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

ANYTHING GOES (2021)

Fourth time’s not the charm for this Cole Porter musical.  A 1934 hit on stage at the height of the Great Depression, it’s one of the few shows from that era to be successfully revived on B’way (twice).  But it's always been a dud on screen.  Sadly, that includes this spiffy HD theatrical presentation of the 2011 staging.  (The 2021 date above presumably refers to its home release.)  In Hollywood, Paramount’s 1936 version (Bing Crosby & original stage star Ethel Merman) stays closest to the original book (Boy Chases Engaged Society Girl onto an ocean liner after telling all to the Lovesick Evangelist who’s also sailing.  Evangelist swallows her pride & helps Boy Get Girl).  But it dropped all but two songs from Porter’s score, and interpolated others from lesser tunesmiths.  A tv ‘spectacular' (Merman, Frank Sinatra, Bert Lahr) was cruelly chopped to under an hour.  Back at Paramount in ‘56, Crosby tried again; this time with Donald O’Connor aboard to share a couple of the original songs and the naughty title.  No one involved ever worked at Paramount again.  Keep in mind, Porter’s original score produced an astonishing four-and-a-half American Songbook Standards (I Get a Kick Out of You; Anything Goes; All Through the Night; You’re the Top and Blow, Gabriel, Blow).  Here, at least, the interpolations are real Porter (De’Lovely; Easy to Love; Friendship; Goodbye Little Dream, Goodbye).  But if the plot changes aren’t ruinous, they’re also not particularly funny.  (Or maybe they just die on-stage because this is one of those ‘captured live’ hybrids that only seem to work for opera, solo shows and boxing.)  Leading lady Sutton Foster comes across on screen as efficient rather than inspired, but taps to beat the band and her ‘Numbos’ all land.  Everyone else, not so much.  Though a British dope (Haydn Oakley?) who turns out to be a ‘right guy’ is a pleasant surprise.  And we get British song & dance man Robert Lindsay, in a role written originally for Victor Moore, picking up for vacationing Joel Grey.  A slight, but noticeable improvement.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Porter didn’t have a lot of luck with film adaptations.  And two bio pics (NIGHT AND DAY; DE’LOVELY) are crap.  One that’s actually an improvement on the stage show is SILK STOCKINGS/’57.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/silk-stockings-1957.html

CHALLENGERS (2024)

As shallow and over-produced as a Tony Scott film from the ‘90s, the big difference being that ultra-sophisticated director Luca Guadagnino knows he’s playing in the kiddie pool.  And that helps make this tennis-oriented DESIGN FOR LIVING good fun most of the way.  (Till a confused ending past the 2 hour mark floods the engine.)   Mike Faist (pale, fit) and Josh O’Connor (less pale, equally fit) go from college to early 30s most convincing as BFFs and rivals on and off the tennis court, gaining and losing favor with fellow racketeer Zendaya whose knee injury will chase her from player to coach.  But which boy will she choose?  Especially after the one she married & mentored to fame & glory gets stuck in a late career slump while their former pal, who’s barely hanging on, has his rival’s number where it counts.  That’s about it for plot.  (Unlike DFL there’s no safe outsider to take our mistress away from both guys which leaves the storyline feeling thinner than the stars’ waistlines.)  Scripter Justin Kuritzkes comes up with a few twists you don’t see coming, but Guadagnino doesn’t trust them and thinks he has to cover with a jumping timeline and too many odd POV shots.  (What?  You didn’t know tennis balls had POVs?)  And the sex plays like a feature layout for Men’s Health when it needs Euro-frankness rather than Hollywood cover-up.  But pretty good fun if watched with a bit of tolerance.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  You can see what’s missing here in THE DREAMERS/’03, one of Bernardo Bertolucci's best late works.  OR:  The Lubitsch/Hecht highly-hetero take on Nöel Coward’s DESIGN FOR LIVING/’33.  (Sex sequential rather than contiguous.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/dreamers-2003.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/design-for-living-1933.html

A STRANGE ADVENTURE (1956)

The writing was already on the wall at Republic Pictures by the time this B-pic went into production.  Even its generic title seems to admit defeat in advance.  With television making their bread & butter Westerns & serials non-starters, and company head Herbert J. Yates unwilling to ‘go big’ as he occasionally did with name stars & directors just a few years back, the studio spiraled down to nothing-burger pics like this little suspenser that might have worked with heavy film noir flair and a cast of threateningly sexy up-and-comers.  Instead, we might be watching a double episode of 77 SUNSET STRIP as boy-next-door type Ben Cooper pines for tenant Maria English at his mom’s L.A. rental property, unaware the girl’s no Hollywood hopeful, but amoral moll to a pair of con men (Jan Merlin; Nick Adams) setting up an armored-car robbery.  They all wind up snowed in for the winter at an isolated forest weather station and try to wait it out while police activity cools down before violent cabin fever heats up.  It’s THE DESPERATE HOURS meets SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS!  Well, not really.  What it really is is lousy.  Visually flat, with cabin interiors staged as if they were radio dramas (soundstage exteriors even worse) and missing those cool side street L.A. locations seen all thru the first act.  Workhorse Western specialist director William Witney, always at his best when there’s a horse around, phones it in.  Which leaves Nick Adams to steal focus with a cold in his nose that doesn’t let up the whole time they’re snowed in.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: The same year, Witney showed what he could do with a real script, real characters (plus horses!) at Republic in the superb STRANGER AT MY DOOR/’56.  Loaded with similarities to ADVENTURE, I doubt it got much more commercial traction.  Pity.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/10/stranger-at-my-door-1956.html

MAN OF ARAN (1934)

Thought those colonizing ‘spice’ miners in DUNE faced difficult living conditions?  They wouldn’t last a day by the tempest-tossed cliffs, wind-swept rock surface & oceanic fury of the Aran Isles off the Irish coast.  And this a real place!  Or nearly so.  That’s because pioneering documentarian Robert J. Flaherty was more interested in fancy than fact; catching legendary lifestyles whether or not they were still being practiced.  Even casting his players on looks (his screen families assembled from a pool of locals) and then reenacting events using multiple takes & angles as needed to get his poetic ideas about ethnography across.  Globetrotting the world to find the next tribal customs to capture for the big screen, his films magnificent fabrications.  Closer to studio films, but made on actual locations.  Holding out for a truthful essence of some iconic civilization, not what you’d find in a modern documentary.  From ‘Eskimo’  to Pacific Islander to all-American boyhood in the swamps of Louisiana, Flaherty didn’t catch reality, but curated it.  And this look at incredibly harsh living conditions and family life on one of the Aran Islands is probably the best introduction to his style; whatever you choose to call it.*  Whether struggling to bring in boats without crashing onto rocks, hauling rare soil & seaweed up the cliff-side to create plots to grow potatoes on the unyielding rock surface, or harpooning sharks the size of small whales for oil, the  film is a stunning series of terrific set pieces.  A mix of bravery (by the locals) and artistry (by Flaherty & crew).  Lots of red filtering on the stunning cinematography (Arthur Miller did no better for John Ford) and some fascinating rapide montage for sea hunts and crash landings.  You’ll see why it’s now considered a period piece and still controversial (the customs covered were all decades in the past when this was made), but still riveting, physically gorgeous, awe-inspiring stuff.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Call Flaherty ‘Father of the Illegitimate Documentary.’

BEACH RATS (2017)

Too arty for its own good, writer/director Eliza Hittman resets SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER/’75 with a queer sensibility (as if SNF didn’t already have one) moving sub-text to text following a gaggle of buff shirtless beach besties over a summer at hangouts & sandy shores of Brooklyn’s boardwalk where the days are all buds, bods, bros & handball.  Harris Dickinson draws focus as the ‘model’ son whose quiet behavior hides his internet cruising and hookups with daddy substitutes on the ‘down-low.’  (His father dies early in the film from cancer.)   As cover for his pals, and himself, he pumps himself up to get something going with a girl who shows interest, but eventually a series of bad decisions (cash, drugs, pawn shop, dangerous late night outings) start to catch up with him and the lines of separation prove impossible to maintain.  All this not without interest, but Hittmann asks for too much understanding and sympathy as his behavior significantly worsens.  Without his looks, who’d give this ‘rat’ the time of day?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Federico Fellini’s I VITTELONI/’53 is ground zero for scores of films charting the ways young men can’t quite grow up.  It has yet to be bettered.

REBEL RIDGE (2024)

Jeremy Saulnier, here writing, directing, producing & editing, takes a big step up from the horror/suspense of GREEN ROOM*, pulling off a twisty revenge drama dipped in southern-fried racism and loaded with great character turns in parts large & small.  Only its structure, ironically the single best element in GREEN ROOM, gets away from him.  Worked out in sequential three-act narrative chunks, it unfolds like a compressed streaming-series, the opening arc a throwback (and something of a fake out) as if it’s still the 1960s with, say, Jim Brown single-handedly taking on Southern racism after being 'pulled over' by local White policemen for riding a bicycle on a country highway while Black.  Then complications set in.  This no isolated incident, but a small piece of interconnected corruption with good-old-boys in uniform (under the supervision of Sheriff Don Johnson) scamming the Black community out of parole cash, helped by crooked courts, shady legal practices and bribed judges.  Saulnier plays close to the vest, pulling you in with a fine eye for detail & blistering action.  Seeing computers screens in patrol cars a shock of the modern in a social system not much changed from ‘60s mentality.  Saulnier also got lucky on second-choice lead Aaron Pierre (a hunk who can really act), easily crossing from barely contained impatient rage (unable to stop a cousin’s prison transfer that amounts to a death sentence) to cooly planned physical payback.  This part of the storyline not so far from the current REACHER series with  Pierre’s military background as a top Marine instructor coming into play.  Though unlike Reacher, Pierre has no in-the-field combat experience and no band-of-brothers to fall back on, only tiny, blonde legal aide AnnaSophia Robb as support.  (But the chemistry between these two, perhaps because nothing transpires, is terrific.)  Too bad NetFlix skipped a theatrical release on this one.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *GREEN ROOM/’15, belatedly seen here for the chance to see the ill-fated Anton Yelchin in a decent role, first brought Saulnier’s confident filmmaking to our attention.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/09/green-roomterr-2015.html

PROJECT X (1968)

Producer/director William Castle (that ballyhooing schlockmeister of horror whose films came, like a box of CrackerJack, with a gimmicky prize inside – a buzzer under your seat, aroma sprayed inside the theater, an on-duty ‘nurse’ for the fainthearted -- to hype the scare factor) was running on fumes by the time he made his penultimate film.  But what am I saying?  Castle was always running on fumes, that’s what made the goofy gimmicks fun.  Here, a cryogenically suspended man from the 1960s is successfully thawed after 150 years and tossed into a town dressed to look just like the 1960s!  How’d Castle get all those ‘60s details right in a film shot in . . . 1968!  That’s Christopher George with the right stuff to save the planet from some horrid . . . oh, well, you get the idea.  There’s some blather about his ‘matrix,’ his custom built new personality, designed to fit the latest situation.  Just don’t get your hopes up for any deep-dish thinking on the idea or for moviemaking & art design more polished than a Third Season STAR TREK episode.  The main reason to have a look is for a chance to savor the unique vocal cadence & off-beat humor of supporting actor Henry Jones.  Enjoying every new crisis with a grin and a new plan of action, he’s ready for anything and a consistent hoot.  As for the special effects on screen (double exposures and film negative imagery, Castle should have gone back to cushion buzzers.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Craftsman-like director John Sturges, of all people, made something along these lines in his overlooked sleeper THE SATAN BUG/’63.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-satan-bug-1965.html

ANOTHER COUNTRY (1984)

Now looking a bit touristy and maudlin, this look back (from his Russian exile) at the salad days of Guy Burgess’s sentimental education at British Prep School is more effective for spotting stars on the rise (Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Cary Elwes - all three lush of hair/dewy of eye) than in sussing out how the playing fields of Eton not only won the Battle of Waterloo but also set the stage of self-loathing & sexual hypocrisy that readied the soil for the Cambridge Five Russian spy ring to flourish.  With a cast old enough to matriculate from college let alone prep school (all in their mid-20s), director Marek Kanievska loses any idea of youthful sexual confusion in an all-boys academy and sits back while original play author Julian Mitchell’s sticks to his idea of Burgess as a sort of iconoclastic Oscar Wilde character, tilting at the lads in class until fatally falling hard for one.  Punished with a whipping on his bony bum, his indiscretions made only worse by crossing over house perimeters.  (Twice the prefects & ‘Gods’ you’d need to pacify.)  Burgess’s path to social & political revenge (a dish best served as cold as vodka at the Soviet Embassy) was set.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For a more sophisticated, if narrowly focused look at Burgess in exile, try Alan Bennett’s delicate miniature AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD/’83, broadcast while COUNTRY was still playing on stage.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-englishman-abroad-1983-question-of.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Everett got all the talk at the time (he’s certainly a striking figure, a Caravaggio portrait in British tweed), but Colin Firth, as an ultra-rational true believer steals the pic.

GLADIATOR II (2024)

No secret Ridley Scott’s recent clutch of films (not so recent, too) haven’t been living up to all the pre-release hype: NAPOLEON, HOUSE OF GUCCI, THE LAST DUEL, ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, ALIEN: COVENANT.  Scott’s become like that old joke about a surgeon whose last operation was a great success . . . other than the patient dying.  Not so here, this sequel to his great hit of a quarter century back isn't even a ‘great success.’   A mishmash of Ancient Rome historical hooey, Scott in too much of a hurry to get either story or cast right.  Hero manqué Paul Mescal (think Spartacus) is over-parted as the captured combatant turned stadium star, losing character interest with every pound of muscle added.  Main adversary Pedro Pascal, the conflicted not-quite villain (think Brutus), unable to connect with anyone on screen scans the room looking for the nearest Exitus.  It leaves Player #3 Denzel Washington foot-loose and fancy-free, stealing anything left on the table.  His actual position/function in Rome's politics & society something of a blank.  Things don’t start well with an unconvincing CGI battle of triremes, an omen of bad CGI effects to come.*  Did no one warn Scott his flooded Colosseum battle was no Chariot Race?  The main storyline, the part not cribbed from SPARTACUS/’60, charts the race to get rid of looney ‘Twin Emperors’ Caracalla & Geta*, replacing them with either a re-empowered Senate or having it swiped by Washington’s Republic-phobic sophisticate.   All complicated by easy to guess secrets in lineage that the story isn’t able to support by anything Scott gets on screen.  No wonder our poster makes Pascal look as if he’s on crutches.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Rule of thumb on falsifying history to fit narrative: Is it more interesting than the truth or less?  Well, the twins weren’t twins; Caracalla a couple of years older than Geta; they died five years apart, Geta murdered in a power grab by older brother Caracalla while being held by their mother.  Yikes!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Have current audiences been softened into CGI acceptance by video games and all those so-called Photo-Realistic animation remakes?  Does that help explain today's reliance, nay preference!, for using the often more expensive digital systems when a ‘practical’ visual solution is both less expensive and often more believable?

WALLACE AND GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL (2025)

Bliss.  In spite of only a handful of Wallace and Gromit stop-motion animations since 1989, and this but the second at feature-length, any lowered expectations of modified rapture can be put aside; VENGEANCE MOST FOWL as good as anything in the Nick Park canon following the adventures of gonzo invertor Wallace and his patient dog/helpmate/companion Gromit, that most empathetic of creatures.  A previous feature, CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT/’05, though wonderful, gave the impression the series would always be at its very best in half-hour shorts.  Not so!  Here, triumphantly equaling their best without any commercially-driven sequelitis faults of going bigger/better/bloated.  Instead, retaining the sweet-natured charm and capacity to reduce any open-hearted viewer to incessant ear-to-ear grins rather than pushing to trigger hardened boffo responses, all while carefully building & positioning an explosively propulsive climax that’s cumulatively hilarious, kinetically thrilling, beautiful simply as design and creatively overwhelming.  (How’d they physically do that?, really not coming into play as you’re too involved in character & story to bother with stop-motion technicalities.  A second watch will do for catching up on the amazing craft & technique that goes into these things.)  This time Wallace creates ‘Norbit,’ an intelligent gnome designed to take domestic drudgery & chores off Gromit’s hands . . . er, paws; and it jolts the delicate balance of their routine, usurping Gromit’s place in it as well as making him jealous.  But there’s worse to come as a Zoo-incarcerated villain from the past (Feathers McGraw of THE WRONG TROUSERS/’93) has figured out a way to reprogram & reproduce the gnomes to rob the town blind and facilitate a jail break.  (Zoo break?)  It’s Cautionary A.I. tale meets THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE; and just about perfect.  Refined modeling materials used on the action figures no longer regularly capture the animator’s fingerprints.  But other than that, I wouldn’t change a thing.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Post prologue, the opening sequence showing the daily routine of the boys getting up and having breakfast with help from mechanized efficiency gadgets (very Rube Goldberg) undoubtedly inspired by the opening scenes of Buster Keaton & comic rival Joe Roberts doing much the same in THE SCARECROW, a comic short from 1920.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/09/scarecrow-1920.html

ENRICO IV / HENRY IV (1984)

Marco Bellocchio’s adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s famous play disappoints on every level; not excluding source material.  Not that you can’t see its appeal as catnip to past-prime stars of a certain age.  Here Marcello Mastroianni is the modern man who’s bumped on his head and comes to believe he’s Medieval Emperor Enrico IV.  Living in an old cloisters, he passes the days surrounded by paid lackeys playing court games while his relatives bring in a psychologist who has a plan to shock him back to reality.  But is he really mad or just playing a game of control to avoid life’s responsibilities?  (This too another form of madness, no?)  Opened out with a big waiting game for the rest of the cast (Claudia Cardinale and other relatives hoping for a breakthru) there’s a bit of amusement seeing Luciano Bartoli play the younger Enrico in what seems to be old Mastroianni hair styles from his matinee idol days.  But it all plays as if everyone is vamping for a tune that never shows up.  The pursuit of empty prestige is palpable.  Pass.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Mastroianni made lots of unhappy choices in his later years, but the old lion was no spent force.  Given a decent script and a sympathetic director, he’s a worthy father and opponent fit for sparring with Massimo Troisi under Ettore Scola’s direction in CHE ORA È?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/02/che-ora-e-1989.html    OR: Courting controversy, and likely to be showing its age, Peter O’Toole & director Peter Medak play similar games in their Pirandello influenced social satire THE RULING CLASS/’72.

BLACK GRAVEL / SCHWARZER KIES (1961)

Intriguing, if not fully functional German film noir straddles two major periods of post-WWII German economy: Black Market manipulators and the fast emerging Industrial Boom.  Co-writer/director Helmut Käutner does a great job loading on the ‘anything goes’ atmosphere usually associated with lawless border towns (had Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL/’59 made it to Germany?) here divided not by a river cutting North from South, but between job-seeking local drifters & grifters still adjusting to the New Germany in a well-paid transient market, and the continuing U.S. presence (military, political, entrepreneurial) running the show and fitfully keeping order.  What he doesn’t do so well is set up the action and characters which don’t click in till the second act is well under way.   Once that happens, the plot still has to fight thru some painfully indicative acting by the leads as an old flame is rekindled between gravel driver Robert Neidhardt (a late film debut at 39) and his ex, Ingmar Zeisberg, now married to an American Major.  As to the missing gravel that drives the plot?  It’s not stolen for sale by some nefarious third party, but swiped to bury a dead dog and a pair of lovers (one an American) accidentally killed and seriously complicating already complicated relationships.  Good nasty fun, with an alarmingly funny twist when a happy solution is suggested by a CIA plant who naturally thinks everything can be explained thru East/West conspiracies before a cascade of bad timing puts the kibosh on any possible future.   Definitely worth a look, but some indulgence needed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The film was slightly reedited between its premiere and general release, much to its detriment.  Especially the end where, in the shortened general release cut, the metaphoric postman not only doesn’t ring twice, but never gets to the mailbox.  Who thought this a good idea?!  Only a minute longer (113" to 114"), it makes all the difference.