this deadly show continues somewhere.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Shot in moody b&w, Holland reverses expectations by using professionals to get a non-pro vibe in the acting.

MURDER BY PROXY / BLACKOUT (1954)

Our unplanned BritNoir mini-fest ends with what promised most, but delivered least of three.  (See right below for the other two.)  ‘Most’ because it should be right up Hammer Films’ alley, the British studio best known for reinvigorating classic horror icons with kinetic charges of action, sex & lurid TechniColor . . . just not yet.  Instead, top contract director Terence Fisher, who made most of those fright films, is held down by a dogged whodunit plot, drab monochrome interiors and a budget that threatens to quit before the wrap.  Dane Clark, the American ‘ringer’ on board to ensure Stateside distribution, is prospectless & blind drunk at a snazzy London bar when he’s approached by a beautiful blonde with an unlikely proposition: Marry me tonight and I’ll pay you £500.  What he doesn’t know is that the gal in question is using him to stop an upcoming forced marriage; that her father will be murdered tonight; that she’ll disappear just as fast; or that Clark will be tagged with circumstantial evidence as suspect #1.  (Told you it sounded promising.)  Clark and the otherwise all-U.K. cast are fine, but the unraveling of lies & motives doesn't add up.  Nor a  necessitated warmup between Clark and Belinda Lee’s femme fatale.  Didn’t anyone on set notice the chemistry developing between Clark and spur-of-the-moment helpmate Eleanor Summerfield?  Send Lee down for the count and have Clark & Summerfield walk off into the sunrise.  If only they had enough cash for the re-takes.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  In Hollywood, Clark was typed as backup man whenever John Garfield was too busy, but could be his own guy given a chance.  See him at his best, and most distinctive, in MOONRISE/’48, the last film worthy of its great director, Frank Borzage.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/moonrise-1948.html

THE INTERRUPTED JOURNEY (1949)

Solid direction from little-known Daniel Birt (dead at 47 after just 12 features) makes all the difference in turning this modestly clever BritNoir programmer into something special.  Richard Todd is particularly good as a failing novelist, married to loyal but disappointed Valerie Hobson, now getting cold-feet as he runs off via train with the wife of his publisher.  And that's when his unscheduled emergency stop to hop off and go back home causes a major train collision with dozens killed, including the adulteress.  This is where the film becomes something unique for movie mavens with Act Two playing out like a compressed Alfred Hitchcock thriller with circumstantial evidence trapping Todd as calm Inspector Tom Walls closes in.  (Todd might be playing CRIME & PUNISHMENT’s Raskolnikov to Detective Walls’ Porifry.)  Just don’t trust that Act Two conclusion, it’s a fake-out to set up even worse charges Todd must disprove while on the run in an Act Three that leans more toward Fritz Lang in Hollywood.*   Fortunately, a short running time (77") doesn’t give you time to nitpick logic, but just enough space to savor how Birt is enjoying himself.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Hitchcock undoubtedly had a good hard look at this, hiring Richard Todd to run with similar lies, half-truths and ambivalent tone as one of the leads in next year’s STAGE FRIGHT/’50.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/stage-fright-1950.html  OR:  Lang’s THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW/’44 for clues on where some of those twists came from . . . and where Birt picked up that ending.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/08/woman-in-window-1944.html

ORDERS TO KILL (1958)

Testing himself on WWII espionage far removed from his usual play or literary adaptations, director Anthony Asquith got lucky when savvy producer Anthony Havelock-Allan gave him Paul Dehn’s morally tricky/fact-suggested script.*  Paul Massie uses his slight build & weak chin to good effect as a grounded flyer transferred to undercover spying thanks to his impeccable French.  The job?  Take out a low level, small-town Resistance liaison man whose British contacts are being discovered by the Gestapo at suspicious rates.  (Five of the last nine dead.)  Only problem: once landed, Massie starts to find reasons that make him believe this middle-aged family man is innocent of the charge.  A classic spy yarn Asquith has trouble putting over at first.  Training and mission detail coming across like canned theatre with flat interiors, bald exposition and the usual British idea of Ugly (wartime) Americans.  But hold on; Act Two brings striking improvement as Massie, once in France, finds the reality of an ordered military assassination doesn’t match up to the larky adventure he imagined.  In a way, Asquith goes thru a similar process, locating his proper place within noir stylistics (seconded by regular lenser Desmond Dickinson’s exterior work), pace, suspicion & suspense.  And he's not hurt by the uptick in acting by all concerned when Irene Worth joins the story as Massie’s ambivalent local contact.   The script even retains a modicum of moral complexity, softened rather than written out, right thru the ending.  BTW: the high billing for Eddie Albert (Massie’s superior officer) and Lillian Gish (mom back home) is exaggerated, no doubt to help Stateside distribution, but they’re both fine.  So’s the film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Dehn misses a sure thing in a little coda by not having the film’s pet cat make a return appearance after finding her way home post-occupation.   On the other hand, there’s a nifty meet-cute for assassin and target at the local bistro involving a rabbit stew that just might be kitty-cat fricassée.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Having the French speak accented English was standard practice at the time (still is to some extent), but not using it here could have considerably bumped up verisimilitude.

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE (2024)

The one thing everybody knows about Beetlejuice (presumably even Tim Burton!) is that you summon him by repeating his name out loud three times.  Please see title.  (Oops.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Along with Michael Keaton’s praise-worthy return 36 years on as the afterlife demon ‘Betelgeuse,’ only Burn Gorman (the immortal Guppy of BLEAK HOUSE/’05) as Father Damien holds tone against Burton’s barrage of faded frights.  Still, credit Burton with bettering his last feature, the wholly lamentable DUMBO remake.  Even showing a touch of the old magic in this film’s 'MacArthur Park' musical finale.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/11/dumbo-2019.html

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  The original BEETLEJUICE/’88, still a ghoulish delight.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/beetlejuice-1988.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Hard to believe, but after four decades on the job, director Burton still cannot handle an action sequence as simple as an out of control bicycle crashing thru street traffic and colliding into a backyard tree.

HIDDEN AGENDA (1990)

Indefatigable U.K. indie director Ken Loach takes on the Irish ‘Troubles’ (or rather Thatcher-Era Northern Irish ‘Troubles’) in both expected and unexpected ways.*  The ‘expected’ sees Frances McDormand and partner Brad Dourif as half of an international investigative team, currently in Belfast looking into police tactics that amount to Human Rights violations being justified as excessive violence to stop excessive violence.  It leads to the film’s McGuffin, a meaningful one in this case, an incriminating audio tape that causes Dourif to take a ride to a secret daybreak rendevous that goes deadly wrong.  So when the official report on the incident from British Special Forces and Northern Irish police proves self-serving coverup, Brian Cox’s honest, hard-nosed British detective is empowered to find out what really happened to the man and to the audio tape.  He functions like a police internal investigator, and is just as popular on all sides.  All this is fine, exceptionally well acted (particularly Cox’s world-weary, wised up, unstoppable force) and unfortunately all too believable, It’s also nothing new.  But that’s where Loach brings in the ‘unexpected,’ pulling out tropes from ‘70s paranoid political thrillers that go one step beyond usual Orange/Green allegiances and peer into messier/more consequential High Tory campaigns to influence U.K. politics.  True or not, it’s certainly convincing; and the portrait of power brokers running the government (the over-entitled titled) curving the arc of history to their liking is more deeply disturbing then the usual suspense.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Loach’s film on the ‘expected’ Irish Troubles was his big award-winner, THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY/’06.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/06/wind-that-shook-barley-2006.html    

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Loach & scripter Jim Allen’s main dramatic cheat is having too many political speeches outline differing goals & self-justifications (from the police, from the rebels, from the Tories) that would be as obvious to all the participants as they are to us.

SIDE STREETS (1934)

Featured players at Depression Era Warner Bros., Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak had just co-starred in the classic Pre-Code proto-feminist HEAT LIGHTNING/’34 when they had this Post-Code proto-feminist rematch.  This time business moves from auto-garage & lodge in the desert to a ‘side street’ fur salon owned & operated by MacMahon in San Francisco.  That’s where she meets-cute (in the Zoo) with unemployed able seaman Paul Kelly.  He’s picking up spilled peanuts meant for the monkeys; she’s picking up him!  The film nothing if not frank & hardheaded.  Soon they’re partners at the store and in bed.  Now married, he's already two-timing the wife with sharp looker Dvorak.  (Film’s original title ‘A WOMAN IN HER THIRTIES’ says it all.*)  But a baby will change the equation as Kelly’s nuts for the little heir.  Too bad the kid with MacMahon ain’t the only infant in this story.  Yep, Dvorak also in the family way.  Worse, Kelly’s roving eye gets another target when MacMahon’s flirtatious niece comes to help in the shop.  Yikes!  Meanwhile, MacMahon displays psychological acumen & salesmanship in selling those fur coats, leveraging mistresses against wives for big sales using subtle suggestion & not so subtle blackmail.  All while being a good egg.  Super stuff, even when some hallowed tropes of Women’s Drama threaten to make things too far-fetched.  But jeez-o-pete, what an actress Aline MacMahon was.*  And though she was big-boned, even matronly, there was a sort of Madonna-like magnificence & beauty to her.  LIGHTNING certainly the finer flick (both films programmer short at an amazingly speedy 1'3"), which means perennially dull megger Alfred E. Green hasn’t the time to slow things down.  Lenser Byron Haskin & typically superb art direction from Anton Grot give this one a sense of place & side street atmosphere.  The film, long hiding in plain sight, overdue for an airing.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, HEAT LIGHTNING. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/heat-lightning-1934.html    

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Keep in mind Kelly and MacMahon exactly the same age: 35.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  In Axel Nissen’s MOTHERS, MAMMIES AND OLD MAIDS (a fine rival on Hollywood actresses to go-to authority Jeanine Basinger), we learn MacMahon had a first professional theatrical experience as a ‘super’ to Sarah Bernhardt and shared the stage on her final B’way show (her 31st) with a debuting Meryl Streep.

LIGHTYEAR (2022)

For Disney/Pixar, seeing a sure bet like this TOY STORY offshoot, The Buzz Lightyear Origin Story, turn into a hubristic New Coke moment, must have been bewildering.*  Particularly as the film is beautifully crafted & darn entertaining.  Yet the explanation of its commercial failure (ok, an explanation) is apparent to anyone with half an ear to the ground: it was sold as TOY STORY addendum, but made as STAR WARS adventure.  (And not just any STAR WARS mind you, but as something that held to the vibe of the initial ‘70s/’80s trilogy.  (Admittedly, some story beats really too close to the original for comfort.  Call it homage.)  Lots of buzz at the time about swapping in Chris Evans as voice actor for original Buzz Tim Allen.  (Evans excellent, BTW.)  Yet not a peep about an even stranger alteration: a slight, but noticeable physical tweak that transforms Buzz, in face & body heft, into a Chris Pratt doppelgänger.  Weird.  (Was he up for the part?)  Briefly, Buzz and his Space Rangers need a new power supply to get off the inhospitable planet they crash landed on.  Testing a new energy crystal takes Buzz only four days in space, but lasts four years back on the planet.  Many tests later, his generation has aged out (or died), his New Space Rangers now two generations removed.  (Ask Einstein; you enjoy a clever twist on Luke Skywalker’s Darth Vader reveal.)  For the millions who passed on this as a probable failed TOY STORY origin story, but who’ve waited long & hard for one of the many STAR WARS reboots to remember what made Episodes IV & V great ‘Pop’ cinema, this one’s for you.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *You can almost hear the Creatives arguing with Publicity not to package this solely as a TOY STORY family film, but to play up its (junior) STAR WARS vibe.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/12/star-wars-1977.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *For the four or five of you who may not recall: 1985 saw Coca-Cola (temporarily) discontinue production of ‘Old Coke’ for the slightly sweeter ’New Coke’ after tests showed a preference for . . . Pepsi!  Yikes!  They completely overlooked two things.  ONE: they never informed customers this wouldn’t just be an additional flavor choice, but that the original Coke recipe was coming off the market.  TWO: Pepsi only beat Coca-Cola in sampling where you’d get a mini-cup.  Sure, the sweeter Pepsi took honors on the first four or five sips, but soon turned cloying.  At least Up North.  Down South, even sweeter R.C. Cola vies with Pepsi for top spot.  Yuck.

SHOOTING STARS (1928)

Considering a largely justified rep as a straightforward adaptor of well-bred literary material in the safe/solid British tradition, Anthony Asquith’s silent film beginnings capture a rarely seen visual showman in near experimental mode.  Especially so in UNDERGROUND/’28 and A COTTAGE IN DARTMOOR/’30, but also showing in this debut pic.  A behind-the-scenes look at how The Movies test the marriage of cowboy star Brian Aherne (long, lean, very Gary Cooper) and temperamental co-star wife Annette Benson.  While she pouts and plays bored on set, Asquith uses the time to give us a technically dazzling high-flying tour of the place.   Benson only perks up when she spots studio top clown Donald Calthrop working his baggy-pants slapstick.  Let the canoodling begin.  But the fun comes to a stop once Benson notices her tube of lipstick is a perfect match for her husband’s rifle cartridges, setting up either an ‘accident’ waiting to happen or the perfect crime.  (Some things never change!)  And if the melodrama feels tacked on, it’s still fun to look behind the camera, circa 1928.  As the unfulfilled wife, Annette Benson tends to play only one emotion at a time (she didn’t last much past the silent-to-sound transition), but Aherne is in his youthful prime, stealing the show while a simple storyline gives Asquith (along with co-director A.V. Bramble) space to stretch his cinematic muscles via fancy crane shots, complicated camera crawls and tricky framing.  Everyone else quite vivid.  Too vivid in the case of an obese clown rival in a film-within-this-film.  His period one-piece bathing suit leaving little to the imagination.  Yikes!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  SHOOTING is a decent start for Asquith, but either UNDERGROUND or DARTMOOR make better intros into his imaginative silent film world.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/10/cottage-in-dartmoor-1929.html   

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  IMDb incorrectly lists a 70" running time; the restoration is more like 100".

ANORA (2024)

Resilience from unlikely people in unlikely situations, the theme in writer/director Sean Baker’s best-known previous film, THE FLORIDA PROJECT/’17; and here again in an even more unlikely situation.  Preposterous, raunchy (make that preposterously raunchy), galvanizingly funny & farcically plotted without losing its line of action, ANORA the working name of a ‘working gal’ pursuing her lucrative trade at a strip club as Brighton Beach’s top lap dancer.  (Competitors grinding right by her, taking on customers lined up as if they were waiting for the next available chair at the barbershop.  Something of a happy-go-lucky hooker (but don’t dare call her that), she gets a special request for a Russian speaker from the 21-yr-old son of a Moscow oligarch, a horny naïf for whom nothing’s off limit, including his sense of entitlement.  But a week’s exclusivity whisks them off to a Las Vegas marriage and instant crisis back home for his guardian-protectors, terrified/mortified by his in-coming parents.  Baker going for a BORN YESTERDAY meets MARRIED TO THE MOB* vibe, finds his own twist on the material, jazzing things up with wavering loyalties so you can’t be sure what comes next or who winds up with whom.  Yet never forcing the material.  (Actually, I wish he would force, tightening the running time by ten or fifteen minutes.)  Great perfs all ‘round, many either debuting or having their first big role.  And given a neat physical look that’s something of a throwback to the ‘80s.  Lots of award action, too, well deserved.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *While the obvious Jonathan Demme shout out goes to MARRIED TO THE MOB, the tone of the film harks further back, to Demme’s earlier, most non-judgemental work, particularly the miraculous MELVIN AND HOWARD/’80.  OR: For more Baker, THE FLORIDA PROJECT.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/melvin-and-howard-1980.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-florida-project-2017.html

TODO MODO (1976)

Italian auteur Elio Petri’s political allegory on the Christian Democrats and Aldo Moro (note how closely the title reflects his name), a savage satire on crony corruption masquerading as populism.  You’d imagine knowledge of the Italian political scene would be necessary to figure this one out, and while such info would clarify some things, more than enough comes thru without any background on the era.  (On the other hand, the kidnapping and murder of Moro by Radical Communists two years later made the film a rarity till a 2007 restoration.*)  When we enter the bunker-like complex that serves for a meeting of political power brokers, a national epidemic is already spinning out of control.  Inside, the men are led by a religious order that has it’s own agenda & priorities.  (This year’s CONCLAVE isn’t too far away - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/11/conclave-2024.html.)  This highly stylized situation cunningly handled by Petri who knows how to turn us all into interloping voyeurs following the moves of Gian Maria Volontè for the secular side (though he’s desperate for religious absolution) and Marcello Mastroianni’s master priest and confessor of choice.  But rather than finding safety from the pandemic raging outside the brutalist-style facility, the participants are anything but safe, falling to murder within . . . or has the disease seeped thru the concrete?  Fascinating stuff, if not always clear.*  But what makes this essential viewing is Petri’s logistical control inside this mysterious complex, half rabbit warren/half convention center; and Mastroianni's staggering power in the second act when he’s had enough of the pomp and hypocrisy.  Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

DOUBLE-BIL/LINK:  Petri still largely known for his Oscar’d & Cannes’d INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-ogni.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *The film’s fortunes not unlike THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’63 which was pulled out of distribution for decades after JFK’s assassination.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-manchurian-candidate-1962.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *And you don’t need to know a thing to laugh when mass comes to a halt because someone has stolen the hosts!  As if they were missing Girl Scout Trefoil cookies.

IN THE HEIGHTS (2021)

Between calling-card hits (CRAZY RICK ASIANS/’18; WICKED/’24), director Jon M. Chu had something of a film musical test-run with this adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first B’way show.  Pleasant, well-fashioned (very Music Video ready), but with a weightless quality to it, like watching cartoon characters who don't cast a shadow.  (Or is it that Chu gives everything the same weight?)  Anthony Ramos, primus inter pares in what is essentially an ensemble piece about a block or two up in Washington Heights NYC, is the bodega owner who dreams of returning to his family roots in the Dominican Republic.  And it’s that flux of people leaving the nab (priced out thru gentrification, for University & upward mobility, simply dying off, or just for the Bronx!) that sets the relationships (and music) in motion.  Mass musical motion that is; substituting for actual choreography.  It’s the camera that does most of the sweating.  But once past the obligatory Welcome to the Neighborhood opening, too many musical numbers repeat the ideas.  Encore or Extended Cut?*  Lin-Manuel Miranda, in a guest spot, does himself a favor with a number lasting about three-minutes.  He nails it; then exits.  Leave ‘em wanting more something of a lost art these days.  And amidst so much raw talent, why are three sizable roles given to seriously over-parted actors?  Was Chu too busy keeping his compositions filled to the brim to notice?  Check out the clear bold graphic statement on our poster (it’s the soundtrack cover) to see what Chu should have been trying to achieve.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Just a few months later,  Lin-Manuel Miranda made his film directing debut to striking effect with the far superior, personally specific choices of tick, tick... BOOM!/’21. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/tick-tick-boom-2021.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Fred Astaire’s famous dictum held that a musical number that worked on stage for eight & a half minutes could play on screen for no more than three & a half.  (Just bare in mind, he’s referring to the carefree B’way musicals of the 1920s and ‘30s.)

JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963)

Even people who haven’t heard of the ‘50s & ‘60s Sci-Fi and Greek Mythology fantasy films made by Stop-Motion master Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer seem to know the stupifying warrior skeletons of this film.  Great fun, for sure; more surprisingly, well-made fun.  The film actually good; not often the case for these on-the-cheap sword & sandal epics.  Harryhausen & Schneer knew it, too; citing this as their favorite.  The credits show why: a Bernard Herrmann score*, writers with an ear for Greek Gods (co-scripter Beverly Cross Maggie Smith’s second husband*), handsome location shooting with Wilkie Cooper’s lensing shot ‘flat’ so the considerable post-production special effects match picture elements without forcing the grain, well-cast, too.  (Jason a bit low on wattage and dubbed, but no deal breaker.)  Definitely not part of the formulaic HERCULES series out of Cinecittà.  Harryhausen named his filming system Dynamation, whatever that was, but it’s the care taken in matching all the separate visual elements that makes the difference in making this look downright posh on screen and ‘selling’ what are essentially articulated puppets.  The story nothing more than Jason going from one adventure to the next (like an old-fashioned movie serial) surviving lively, perfectly integrated, stop-motion obstacles to reach the Golden Fleece, helped by his hunky argonaut mates.  Not a gym rat among them BTW, but plenty of rough-hewn masculinity.  Not really a pretty sight, but a good explanation of why those Trireme battle ships were open-air vessels!  Yikes!

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *(Another HEAR All About It)  Though this film’s music isn’t included, the best collection of self-conducted Herrmann fantasy film scores is on BERNARD HERRMANN: GREAT FILM SCORES, originally out on gimmicky, but spectacular Phase 4 Stereo vinyl.   (Easy to find on all major streaming services.)  

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Harryhausen, Schneer & Cross all went back to the well for 1981's CLASH OF THE TITANS.  All that was missing was the magic.  (Apparently, Harryhausen had to do a bit of a rush job and was forced to delegate much of the painstaking work.)

GLORY / SLAVA (2016)

Superb, hilarious, devastating.  Tone is everything in this bitter fable of comic frustration as Bulgarian writer-directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov demonstrate the grim, inevitable ramifications of no good deed goes unpunished.  It starts with good fortune as a simple, but honest railroad linesman returns a stash of cash he’s found on the track bed during his daily maintenance rounds.  So, in spite of a disabling stutter that makes him appear witless, the poor man is brought to the city to be celebrated only to encounter a Murphy’s Law of disaster as he’s shuttled about for P.R. events run by an over-burdened official currently in the midst of fertility treatments she hasn’t the time for.  Her selfish contempt for the hero-of-the-day only abetted by her incompetent toadying staff and by her demanding superior.  The misery climaxed by an exchange of the poor man’s beloved ‘Glory’ watch, a cherished gift from his father, with a piece of modern digital junk.  Its inevitable loss setting the stage for a hopeless crusade of sorts; and not just for the missing watch, but also for civic justice as he opens up to a reporter about disappearing fuel deliveries and widespread corruption at the railways.  But when everyone’s in on the action, this truth-teller, honest but plodding, is easily portrayed to look like a menace who must be stopped.  The basic tone of a corrupt society not far from the films of Romania’s Cristian Mungiu*, but given a madly comic twist Preston Sturges would have understood.  (Or is that Gogol nodding in agreement?)  By the third act, all the laughs are sticking in your throat as worst case scenario takes over the action.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Cristian Mungiu’s best known for 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS/’07, but BACALAUREAT/’16 makes the better match.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/04/bacalauureat-graduation-2016.html   OR:  On the Film Movement DVD, this comes with the Oscar-winning Live-Action short, HELIUM/’13, a heart-breaker about a caring hospital orderly who bonds in fantasy with a 10-yr-old terminal patient.  Sounds sentimental, it probably is, but pretty wonderful all the same.

SEBASTIAN (2024)

The well-trod tropes of the gifted young writer caught transcribing rather than transforming friends, relatives  & personal experiences as source material, gets the New Queer Cinema treatment in this London-set film from Finnish writer/director Mikko Mäkelä.  Ruaridh Mollica is Max, a standout college writer earning awards & publishing opportunities for his graphic tales of the city, mostly about gay sex-worker Sebastian.  Sebastian no creation, but Max’s pseudonym when turning tricks for cash and literary inspiration.  But is the line dissolving between these two?  Caught up in a reckless world of paid pleasure, Max is losing his grip, missing class, assignments and blowing off interviews for the school’s respected magazine.  But a rather elegant, elderly client, seemingly his least appropriate, will shake him up in emotional/intellectual ways, just as he’s starting to fall apart.  With an excellent cast and London’s gay demi-monde nightlife believably caught, the action doesn’t always move in ways you expect.  A shame the film loses a step in the second half with Mäkelä hanging fire when he tries to reflect the wary caution Max lives with.  On the other hand, it’s nice to avoid one of those tragic endings you typically get on a queer Pilgrim’s Progress, instead recognizing the oneness of Max/Sebastian.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  See what’s changed in seven decades of gay themes on college campus life with TEA AND SYMPATHY/’56.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/02/tea-and-sympathy-1956.html

WITH A SONG IN MY HEART (1952)

So many Golden Age Hollywood bio-pics start at the end, with some sort of testimonial dinner setting up a flashback to cover the whole story, this structural device is a genre on its own.*  As here, with this largely forgotten film about a largely forgotten singer (Jane Froman).  A surprisingly big deal in its day with one Oscar, five noms, (including the two femme leads); the year’s #11 grosser; TechniColor; plus 20th/Fox’s Darryl Zanuck assigning it to fave scripter Lamar Trotti.  Susan Hayward (dubbed by Froman) has an easy rise up the Hit Parade, but the real drama is saved for the second half of the pic when ONE: she’s seriously injured on a WWII flight to entertain the troops in Europe, and TWO: when she falls hard for pilot (Rory Calhoun) but won’t break with loyal hubby David Wayne.  Unexpectedly, the big drama involving her leg injury (other than the great Thelma Ritter as a wisecracking nurse) takes a backseat to the adult behavior attempted on the villain-free romantic triangle.  If only director Walter Lang weren’t such a friction-free megger!  And if only the film didn’t climax with an interminable States of the USA medley that merges seamlessly into a reprise of her signature tune at the big testimonial.  Like a built-in encore we didn’t ask for.  Otherwise, standard stuff.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *There’s nothing inherently wrong with the full-life flashback bio-pic.  For a WWII example you can’t do better than James Cagney in Michael Curtiz’s YANKEE DOODLE DANDY/’42.  Froman even sings George M. Cohan’s iconic ‘Give My Regards to Broadway.’ 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Nice little dramatic showcase for a very young Robert Wagner as a fan, and then a wounded soldier boy.

VERONICA GUERIN (2003)

I suppose action-specialist producer Jerry Bruckheimer could have found a director less well suited to this fact-based tale of a risk-taking, overconfident Irish journalist who battles the Dublin drug lords of the ‘90s than Joel Schumacher, but it’s hard to think of one.  With his usual trifecta of faults (coarse tone, clichéd response, co-opted tropes), Schumacher pushes too hard at both ends of the film, starting Veronica’s story with a nuclear family so happy, they dance their doubts away before she heads off alone down a dark alley with near masochistic longing.  Cate Blanchett’s Guerin a tricky character, a scandal-seeking reporter with her own ethical problems (she’s repeatedly led my the nose into printing single-sourced articles that play into power struggles among the drug kingpins), and so willfully foolhardy about safety, you wonder if she has a martyr complex.  Schumacher not unaware of the contradictions, but seemingly more interested in a makeup for Blanchett that turns her, distractingly, into a Princess Di facsimile.*  Weak as much of this is, there’s a dramatic pull to the facts and a typically elusive turn from Ciarán Hinds as Guerin’s inside frenemy contact.  His hulking features withstanding even Schumacher’s attempts at taming.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Blanchett went from lookalike Diana to Katharine Hepburn in next year’s THE AVIATOR/’04, Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes whitewash.

THE SECRET BRIDE (1934)

Overlooked and underrated, this political drama from Warner Bros. needs a bit of creative viewing to take flight, but is worth it.  Briefly, Governor’s daughter Barbara Stanwyck has secretly married State D.A. Warren William just as Dad gets hit with impeachment on a Cash-for-Pardon bribery scandal.  Worse, she’s the sole witness on a follow-up murder that would explain everything.  Yet she refuses to take the stand & testify (this murder trial is in court the next day!) because her recent marriage to William’s D.A. would make his efforts look romantically & politically tainted.  Really?  That’s the motivation?  This idiotic idea scuttles what is otherwise an exceptionally tight & imaginative production (lensing/direction/sets : Ernst Haller/William Dieterle/Anton Grot - all three on fire).  Pacey & suspenseful from the first shot, with one of those amazing four-star Warners contract player lineups of supporting character actors.  So what’s behind the weak underlying motivation?  See release date for a probable answer: late 1934.  The film, all but certainly developed Pre-Code, now scrambling to find acceptable Post-Code substitutes for Babs non-action and reluctance to testify to save both Father and Glenda Farrell’s innocent secretary from jail . . . or worse.  Our speculative guess is that the original storyline had Babs & William trysting before marriage (she spotted that murder from his bedroom - Yikes!) and now he’s insisting they keep the pre-marital affair under-cover while he works to get the charges dropped without Babs having to admit her moral disgrace and ruin Dad’s political career.  Viewed this way, plot & motivation click into place with something believable at stake.  Keep that in mind to get the most out of what’s otherwise a damn fine, if forgotten production.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  This entire POST a Screwy Thought, no?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  1934 was the year Warren William should have, but didn’t become a major studio star.  With nine films, co-starring Mary Astor, Ginger Rogers, Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert (twice!), Joan Blondell & Kay Francis.  Even playing Perry Mason and working under C. B. DeMille.  He was even better cast in his six 1933 films where that slight sleazy factor he carried with him (and that we love him for) was more fully on display.

LOOK BACK / RUKKU BAKKU (2024)

The first major new voice in Japanese anime to appear after Makoto Shinkai’s breakout spectacular YOUR NAME/’16, has produced no spectacular.  But that's fine for this chamber piece from debuting director Kiyotaka Oshiyama taken from a popular manga that's all about manga (the Japanese comic book/graphic novel hybrid) and lasting just under an hour,  It’s a high-spirited yet contemplative look at two unlikely friends, an ultra popular, extroverted grade schooler and an introverted home-based classmate (a near shut-in) who become rivals with competing mangas on the school paper.  But a face-to-face meeting shows what opposites can offer each other, a yin to her yang.  Oshiyama has yet to build up his narrative skills, and a discontinuous timeline doesn’t help clarify things, but as anime technician & innovator, he’s downright formidable.  What cool POV angles!  And he’s helped rather than hindered by the tight budget forcing set pieces to be built up from stills & montage effects that detail artistic growth as these two natural artist pals work their specialties (character, story, background) to reach the greater goal.  A treat just to gaze at; plus some big emotional payoffs catching us by surprise.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, YOUR NAME which is a fully mature masterpiece.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kimi-no-na-wa-your-name-2016.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One of the film’s producers is M-G-M whose famously fatuous motto: Ars Gratia Artis, for once, actually fits the project it’s attached to!

EMILY THE CRIMINAL (2022)

Nifty debut from late-starting writer/director John Patton Ford is more character study/violent amuse-bouche than full-fledged feature . . . plus, it ain’t clear if anyone involved knows how ‘amuse’ it is.  Aubrey Plaza’s the character in question, a hard-luck gal saddled with debt and unable to turn her design talents into a job (she’s got a criminal record), while barely making ends meet at a food catering factory.  The chip on her shoulder well earned, yet she can’t figure out that others don’t care how it got there.  One way or another, she’s open to a tip that leads to quick bucks working a credit card scam, buying goods with phony cards loaded with stolen assets.  It quickly escalates into a side-career under the watchful eye of entrepreneurial scammer Theo Rossi.  He even brings her home to play proper girlfriend and meet his immigrant Mom; inadvertently meeting his more criminally established brother as well.  Then, when things start to go wrong, he retreats into defeatism, tossing blame her way.  And it’s his moping that triggers the revelation: she’s the real Alpha Player here, ready to pick up the baton from him.  She hasn’t fallen into crime, she’s revealed her true self.  (Plaza's off-putting honesty paying off dramatically.)  Ford now moves fast, wrapping things up with a bit of serious violence and apparently setting up a continuing series he’s currently developing.  With good support across a wide range of social levels, but showing a better eye for atmosphere than for action.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Ford may or may not be aware of the film’s comic undertone, but he's not without a sense of humor, hiding stolen cash in the refrigerator lettuce drawer.

SING SING (2023)

Like A CHORUS LINE for recidivists, this prison drama puts a group of incarcerated Sing Sing inmates thru the paces of an ‘in-house’ theater company as they hash out personal demons, wait on parole board hearings and go thru Methody acting exercises under the sharp eye of their outside director.  (The much admired cast, from Colman Domingo, Clarence Maclin & Paul Raci, to a host of former program participants, also feeling like over-eager actors exercising for their peers.)  Based on real motivational programs meant to bring in an educational/cultural/socializing alternative to the drudgery of prison life with its dull routine, hopelessness and threatening atmosphere.  (Co-scripter Brent Buell ran just such a project.)   It’s pretty much a can’t miss setup, but the filmmakers (from director Greg Kwedar on down) don’t give us what we need to see for the sort of identification the film asks from us.  Not enough sense of restriction & soul numbing repetition; instead, revelatory fun at rehearsal!  And the play’s no help; a silly time-traveling mash-up of famous literary characters.  (Yes, Hamlet shows up to recite you know what.)  It’s a relief when we cut away from the stage on opening night and miss the actual production.  But the overriding problem may be the sheer likability of the cast members.  A bit like all those prison softies populating THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION; you’d think you were a substitute player filling in at some contract bridge club.*  The film ‘works,’ I guess, but so earnest, hard not to imagine a wicked takeoff with lives changed thru pottery classes or cat grooming.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For comparison, see what the Italian Taviani Brothers did with a similar concept in CESARE DEVE MORIRE / CAESAR MUST DIE/'12    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/cesare-deve-morire-caesar-must-die-2012.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Talk about loading up on unearned sympathy, when a former player stops by for a catch-up chat and goes on about having to put down his beloved dog, where’s ALL ABOUT EVE’s Thelma Ritter to quip ‘What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end.’

A SAILOR-MADE MAN (1921)

With rare exception, Hollywood silent comedies were 2-reelers running between 20 and 26 minutes.*  Feature-length gaggers didn’t become a regular thing till Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and a bit later Buster Keaton switched to long form (five or six reels).  Sure, their movies were growing up, but there was also a big financial incentive.  (How frustrating to watch your two-reeler bring in the customers while some mediocre feature piggybacking on your popularity took home the lion’s share of the gross.)  What’s more surprising is that all three got there in two-steps, at first adding a reel or two to make what were essentially expanded ‘shorts’ before adding another reel, not only for length, but for complexity, essentially finding something new: The Shape of a comedy feature film thru story development and character arc.  So Keaton moves from THE THREE AGES/’23, basically a trio of cleverly intercut  two-reelers, to OUR HOSPITALITY/’23, a comic ‘feudin’ families’ melodrama.  Chaplin from the four reel WWI parody of SHOULDER ARMS/’18 to heartfelt human comedy in his six-reel THE KID/’21*  And Lloyd from this four reel knockabout slapstick to real emotion in the five reel GRANDMA’S BOY/’22.  That’s not to say that SAILOR-MADE isn’t a superior expansion of what he’d been doing.  It’s hilarious; with rich wastrel Harold wanting to marry the even richer Mildred Davis (as they would in real life), but first needing Daddy’s approval.  Get a job young man, he tells the boy.  Luckily, a Navy recruiting poster offers the chance.  And thru a series of challenges met & adventures on sea & land, Lloyd learns to swab the deck, throw a punch, even rescue Mildred from a harem (don’t ask).  Lots of fun, and with greater things to come as Lloyd’s less eccentric persona proved an even better match for features than it was for shorts.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While a synch-sound reel runs about ten minutes, cranking speeds varied not only by cameraman but also by projectionist.  Cheap studios getting as much product on a single reel of expensive film as possible.  Grind slow!  Greedy theater owners trying to squeeze in an extra show per day.  Grind fast!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Chaplin’s evolution tricky to follow not only because he made two shorts between ARMS and THE KID, but because a deteriorating negative forced him to reedit ARMS down from about 45 minutes to about 35 minutes for re-release.  (A restored cut, sourced from various prints in various conditions in various archives currently being attempted.)

THE RITCHIE BOYS (2004)

Standard-issue WWII documentary about the anything but standard-issue Ritchie Boys.  Self-exiled Europeans, mostly German Jews, who got out just before hostilities started, and were either drafted or volunteered for war service only to quickly find themselves transferred to the idyllic countryside of Camp Ritchie, MD where they were assigned to the elite unit of Military Intelligence  Training Center.  All multilingual (idiomatic, if not accent-free) in three or four languages*, they were uniquely qualified for enemy interrogation and in getting information on troop & equipment movements from suspicious locals.  Many of them sent in with the Normandy invasion (some introduction to war!) before continuing East where they eventually would be caught up in The Battle of the Bulge; something they had tried to warn their superiors about.  These are the guys who put the great into the Greatest Generation; a phrase tossed around far too easily.  Interviewed in their eighties, you can get a real feel for them (and for this film) in the two obits linked below on the last two surviving members.  Brilliant men who all seemed to have gone on to remarkable post-war careers, all of them holding back their stories for decades.  Great stuff here, the memories precious, the sentiments wise.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention by whomever did post-production for writer/director Christian Bauer as newsreel and archival actualities used between the 2004 interviews are all mastered to fit the wider modern frame ratio not by cropping the old square picture, but with anamorphic distortion to stretch the image.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  *Two surprise take-aways from the stories.  Best way to scare a Nazi into talking?  Tell them they’ll be sent over to the Russian authorities for questioning.  Scariest threat for the Ritchie Boys at the front?  Having the same accent as the Nazi infiltrators dressed in US uniforms.  Especially if you weren’t a baseball fan and didn’t know who won the World Series.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/world/europe/guy-stern-dead.html?searchResultPosition=2  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/us/victor-brombert-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

QUEER (2024)

Granted, the bar’s set pretty low, but Luca Guadagino’s latest (his second major release of the year) must be the best William S. Burroughs adaptation yet made.  Taken from a late novella (Justin Kuritzkes scripts, following his debut on CHALLENGERS/’24, also for Guadagnino), the first half is set in a gay-friendly Mexico City nab for Stateside ex-pats in the late 1940s.  Though it’s more specifically set within the even smaller sui generis world of Burroughs fevered mind.  He’s there to pursue his addictions: drugs, tobacco, alcohol, handsome young men.  And Daniel Craig, solidly muscled considering the decades of heroin and all-nighters, makes a four-course meal out of the part.  (No problem accepting Bond, James Bond, tangling in bed with guys, but seeing 007 with bad hair takes some getting used to!)  Cruising for Mr. Right, he finds lanky, lush Drew Starkey, a journalist of some sort, currently involved with a red-head, a female red-head, but an eager gay lover when needed.  The film takes a big turn at mid-point when William Lee (the Burroughs alter-ego) heads to uncharted jungle territory far South, hunting for an elusive drug rumored to have telepathic properties.  Not quite the case; but a sort of HEART OF DARKNESS adventure brings in an alarming Leslie Manville as a researcher who knows the hallucinogenic effects of the plant.  These relationships provide plenty of character and narrative drive for Guadagnino to work with.  But he truly excels with simpler things, like those dark, painterly apartment & hotel interiors that all seem to have magically expressive blue-toned vistas thru the window.  All in all, it’s a very impressive display of filmmaking legerdemain.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Craig took on the younger man role, a ‘rough trade’ type, to Derek Jacobi‘s masochistic Francis Bacon in his breakout film, LOVE IS THE DEVIL/’‘98.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/love-is-devil-1998.html

NORDLAND ‘99 (2022)

Danish director Kasper Møller Rask may have been born after the initial run of David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS (Rask born 1993/PEAKS airing 1990), but he’s one of the few to successfully pick up on the propulsive combination of narrative fog, deliberate pacing and creepy anxiety that helped make Lynch’s first season mesmerizing.*  A small town story of teen abduction and disappearance, it even takes place in the ‘90s (see title), and largely concerns a hunt for a second local teen who’s gone missing.  Already hounded by the mother of the first missing boy, a local policeman is in over his head when this second boy vanishes.  Filling the gap is his own son, the younger sister of the latest missing boy, and another teen pal employed at the local video store/hangout.  Period detail and social interaction all spot on; the cop’s son (Elias Budde Christensen) a real find.  And what a collection of horrors and horrible people the three searchers find living in the cracks of society around this town.  (Makes you want to move to the city.)  Made in eight episodes (the first two a bit of a slow burn, but hang in there), each running only about 20" sans credits so you could binge it, but as it’s not one of those streamers that’s half filler, best parsed out.  With a bit of unexpected emotion at the end; a very un-Lynchian move, but an effective one.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  No sequel announced, but for once, it’d be something worth thinking about.  So many memorable characters here.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Partially, Rask pulls off the Lynch factor simply by not overdoing it.  A trap Lynch’s many imitators, and indeed Lynch himself, all too easily fall into.

LUISE (2023)

Taking D.H. Lawrence’s novella THE FOX as starting point*, director Matthias Luthardt and writer Sebastian Bleyl have kept the time frame (1918 - tail end of WWI) but moved the place (an isolated Alsace farm) to make this intriguing three-hander.  Beautifully observed, warmly shot & acted, but the film makes a big ‘ask’ to work thru its tragic romantic triangle, one you may or may not buy into.  Luise, barely on the cusp of young womanhood when we meet her, by default runs the small family farm on her own after her mother dies.  But a young Frenchwoman and a young German soldier separately passing thru will unexpectedly stick around, ‘guests’ who bring sexual baggage with them.  The Frenchwoman, a lesbian who had been trying to reach Holland where she’s heard of more personal freedom; the soldier, a deserter after four years of combat.  Luise will be attracted to each in turn (or is she simply trying out possibilities?), before choosing one and triggering a veritable Greek tragedy of mortality; and more off-screen.  The ‘ask’ comes in the easy acceptance by Luise, who’s plenty smart, but also a simple country girl without any sexual experience, of what must have seemed in 1918 a most unconventional offer to take off with this female she’s just met.  On the other hand, the deserting soldier’s offer to stay as husband and share duties on the farm seems a far more likely proposition.  But even with a hand placed on the scale that shows the women’s warm/caring physical intimacy vs the soldier’s rough bedroom manner, the film pulls you into their bubble, letting the war proceed on the other side of the forest while these three tread sexual borders that prove equally deadly.  An impressively balanced chamber piece from all concerned.  And who is this Sebastien Pan, a French composer who wrote the subtle & moving chamber-like score.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *THE FOX was filmed in 1967 by Mark Rydell (normally a pretty coarse director) with the intriguing cast of Sandy Dennis, Keir Dullea & Anne Heywood.  (not seen here)

BOGART: LIFE COMES IN FLASHES (2024)

Another Humphrey Bogart bio-doc, but the first to come out since all the principals in his life have died.  (Other than his two children, but the oldest only seven when Bogart died.)  So, it’s disappointing to get boilerplate cable-ready fare that adds little to what we’ve seen before.  Some new home-movie clips hardly revelatory and narration from an uncomfortable Bogie impersonator reading from a purported memoir feels chintzy.  All in all, a missed opportunity to get under the surface of a difficult man often voted Hollywood’s greatest star.  Perhaps it has some use as a primer for movie mavens born this century; but would they watch?  The only fresh insight comes from silent star/film essayist Louise Brooks who rightly points to Bogart’s soul-flaying work in Nicholas Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE/’50 as a possibly revealing personal portrait.*  Elsewise, this is a largely hagiographic work.  No surprise with his still living son on as exec-producer for co-writer/director Kathryn Ferguson.  But why not a fresh look at Bogart’s first try at Hollywood?  His prison/baseball pic with Spencer Tracy for John Ford a delightful nut-job of work.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/07/up-river-1930.html)  Or an honest appraisal of how stagey his breakthru in THE PETRIFIED FOREST now looks.  (Or for that matter, how narrow his range was and how he couldn’t quite hide his displeasure at having to play second fiddle to Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis & James Cagney in his first decade at Warners.)  Fine as a DVD extra, but don’t expect much more.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Take your pic of our Bogie pic posts (the main iconic titles start in 1940) by typing Bogart in the MAKSQUIBS Search box.  (Upper left corner on the Main Site.)  But first check out the truly unnerving IN A LONELY PLACE.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/in-lonely-place-1950.html