THE UNHOLY GARDEN (1931)

While eventually bristling under his contract to Goldwyn (10 years, crossing the Silent-to-Sound transition), Ronald Colman did fairly well by it; just not on this notorious flop.  Or so commercial & critical consensus would have it, then and now.  Why bother to have a fresh look?  Turns out, it’s a delightfully silly charade of comic-romance and adventure.  Zippy for 1931, too, with director George Fitzmaurice continuing in the spirit of visually juiced optics Colman had received since his remarkable Talkie debut in F. Richard Jones’s BULLDOG DRUMMOND/’29.*  Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur share writing credit, but it’s really all Hecht, goading himself with a personal challenge to write an entire ‘original’ screenplay in a day!  John Lee Mahin, whom he was mentoring surely did a polish.  (Hecht had done much the same race with the clock on the quickly written mystery novel, THE FLORENTINE DAGGER in 1923.)  Goldwyn supplied a strong cast (Tully Marshall, Fray Wray, Warren Hymer, Mischa Auer, Lucille La Verne) and below-the-line, George Barnes to lens, Alfred Newman for music cues & Richard Day on art direction.*  Colman’s a gentleman crook, hiding from international authorities, along with a motley group of cutthroats & thieves, at some desert hideaway run by La Verne.  Tully Marshall’s a blind embezzler, hoping to set up daughter Fay Wray with his well-hidden loot.  Colman proposes to his fellow crooks that he’s the guy who can get the info by ‘making love’ to Wray; but he’s really out to divide and conquer.  Only problem, he falls for the dame and just might do the honorable thing.  (Cue wistful renunciation.)  But not before he beats the crap out of the loose broad who's out to grab him and the reward for his capture.  (What?!  So ungentlemanly!  Hope there’s an explanation.)  Why no one’s noticed what a fun put-on this is beyond me.  In many ways, it’s a genre goof like BEAT THE DEVIL/'53, also a major flop before catching on years later.  This one never acquired a cult, but can be seen all over the internet in lousy dupes for free.  Here’s’s the best of a bad lot.  https://archive.org/details/the-unholy-garden-1931-1

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *When Darryl F. Zanuck put 20th/Fox together, he poached Day & Newman.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The little-known F. Richard Jones died young after DRUMMOND.  OR: As mentioned, BEAT THE DEVIL.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/bulldog-drummond-1929-bulldog-drummond.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/beat-devil-1953.html

KOMPROMAT (2022)

The title refers to the Russian practice of forging damaging evidence to either blackmail or secure convictions on falsely accused enemies.  Here, it’s aimed at the new Director of the French/Russian Alliance in Irkutst.  (You know, like the RISK board-game territory.)  It ought to be a natural for a thriller about the French Alliance Chairman finding himself trapped in a Kafkaesque diplomatic nightmare, his conviction a fait accompli and escape the only option.  The problem is co-writer/director Jérôme Salle making nothing but false moves at every story beat to get to the next narrative staging area.  And while it’s hardly unusual to find a film asking us to swallow something unlikely to get the ball rolling, or find a way out of a narrative jam, KOMPROMAT is ludicrous right from the start and stays that way.  Just take the opening, a festive gala at the Alliance auditorium to celebrate his appointment in Irkutst.  Who wouldn’t begin the evening for these overdressed political hacks with anything but an R-Rated homosexual pas de screw for a near nude, writhing couple?  Just be sure your estranged wife brings your 6-yr-old daughter to see it, along with the aghast ultra-conservative locals.  French cultural arrogance?  Or entitled cluelessness?  Our director is soon charged with transparently false claims of distributing internet child porn and sexual abuse of his daughter.  (Hey, she fell asleep and left before the erotic dance started.)  But the real agenda is to expose a putative spy network.  Gilles Lellouche, who plays the blinkered cultural leader brings a Liam Neesom vibe to his role, but his actions are so consistently brain-dead, this quickly wears off.  As in: getting a ride to an escape point near the border from the blonde translator who’s decided to help you (for unknown reasons)?  Don’t forget to hang around in the car to strip and have passionate, steamy sex before you start your escape.  So French.  Grabbing a ride back to Moscow to try for ‘safety’ at the French Embassy?  No problem, you’re sure to get a ride with a worldly pastor who’ll hide you in his car trunk and yell at the guards who want to have a look.  N'est-ce pas?  Another twenty plot turns go like that.  And when that’s not enough,  Lellouche is sure to be on his cell phone so the wicked FSB (sort of like the old KGB) can track his position.  And the film’s handsome production (great location shots of fierce roads thru forests), only make it all worse.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  But imagine the possibilities of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau fumbling his way to freedom with this script.  It’d be worth it just for the car sex.

SNOW WHITE (1937)

With Disney about to release the latest of their audience-pleasing, taxidermical Live-Action adaptations of beloved animated classics (the one that started it all), a post on the original 1937 beauty.  (Along with Warners’ first properly distributed Talkie, THE SINGING FOOL/’28, SNOW WHITE probably the film seen by more people than any to come out between BIRTH OF A NATION/’15 and GONE WITH THE WIND/’39.)  It recently was trending on social media after the new SNOW WHITE opined on not much caring for it; even finding Prince Charming something of a stalker.  Immediately retracted, and walked back by mortified Disney publicists, the idea that a 13th century fable, as compiled by the Grimm brothers in the early 19th century, wouldn’t line up with 21st century mores & manners apparently too much to take in.  Anyway, stalking?  He’s searching.  And the film’s big hit tune is all about how the princess, having already met and fallen in love, dreams that ‘One Day My Prince Will Come.’  As she tells the Seven Little Men.  A surprisingly up-to-date term for 1937.  (Apparently, the dwarfs 100% CGI in the new version which makes them . . . animation?  Or is it more a photorealistic CGI kind of thing?*)  Enough preamble.  How’s the old film holding up?  Wonderfully, especially when seen in its latest restoration; more dazzling and much sharper than recently.  In addition to the miraculous set pieces (the housecleaning, the marching to & from work, dancing (those organ pipes!), with details you might not have noticed before.  Like the way the air briefly fills with dust when rags are shaken out the window.  Such care!  Not only showing off, but showing a level of pride in the product that’s also a lost art.  (Speaking of lost techniques, note the unique water effects, changed in the next Disney features.)  The film exceptional at displaying what was probably Walt Disney’s best gifts as moviemaker: famously not much of an animator, it was his superb sense of character development and his often ruthless way with story editing.  (Compare the lack of focus & drive to similar story beats in his SLEEPING BEAUTY/’59 when Walt had grown far less involved.)  To nitpick, one song isn’t up to the rest (‘With a Smile and a Song’), but even Adriana Caselotti’s childish coloratura now seems more appropriate.  (Brief personal note: when those rocks fall on the Wicked Queen, this toddler was being quickly hauled out of the theater in sheer terror, but watching the screen over his mother’s shoulder for the next horror.  It’s still a scary pic.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID I:  When the Disney brand was at a low point culturally & commercially in the ‘70s, lots of backlash in how Dopey was treated.  True, the guy’s a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, but look again to see just how much he’s mainstreamed into the group, part of the team and used to the best of his abilities.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID II:  Six years later, in 1943, Rodgers & Hammerstein would get credit for inventing the fully integrated musical in B’way’s OKLAHOMA!, with all songs advancing action or character.  Yet isn’t that what happens in SNOW WHITE?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Before Live-Action remakes and photorealistic CGI animation, those clever Disney monetizers would turn everything into a skating show.  SNOW WHITE ON ICE!!

DOOMED TO DIE (1940)

Leaping into the breach after Warner Oland’s made his last Charlie Chan in 1937* (dead the next year), penny-pinching Monogram Pictures came up with their own ace YellowFace detective to fill the void starting in 1938 . . . at one-fifth the cost.  (The 20th/Fox Chan pics were both well-produced and hugely profitable.)  So, here’s Boris Karloff, sinking from Universal & Warners to Monogram as the Caucasian star playing Mr. Wong, yet hardly touching the makeup box.  A bit of eye makeup (?), otherwise acting and speaking more like a British Prep School Don than a brilliant ‘Oriental’ crime solver.  (Sly revenge or just budget conscious?)  In any event, by the time the five Wong titles had run their course, there was a new Chan (Sidney Toler) installed at FOX who would, ironically, soon move over to Monogram, to replace WONG, but now on a starvation budget.  The Wong films, at their best, harmless; this final entry doesn’t even bother to put WONG in the title.  Plot?  A shipping disaster leaves 400 dead and the company owner a probable suicide.  Or did his daughter’s fiancé, scion of a rival ship company shoot hm?  Enter Wong who naturally finds both explanations wong . . . I mean wrong!  There are bickering cops & reporters, a car chase for some rare movement and a modicum of gunplay.  Elsewise, journeyman director William Nigh seems to be watching the budget and not the dailies.  Still, Karloff fans will want to see one of these.  This was my second.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  For Karloff in full Asian war paint & Eastern wickedness, THE MASK OF FU MANCHU/’32 is unbeatable.  (Politically correct blinders a must.) https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/mask-of-fu-manchu-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Peter Lorre’s superior MR. MOTO series continued to serve this audience niche before politics ended its run with its two weakest entries out in ‘39.  One of them, an unused,  repurposed Charlie Chan script originally written for Warner Oland.

THE LESSON / UROK (2014)

From today's Bulgaria, where old Communist State inequities merge with new Capitalist horrors, parallel stories of theft & free enterprize.  Margita Gosheva is calmly indomitable as the High School English teacher out to uncover a classroom thief, and at home, trying to come up with a loan payment to save the family house after being blind-sided by a husband who’s been pocketing the monthly payments she gives him to handle.  What follows is more Murphy’s Law than modern Job parable, though debuting married filmmakers Kristina Grozeva & Petar Valchanov might disagree.  But the series of financial disasters are real enough (a true story lurks behind ths) as Gosheva lowers herself again & again, to get thru the latest crisis.  (Interestingly, and no doubt accurately for Bulgaria, she never blames her spouse.)  Scooping coins out of a fountain to raise a couple of bucks embarrassing but benign; getting involved with a vicious, sexually depraved loan shark considerably scarier.  Yet I’d opt for her cheerful second employer (she does translating on the side) as the biggest prick.  The film, a big player on the International Fest Circuit, is highly accomplished if a bit overextended, but finds a trifecta of a finish: ironic; cynical; and, in its way, even Happy Ending-ish.

DOUBLE-BLL/LINK:  Grozeva & Valchanov would find just the pace & variety needed here in their next film GLORY/’16.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/01/glory-slava-2016.html

ESCAPE / TALJU (2024)

Depending on how you count, it's either Prologue or Half of the First Act (I'd say prologue), Lee Jong-pil’s North-to-South Korean defection adventure begins with considerable Pop entertainment value.  Lee Je-hoon stars as a respected North Korean sergeant, nearing his ten year service quota, but meticulously plotting an escape to the South thru the DMZ.  He’s worked out a detailed map of land mine placements, and now needs to take his chance before forecast rain storms move in and shift the bomb positions.  Defection now or never.  And weather’s not the only obstacle.  He’s also being blackmailed by a fellow soldier who's on to his secret and desperate to visit family in the South.  Sure enough, things quickly go south and the pair are quickly discovered and arrested.  As filmmaking, so far, so good, in fact excellent!  But once the two are separated by Koo Kyo-hwan’s politically-connected Major (he’s also a champion pianist though seems to prefer Je-hoon to Rachmaninoff), we quickly devolve into a series of neatly handled, but unlikely action sequences, impossible coincidences, and blind favors from our love struck Major.  Heck, there’s even a surprise last second rescue by a group of female Nomadic warriors who roam the border lands and are currently looking for a relative who just happened to be held in a prison cell next to the tag-along blackmailer.  Remember him?  Je-hoon did, and picked up the poor guy to join in border dash.  Too silly for words.  And oddly made worse rather than better because Jong-pil proves so talented: pace, locations, eccentric acting choices that pay off, action chops; the works.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Just his fourth feature, director Lee Jong-pil’s definitely a guy to pay attention to.

LIE WITH ME / ARRÊTE AVEC TES MENSONGES (2022)

Guillaume de Tonquédec plays a well-known, successful author, returning to his home town for the first time since graduating high school 35 years ago.  The town, famous for its cognac, if little else.  But for Tonquédec it was source material for his many romantic novels, one secretly based on his own first love back in 1984 with a popular, but deeply closeted boy.  There’s a public event to speak at, but he’s really there to find his own past . . . and possible new inspiration as his well of usable memories has run dry.  Instead, he meets the man’s son (Victor Belmondo), a likable cognac rep in his thirties, running a tour for Stateside distributors, mostly from California where he now lives.  From this setup, co-writer/director Olivier Peyon jumps smoothly back & forth between the two time periods with decidedly awkward encounters, well-observed, if a bit obvious, but ultimately rather touching as the son gains a bit of understanding toward his distanced father while Tonquédec starts to figure out what’s been creatively holding him back.  Peyon is particularly fine succinctly etching in the over-eager locals, proud and a bit mystified at the impulsive native son who became a national treasure.  Will he even show for the speech?  And what will he actually say?  Something off-topic for sure.  (Fortunately, enough cognac will be flowing so no one should notice!)  And while the film is pleasant company and heartfelt, it also gives out the undeniable vibe of a jarring hard-R-rated BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: the After-School Special.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The teen couple, Julien De Saint (as the boy who stays) and Jean Jérémy Gillet (as author designate) are both excellent.  But, Gillet in particular, is not only fit & very lean, but boasts the sort of striking muscle definition you simply wouldn’t have come across in 1984. (Especially on a dreamy literary kid.)  Youthful actors with modern gym-rat bods look great, but can easily kill period verisimilitude.

DOUBLE BILL:  André Téchiné’s WILD REEDS / LES ROSEAUX SAUVAGES/’94 remains the go-to title for this type of gay-angled coming-of-age pics, at least in France.

MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK (2022)

Smart, cleverly built essay film, Mark Cousins’ witty Alfred Hitchcock bio-doc, mostly concerned with themes & stylistics, but also touching on his personal life, is both the real thing and a big fake-out.  Its voice-over script read by a Hitchcock impersonator (who thankfully doesn’t overdo it*), Cousins takes real quotes from myriads of interviews and arranges them to cover five major themes over a five+ decade career.  Supported by film & home movie clips, all high quality resolution, with even the troublesome ‘60s Universal color processing triumphantly overcome.  They didn’t look this good on initial release.  Are they this refined on the latest Blu-Ray editions?  (Perversely, the always great looking VistaVision colors turn up looking a bit ‘hot.’)  Cousins generously includes clips from often ignored pics (dissed titles range from THE FARMER’S WIFE/’28 to TORN CURTAIN/’66) to show repeated motifs and revealing camera moves.  Little deep dish theorizing or attempts to rewrite the canon, just fresh-as-paint prints getting a bit of near revelatory attention.  Fun!

DOUBLE-BILL:  Most Hitchcock interviews find him speaking more haltingly than this impersonator does.  But The Master can be heard speaking just as fluidly in a delightful one-off tour he filmed for a little U.K. film society in THE WESTCLIFF CINE CLUB VISITS MR HITCHCOCK IN HOLLYWOOD/’63.  Currently hard to find unless you’re in the U.K. where it’s available for free at the BFI site.

INUGAMI-KE NO ICHIZOKU / THE INUGAMI FAMILY (1976)

Master of All Genres Kon Ichikawa* went out on a limb on this one: murder mystery, family inheritance/mother-love saga, comic-horror pic.  A big hit in Japan  (sequels; remake), yet never distributed Stateside.  Perhaps if Ichikawa hadn’t been tagged as a big-issue, serious subject kind of guy after acclaimed WWII films (FIRES ON THE PLAIN/’59; THE BURMESE HARP/’56).  After that, with few exceptions, he was under-served in the West in spite of a life that was long & productive to the end.  (1915 - 2008; 95 films.)  OR: Was the film simply considered too inscrutably Japanese, too plotty?; as indeed it is over the first two acts.  But you pick up enough of the pieces to catch up, and then some, in a phenomenally propulsive, lucid Act Three.  Anyway, Ichikawa’s compositional mastery carries you along at the densest of narrative moments.  It starts with the Inugami family gathered at the deathbed of their aged patriarch, a rich Pharmaceutical Mogul with three daughters from three different women.  (He never married.)  Even more complicated bloodlines among the relatives & in-laws along with a gaggle of  next generation hopefuls standing by for the will to be read.  Turns out, Inugami Senior is giving his entire fortune to a girl outside the family line.  But only if she marries one of his three grandsons.  (From those three half-sisters, got it?)  No wonder murder & mystery follow.  Will any of the three grandsons survive to marry into a fortune?  Inevitably, death brings in the police as well as loose cannon private detective Kôji Ishizaka, shuffling off with the movie.  Don’t despair if some details pass you by, all will click into place by the third act.  And in thrilling, audience pleasing, character driven fashion.  Immensely satisfying pop entertainment.  Ichikawa’s mise-en-scène, color grading & pallette, and unannounced segues into highly stylized vignettes, all second-to-none; worth every polished pixel in the 2021 restoration you should look for.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Probably the best introduction to Ichikawa is, from 1983, his women’s period drama, set in the clothing biz of the 1940s and as stunningly beautiful a film as you will ever see, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/07/sasame-yuki-makioka-sisters-11983.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Really?  Every genre?  Did Ichikawa ever do a musical?

DER FUCHS / THE FOX (2022)

Superbly handled WWII/coming-of-age story from Austrian writer/director Adrian Goiginger plays out like a real-life fable.  (Apparently it’s glancingly based on a true family incident.)  Young Franz, part of a large family barely eking out a life in the countryside, is indentured to a prosperous farm in a distant county, only leaving upon gaining his maturity at 17 after a decade.  Homeless, jobless, without prospects, he joins the Austrian military not long before Nazi annexation.  Having grown up without social skills in the basics of personal interaction, he’s a well-behaved, dutiful odd man out in most situations.  But things change when he comes across, and adopts, an orphaned fox pup, going thru the first year of war with the animal increasingly attached to him . . . and vice versa.  Fascinating & believable, with Maximilian Reinwald a decade too old as the young soldier, but very fine nonetheless,  Goiginger shows stunning control in giving us just the amount of information needed to intuit narrative and emotional content, allowing it to resonant by withholding step-by-step exposition.  There’s something musical in this approach; like a baroque composer who has us extrapolate chordal progressions out of a single musical line.  (Cinematic continuo.)  Nazi themes are largely kept in the background, though Goiginger drops in a deadly one perfectly.  And if you think there’s not going to be a devastating separation worthy of a ‘50s Disney boy-and-his-dog film, you’ve got another think coming.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A long scene for father & son where the boy’s curiosity & fear of death is explained thru a folk tale alone makes the film a must.

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