THE LAST SUNSET (1961)

After officially emerging from the ‘50s Hollywood Blacklist of Card-Carrying-Communists (and those who may simply have rubbed shoulders with one) in 1960 with the one-two-punch of SPARTACUS and EXODUS, longtime top-tier screenwriter Dalton Trumbo* solidified his renewed standing with this solid Western for Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas who also produced.  Based on a novel by Howard Rigsby*, it’s a neat piece of plotting that can’t nail the ending, but still worthy under Robert Aldrich's firm control; stately, but flaring up whenever Joseph Cotten’s ex-Confederate officer hits the bottle and in some imaginative action under clouds of dust, courtesy of cinematographer Ernest Laszlo.  The main story has Sheriff Rock Hudson following Kirk Douglas into Mexico with a warrant for his arrest on a murder charge.  Douglas, not only escaping the law, but trying to rekindle an old relationship with Cotten’s wife Dorothy Malone, stuck on their cattle ranch with pretty young daughter Carol Lynley.  Hudson & Douglas make unlikely hires to get the herd back to the States for sale . . . and Douglas to trial.  Trumbo can’t quite finesse this major plot point, but, hey, there’s a movie to be made.  Hudson near his best here, much helped by having to play with an actor as naturally theatrical as Douglas, the ball coming back harder than he throws it.  (Benefits also work in the opposite direction.)  And the cattle drive sees shifting allegiances as Malone leans in to Rock while daughter Lynley falls for Douglas.  With a good twist up ahead to drive the finale after having survived rough terrain, a trio of mutinous cow hands (Jack Elam, Neville Brand, James Westmoreland) and a Capitalist tribe of Indians.  Trumbo no doubt delighted by these smart Native traders.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Check out the three-inch heels on Kirk’s boots.  There’s a clear shot near the end on a wharf.  Kirk usually touchy on the subject even allows 6'4" Rock to describe him as a short guy.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *TRUMBO/'15.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/trumbo-2015.html

CONTEST:  *Either Rigsby or Trumbo must have had Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES in mind when they were figuring out two major plot points.  Figure out the connection and put it in Comments to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choosing.

LA FEMME INFIDÈLE / THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE (1969)

Often beginning his films with little inflection and just-the-facts directness, gourmet gagster Claude Chabrol could come off as the Jack Webb of the French Nouvelle Vague.  Often as not, this tactic was a fake-out meant to leave you off-balance, uncertain where you were being led till you’d digested the first act.  By then, you’d know if you were watching good or bad Chabrol.  This one of the good ones.  Stéphane Audran (then married to Chabrol) is the beautiful, blank wife of well-heeled businessman Michel Bouquet; working in Paris/living with their 10-yr-old boy in Versailles.  Right now, Bouquet’s visiting mother is about to head home, but not without first telling her son to lose a little weight.  Seems rude, but Maman has picked up on the ‘off’ vibe between the couple.  And a stealth phone call by Audran cues us in to some sort of relationship troubles before the pair share a joyless night out with friends, highlighting a couple at cross purposes.  Soon after, Bouquet hires a P.I.; Audran disappears every other afternoon; an affair of no great passion is confirmed; and civilized confrontation turns on a dix sous piece into violence.  The mix of family comfort and discomfort; smiling lies & unpleasant truths; married & unmarried beds of iniquity.  Like the jigsaw puzzle the young son is trying to complete, there’s a piece missing in this relationship.  Then two detectives knock at the door after dinner.  Death and domesticity.  Chabrol couldn’t always be bothered, but when he could, he knew how to tighten the screws.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  And dig how Pierre Jansen’s atonal score keeps you off-balance.

CONTEST:  Along with fellow Nouvelle Vague-er Éric Rohmer, Chabrol co-authored one of the first books to make the case for Alfred Hitchcock as more than ‘mere’ entertainer. (As if that alone weren’t enough!  Ah, the French.  See: HITCHCOCK; THE FIRST FORTY-FOUR FILMS.)  So, no surprise to see Chabrol lift a major scene from a major Hitchcock film here.  Use the Comment Box to name the film and the scene to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choice.

LOVE AFFAIR (1939)

Starting as shipboard rom-com between solo passengers on their way to NYC, Charles Boyer (Continental Rake) and Irene Dunne (ex-club singer/current publishing secretary), the two  engaged, just not to each other.  (And both peerless.)  Shifting to dramatic romance and a decisive meet-up six months later at the Empire State Building, Leo McCarey’s genre mash-up looks better than it has in seven decades when R.K.O.’s original film elements were lost in transit to 20th/Fox where McCarey was remaking it for Cary Grant & Deborah Kerr as AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER/'57, a notably inferior effort.  It got a lot of attention when some of the plot and a bit of the film showed in Nora Ephron’s typically anodyne SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE/’93.*  Now, with the 1939 original restored by Lobster Films & MoMA from McCarey’s donated 35mm nitrate print (check out the before & after on Criterion) you can at long last really see it.  McCarey, in the sweet spot of his career, between THE AWFUL TRUTH/’37 and GOING MY WAY/’44, seems unable to put a foot wrong.  His loose, improvisatorial style, built in his early silent comedy days, entirely intuitive, finessing pivotal moments like the lovers’ visit with Boyer’s failing grandmother, to unexpected emotional levels.  McCarey’s pay-to-play Catholicism held from treacle by his Personal Trinity: Faith, Sex and Comedy.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Enough attention to generate an unhappy third version: 1994's LOVE AFFAIR with Warren Beatty & Annette Bening.

CONTEST:  How does Elvis Presley figure into this?  A correct answer earns your choice of movie for a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up.

INFERNO (1953)

Weeks before 20th/Fox introduced CinemaScope (‘the miracle you see without glasses!’) to the public with THE ROBE, helping to speed an end to the brief early ‘50s 3-D craze, they released one of the better films made in the process.  Doubly ironic, since, like so many 3-D pics at the time, INFERNO largely distributed ‘flat,’ in 2-D.  Another POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE infidelity/murder story (though with different outcomes), the film’s mostly a three-hander, and good even in 2-D, with the guilty pleasure bonus of watching the action-packed last reel (actually two separate reels running in synch) hoarding most of the objects thrown directly at the camera.  Fun spotting even in 2-D.  (Make it a drinking game!). Journeyman director Roy Ward Baker runs a cool, clean narrative as lethal lovers Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan try to get away with the murder of Robert Ryan, Fleming’s rich, older, selfish husband, abandoning him in the desert with a broken leg before carefully setting the scene to make it look like his own doing.  Only wily Ryan proves too stubborn, too ornery, and too self-reliant to die.  And the longer he can keep going, the more chance he’ll be rescued.  There’s a good cast in support (Carl Betz, Henry Hull, Larry Keating), with cleverly worked out falling objects for those 3-D effect shots, and the great Lucien Ballard to shoot them.  Along with LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN/’45, one of the rare TechniColor & sunshine noirs, even rarer with 3-D.

CONTEST:  Explain why these early ‘50s 3-D films always ran about 80 minutes (with half-point intermissions) to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streaming film of your choice.  (NOTE: Professional film projectionists ineligible.)

DR. NO (1962)

The most recent James Bond film/s (in case you forgot, it was split into two parts) goes on five & a quarter indigestible hours.  This first James Bond film (now an improbable senior citizen) runs an hour 50 minutes and plays better than ever.  Long considered a trial run next to its two top-rated follow-ups (FROM RUSSIAN WITH LOVE/’63; GOLDFINGER/’64), a look at the refreshed print proves it holds its own in the early Bond pecking order.  With a just unpacked quality from semi-regular Bond director Terence Young on a laundry list of Bond iconography.  From bloodied gun-barrel kickoff and Monty Norman’s hot electric guitar-lick theme; into Maurice Binder’s opening credits; that unstirred martini; brief banter with Miss Moneypenny; chemin de fer at the card table, the formal introduction ‘Bond . . . James Bond’; Ken Adams sets; Richard Maibaum script & quips.  (Plus hardly a process shot in sight, the bane of '70s BOND, none till the 50" mark.)  And, of course, Sean Connery’s Bond; classic & classy, but with an indelible touch of working-class bully-boy in his cruel curled lip.  Only two missed elements of much importance: no John Barry score* and no final credit notification saying ‘James Bond Will Be Back.’  The storyline (wacko genius, think Asian Captain Nemo, hopes to disrupt NASA’s latest moon-prep launch from his secret ocean fortress near Jamaica) as clever & lean as Connery’s never surpassed Bond.*  Both story and character driven, the film blessedly bloat-free (bloat crept in early, starting with THUNDERBALL/’65.  And note, those early films came out every year, no six+ year wait between.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Per that famous Bond theme: John Barry (and his band) credited with the rendition, and Barry long claimed partial authorship. 

CONTEST:  *People also think Connery the hairiest of all Bonds.  (Not on his head!  Look close, it’s already going,)  He’s not!  Name the most hirsute 007 to win your choice of a MAKSQUIBS writeup. 

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!

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (2025)

With the notable exceptions of CABARET and CHICAGO*, B’way lyricist Fred Ebb & composer John Kander mostly turned out near misses that had good concepts, catchy scores, short runs and cult cast albums to keep their reps alive.  KISS, probably the best of these, still comes up short in Bill Condon’s heartfelt, but commercially DOA film adaptation.  Based on Manuel Puig’s novel (as was the 1985 William Hurt/Raul Julia film, uncredited here), it’s a sort of Queer Scheherazade with two prisoners of the Argentine military dictatorship in for Sultan and Storyteller.  Sharing a cell and an evolving friendship, Valentin, Diego Luna’s macho revolutionary political prisoner, and Molina, Tonatiuh’s effeminate informer, in on a vice charge, survive the misery of incarceration with nightly story recitations by Molina of the OTT romantic musical melodramas he loves and which now help take them out of the prison reality of  torture, poisoned food and isolation.  Under Condon (under Kander & Ebb for that matter,  the conceit only works sporadically, unsure how directly to reflect or comment.  Something the film points out all too well, highlighting the one musical number that pulls the whole concept together, ‘Where You Are.’ since it does exactly what the rest of the film only hints at doing.  Condon & Co. merely distracting when they mean to distance, in the Brechtian sense.  ‘Where You Are’ also exceptional because, while Molina is infatuated with lush TechniColor, this number, is lit & costumed to mimic glossy b&w showstoppers of the’30s,  using the natural abstraction of b&w to enhance a dialectic between audience & screen without need of forcing the conceit on us.  No complaints about the two leading men: Diego Luna’s Valentin gaining nuance and offering acceptance thru suffering; Tonatiuh’s Molina, pitched a bit high in the opening, but soon showing his best form and wide-ranging talent.  As the woman of their movie dreams (in multiple roles), Jennifer Lopez is proficient, sabotaged by leftover costume designs from Chita Rivera’s B’way run and by make-up that turns her into a wide-mouth ringer of musical comedy cult fave Dolores Gray whom you may recall from IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER/’55 and DESIGNING WOMAN/’57.*  Intentional?

LINK:  *Speaking of CHICAGO/Speaking of Dolores Gray: ‘IF,’ a comic ballad/tortured torch song (Jule Styne; Betty Comden & Adolph Green) introduced on B’way by Gray in TWO ON THE AISLE, is like a précis of CHICAGO, shrunk down from 2.5 hours to 3.5 minutes.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1XoR-fuzvY   

CONTEST:  For unknown reasons, two references to an earlier ‘concept musical,’ LADY IN THE DARK are in here.  Spot them and send your answer via our COMMENTS Box.  The first correct answer wins a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streaming film of your choice.

ALL FALL DOWN (1962)

Always in the shadow of Tennessee Williams (who he was unfavorably compared to in spite of successes COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA; PICNIC; BUS STOP), playwright William Inge died long before his current (if partial) critical reclamation.  But easy to see why he was seen as a backup Williams in Inge's adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s overwrought novel about a dysfunctional family down South.  Warren Beatty, in his arrogant pretty-boy prime, repeats the Angel of Death* he’d just played in Williams’ THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/the-roman-spring-of-mrs-stone-1961.html), but sans suspect Italian accent, as irresponsible prodigal son to suffocating mom Angela Lansbury (very Shelley Winters here) and libido-free dipso dad Karl Malden.  Brandon De Wilde (remarkably good considering) is the worshipful kid brother/family peacemaker who finally spots the feet of clay, and Eva Marie Saint is a visiting cousin who brings out a new leaf on Beatty only to discover the new growth is no different than the old.  While director John Frankenheimer, only his third feature after much tv work, can’t find a level of artifice everyone can work in, so the acting is something of a free-for-all.  For the film, hysterical playing and physically drab presentation prove a bad combination.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Next year, next big brother with feet of clay as De Wilde sees Paul Newman plain in the far superior HUD/’63.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Something our foreign poster picks right up on.  (see above)

CONTEST/LINK:  Wildly misrepresentative trailer, even for Hollywood.  Plus a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up on a streamable film of your choice if you can name the tune & the film the trailer uses as playout.  https://www.tcm.com/video/61703/all-fall-down-original-trailer

BELLS ARE RINGING (1960)

Minor, but endearing Betty Comden/Adolph Green B’way musical (Jule Styne score), written for Judy Holliday, once part of their early club act ‘The Revuers’,  Bought by M-G-M’s Arthur Freed, it turned out to be something of a last call for a generation of film legends.  For producer Freed, his last musical; for Holliday, her last film; for director Vincente Minnelli, his last M-G-M musical; for Comden & Green, their last film musical.  Little more than a showcase for Holliday, but that was enough to get Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse involved in the stage production.  The story puts Holliday in front of a switchboard at a phone answering service where she assumes different personalities to play Fairy Godmother to a gaggle of needy clients; especially Dean Martin’s struggling playwright.  He calls her ‘Mom.’  Meeting him for real, she assumes yet another identity to hide behind.  Meanwhile, boss Jean Stapleton is involved with shady bookie Eddie Foy Jr, starting up a horse betting syndicate (in code) using the answering service.  And the Vice Squad already investigating the place as a possible brothel.  Yikes!  Songs range from serviceable to tuneful to American Songbook standards (‘The Party’s Over’; ‘Just In Time’).  With this kind of show, you really had to be there for full effect.  (And how, Holliday beating both Ethel Merman and Julie Andrews for that year’s Tony Award.)  But Minnelli finds his way in by using soundstage artifice for a heightened kind of ultra-reality, and by shooting as much as possible in unusually long takes.  Both Martin and Holliday get one-take complete musical numbers that play on the big screen in ways impossible to recreate thru home video.*  But for the converted, once Holliday drops the lyrics and joyously vocalizes (at a moment of intense unhappiness) in the second verse of The Party’s Over, you’ll be a goner.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Something Comden & Green discovered when putting together a traveling show of film highlights.  They’d planned to end with, what else, Gene Kelly 'Singing in the Rain,’ only to find that it was impossible to find anything that could follow Holliday’s final number here, ‘I’m Coming Back.’  The combination of Holliday, alone on stage, seeming to be performing live directly at us, with Minnelli’s one-shot approach going against every directing rule to capture a real event happening in front of us by ignoring six or seven obvious go-to-the-close-up cuts during the four minute number is nearly unique on the big screen.  So this all but unknown number wound up as the big finish in their retrospective.

CONTEST:  Did Minnelli have an inkling this would be his M-G-M Musical finale?  Maybe, as he goes all the way back to his first M-G-M film musical for a reference he sticks in the background.  Name the film and find the reference to win our usual prize, a MAKSQUIBS film Write-Up of your choosing.

ACT ONE (1963)

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

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

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

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

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

LADY L (1965)

Another over-produced dud for Sophia Loren from movie-mogul husband Carlo Ponti.  (His creative energies must have been going into DOCTOR ZHIVAGO that year.)  Adapted as a lux romp by Peter Ustinov (he writes, directs, dubs & cameos), Romain Gary’s bestseller on exuberant turn-of-the-last-century laundress Loren who gets in over her head in political affairs (much like her MADAME SANS GÊNE/’61) when she’s mistaken for a bawd at a bawdy house by anarchist-on-the-run Paul Newman.  Hiding from authorities; bombing theaters; getting the current ‘Party Line’ at clandestine cell meetings; it might just play if only there were some romantic spark between Loren & Newman.  (Per Ustinov, instant antipathy on and off set.)  Fortunately, halfway in, David Niven appears as a Duke on the hunt for spouse & heir; finds both in Loren (literally, she’s already pregnant); and helps Newman escape to gain Loren’s hand in marriage.  Niven can’t do much for Ustinov’s epigrammatic clunkers or clear out the extras clogging the frame in yards of fabric, but at least he knows how to play the dialogue, tossing wise counsel & witticisms over his shoulder like spilt salt while Newman stomps on them and Sophia covers with a one-size-fits-all smile.  ( . . . and that size is LARGE.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One truly funny line to savor.  Upon hearing of a morning duel between the Prime Minister and a cabinet member: ‘Well, it is a coalition government.’ 

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Ustinov directed only a handful of features.  Best by far, the one he’d made most recently: BILLY BUDD/’62.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/billy-budd-1962.html

CONTEST:  Newman repeats a suspenseful set piece from this film in next year’s TORN CURTAIN/’66.  Name the situation to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choice.

THE FALL GUY (2024)

Since on some level all Hollywood films exist mainly to make money, when one solely made for that purpose seriously underperforms, that becomes the sole thing the film is about: commercial disappointment.  So it goes for director David Leitch whose last film, BULLET TRAIN/’22, also didn't deliver, but with that film's Brad Pitt, rather than this film's Ryan Gosling suffering the damage.  Gosling, fresh off BARBIE, lowers himself from subversive satirist to pandering audience-pleaser as the designated stunt man to cinema’s top action star.  He's doubly wounded on the job: Professionally when a stunt goes badly wrong; and Romantically when his injuries cause hm to be separated from the film’s D.P. & new lady love Emily Blunt (weirdly wooden).  A year and a half later, he’s called back to action by the star’s producer/manager (Hannah Waddingham, wildly overplaying) to stunt again for his longtime employer, moody, and currently missing Aaron Taylor-Johnson who's starring in Blunt’s directing debut.  The story gimmick is that he’s not just The Fall Guy (as in stunt double), but also The Fall Guy (as in being setup to take the fall on a murder rap).  With near constant stunting, you can see how this could work.  And from the hyper-active prologue thru the first act, it largely does.  But once the film’s ‘70s style Black wingman (Winston Duke) gets bumped into a mysterious shoot-‘em-up/inner-city car chase against him & Gosling, everything goes into terminal overdrive.  It’s also impossible to follow.  (Which one assumes is meant to be the film's overriding meta-joke.)  One of those films where cast & crew seem to have had a much better time making it than you will watching it.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a better stunt man movie, try HOOPER/’78 (with Burt Reynolds on good form) or, even better, Richard Rush’s seriously deranged wonder THE STUNTMAN/’80 with Peter O’Toole and the unlucky Steve Railsback.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/hooper-1978.html

CONTEST:  The film-within-the-film Blunt is directing looks like Space Cowboys on a DUNE-like alien planet, but is summed up for us as HIGH NOON at the Edge of the Universe.  Oddly, a film fitting that exact description was made some time back.  Name it to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streaming film of your choice.

THE WORKING MAN (1933)

Distinguished, but little remembered British stage actor George Arliss suffers the double burden of having his two highest profile films show him at something less than his best.  DISRAELI, filmed twice (a lost silent in ‘21, an Early Talkie in ‘29) stiff as a board; THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD/’32, mostly known for saving Bette Davis’s career at Warners before she broke out in OF HUMAN BONDAGE/’33.  Arliss looks slow & hammy in both; 'distinguished' in all the wrong ways.  Here's a much better place to start: Playing a shoe manufacturing titan, he's still hammy, but also forceful & funny when his work ethic gets thrown for a loop after his main competitor dies.  With no rival to best, what’s the point?  Now’s the time to take that long delayed fishing trip, which is where he bumps into his late rival’s kids, entitled nincompoops Bette Davis & Theodore Newton who’d rather drink & socialize than run a shoe factory.  The way they’re going, they’ll soon lose the company.  Now Arliss has his new mission: anonymously save his competitor’s company; even at the expense of his own.  The film turns into something of a Depression Era pep talk and has a lot of fun keeping the deceptions & romantic roundelays spinning with Arliss functioning as secret Godfather.  Less pushy than most Warners’ comedies, the two male ingenues (Newton and Hardie Albright as Arliss’s workaholic nephew) both hilarious.  (Davis, BTW, at her most fetching.)  John G. Adolfi, something of a specialist directing Arliss, keeps it moving without the usual panicking flop-sweat of a typical Warners comedy.  Modest, but fun.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Arliss would have even better vehicles to show himself off when he followed Warners exec Darryl F. Zanuck to his new company, 20th Century.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/cardinal-richelieu-1935.html

CONTEST:  Even if you never warm up to Arliss’s old-fashioned stage technique (he was born in 1868), you can still appreciate his longest lasting achievement . . . if you like salad.  Touring in San Francisco, a brand new salad dressing was named for the play he led.  Name the play (and the dressing!) to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (2024)

Mystifyingly well-reviewed character study from indie filmmaker Nathan Silver lost whatever appeal it may have had after the early buzz cleared.  Seen plain, this soggy mid-life crisis story fails on nearly every level.  Forty-something Jewish Cantor Jason Schwartzman has recently lost his wife and then his voice.  Feeling useless, his two Moms (birth mother and religious convert Latin spouse) are eager to help get him back on his feet, setting him up with dates & psychologists.  Sometimes in one & the same package.  But the only comfort he finds is when he meets-cute with seventy-something gadfly Carol Kane, his former music teacher.  (She doesn’t recognize the boy he was, but then, Schwartzman has recently packed on about thirty pounds, you might not recognize him.)  Maybe this odd couple can help each other: she’ll give him voice lessons/he’ll help her with her fondest wish, getting the bat mitzvah she never had.  Meantime, he’s started dating the Rabbi’s daughter who joins him near his late wife’s grave where they listen to old erotic phone messages he’s saved from his wife.  Less gross than it sounds, a talented comic director might mine squeamishly uncomfortable sub-Philip Roth fun from it.  Alas, Silver anything but a great comic director, egging on his cast to overplay (Kane’s ditz all but unwatchable, especially when stuffing burgers in her mouth), unable to stage or pace comic action or dialogue.  Even these problems might be forgivable if Silver would occasionally put the camera in the right place . . . and leave it there.  Usually it's way too close.  And when he does pull back, the composition goes dead.  So too the film.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a funny/touching late-in-life bar mitzvah, try this gem from the old DICK VAN DYKE show where staff writer Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) become a man.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m54VraF-1PM

CONTEST:  The congregation looks to be what might be called Jewish Conservative Lite which makes nonsense of a late ‘reveal’ in Kane’s character.  Name the unlikely plot twist to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the streamable movie of your choice.

CALIFORNIA SUITE (1978)

Maggie Smith stole this film (and won a second Oscar®) with a brief silent bit roaming the halls of the Beverly Hills Hotel gleaning off trays of leftover room service food after the hotel kitchen had closed for the night.  Nothing else in this stage-to-screen adaptation of Neil Simon’s L.A.-set four-part follow-up to his three-part NYC-set PLAZA SUITE/’71 gets as much across in such a fast & funny way.  But under Herbert Ross’s smooth/pacey direction, and with Simon’s seamless restructuring of his play, it works far better as film than PLAZA SUITE did.*  Alan Alda’s West Coast scripter and Jane Fonda’s East Coast news editor have the least to do as longtime ‘exes’ working out parental rights over a runaway teen daughter, their self-confessed brittle bantering going in circles.  Bill Cosby & Richard Pryor are competitive doctors at loggerheads on a vacation from Hell with their wives.  (Alas, their pratfall technique proves wanting.)  Walter Matthau, in town for his nephew’s bar mitzvah, shows alarmingly funny physical shtick after his brother ‘gifts’ him with a hooker who won’t wake up when wife Elaine May gets in next morning.  Her Cat Who Swallowed the Canary act impeccable.  Then there’s antiques dealer Michael Caine, affectionate but queer husband to Smith who brings a wide, knowing range to Simon’s semi-serious mariage blanc clichés.  Something both Dame Maggie and director Herbert Ross personally knew a thing or two about.  It takes this section to a different level than the rest of the film, even when the writing fails to go as far under the surface as it thinks it does.  Truth is, the Simon hit-to-miss ratio isn’t much different than other middling efforts.  But Ross, one of the great B’way musical play ‘doctors,’ had a way of making the best out of whatever goods he was handed.  A special talent that was both his gift and his curse.

CONTEST:  A line about how great the Pacific Ocean once was anticipates a more famous line about the Atlantic Ocean from a film out two years later.  Name the film, the line, and the Golden Age star who says it to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film you chose.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Simon had one more SUITE in him, the four-part LONDON SUITE which played OFF-B’way and was made as a tv movie.  (Not seen here.)  Turns out, PLAZA SUITE was also written as a four-parter, but the show’s stage director, Mike Nichols, thought it made the play run far too long and dropped its first episode.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/04/plaza-suite-1971.html

PASSAGE TO INDIA (1984)

Forty years after coming out, David Lean’s final film has, if anything, ripened; most of the reservations found on its release now hardly noticeable.*   Unprecedented three-in-a-row epic successes (BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI/’57, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA/’62, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO/’65) had left Lean unprepared for really bad notices on RYAN’S DAUGHTER/’70.  And though profitable, Lean basically licked his wounds for 14 years before PASSAGE brought him out of professional exile.  Now 75, the film has an I’ll-show-you energy & pace that’s rather thrilling.  It also looks like it cost three times its 16 mill. budget.  Thru sheer craft and a master’s confidence, it's not merely deeply satisfying but somehow, on a technical level,  emotionally moving.  And what a daring choice for a literalist like Lean, E.M.Forster’s critical look at the ruling Brits in India, with Lean's signature large-scale East/West clashes set beside personal stories defined by half tones, unknowable truths & emotional deflection following a nearly affianced young woman (an unsettling Judy Davis) when she visits her intended (Nigel Havers) on a trip with his aging mother (Peggy Asncroft, nonpareil) to his posting.  Hoping for real contact with a different culture , the two visitors feel stuck in the English colonial lifestyle, but break out thru a chance encounter the mother has with local doctor Victor Banerjee (Satyajit Ray's frequent lead).  Their nighttime meeting in an elsewise deserted mosque mysteriously throbbing with emotion.  But the path of good intentions . . . you know, East is East and all that, lead to an outing gone wrong at some foreboding caves, a criminal case, a confession to . . . well, to what, exactly?  Not really Lean territory at all.  Yet what an involving piece he makes of it.  So consistently interesting, thoughtful and well paced, it’s one of those 3-hr films that feels untethered to its actual running time.  Lean died before starting on Joseph Conrad’s NOSTROMO (still unproduced), but could he have chosen a better farewell?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Three can still rankle: Maurice Jarre’s catchy score which naturally was Oscar’d; Lean reversing the novel’s last sentiments; and (the elephant in the room) Alec Guinness in ethnic drag as Professor Godbole.  And while he’s both charming & quite funny as the eccentric teacher/philosopher, the practice of Whites playing people of Color, at least in serious films, had already passed.  This casting entirely at Lean’s insistence, probably as insurance since Guinness, in spite of their long, bickering relationship, had been in all the late epics except the poorly received RYAN’S DAUGHTER/’70.

CONTEST:  Of late Lean epics, the only one shot flat (1.85: 1) instead of in a WideScreen format.  Explain why to win a MAKSQUIBS WriteUp of your choice.

ROBOT DREAMS (2023)

Officially released Stateside last year (no doubt for Oscar® consideration), but not in general release till now, this dialogue-free hand-drawn feature from Spanish writer/director Pablo Berger must be the most endearing, ultimately thoughtful & touching, animation since WALLACE & GROMIT stop-motioned into our hearts back in the ‘90s.  Wonderfully funny, too, but just as often tough-minded on love, life & loss.  A wise fable on happiness qualified as a lonely Manhattan dog in graffiti-clad  ‘80s NYC (no humans; just anthropomorphic animals) finds happy couples wherever he looks, while he's stuck with tv dinners and cable tv.  And that’s where he sees an ad for a companion robot.  Soon, the pair bond, an instant match, but then lose each other after an oceanfront beach visit leaves Robot behind a locked/patrolled boardwalk gate.  Closed for the season until Memorial Day.  Yikes!  Attempts at rescue prove hopeless with each side going from hope to abandoned acceptance, then on to dangers and even new partners in spite of remembering that first love.  Phenomenally well-observed (period NYC perfectly caught - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/04/movies/pablo-berger-robot-dreams-movie.html) and so delightful that the seriousness of the situation and a melancholy manner sneak up on you, leaving you smiling and a touch devastated.  Youngest viewers may need a nudge to explain some frequent unannounced jumps into and out of dream sequences*, but just about anyone other than snarky teens will be enchanted.  Heck, them too, though they may not admit it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Kids will likely spot Dog & Robot watching THE WIZARD OF OZ and note a parallel between Robot and the Tinman who both rust up and lose a limb.  If they haven’t seen WoO, you might have a nightmare to deal with.

CONTEST: In addition to the WoO quotes, one sequence prominently pays homage to two classic stunts from Buster Keaton silents.  Name the situations and the films they come from to win our usual prize: a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

With Dino De Laurentiis exec-producing, Canadian director David Croenenberg was finally able to move up from schlocky (in a good way) mind-blowing shockers to classy, B+ budgeted horror via this Stephen King adaptation.*  Christopher Walken, forty but looking much younger, brings his peculiar, wary anxiety to a well-liked High School teacher who wakes from a five-year coma with inexplicable psychic abilities allowing him to visualize past & future events in subjective POV.  Reluctant to use his new power, he’s convinced to try and solve a still active serial murder case and finds his ‘gift’ a two-edged sword.  Running away from instant notoriety, Walken starts a new life as a beloved tutor in a new town, only to be confronted by his past when former fiancée Brooke Adams (now married with kid) comes thru town; and by his present and putative future thru Martin Sheen’s Kennedyesque Senate candidate (and future Fascist President?).  Like a lot of Stephen King, the second half has trouble answering what gets raised in the first half, so Croenenberg holds tight to a blueprint slavishly lifted out of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and hopes for the best.  (That tight budget working hard against the big set pieces which come off as tinny.)  But he does provide a real humdinger of a jolt in a final ‘future ‘visualization’ from Walken that audiences of the time must have shrieked at in outraged pleasure.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Note the all-star character actor list in parts large & small: Tom Skerritt, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Herbert Lom..

CONTEST:  Either King or Croenenberg was really paying close attention to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’62 as a certain liquid beverage figures into both plots in unlikely ways.  Name the beverage and how it shows up in each film to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Naturally, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-manchurian-candidate-1962.html

THE GIRL SAID NO (1930)

William Haines’ brief run as a top M-G-M star peaked with five films in 1930.  Yet only two years on the studio dropped him; presumably for his unapologetic gay lifestyle.  And while he limped thru a couple of 1934 indies, Haines largely pivoted (very successfully) to antiques & interior decorating.*  (Joan Crawford & Nancy Reagan swore by him.)  A tough sell these days, he usually played the scapegrace kid, a scamp whose devil-may-care selfishness got everyone else in trouble.  Then, with about a reel & a half left in the pic (at college or on a first job; in the service on land or sea; at Pop’s failing family business), he’d have some sort of short, sharp, shock, see the error of his ways, ‘man up’ and save the day.  Forgiven, a twinkle in his eye would hint at fresh bad behavior ‘round the corner.  The End.  This one’s the same . . . and different.  (And with Sam Wood directing, not too sleepy for an M-G-M Early Talkie.)  Back from college after manhandling a new girl and her new car (his behavior more appalling than laugh inducing), Haines skips his folks’ anniversary dinner to hit the town with college pals.  Scripter Charles MacArthur making a cunning move by showing he’s really no worse than his pals.*  An entire generation of self-centered hedonists!  Then, MacArthur places the required life-altering crisis not at the end, but in the middle.  (Dad dies and the whole family leaves manse for tenement.)  Haines, still the supreme Jerk of No Trades, continues to force his affections on an engaged Leila Hyams (it’s 1930 so she encourages the mauling) only to luck out when he nails a seemingly impossible office assignment.  This not only leads to a happy ending, it also sets up a one-reel comic duet between Haines and the always astonishing Marie Dressler, fresh off her ANNA CHRISTIE/’30 comeback, as a rich old bat Haines needs to ‘land’ for the bank.  When Haines gets top billing, the story is always The Rake’s Progress.

DOUBLE-BILL: *The best iteration of the usual Haines character arc is in George W. Hill’s TELL IT TO THE MARINES/’26 with Eleanor Boardman coming between Haines and co-star Lon Chaney.  Alas, Haines’ best film, MEMORY LANE/’26 (John Stahl; Conrad Nagel, Boardman) only exists in a superb, but out of order print that (reel-by-reel) has its scenes grouped not by story continuity but by tinting color!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *So, what did happen with Haines?  Was his carefree character too irresponsible as the Depression took hold?  (The economic crisis had yet to fully hit Hollywood in 1930.)  Was it simply that what seemed like larky fun in a 20-something became unacceptably cruel in a 30-something slightly thickened by age?  Or did synch-sound & dialogue add unattractive realism to his constant ribbing, quips & caustic hijinks?  Suddenly the playful jabs really hurt.

CONTEST:  *MacArthur lifts his famous ending from THE FRONT PAGE (co-written with Ben Hecht) here.  It's the one signified by the line: ’The son of a bitch stole my watch.’   Explain its use here and name another MacArthur/Hecht film classic that reused the same idea.  (And no, it’s not Howard Hawks’ gender flip reworking of THE FRONT PAGE as HIS GIRL FRIDAY/’40.)

PHASE IV (1973)

‘Yes, but what I really want to do is direct.’  That old Hollywood punchline is usually tagged on ‘personality’ actors, but here, acclaimed graphic artist Saul Bass, whose posters & credit sequences for Hitchcock & Preminger are the stuff of legend, picks up the megaphone for this small-budget Sci-Fi Horror.  Even more surprising, it works!  A real creep out on an eclipse that changes the nature of all the ants on Earth, defanging their natural enemies & turning various ant species from combative to single collective.  The film a three-hander for two scientists (Nigel Davenport; Michael Murphy), sent to an isolated desert lab to work out ant communication & a plan for human survival, who wind up hosting a left-behind local (stowaway Lynne Frederick), who plays Eve to the men’s double Adam act.  Davenport the nihilist; Murphy the idealist; Frederick the author of the lab’s original sin, ruining the experiment before she's catalyst to transformation.  Not without gauche moments and all too obvious moves & motivations, but also with many memorable visuals (expected) and ideas (less expected).  One shot of rows & rows of pale poisoned ant warriors on their backs, surveyed by their black ant compatriots quite spectacular, and not only conceptually.  The end proves more than the budget (or Bass) can properly handle, but taken for what it is, this film should have led to further adventures for Bass away from his drafting table.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Why so unknown?  Best guess is that Stateside releasing company Paramount simply didn’t know how to market this sort of thing.  Pity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Scientists experimenting in an isolated lab a genre unto itself in this period.  Skipping over all those orbiting Space Station variants, you might try John Sturges THE SATAN BUG/’65 or Robert Wise THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN/’71.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-satan-bug-1965.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-andromeda-strain-1971.html

CONTEST:  Beware!  SPOILER embedded in this Contest Question.  PHASE IV’S outcome involves the evolution of a hybrid creature combining ant and human elements.  It’s not all that far from the précis of a faux trailer seen in a comic movie about the film biz.  Name the Faux Feature title and the film the trailer comes from to win our usual prize, a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.