CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1964)

The late Baby Boom years of the early ‘60s weren’t only fecund with tots but also with fears of their eventual takeover.  No wonder Creepy Kids genre pics came into fashion as The Greatest Generation started having second thoughts on what they’d wrought.  In the U.K., British M-G-M showed the way with VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED/’60 and this follow-up.  While horror house Hammer Films unofficially made it a trilogy with THESE ARE THE DAMNED/’62 coming in-between.*  All three featuring a new wave of dangerous brats (super alien brats at that) bringing death or disease (or could it be salvation?) to earth.  The films unusually grown-up horror, far removed from the super-charged monster movies aimed at kids.  (The elevated tone beginning perhaps on THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL/’51.)  This one fairly effective, but losing punch in shifting its focus from local in the first film (native blue-eyed blondes from interstellar seed) to international (six global Junior U.N. representatives of various ethnicity appearing with a million years of DNA evolution in their blood).  Structured as a chase, the hunt for the six brilliant boys & girls by military and scientific forces, it’s mostly fun, cleverly worked out to end up at an ancient gothic cathedral* (a real one) where the kids gather to hide out while authorities panic.  Briskly helmed by journeyman director Anton Leader, with strong low-key noirish cinematography from Davis Boulton, who’d just shot Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING/’63.  Plus a better than usual cast for the genre than was common at the time.  The kids let their glowing eyes do most of the work; none as memorable as the look-a-like crew in VILLAGE.  But it’s always a kick to note just how much Alan Badel looks like Peter Sellers under a comedy restraining order.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *A triple bill if you start with VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and follow with THESE ARE THE DAMNED.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/village-of-damned-1960.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/these-are-damned-aka-damned-1963.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *No wonder they wind up in a Cathedral, all the kids from 'virgin' mothers.

BUG (2007)

Easy to see how effectively Tracy Letts’ scary thriller might work on stage.  Even with a cast of five, it functions like a classic ‘Lost Souls’ two-hander.  Or does till Letts swerves into Body Horror in the last act.  Creepy stuff with sadder-if-not-wiser waitress Ashley Judd meeting up for the night with shaky military vet Michael Shannon.  The two something of a match: she’s being stalked by violent ‘ex’ Harry Connick Jr (excellent); he’s stalked by demons in his head.  Her monster corporal/his a manifestation of bug infestation.  Yikes!  Their deteriorating psychological condition visually climaxing in a last act coup de théâtre opening curtain.  All dutifully recreated by director William Friedkin in this low-budget, yet technically immaculate film transfer.  But any effect doomed without the possibility to think Shannon’s bug paranoia might be real.  And Shannon, repeating his stage triumph, is far too obviously paranoid schizophrenic, even with those nasty skin bruises, to let us imagine they ain’t self-inflicted.  Judd also too busy working the sensitively angle.  You see what they’re all trying to get across, but the modest result is predictable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  CHILD’S PLAY/’72;  SLEUTH/’72 & 07; DEATHTRAP/’82; the list of stage thrillers that went flat on film is a long one.  Though there’s always Alfred Hitchcock’s DIAL M FOR MURDER/’54 (which hardly changed a thing) and George Cukor’s GASLIGHT/’44 (which changed a lot).  Go figure.  (Look up most of these in our SEARCH BOX - upper left corner.)

THE FLYING ACE (1926)

All-Black ‘Race Film,’ the credits tout an ‘Entire Cast Composed of Colored Artists,’ but that’s in front of the camera.  ‘Behind’ is led by White producer/director Richard E. Norman.  And probably the rest of his crew at this ‘Pop-Up’ Florida studio.  Lots of unusual elements here, good ones, starting with it being what we’d now call a dramedy.  Most race films, made for bookings on the Black Film Circuit or as a Special One-Night Screenings in non-race houses, were either comic burlesques, educational, or for social/religious uplift.  This one’s just entertaining, especially once the action gets up to speed in the third act.  (Even more unusual, it’s come down to us in good physical condition.)  Classic cops & robbers stuff, it opens when a handsome young payroll man for the railroad comes to town a day early with $25 thou in cash, and without his usual guards,  Overheard by three shifty locals: a layabout; a corrupt cop; a high-flying bootlegger (literally high-flying, he does his rum-running by plane).  But, after stopping to see the railway station master, the one with the pretty daughter, he and the payroll go missing and the station master is blamed.  Enter the Flying Ace, a World War One hero, back on his old job as chief railroad investigator.  A regular Sherlock Holmes at figuring out crimes, he’s also not afraid to use his fists or his skills in the air when that booze smuggler takes off with the station manager’s daughter and tries to rape her while flying in his two-seater.  Yikes!  And no auto-pilot!  Double Yikes!  Naturally, payroll is saved, station master & courier cleared, now only the daughter must choose between two upstanding men.  This touch of romance cleverly shot by Norman who holds on their legs; a neat bit of mise-en-scène.  And not the only one in here.  One qualifier, the use of the lightest skinned actor in the film as the WWI hero.  Was it noted by Black audiences at the time?  On the other hand, a more welcome idea sees his assistant, played by a War vet amputee, a one-legged wonder who uses his crutch as a weaponized limb.  Bashing bad guys, pedaling his bike, making instant U-turns, and more or less stealing the pic.

LINK:  Here’s the excellent high-def Library of Congress restoration:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSE-WksQwIg 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Other than a bit of Schubert at the end, the film score has been skillfully arranged from classic film music cues from the late silent era.  Hear them on ’The Pioneers of Movie Music’ on CD and many music streamers.

WAKE UP DEAD MAN (2025)

Third of the Rian Johnson KNIVES OUT murder mysteries; all with Daniel Craig as dapper Deep South free-lance detective Benoit Blanc, now with less accent.  It’s the darkest yet.  Not dark in tone or topic, but in lighting.  Interiors: murky church naves; clubby lamp-lit offices.  Exteriors: dense moody woods; twilight excursions.*  Elsewise, more or less the same Agatha Christie manqué, Johnson even showing us a typed list of literary inspirations for this ‘impossible crime’ knock off.  And if it goes on a little longer than it has to, it’s mostly good fun when a controversial priest gets knocked off mid-mass, and his acolytes are the suspects..  (Never-mind the Pop religious philosophizing.)  A game cast eagerly gnawing the scenery with displays of bravura acting include Josh O’Connor, new young priest under hard-nosed fanatic Father Josh Broslin.  With Glenn Close, spinster church manager; Thomas Haden Church, church property caretaker.  Plus church-going regulars Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner; local Police Chief Mila Kunis, many more.  And you won’t drift off during the extended investigation (the murder is ‘solved’ multiple times), because Johnson appears to have had movie stars of his film going youth in mind for the major characters.  See if you can spot his substitutes for Gene Hackman, Cloris Leachman, Nick Nolte, George Segal², Diahann Carroll and (maybe?) Steve McQueen.  It’s more inetersting than solving the obfuscated, but oddly simple murder.

ATTENTION MUST BEPAID:  *The crepuscular cinematography would look infinitely better on the big screen.  With an arc-lamp projector running actual celluloid film stock.  But even in digital, only KNIVES OUT/’19 had a proper theatrical release, grossing well over 300 mill.  GLASS ONION, with but a token release nudged 20.  And WAKE UP?  Only a brief award qualifying vanity release that totaled one & a half million before it went online.  The NetFlix financial model obviously working for someone, just not the vanishing film going public.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  GLASS ONION’s tag ending teased us with a peek at Hugh Grant as Craig’s significant other, suggesting an obvious sequel with the pair doing a Nick & Nora Charles routine on the next case.  What a missed opportunity!

CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY (1951)

Published in 1948, South African writer Alan Paton’s novel put apartheid, his country’s policy of strict racial segregation, in the political conversation as few books had.  A near miss in its first theatrical incarnation (the 1950 Kurt Weill/Maxwell Anderson musical LOST IN THE STARS*), then quickly followed by this film.  Later, two more straight adaptations; on tv in 1958/another feature in ‘95, with the musical filmed in ‘74.  None come off, they’re ‘worthy’ and slightly afraid of what they’ve gotten themselves into.  But at least this 1951 attempt, a passion project for director Zoltan Korda, has real South African verisimilitude going for it, which helps counter the stiffness.  Canada Lee, remembered from Alfred Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT/’44, only made five films, staying mostly on B’way.  (Orson Welles directed him in NATIVE SON.)  Here he’s a rural minister on his first trip to Johannesburg, where people go, but never come back.  His brother, sister and son all lost there one way or another.  Mostly his son, whom he tries to find with help from a 24-yr-old Sidney Poitier, a fellow minister, but savvy to the ways of the city.  (Watching these two, we might be witnessing a passing of the torch.)  But once they do find the son, it’s worse than they could have imagined.  A prominent anti-apartheid progressive murdered, a man whose family lives not far from the minister.   By this point, the film has gained a fair amount of power and passion, somewhat overriding the dirge-like tone Korda holds to.  Paton c-wrote the script, which may explain some of the problems.  But the film still deserves a look, and not only for historical reasons.

LINK:  *Here’s the title track from the original cast album of LOST IN THE STARS.  Anderson with an aching lyric to match Weill’s genius.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygkCMrC5t0Q

PARIS, TEXAS (1984)

While not immune to the usual post-passing downturn in critical reputation, this Sam Shepard item (self-adapting his own story) remains a loving/haunted human comedy under director Wim Wenders’ patient hand and knack of finding just the right location.  Especially as shot by Robby Müller, perfect down to the grain in the film stock.  No surprise to see Shepard with a tale of two brothers, though no rivalry here, instead a Prodigal Brother (and wife) fable.  Older brother Harry Dean Stanton, a lost soul stumbling toward a small Texas town (today’s audiences might assume he’s ‘on the spectrum’), a victim of personal rot as becomes increasingly clear when ‘good’ brother Dean Stockwell flies in to bring him to his home in L.A.  (It’s a Road Pic so detours along the way inevitable.)  There, Stockwell and wife Aurore Clément have been raising Stanton’s eight-yr-old boy for the past four years so there’s a period of adjustment.  But a quickly improving, Stanton is soon determined to find missing wife Nastassja Kinski who's somewhere back in Texas.  And he's thrilled in his undemonstrative way to find his son wants to come with him.  The last act plays out in a different style, less interested in making every step believable or even dramatically justified.  But Shepard can only find his satisfyingly logical conclusion by flipping Stanton from helpless inarticulate to being psychologically articulate as hell.  As if William Inge had been brought in for a rewrite.  (BUS STOP, anyone?)  Meantime, Wenders over-indulges in onanistic Americana quirkiness.  But the film is endearing enough and strange enough, so you go with it even when you (as well as Wenders & Shepard) know better.  Its magical grace worth it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Apparently the script didn’t originally treat Stockwell & Clément in quite such a cavalier manner.  They deserved better.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Shepard, helped by his high public profile (actor, craggy good looks, glam marriage) no doubt got him more than his fair share of film adaptations.  At his most persuasive, with off-the-charts cool factor, in THE RIGHT STUFF/’83.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-right-stuff-1983.html

NORA PRENTISS (1947)

A stable upper-middle-class husband (wife, two kids, good job/good pay, two-level colonial with garage, cabin in the country) casually gets involved (then entwined) with a younger woman, succumbs to passion and loses everything . . . including the mistress.  An oft-told tale, notable here because of how closely it follows the pattern of Theodore Dreiser’s SISTER CARRIE.*  Or does for the first half.  After that, running amok with melodramatic tropes, plot-driven coincidence and a series of convenient crimes of opportunity.  Ann Sheridan’s penultimate film under Warners contract, she’s the object of desire, a nightclub chanteuse working for gentlemanly club owner Robert Alda, who meets-cute with Dr. Kent Smith after a traffic accident brings her to his office and reminds him what’s missing in his life: passion.  The promise of divorce hovering, but always out of reach.  Then the death of a patient brings swapped identity, bank withdraws, a move cross-country, another promise of divorce, a life in hiding (first for her/then for him), misery, boredom, madness, plastic surgery . . . the works.  Not without its amusing OTT moments of gloom & doom, but with also-ran director Vincent Sherman in charge (often assigned to escort fading stars on their way off the lot) the movie can’t make the stylistic turn it must between the mundane and stark melodrama.  Still, nice to see Warners giving good roles to B-Listers: Kent Smith’s doctor on the mark when he doesn’t have to hit extremes (he also looks a bit like Laurence Olivier who took the equivalent role in William Wyler’s CARRIE - see below), Alda, as mentioned, and a typically excellent turn from reliable Bruce Bennett, the carefree bachelor partner at Smith’s doctor’s office.  Sheridan, who rarely got roles worthy of her talent (Warners execs blinded by the va-va-voom rep they first gave her), handles this Lana Turner-esque role with ease.  But a chance to make something more than claptrap is squandered.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, William Wyler’s CARRIE/’52 covers all the bases on this wandering husband storyline with stunning precision. Even for those allergic to Jennifer Jones’ studied charms.  While Olivier never did anyting better on film.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/carrie-1952.html

LA GRANJA / THE FARM (2015)

Exceptional, if exceptionally depressing cross-section of Puerto Rican Lower-Depths, told thru multiple stories put together like an interlocked wooden puzzle to form an ensemble portrait of have-not society.  Puerto Rican born writer/director Angel Manuel Soto, whose fast rise took a hit after the poorly received BLUE BEETLE/’23 (not seen here)*, proves just the guy to handle the mobile structure and difficult subject matter.  A barren hospital midwife, working intensive natal care, takes desperate action to ‘save’ an infant for herself.  A promising young boxer and his elderly trainer, picking up small change in the same ring used for lucrative cockfights.  The boy encouraged to bring the same cutthroat tactics to his fights as the killer roosters.  Highschoolers negotiating sex-for-drugs meet-ups, while the cool kids flirt, gossip, put out for the physically attractive and mete out rough justice for those trying to break in to their cliques.  The unlikely sympathetic loner, a bullied fat kid (‘Piggy’) who spies on his sister having sex, steals the camera the boyfriend used to photograph them in action, reads books (!), and swallows condoms of drugs to cart past police check points as a bike riding ‘mule.’  Pretty much everyone dancing to the tune of the aging, but ruthless smalltime neighborhood crime boss.  Soto’s direction, plainspoken, but not without style, perfect for his purpose; emotionally gripping yet letting action speak for itself.  A film natural.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  We’re not so far from Luis Buñuel’s early Mexican post-Neo-Realist masterpiece LOS OLVIDADOS/’50.  Just don’t go looking for any surrealism,    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/03/los-olvidados-aka-forgotten-ones-young.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Soto apparently back in good graces with the just released/well reviewed buddy/buddy action comedy THE WRECKING CREW/’26.  (not seen here)

FOLLOWING (1998)

Writer/director Christopher Nolan never went to film school, but you’d never guess from this zero-budget feature which looks, talks & acts like a graduation project from the smartest kid in class.  A beginner’s film noir pastiche, it might be afterglow off the ‘80s Neo-Noir revival.  (Perhaps unnoticed because the over-saturated color & formal set-ups of those films gets replaced by mournful monochrome & handheld jitters.)  Jeremy Theobald is physically right as a failing young writer filling his days aimlessly following strangers, hoping to find a story.  Instead, one finds him.  Alex Haw, as a deceptive fellow who just may be following him. Or does he want to get caught in one his burglaries, swiping sellable goods from apartments when he hopes no one is home.  Soon, these two are partners in trade and romance.  You thought Nolan would leave out the classic femme fatale (Lucy Russell)?  But who has the upper hand?  Who’s leading whom?  What’s being staged for effect and who’s being set up to take the fall from the small fortune in cash hidden in an office safe?  Nolan giving this story his preferred non-linear timeline treatment; counting on that approach to add depth, complexity and a puzzling vibe.  (Succeeding at only one of the three.)  Something that’s proved to be an Achilles Heel in about half of Nolan's subsequent films. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  A very short double-bill: Nolan’s apprentice short DOODLEBUG/’97 (it’s included on the Criterion edition of FOLLOWING), playing like some TWILIGHT ZONE episode (or is it ONE STEP BEYOND?), but reduced down to its essence at less than three minutes.  (The disc also holds an alternate ‘Linear Cut’ of FOLLOWING - not seen here,)

FLESH AND BLOOD (1922)

Typical Lon Chaney vehicle from 1922; ten films that year, moving him up from support to top-billed.  (Mostly, naturally his Fagin in OLIVER TWIST puts him below child phenom Jackie Coogan’s Oliver.}  This one something of a template for much of Chaney’s career: Wronged years ago by some powerful man, he nurses a grudge before returning in disguise for his chance at revenge.*  Here, framed by a wealthy businessman via forged signatures, he finaly breaks out of prison after hearing of his wife’s serious illness . . . too late!  He watches from afar as her coffin is carried out of a tenement apartment before spotting his daughter, now a young woman who has no memory of him.  Complications?  ONE: the entire police force on the hunt for the escaped prisoner, so he’s forced to hide in plain sight disguised as a twisted cripple, sheltered by Chinatown Tong Lord Li Fang (Noah Beery!) while hunting down the true guilty party, that businessman.  Complication TWO: his daughter is about to be engaged to the son of that very man, the villain Chaney plans to take down.  Yikes!  Alas, three major obstacles hold the film down.  ONE: Chaney’s oddly ineffective disguise as a cripple with twisted legs and crutches.  (Likely more uncomfortable for Lon to play than for us to watch.)  TWO: Irving Cummings’ duller than dull direction.  (Cummings peaked in the ‘40s with light fare at 20th/Fox.)  And THREE: sadly subfusc surviving picture elements.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Chaney was one of the fortunate few who went to M-G-M and was paired with a series of truly outstanding, visually oriented directors..   Tod Browning, George W. Hill, Benjamin Christensen, Herbert Brenon (far better in silents than in Talkies) and Victor Seastrom whose HE WHO GETS SLAPPED/’24 (co-starring Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Tully Marshall) is a paradigm of the standard Chaney narrative formula.

DER TIGER / THE TANK (2025)

DAS BOOT in a TANK.  At least, that’s the idea till the last reel takes a couple of sharp right turns in a double epilogue.  Your reaction to them (it’s a big ask!) sure to determine your response to this generally excellent German POV WWII film.  Co-writer/director Dennis Gansel, with numerous episodes of tv’s BOOT behind him, an obvious choice (and a good one) to helm as we tag along with the five-man crew of a German ‘Tiger’ tank.  Theirs the last vehicle to make it out of Stalingrad in the 1943 retreat. And now the first sent back in.  The mission?  Retrieve a Lieutenant Colonel along with his notebook of codes, plans and final goals covering the next phase of the war.  Orders being orders (and Germans being Germans), the men mount up with only minor grumbling, driving their tank thru corpse-filled battlefields and blasted village remains.  At one point, hiding from enemy tanks underwater in their submergible tank.  (Now we’re really redoing DAS BOOT.)  Believably handled and often suspenseful (land mines; engine start-ups; fuel shortages; partisans), at least we’re spared the true deafening noise levels inside those metal echo chambers.  (Thanks tech people!)  They also keep things as apolitical as possible so we can root for our crew; saving Nazi atrocities for soldiers met along the way.  (A cheat and a cliché that’s been standard procedure for decades of largely sympathetic German-made WWII films.  Non-German ones, too.)  Well staged and acted, without blowing the budget on CGI overkill.  But just when we reach our destination, after sacrifice and loss to man and machine, the storyline shifts into something out of HEART OF DARKNESS before spinning again into one of those cop-out endings so popular back in UFA silent cinema days.  See Lang, Murnau, Weine.

DOUBLE-BILL:  DAS BOOT/’81, go for the 209" ;director’s cut.

SORORITY HOUSE (1939)

Cat fights.  ‘Perverse’ sexual sub-text.  Quid pro quo professors.  What else to expect with that title?  Shame on you!  Turns out this deceptively sharp R.K.O. programmer uses it’s one-hour running time to find interesting angles on the high expectations and social adjustments made when a 1930s small-town middle-class co-ed (only child of a widowed grocer) heads off to a well-heeled Liberal Arts college that lives & dies by ‘Greek’ Society.  Get ‘rushed’ by the right house and you’re a made gal; social & love connections present and accounted for.  Who says college isn’t worth the money?  Pretty Anne Shirley’s the down-to-earth freshman who meets-cute with top-dog senior James Ellison (a dead ringer for Christopher Reeve in build & profile).  He ‘helps’ her by spreading lies about a family fortune; she wins his heart by being sincere & unspoiled.  But it’s the customs & campus rituals of the time: the parties; the jackets & ties/the salon attire; the serenading frat boys & groveling pledges, the cutthroat ‘Greek’ rivalries that might be from another planet that sting.  And not as exaggerated as you might suppose.  Nothing startling, just that everything’s a little better than you expect.  And why not with Dalton Trumbo scripting from Mary Chase’s short story (Trumbo tacking on a little political speech for Dad after his daughter apologizes for excluding him from a fancy party); future noir master Nicholas Musuraca even on this workaday lensing assignment; director John Farrow (Mia’s dad) maintaining pace without pressure.  And, as a bonus, a rare chance for a remarkable Barbara Reed to show her stuff as a sophomore who knows she’s neither wealthy nor pretty enough to ever get a pledge.  (The pretty ones useful as bait to bring in trust-fund legacy boys.)  One of those little pics that thrive by being overlooked by studio execs, happy it came in under budget, ready to go on as a second-feature in big city second-runs and first-runs in the ‘sticks.’

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  Look for classic character actress Elisabeth Risdon in particularly good form as a snobby aunt who pushes her niece so hard it leads to a suicide attempt.  One of many moments in here that let you know R.K.O. was hoping to turn this into something closer to their big hit of 1937, STAGE DOOR.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/stage-door-1937.html

MEL BROOKS: THE 99 YEAR OLD MAN! (2026)

From Judd Apatow, a fawning two-part documentary on iconoclastic funny man Mel Brooks; his rise from hardscrabble Bkln boyhood to WWII army service, then comedy sketch writer for tv’s Sid Caesar, ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’ LPs with BFF Carl Reiner, near idyllic marriage to Anne Bancroft (Beauty and the Boychik); the great (and not so great) series of comedy films as writer/director/star (along with straight stuff he only produced). Then a dry patch followed by career resurrection on B’way with smash musical adaptation of his first film THE PRODUCERS; and lastly, baggy pants éminence grise pushing 100.  The film no more than an elegant cut & paste clip job, with interspersed interviews from collaborators (that’s where most of the fawning comes in).  Fine & informative, just be aware there’s nearly four hours of it.  Nice to see underrated titles like THE TWELVE CHAIRS/’70 and HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART ONE/’81 (his most ‘serious’ work) given attention.*  Though it’s a bit cheeky of Mel to go on about being the first to take down Hitler with laughs when Ernst Lubitsch did it four decades before him, while we were still at war, in a film Brooks himself remade!  TO BE OR NOT TO BE/’42; ;83.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Some Brooks titles have improved with age, but YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN/’74 still tops.  Best directed too, thanks to its physical attachment to the James Whale original.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/02/young-frankenstein-1974.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Lots of archival material that let you compare & contrast interviewers.  Who is that British gal who doesn’t let her guests get a word in edgewise.  Yikes!  Mike Douglas gently riding roughshod as needed.  Dinah Shore babbling away.  Tom Snyder pronouncing judgement.  Fun!

VOLCANO (1997)

Hoping to ‘fan-boy’ up film coverage readership with genre savvy writers, ever longer reviews on marquee titles, and recurring beyond-the-algorithm lists covering Horror, Foreign, Action, the New York Times recently added participatory fluff like Good-Bad films.  That’s where we found this unlikely/unloved ‘90s disaster flop getting the Gen X nostalgia treatment.  Easily confused with Guilty Pleasure pics (laugh with it) or films ‘so bad they’re good’ (laugh at it), whatever your definition (perfect analogy: Tex-Mex Frito Pie), this ain’t it; not so much Good or Bad, but Generic.  It’s also, as disaster pics go, more ‘70s (naturally caused like EARTHQUAKE*) than ‘90s (a threat from Outer Space).  Journeyman director Mick Jackson fails to class up the form (presumably what made middlebrow movie execs buy into the project), and no one involved has (or will admit to) the Junk Food æsthetic needed.  Tasteful trash won’t cut it.  City Commissioner Tommy Lee Jones crinkles his way thru the crisis while chilly co-star Anne Heche tags bravely along as chief geologist after losing her assistant in a gassy crevasse.*  With kids and puppies to wander into trouble; middle-aged White martyrs saving minorities; a big Black baddass, ‘cuffed by a White racist cop but still turning lava away from an endangered neighborhood.  One plus comes from seeing a late example of pre-CGI ordnance and Don Cheadle, as Tommy Lee’s deputy at Command Central, coax a few laughs while trying to wheedle his way onto the field.  But it’s all pretty dull.  How could they set the stage for catastrophe at La Brea Tar Pits and not have some dinosaur spew out with the lava is beyond me.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Not a Good/Bad film nor a Bad/Good film, EARTHQUAKE/'74 is a Bad/Bad film.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/10/earthquake-1974.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The last screen blonde this chilly was Victoria Tennant, directed in L.A. STORY/’91 by none other than Mick Jackson.

MAZURKA (1935)

After choosing Hitler over Hollywood as the lesser of two evils (at least for getting a film made), G.B. Pabst found himself the most acclaimed filmmaker in mid-‘30s Nazi Germany, but not the most popular. That would have been Willi Forst after the one-two punch of MASKERADE/’34 and MAZURKA, rare international successes out of the Reich, using his patented mix of romance, melodrama and music.  (Both films quickly/faithfully remade by Hollywood.*)  MAZURKA stars silent film diva Pola Negri as a rising young operatic soprano wined, wooed and wrangled into bed by Albrecht Schoenhals’s womanizing piano virtuoso.  A sorry tale reluctantly told in flashback twenty years after the fact by a sadder-but-wiser Negri, on trial for his murder.  Now a Music Hall chanteuse she recognized her seducer starting the same routine with a young woman, a fresh young thing just about the age the daughter she gave up all those years ago would now be.  Yikes!  Where’s Douglas Sirk when you need him?  Technically a bit rough around the edges, Forst likes tricky editing and optical printer tricks the German film industry couldn’t handle as smoothly as Hollywood did at the time. (A recent restoration may iron out some of these faults.)  Negri, thicker than she was in her heyday, but still a powerhouse, and surprisingly non-demonstrative/modern in her acting choices, leagues ahead of the acting going on around her.  The film largely holding up right thru its secret mother/grateful daughter renunciation scene.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Over at M-G-M, MASKERADE became ESCAPADE/’35 while MAZURKA landed at Warner Bros. as CONFESSION/’37, probably the best of Kay Francis’s post-Production Code vehicles.  Ironic as Warners stopped German distribution in 1934, the year before MAZURKA was made, after one of their reps was attacked in the street for Jewish connections.  Even more ironic, CONFESSION was directed by German/UFA emigré Joe May.  Off the record, I prefer it.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/confession-1937.html

A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO / AI NO SHINSEKAI (1994)

Blur-free nudity (a first in mainstream Japanese film fare*) was the commercial come-on for this largely giddy look at a sex workers boutique, the ‘girls’ waiting for the next order to phone in at their small Tokyo office.  A plump, jovial  office manager handles appointments and makes sure special requests are honored (the right girl for the right job), billing rates set in advance and assignation locations cleared.  The small staff (six young women/one young man) on hand (or on-call) to fill any & all requests.  We largely stick with two of the girls: Dominatrix Sawa Suzuki (treating her work like acting opportunities; whipping, piercing, turning her clients into literal bootlickers), while less kinky call-girl Reiko Kataoka sticks to the basics.  Meet-ups so frank (bouncy fucks or rock-‘em/sock-'em pain-for-pleasure fetish), it plays with a comic edge.  Advertent?  Or are we just self-distancing?  Elsewise, personal life filters in (love & marriage), climaxing in a theatrical orgasm, a play put on by an amateur company the staff has joined, supported by the mob who also seem to work as protectors.  The show an all hands on deck production; immediately followed by a swingin’ first-night/backstage cast party.  With a script co-written by famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki (his full-frontal nude shots pop up thru the film), and pacey, colorful direction from the prolific Banmei Takahashi, the film leaves no pornographic aftertaste.  Indeed, no aftertaste of any kind,

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *No blurring for the men, either, but none needed as they remain discretely covered by fundoshi, traditional Japanese male underwear.

LA FINESTRA SUL LUNA PARK / THE WINDOW TO LUNA PARK (1957)

Best-known for lighter fare (often with an edge of social criticism), here Italian director Luigi Comencini reaches back a couple of decades to channel a Neo-Realist vibe, specially Vittorio De Sica’s.  Not just any De Sica classic, either, but the most famous one, BICYCLE THIEVES; and with that film’s main writer Suso Cecchi D'Amico on board.  Another father/son story, even the ages similar, though these two leads considerably spiffed up: Father not gaunt & defeated, but a big, strong handsome guy (with a temper), home after the death of his young wife (hit by a truck crossing a street in Rome); the son no funny-looking urchin, but a tousle-haired kid with more attitude than love for a Dad he hardly knows.  Raised by grandparents who let his school grades slip, and tagging around with a surrogate father who makes a bare living with odd-jobs, the situation is further complicated since the mother and this ‘Uncle’ developed serious, if unconsummated, feelings for each other.  No surprise where this is going, confidently put across by Comencini.  Even so, at best, it’s no more than a reasonable facsimile of De Sica.  Like the films some critics accuse De Sica of making: soft & sentimental, with convenient character development.  None of these faults even remotely true of De Sica, but entirely true of Comencini.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Naturally, BICYCLE THIEVES/’48, beautifully restored on Criterion; avoid Public Domain editions which are often titled THE BICYCLE THIEF.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/bicycle-thieves-1948.html

THE GIANT GILA MONSTER (1959)

Typical low-budget (very low-budget) late ‘50s, over-sized, hungry monster movie, with a beast showing up to terrorize a small-town.  Last year’s THE BLOB/’58 a sure inspiration.  For once, our carnivorous entity neither a radioactive experiment gone wrong nor some creature from Outer Space, but merely some genetic growth error.  Not the sort of film you expect to get the full fine-grained restoration treatment it’s been given by Film Masters on DVD.  (An ironically named company?  And is this sort of grungy film helped or hurt by a pristine print?  Discuss.)  Under occasional director Ray Kellogg (normally a busy Hollywood visual effects vet) and legit lenser Wilfrid M. Cline, the Gila is enlarged with the simplest of tricks: dollhouse sized models of buildings & cars; and a terrarium for ‘location’ close-ups.  The effect wouldn’t scare or convince a toddler.  What is interesting is the most unthreatening gang of high school hot-rodders ever seen in a teen-oriented pic; garage mechanic lead Don Sullivan, who writes Christian ‘Pop’ tunes for his invalid kid sister and his dance party peers; and his uncomfortably close relationship with middle-aged sheriff Fred Graham whom he helps out at the drop of a hat.  Meant as a surrogate father relationship, it feels mighty creepy as played.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  And what gives with the John Ford connection in the film?  Producer Ken Curtis, a Ford regular and married at the time to Ford daughter Barbara, he’d produced and starred in the previous film from this group (THE KILLER SHREWS/’59 - not seen here).  While this film’s main comic reliever is Shug Fisher, another Ford regular.  (Particularly memorable in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE/’62.)  Did Curtis invite Ford to have an early look.  What the hell would the old man have made of it?  (Then again, Ford did exec produce KING KONG follow up MIGHTY JOE YOUNG/’49.)

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE / LA DOUBLE VIE DE VÉRONIQUE (1991)

Polish-born writer/director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s calling-card film; not his best (that’d be TROIS COULEURS: BLEU/’93), but plenty mesmerizing/confounding, with subconscious logic replacing normal narrative design.  The story involves two protagonists (one French/one Polish) who, a bit like the Holy Trinity*, are also one.  Polish Veronique (Irène Jacob, a young Ingrid Bergman type), who takes a miraculously fast ride from amateur choir member to soaring soprano classical soloist within days before being felled at her debut by a heart ailment.  (Or is it the high tessitura?)  While simultaneously, Parisian Veronique (still Irène Jacob) is more acted upon than acting in a metaphysical tale that brings her tru-love thru the psychic powers of an admiring Children’s Books author.  He ‘pulls’ her to a train station  restaurant meet-cute thru brain waves . . . or something.  It all seems perfectly logical while you watch, as if Wong Kar-Wai’s visual æsthetics were being realized before the fact by a Pole in Paris.  The film, more program music than program, as compelling as ever.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *And speaking of Trinities, Kieslowski’s early film BLIND CHANCE/’87, gives us three takes on one storyline.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/przypadek-blind-chance-1981.html

A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST (1934)

The filming is downright primitive under Christy Cabanne’s non-interventionist helming in this Monogram Poverty Row production of Gene Stratton-Porter once popular novel.  (Five filmings from 1924 to 1990.)  But perhaps raw & obvious is the right way to go on this rural Pollyana tale of hard-luck kid Elnora Comstock (Marian Marsh) whose embittered, careworn mother (Louise Dresser) blames the child for the premature death of the father, drowned in the swamp on his way home for the birth.  Largely raised by the kindly, childless neighbors over the years, and by two rich benefactors (a local dowager and a sparkling Eastern college boy) who take pity on the girl, she rises above schoolyard taunts and tattered homemade clothes to graduation honors and beyond, even finding peace with her mother.  No surprises in how the story turns out, but plenty of surprises in Monogram putting together such a top-notch cast.  Admittedly mostly stars on their way down, but Marsh had been starring with John Barrymore & Richard Barthelmess just a couple of years back; Dresser co-starring with Will Rogers in last year’s STATE FAIR.  Ditto Henry B. Walthall earlier this year, in John Ford’s JUDGE PRIEST.  While Ralph Morgan (brother of Frank) usually busy @ Fox.  How’d Monogram ever afford them?  (But worth it, the film apparently did a lot of business.)  Currently available only in subfusc prints, but pretty interesting on many levels . . .  other than moviemaking!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  To see Dresser really go to town on this sort of role, try THE GOOSE WOMAN/’25.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/08/goose-woman-1925.html

L'ARMATA BRANCALEONE / FOR LOVE AND GOLD (1966)

Mario Monicelli’s warts and all (but mostly warts) spoof on noble knights and all things mediæval could have been titled VITTORIO GASSMAN AND THE HOLY GRAIL.  Twenty years before Monty Python got there, this large-scale farce on muck & loyalty still comes across with its big battles (bloody & bonkers) and a ridiculous, yet oddly believable, view of the pre-renaissance Middle Ages as human comedy.  Gassman, principled master to a motley crew of wandering swordsman (and one Jewish peddler) are heading to his home-base castle at Aurocastro; if they can only get there between warfare (Saracen Pirates; rival Christian Brotherhoods) and the tempting Waiting Ladies (engaged virgins to demur; devouring dominatrix to try on) they come across.  Epic Euro-comedies usually aim low and miss, but Monicelli aims down & dirty while taking the high road.  (Past pics include BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET/’58 and THE ORGANIZER/’63*, so dumb comedy not his style.)  No doubt, a lot of laughs get lost in (subtitle) translation, dialect riffs only native Italians will spot*, but more than enough comes thru for the non-cognoscenti.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Monicelli’s masterpiece, THE ORGANIZER, criminally under-seen.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/i-compagni-organizer-1963.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Popular enough in Italy for a sequel : BRANCALEONE ALLE CROCIATE/’70 (not seen here).  The original (recently restored) barely got a token Stateside release in 1981.

TRAMPS (2016)

A trifle from NYC indie writer/director Adam Leon about a pair of twenty-somethings, would-be grifters, strangers who meet cute (and anonymously) after a suitcase swap on a subway platform goes wrong.  He’s bagman/she’s getaway driver; attractive antagonists who’ll awkwardly discover romance. The film might be a Sundance submission that missed the cut (was it?), now streaming to help indie film fans over the long wait before the next festival.  Callum Turner, dropping his British accent, is a would-be chef living at home (in Queens?) with his Polish mom (she runs an informal horse-betting parlor from her living room) and an older brother who needs a favor: drop everything and cover me on a ‘bag swap.’  Naturally, Turner takes the wrong suitcase from some innocent person and winds up on a hunt for the ‘right’ suitcase with getaway driver Grace Van Patten.   It’s a long night’s journey for two soulmates, ending with everything back in place and a first big step together as a couple.  Leon shows a jagged, short attention-span style, calming down as we go along, but can only do so much to get us to care about these self-centered petty thieves.  The only way these stories work, especially when the tone is this light, is for the leads to win us over with natural charm.  Something Turner pulls off with a naturally friendly appeal, but Van Patten doesn’t show.  Too hard in her approach.  Perhaps a less informal filming style could give Leon the chance to literally light up her face in a way that might let us see what he sees in her.  Instead, she’s a pain.  And the best scene in the film is a brief funny anti-climax when we discover what was hidden in that briefcase, and how utterly unnecessary all the skullduggery was.  A real ‘shaggy dog’ story.

JERICHO OF SCOTLAND YARD (2005)

Another British police procedural?  Well, yes and no as it’s different than 90% of the others.  Also better.*  Instead of the current default model: troubled lead investigator/less quirky apprentice seconding/impenetrable North UK accents/equally impenetrable clues that don’t add up; this one is both set in the late-fifties/early-sixties, and to some extent uses the filming style of that era.  Though looser in camera technique and franker in violence & sexual content, but finding a bright period color palette with grain to match and multi-composition within the frame you might have seen from a British director like Mike Hodges (though he’s more ‘70s) or in the cycle of mid-‘60s Hollywood detective films that might have starred Paul Newman, James Garner or even those late-career urban crime dramas Frank Sinatra walked thru in a failed attempt to stay with-it and relevant on the big screen.  Like a particularly nasty one imaginatively titled THE DETECTIVE/’68.  And with Robert Lindsay in the lead here, we’re not so far from '60s Sinatra physically.  Only this film is good.  Those late Sinatra films are stinkers; out-of-touch squares trying to be hip.  They made four of these JERICHO films*, each about 100", only the first seen here, and it follows a typical format of having two seemingly unrelated crimes (one murder/one kidnaping) turning out to be connected when Lindsay and his team of vets and a beginner are pulled from the murder case of a Black ‘nobody’  to the kidnaping of a rich immigrant whose fortune, wife and kids are all facade/no foundation.  Physical period detail and (far less seen) gestural period acting given unusually close attention, not just costumes & cars, but posture & the entitled habits of social position.  The cast is all good (Tom Burke exceptional as a too loyal son), but it’s Lindsay’s show.  Busy in the UK, but not much seen here once a promising Stateside career collapsed after his Tony-winning B’way turn in ME AND MY GIRL was stopped in its tracks by Carl Reiner in the disastrous  BERT RIGBY, YOU'RE A FOOL/’89.  It’s never too late.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The quality of these Brit-Crime dramas hardly seems to matter as they’re all so similar.  Only the ones that turn too cute for words becoming truly unwatchable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Three more of these were made, so I guess that makes for a Quadruple-Bill.  Hopefully they're as good as this one.   (ADDENDUM - 01/24/26 : They’re not.)

COMPANY BUSINESS (1991)

A critical & commercial write-off for M-G-M on release, writer/director Nicholas Meyer’s Spy vs Spy Cold War dramedy now seems a modest, but tasty treat, an amuse-bouche for sophisticated palettes.  Meyer, who wrote THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION/’76 before saving STAR TREK twice (WRATH OF KHAN/’82; UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY/’91), has an unusual ability to hold tone across serious & comic boundaries.  (Not the same as being semi-serious or semi-comic.)  Here, refreshing a favorite old standby: the under-appreciated vet who gets a second chance unaware he’s being brought back not to succeed, but to fail.  Naturally, he proves them wrong, screwing up their devious plans by coming thru with the goods.  This one has former CIA man Gene Hackman, currently reduced to freelance industrial espionage gigs, called back to Washington headquarters to handle a Russian spy swap.  Mikhail Baryshnikov’s the token incarcerated spy Gene’s escorting back to Soviet agents in Germany (along with two million in cash as sweetener), or is until they smell something fishy just before handoff, escaping on a dangerous (or is it merry?) Euro-chase to stay alive and find out what’s really going on.  With top-tier tech work on location (mostly Berlin underground and Paris above) from D. P. Gerry Fisher; Ken Adam production design, Michael Kamen score (listen for a bit Tchaikovsky arranged for balalaika) and a super supporting cast, it’s easier than usual to follow along, twists and character reveals very satisfying.  No surprise with Meyer in charge, his main fault is being too clever for his own good, but the years have made this civilized entertainment only more civilized.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Baryshnikov, no longer a kid at 43, looks and acts better than in anything else he did that didn’t focus on dance, hated the film and never made another feature.  Pity.

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY (2017)

Late in the day gay-coming-of-age story: late for our mid-20s protagonist, late in a film cycle on the subject, and now nearly a decade after its release, but so well observed and acted, it hardly matters.  We’re in Yorkshire, England (where writer/director Francis Lee is from), farm country where a young Josh O’Connor (his face not quite settled, other than those protruding ears) is running the small family sheep farm by default, and nearly by himself, as his father is invalided after a stroke and Mom busy running the house.  He’s increasingly miserable, drunk most nights after pub visits where he’s up for shagging a local bar-mate as long as it doesn’t require more from him than the sheep get when he thrusts his arm up their bum as part of his farm duties.  But a temp hire of a slightly older/far more mature Rumanian immigrant (Alec Secareanu) upsets his routine because the stranger is happy to get the work, preternaturally gifted with the animals, and an (unconscious?) object of lust self-denied.  Met with unreasonable belligerence simply for being a good worker, the resentment explodes during an isolated spring lambing trip where a shove becomes a fight and the fight becomes a sort of mutual rape.  (I know, an old cliché, but the sex for a change looks something like sex.)  Naturally, the relationship doesn’t run smoothly (unspoken love at first fuck?), while an unexpectedly upbeat ending feels whipped up for drama and an easy exit.  But the handsome locations and leads make it easy enough to accept.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Lots of misleading comparisons with BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN/’05 on this one.  Instead, try MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE/’85, mostly for the evolving relationship between Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/my-beautiful-laindrette-1985.html

ACCENT ON LOVE (1941)

Highly prized/highly paid, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is probably the best known of the Hollywood Ten, the ‘card carrying’ members of the Communist Party who went to jail in the late ‘40s rather than ‘cooperate’ (‘naming names’ of other members) to Washington’s HCUA investigators.  The public justification was that they were, as a group under Russian orders, slipping Commie Doctrine and 'The Party Line' into film scripts to warp weak American minds.  (And good luck finding anything more dangerous than a communal rooming house for single women to share during the wartime housing shortage.  Gals voting on common space issues?  The horror!)  If they’d only gone back to 1941, they might have salivated over this ‘original’ Trumbo story (heavily indebted to Frank Capra’s film adaptation of Kaufman/Hart’s YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38; its stupid, lazy screenplay credited to John Francis Larkin) which touches a Marxist third-rail in having George Montgomery’s junior investment exec, toss fat-cat Capitalist father-in-law Thurston Hall to the side so he can be his own man, working with his hands (and a shovel) digging ditches for the WPA and sharing a tenement flat with Portuguese foreman J. Carroll Naish & famille.   (Carroll also Marxist, but in looks & accent Chico Marxist!)  Montgomery also dumping his wife for fetching immigrant Osa Massen.  All living in a crumbling tenement apartment building owned by (wait for it) father-in-law Hall.  Naturally, this being Hollywood, an overnight stay at the flat opens Pop’s eyes to inequality.  He even drinks a toast to FDR.  Yikes!  On the other hand, the film has a rare pro-divorce message.  (Take that Catholic Joe Breen, head of the Production Code.)  The film, so chock-a-block with touchy issues, it’s a shame execution such a washout under director Ray McCarey, kid brother of the great Leo McCarey.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Ray McCarey, starting in comedy shorts like big brother Leo, but then going on to make tons of forgettable features, unlike Leo who in his early shorts put Laurel & Hardy together and then relatively few films, but some were classics like THE AWFUL TRUTH and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’45  before drying up and offering MY SON JOHN/’52, possibly the most ridiculous of all the anti-commie fear mongering pics.  It’s the one where mom Helen Hayes thinks son Robert Walker has turned ‘red’ when she finds out he’s been playing tennis.  (Maybe Leo was doing penance for his brother’s soul.)   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-son-john.html

CONTEST:  *Ray McCarey not the only less prominent kid brother working on this movie.  Name the other creative sibling with a more famous older brother to win a MAKQUIBS Write-Up of a streaming pic of your choice . . . assuming I can get it online!

TEHRAN TABOO (2017)

Hard to imagine a more timely moment for writer/director/animator Ali Soozandeh’s (Iranian-born, now living-in-exile) look at religious hypocrisy & sex (passion or paid-for) in a tradition-challenged modern Islamic State.  Structured in the form of a loosely bound relationship relay among a cross-section of twenty-somethings: prostitute with kid in tow; techno-musician pushing against old forms & disinterest*; pregnant wife with two illegal abortions behind her; deflowered fiancée desperate for a hymen repair job; not the slice of Iranian life you’d expect.  Sexual bartering used and abused by taxi drivers, landlords & pencil-pushers, rising all the way up to doctors and judges.  A constant threat from government enforcers, zealots with  military or religious agendas, fronting a second line of offense behind the daily offers of bribes in cash and/or sexual favors.  A societal pressure cooker that forces top talent to flee and those who can’t to take to the streets . . . as currently playing out.  All of it despairing and believable, presented in a sort of modern digitally-assisted rotoscope technique (filmed live-action manipulated into animated form) that has its pluses (buildings, backgrounds and objects well suited to the system with interesting color-sweetened transitions) and minuses (people in general and faces in particular losing individuality the closer you get).  A pity as some of the twists and reveals that connect separate story strands together lend a satisfying puzzle-solving aspect, but only deliver a fraction of the emotion they might have.  Worthy, in a good way; but Soozandeh has yet to put out another feature.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Ali N. Askin’s wide-ranging score a big plus.

CAR WASH (1976)

Coming out between JAWS in’75 and STAR WARS in ‘77, this little Black-oriented ensemble comedy (a day-in-the-life of an urban car wash business) may have broken as many cultural Hollywood norms as those films did financially in reconfiguring Summer Blockbuster release patterns.  And while, unlike JAWS and STAR WARS, there have been relatively few follow-up think pieces or anniversary reissues to boost its rep (it’s a lot of fun, but more important for its influence), the film deserves credit for bringing Blaxploitation tropes & attitudes to the Hollywood ‘Majors,’ not as sidebar action, but as the main event.  Plus,  its all-black R&B soundtrack, which the largely Black working crew pace themselves to on the cleaning line, was even more influential, especially in using disco-friendly cuts.  (Note that COOLEY HIGH/’75, the previous feature from director Michael Schultz, a rare Black in that position at the time, was from bargain basement A.I.P.  This film, from Universal, if IMDb can be believed, had about the same 7 mill budget as JAWS.)  A series of tidy endings wrapping things up for all the main characters doesn’t show Joel Schumacher’s original screenplay at its best, but the gay friendly attitude he snuck in (under the guise of the usual gay panic reactions) was also new, if less quick to catch on.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Schumacher (White, Jewish, Gay) got his start with three Black-themed scripts, SPARKLE/’76; CAR WASH; THE WIZ/’78.  Then fetishized BATMAN & ROBIN/’97.  So much for ‘write what you know.’ 

TROOPER HOOK (1957)

In the last of six films together, Joel McCrea finally got top-billing over co-star Barbara Stanwyck.  It was hardly worth the wait.  A modest, by-the-numbers indie Western with an anti-racist message typical of the period (Native Americans doing double-duty as a less politically contentious stand-in for Blacks), but, in the hands of director Charles Marquis Warren, it’s largely undistinguished (or should that be indistinguishable?) over a flood racially progressive Westerns.  And while Warren had an undeniable knack for developing long-running tv Western series (GUNSMOKE, THE VIRGINIAN, RAWHIDE), a feel for the pace & variety needed for features was missing.  As if his imagination was as compressed as the gray-scale favored on old tv Westerns.  (Lucky here to have uncompressed cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks.)   Hard not to think of half a dozen Western specialists who might have made more on this story of terrorizing Indian Chief Nanchez (Rodolfo Acosta) whose capture frees Stanwyck’s kidnaped ‘squaw’ of the last eight years and their little boy.  Now McCrea’s soon-to-retire Cavalry Sargent, charged with delivering them to her ‘real’ husband (John Dehner), finds he’s growing attached to them in his gruff, military manner.  McCrea particularly good working thru the tough/tender clichés;, Stanwyck having a harder time, especially after a blown introduction where she looks powdered and neat as a pin amid Indians taken after a military loss.  She only partially recovers; and you can’t help noticing all the missed dramatic opportunities.  But credit for a lack of condescension these progressive ‘50s films offered as corrective to decades of Indian slaughter.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Treating the American Indian as frontier terrorist, though common enough in programmers & Western serials, is seen less in A-list films than you may imagine.  They tended to mourn the disappearance of America’s ‘noble savage’ as if they were a species gone extinct.  Which attitude more dismissive?  Discuss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  On DVD or streaming, TROOPER usually defaults to Academy ratio (1 : 1.37), as it was shot.  But the film was designed to be cropped down (via screen scrims or an aperture plate in the projector) to about 1.77.  So, if your set up allows, feel free to enlarge one step.  Just don’t use the anamorphic setting.

HOUSEWIFE (1934)

Unheralded home vs work love triangle (interloper Bette Davis said of this one: Dear God!  What a horror!) sees over-burdened housewife Ann Dvorak making do on George Brent’s puny salary while fortifying him with ambition to break out of his office manager position at a mid-sized Chicago advertising agency.  At home, she gets the worst of it, while at work entitled husband Brent catches it from his demanding, do-nothing boss.  But all changes when former high school pal Bette Davis reenters his life after eight years in New York becoming a big time ad copywriter.  She’s just joined his firm with a salary that dwarfs his.  Humiliating.  Taking a chance on himself (but only upon Dvorak’s encouragement and secret savings), his new company turns the corner just in time, soon big enough for him to hire Davis!  And while he’s openly pulled from his new lux home by an emboldened Davis, Dvorak also has a new admirer in older top client John Halliday.  None of this played out in the usual hand-wringing manner, but met head-on with both women knowing their strengths and weaknesses.  Quite an interesting angle, and retaining a Pre-Code attitude in spite of coming in (just) Post-Code.  It freshens a lot of the clichés.  (Well, not all of them, there’s a kid in the pic to catalyze a happy ending.  Boo!)  If only director Alfred E. Green weren’t such a stick-in-the-mud, the proto-feminist elements might be more celebrated.   With Davis displaying a great slouch, but still in her brief platinum blonde period.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  One moment holding this back demands a BlackFace ALERT!  It comes during one of the film’s highlights, an hilariously awful radio program for Halliday’s classy cosmetics company which hits rock bottom when a pair of lousy BlackFace comedians come on.  But then something fascinating happens.  None of the four principals had advance notice (they’re watching a final rehearsal) and, plainly disgusted by the act, immediately demand a complete rewrite.  (Ironically, director Green’s last big hiit?  THE BlackFace friendly JOLSON STORY/’46.)  It may be the first rejection of the still highly popular practice in film.  Indeed, last year’s Al Jolson starrer, WONDER BAR/’33, also from Warner Bros., features what may be the most infuriating BlackFace ‘Numbo’ ever filmed as its showiest musical sequence.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/01/wonder-bar-1933.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention to meat prices in 1934.  Listen as Brent bemoans yet another leg of lamb dinner as beef and chicken are too expensive on the budget Dvorak is so careful to hold to.   (Just bear in mind, lamb in the ‘30s likely to be closer to mutton than what we’d get today.)

THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN (2019)

Appalling.  Even those who go for drippy Boy and his Dog stories (here an adult with dreams of Formula One racing) have limits on just how much soggy manipulation & cheap sentiment they can take.*  Director Simon Curtis, who followed this with a pair of harmless DOWNTON ABBEY pics, seems able enough, but this is an embarrassment from its wet nose to its floppy tail.  Milo Ventimiglia, a car mechanic trying to move into professional racing, adopts a puppy on a whim, unaware his golden retriever, voiced as a croaky old soul by Kevin Costner, is a fount of cracker-barrel commonsense, user-friendly philosophy and medical expertise.  Lucky for Milo, he can’t hear the loyal pooch rattle on; we’re less lucky.  Enzo (that’s the dog’s name, as in Ferrari) narrates incessantly, and is full of shit, metaphorically and literally.  (Gary Cole’s mean FIL gets the mess on his new white carpet.  ‘Good dog.’)  With story beats courtesy of some over-priced film school, the tears and triumphs come with monotonous regularity, but can’t hide a certain awkwardness from the cast who, to their credit, can smell the equivalent of a Hallmark film as surely as a dog can smell a rotisserie chicken thru a paper bag.  (As wife/mother, Amanda Seyfried gets off easy, coming in late/leaving early.)  And just to add insult to injury, the film sends us home with an uplifting hint of reincarnation.  Enzo Lives!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  It’s always had something of a rotten rep, but Tom Hanks’ TURNER & HOOCH/’89 is a pretty irresistible (adult) boy and his dog film.  (Lots of drool, though.)

DARK JOURNEY (1937)

Backed by  Alexander Korda’s glossy production, Victor Saville’s smoothly muscular direction and especially as lit by dream-team cinematographers Georges Périnal & Harry Stradling, Vivien Leigh looks spectacularly pretty in this stylish WWI romance & espionage number.  She’s second-billed to Conrad Veidt, in a rare English language romantic lead (an odd couple in many ways, even in height where he towers over her by nearly a foot), the both of them Spies in Disguise working undercover near the end of the war out of neutral Sweden.  She runs a posh dress shop and brings in coded secrets woven into the patterns & hems of the latest Paris styles; he’s a wealthy Baron who left Germany to live the safe, luxurious, bachelor’s life.  Only he’s secretly running German covert ops out of Sweden.  Lovers and enemies, but not coming to a head since neither knows the full story . . . for a while.  Glamorous stuff, and with more action than you might think, mostly in the opening and closing scenes.  Some of the model ships at sea less than convincing, as was typical at the time, the action far more effective at closer range.  How different this one would have been a year later when background rumors of war were growing louder by the day.  So, in addition to a love story, and its resolution, you get a feel for the attitudes just before the political tide turned as another World War became inevitable.

PHINEAS AND FERB: STAR WARS (2014)

No doubt you’ve heard, LucasFilm is vowing to ‘fix’ the STAR WARS franchise . . . again.  (Read all about in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/movies/shawn-levy-star-wars-stranger-things.html)  Picking up the mantle/albatross is producer/director Shawn Levy (NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM, STRANGER THINGS, DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE, many more).  Of course, diehard Star Warriors have been demanding a return to ‘canonical principles’ since the third film (Episode #6 to true-believers), RETURN OF THE JEDI/’83, took  the saga to the toy shop; while oddly, this recent bout of hand-wringing comes hot on the heels of ANDOR/’22, the best received addition to the canon in decades.   Still, if you want to see what it’s all about, you could do worse than to watch this affectionate/deeply fun hook-up with the long-running kids’ animated series, P&F.  It’s a delirious burlesque of the original plot with only slightly more detailed animation than usual for the series, the show’s characters larded into a relatively faithful ‘New Hope’ storyline with absurd ease.  (And plenty of Easter Eggs nestled inside.  Like The Rite of Spring, less a Stravinsky than a FANTASIA homage, bumping into the classic John Williams score.)  But only those who get this on DVD will get the chance to see what’s gone wrong with STAR WARS as Disney’s stuck extended clips/trailers for a continuation to the animated CLONE WARS called REBELS*, and it’s a drab, self-serious, CGI-hideous sample of the problem.  Whereas the cartoony special is all airy, goofy fun in support of the action-oriented set pieces, REBELS is a downer.   Back in 1977, when A NEW HOPE was just called STAR WARS and in its first-run, the gasps, cheers, laughs, danger, F/X and heroics tumbled over each other cheek by jowl on the big screen to exponential effect.  Maybe instead of market research, the current LucasFilm execs could simply get this DVD.  A Disney product, I'd bet they could get a free copy via inter-office mail pouch.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Perhaps too much attention paid to Star Wars fanboys who mostly like CLONE and REBELS.  But if you want to expand the audience beyond acolytes . . .  Well, good luck, Mr. Levy.