THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER: RECOBBLED (1992 - 2013)

A Holy Grail for British animator Richard Williams (WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT/’88; sequences in A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM/’66; THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE/’68; various PINK PANTHERs), this never completed magnum opus was probably too ambitious from conception.  But what a conception!  And what an achievement as far as he got!  It’s THE LAST SUPPER for animation heads, a mess, but also the greatest painting ever made.  Basically, a standard ARABIAN NIGHTS story: beautiful princess pursued by an evil usurper is saved by a not-so-simple simpleton with a mouthful of tacks.  There hadn’t been an animated film this visually ambitious since Disney fell on his face with the stunning, but inert SLEEPING BEAUTY/’59. (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/12/sleeping-beauty-1959.html)  That too a financial disaster.  But Disney could weather the loss; Williams could not.  Far from finished when funds ran out and a Completion Company took over, the eviscerated results (about 80") issued by MiramaX vultures to zero B.O. under a couple of titles.  Fortunately, Williams retained his work print.  (Seen here with Williams in attendance.)  But while the work print proved invaluable, much better visual quality appeared on any number of fan edits that started to show up on the internet.  Best of the lot, Garrett Gilchrist’s long evolving ‘RECOBBLED Cut,’ dropping installments as it added chapters and refined as ever better elements appeared.  Where do these materials come from?  (The dates listed above reflect Williams’ work print and Gilchrist’s final (?) revision; running time 1'39".)  That’s the one to look for.  Hardly a perfect work, story sense never Williams’ forté, but being forced to see so much effort in such different stages of creative development isn’t just enlightening, but a backstage thrill into the wizard’s workshop.  With lovable characters (even Vincent Price’s villainous ZigZag with his rhymed couplets carries rooting interest), you’ll soon pick up on the hop, skip & jump rhythm of the narrative thread while you goggle at visual influences ranging from Chuck Jones to M.C. Escher, Aubrey Beardsley to Peter Max.  Designed to play on the biggest, deepest, widest screen possible (Williams has the compositional eye of William Wyler), if you can’t make out the flies buzzing around The Thief’s head, you need a bigger screen.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The ReCobbled Cut uses well-matched, if abruptly edited classical music, heavy on Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade.’  But the repeating decor, designs and geometric floor patterns beg for an original Philip Glass score.  ReCobbled ReScored?

KING SOLOMON’S MINES (1937)

Originally published in 1885, H. Rider Haggard’s book was still showing up as major motion picture material every other decade a century later (1919; 1937; 1950; 1985).  To say nothing of once-removed second cousins for Tarzan & Maciste to visit; even a Son-Of iteration in WATUSI/’59.  And that’s before hitting the small screen via one-offs & series in spite of dated elements and attitudes: Darkest Africa clichés; Great White Hunter leading man.  M-G-M’s splashy version of 1950 (Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, African location backgrounds, TechniColor - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/king-solomons-mines-1950.html) long considered the class act in a landfill of kitsch, usually given top rating.  But a look at this British production when seen in a good print, easily overtakes it.  With solid journeyman director Robert Stevenson* on U.K. studio work, producer Geoffrey Barkas shooting location footage in Africa and cinematographer Glen MacWilliams (he’d later do remarkably convincing water tank work for Hitchcock in LIFEBOAT/’44) getting it all to match up pretty well, the film holds up better than M-G-M’s.  Just don’t expect major studio Hollywood technical polish.  (Certainly no ‘invisible’ editing!)  But what really makes this version a standout is in how it follows the book and in how well it’s cast.  Cedric Hardwicke, Roland Young, John Loder and Anna Lee all dashing, amusing, romantic as needed.  And then there’s Paul Robeson as mysterious fellow traveler Umbopa; friend, foe or just out for himself?  Just shy of 40 and in terrific shape, still built like the former Rutger’s football star he’d been before stage & concert hall, it’s probably the best role of his curtailed film career.  Somehow making his aid to these White fortune hunters & adventurers believable in even the most ridiculous situations.  And when he opens his mouth to sing one of the pseudo African songs, especially when he lets his bass bottom loose, he’s simply undeniable on screen.  He also looks like he’s having a great time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Yes, the same Robert Stevenson who directed Orson Welles in JANE EYRE/’43 and became Disney’s top house director in the ‘50s and ‘60s: MARY POPPINS/’64 and a host of Disney hits.  Considering his gross figures include half-price kids, it’s entirely possible Stevenson is the most commercially successful director in Hollywood history counting not by dollars but admissions.

LA CAPTURA / FACING EL CHAPO (2026)

If other Mexican tv-movies are this good, sign me up for a subscription.  Directed by Chava Cartas (script by Bernardo Esquinca from Héctor de Mauleón’s magazine series), a story too amazing to be anything but true.  Naturally well constructed, too.   (Who’d believe it as a piece of fiction?)  It opens as El Chapo, Mexico’s top-drug lord (Hector Kotsifakis) and top cartel second El Cholo (Juan Pablo Cruz García) wade to freedom thru one of his infamous escape tunnels.  Moving thru the watery muck in their underwear, they emerge (weapons intact) then steal a car after tossing its middle-aged driver & passengers out.  The incident, initially reported as a simple stolen vehicle, and the car quickly spotted by roadside Federal Policemen (Alfonso Herrera; Noé Hernández), patrol car partners just reassigned to night shift.  Family man Herrera and near retirement loner Hernández strangers without a known history to have built trust on.  And with bigtime drug money corruption so rampant, it’s naive to have trust between agencies; from one desk at headquarters to the next; let alone  to the guy sharing the front seat of your police vehicle.  Even more so with two of the most dangerous people in the world cuffed and wearing dirty underwear behind you.  (No wonder some crucial info gets ‘slow walked’ thru the system, there's always someone  on the take you've got to work around.)  Overtaking that stolen car, the pair immediately know who they’ve got and what the stakes, bribes and odds of survival are.  Plus, they’re running out of gas in unfriendly territory and a stop will surely expose the men in the back seat.  Sure enough, word inevitably leaks thru mobile phone pics and a hostage drama quickly ramps up as cops & criminals race not only to the scene, but also to Herrera’s family home.  All this honestly and cleanly handled without having to push the situation.  Yes, massed military-style standoffs in the mix, but at heart this is a chamber piece.  And all the more effective for it.  (NOTE:  Once again, for those on the Main Site who see our LABELS which don't show on e-phones, another Family Friendly listing, but definitely not kiddie fare,  Think Junior High and up.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  Instead of other drug cartel action/suspensers, go for a Western that works in similar fashion, 3:10 TO YUMA/’57, the Delmer Daves classic with Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, everyone at their peak.  Not the over-egged 2007 remake.

LA FRENCH / THE CONNECTION (2014)

A fact-touched, but largely fictional, drug-trafficking thriller out of Marseilles (1975 - 1981), structurally neat as a pin, and unusually easy to follow.  (And note how its French & International titles are combined on our poster to reflect a certain 1971 movie.*  Writer/director Cédric Jimenez earning rather than coasting on the reference.)  A mano-a-mano duel between the lawman and the dealer, with Jean Dujardin’s magistrate, just promoted from juvie drug crime to the big leagues, playing new sheriff in town to go after longtime drug boss Gilles Lellouche*, a man whose tentacles reach all; from murdering henchmen to judicial bench men and disco club investors,  desk-jockey police dicks and political appointees.  What he didn’t figure on was the obsessive/addictive personality and workaround legal tactics of Dujardin’s Judge, a man who puts everything aside (even family and his own survival) to bring down decades of backroom deals and delivery infrastructure.  Jimnez is technically fully up to date in action-driven movement and editing, but he gets real period texture by shooting 35mm in a style that (abetted by cinematographer Laurent Tangy) mimics the color, tone and film stock of the late ‘70s.  (Note the '70s animated Gaumont logo, too.  As much a throwback as the sideburns.)  Not a great film or even a great story, but solid, pleasurable work.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Naturellement, FRENCH CONNECTION/’71.  (In France, they dropped the article.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/french-connection-1971.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jimnez gives the leads a Michael Mann stare-off meeting midway along.  A misstep, though you can see why he felt he had to.

CANOA: A SHAMEFUL MEMORY (1975)

Working off a straightforward/fact-based script by Tomás Pérez Turrent on how small-town mass hysteria led to a mistaken-identity mob-lynching (the corrupt local priest falsely tying the victims to the 1968 international student uprisings), Mexican director Felipe Cazals used linear deconstruction and Brechtian distancing devices to create this classic of political engagement and generational cinematic change.  The story simple enough for a fable, a Grimm fable, as a happy-go-lucky group of 20-somethings, low-wage University workers, head off for an overnight hike on a nearby mountain.  But bad weather leaves them seeking shelter in an unfriendly rural town.  And while they find welcome at a farm building for the night, word has already spread (even on the town loud speaker system) that these kids are front men for a Communist invasion of rioting students out to destroy the church and local monuments.  Hasn’t their priest been warning of this for months?  The rest plays out like a lethal game of rumor, lies multiplying into violent attacks on the outsiders, though the first victim is a long distrusted local.  And neither the law nor a Hollywood-style voice of reason to stem the vicious tide of hate.  Cazals over-eggs the first half of the film with too much endearing larky behavior by the university crew, but there’s no denying the power of the inevitable atrocities of the something wicked this way comes second half.  Or the lack of justice after the fact.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Stateside mob violence of a different kind, but with a similar feel comes over strongly in Joseph Losey’s THE LAWLESS/’50.  OR:  *Take director Cazals’ advice, as seen in an Extra on the Criterion edition where, in conversation with fellow Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (BTW  Guillermo del Toro introduces the film), Cazals says the only film influence on this was Juan Bustillo Oro & Fernando de Fuentes’ EL COMPADRE MENDOZA.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/el-compadre-mendoza-1934.html

THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES (2018)

The work of film essayist Mark Cousins can be a bit precious and navel-gazing.  (Fine if the navel in question weren’t his but the subject’s!)  But in this fresh take on Orson Welles’ life & legacy, the style suits Cousins and subject equally well.  Probably the best film on Welles.  (Or is till Cousins misguidedly continues into post-mortem supposition.)  Aided by Welles' lifelong habit of sketching everything he was thinking about, Cousins organizes a peripatetic life with drawings casual and frame-worthy; by-passing protective moats to enter the Wellesian fortress.  Focusing more on the work than the life, this telling is immediately enveloping even for what’s not in here.  Not a word on weight.  Nothing on Hollywood disappointments.  Passing over the WAR OF THE WORLDS scandal.  Indeed, not quite enough on mundane commercial success as actor (largely for self-financing projects) or showing how Welles could coopt the system when it fit his purpose.  Instead, his astounding range of media reinvention (radio, film, theater), and nods at some bravely controversial political stands, particularly on race issues far ahead of the curve.  Much of this told thru a previously overlooked treasure of archival holdings of those quick-stroke drawings.  The University of Michigan archives seems an especially rich repository.*  Revelatory stuff.

DOUBLE-BILL:  The film points out a couple of attempts at dramatizing events: Richard Linklater’s ME AND ORSON WELLES/’08 surprisingly worthy; Tim Robbins’ CRADLE WILL ROCK/’99 weirdly mean-spirited.  Or look for most of his own work covered within.  Just type the title wanted into our SEARCH Box located on the Main Site (left side/top of the page).

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Has an exhibition of drawings using works spread across various institutions been attempted?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Cousins errs in showing clips from TOUCH OF EVIL/’58 in Academy Ratio (1.33:1).  The full frame negative was meant to be cropped down to 1.85:1, common practice at the time in many non-anamorphic films.  Universal Pictures was apt to send out uncropped full-frame prints where, if shown without the correct aperture plate, they'd reveal all sorts of studio-set artifice (lights, girders, wiring) hanging above the intended image.

THE TRIBE / PLEMYA (2014)

The sole feature from Ukrainian filmmaker Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi is distressing, but worth it.  (Surrounding this, he’s made about a dozen short subjects.)  A real misérable story, it follows (and ‘follows’ is the word for his tagalong/long-take film technique) a just-arrived deaf teenage student at his new boarding school.  Co-ed, though more boys than girls, the all-deaf institution a horror house for ‘parking’ unwanted kids in a kind of Survivor Academy of little learning and scams on & off campus, organized thru a pecking order of seniority rule.  Daringly, Slaboshpytskyi leaves the (Ukrainian?) sign language entirely untranslated (no subtitles/no voice-over, just natural sound) as 16-yr-old Sergei is greeted with a series of rough hazing assaults to put him in his place before he’s even found a dorm spot.  Later, he’ll be assigned various low-level jobs to make a few bucks selling crap on trains or pimping girl students at a truck stop.  Cash split between him, the girls and the older boys.  Sergei will wind up paying for his own session, losing his virginity and his heart.  He’s already losing any sense of humanity.  (Sex, violence and an edit-free bathroom abortion all Hard-R level.)  Everything fascinating and horrifying.  As for teaching , a smattering of subjects.  We see history and shop; if there’s any literature, the reading matter would likely be LORD OF THE FLIES.  Finally pushed too hard, the worm turns in Sergei with grisly finality.  No gloss, no answers, certainly no happy ending.  Really, no ending at all.  Just departure.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: We’re a long way from ZÉRO DE CONDUITE/’33.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/05/complete-jean-vigo-1930-34.html

POLICE STORY / GING CHAAT GOO SI (1985)

Though a star in comic-leaning Hong Kong actioners for a decade (directing for five years), to the international audience, this film was Jackie Chan’s ‘calling card.’  (A previous self-directed ChopSocky period piece, PROJECT A/’83, likely primed the pump.)  STORY still one of Chan’s best, well-balanced between thrills, impossible stunts done ‘for real,’ slapsticky Martial Arts, a game gal adversary who flips, turning from reluctant to enthusiastic helpmate, a Mr. Big & gang out to silence or frame Jackie, his own police force hunting him, and chases via car and foot thru tight corners on streets and inside public spaces.*  Yet still human-scaled so you can just believe what you’re watching could happen.  (Nothing like ‘practical’ effects to sell a scene thru punches that land with consequence via camera angles, timing and editing rather than vapid CGI.  Why there’s even a plot you can follow.  Mostly about Chan peeling off mob secretary Maggie Cheung to testify against her boss in court.  A partnership with Chan that’s starting to look fishy to fiancée Brigitte Lin.  (Her evolving relationship with Cheung an unexpected treat.)  Jackie Chan’s film idols were Bruce Lee and Buster Keaton, and while he hasn’t the line or grace of either (more young Douglas Fairbanks, even in build), STORY let’s you see the connection and makes a great introduction.

DOUBLE-BILL:  This is probably Chan’s Goldilocks of a film, not too big, not too small, the size just right.  STORY 2 not seen here, nor 3 (and there’s a NEW POLICE STORY in the works for the 72 year-old veteran star), but as mentioned above, PROJECT A would pair well.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A tricky solo comic bit for Chan and a bunch of landline telephones needs a one-shot/one-take approach to work properly.  Here, it’s funnier in concept than in execution.  Chan not quite having the physical chops to pull it off.

FRANZ (2025)

Polish-born/Prague-trained director Agnieszka Holland, still making smart, provocative, accessible films 55 years into her career/35 years after hitting the international circuit with EUROPA EUROPA/’90, finds new angles on Franz Kafka less in content than in execution.  It freshens the conversation on this over-analyzed modernist to good effect.  Hopscotching around his short life (40 years), Holland’s Kafka (Idan Weiss) grows less neurotic, if more fragile (TB did him in) as the years pass, and with more public success in his lifetime than you may recall.  Decently, if unhappily employed; published, even a major literary prize; public readings; no unknown recluse.  Plus quite a bit of sex.  (What a lot of male nudity in the film.)  At home, a sympathetic family with the notable exception of his loud, large, dominating businessman father, always on the edge of financial failure at work or an explosion at the dining table.*  All beautifully caught in the film’s physical production.  And all relatively standard readings.  But Holland’s not only making a bio-pic, but also an Essay Film.  So we not only jump around his life span (1883 - 1924), but also into the present day with tour groups & guides talking us thru his work and workplaces.  Objects and physical spaces Holland has Franz enter as well, as if he were one of the tourists out to see where the great man lived and worked.  It sounds gimmicky, but doesn’t play that way.  More like a living tribute.  The film isn’t meant to be definitive.  It just wants to restart a conversation we thought was no longer going anywhere.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For all his literary influence over the past 100 years, Kafka’s film record is mostly misses.  A bit of THE TRIAL at a reading in here with lots of laughs would have been pleased Orson Welles whose film adaptation always made him laugh . . . if no one else.  Instead, the most successful Kafka on film is merely ‘Kafkaesque.’  Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES/’00 and Roman Polansky’s THE TENANT/’75 about as close as anyone gets.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-tenant-1976.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/04/werckmeister-harmonies-2000.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That’s Peter Kurth as the Father, a dead ringer in voice & face for classic Hollywood supporting actor Sig Ruman, a favorite of Ernst Lubitsch & Billy Wilder.  (On purpose?)

I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! (1945)

No doubt, the signature film of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, the ‘written, produced and directed by’ team known as The Archers, remains THE RED SHOES/’48, their hit ballet backstager.  Though with 15 features (1941 - ‘57), P&P fantasists may look to A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH/’46 as ‘best,’ while those who lean exotica choose BLACK NARCISSUS/’47.  But all must agree the pair’s most perfect is this windblown enchantment.  A romance (no rom-com, more in the vein of late Shakespeare, think THE TEMPEST), at first view lighter than some of their major achievements, but growing in heart and mind over time.*  Their last WWII production, its distinctive stars, Wendy Hiller & Roger Livesey, meet cute (make that meet surrealistic, what a dream Hiller has!) on separate paths to an island in the Scottish Hebrides.  Indeed, his island as Livesey is ‘Laird’ and using his eight-day military leave to visit.  Hiller’s joining the wealthy, older industrialist who’s rented the entire island for their wedding.  Problem #1: a gale is rising at sea, making passage too dangerous.  Problem #2: Livesey & Hiller are falling in love.  Complications, characters and traditional Scottish customs bridge the personal divide (purposefully awkward) until their protective lies are finally cleared in a storm at sea that pushes the relationship as well as the technical limits of 1945 special effects.  (So much more convincing at the time in b&w than color.)  All leading to what must be the most satisfying finish of any P&P movie.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The special handcrafted look & sound of so many Archers’ films on full display in this most British/Scottish of their films.  How ironic that nearly all the major creatives, other than Powell, were German/Hungarian Jewish exiles from the Nazis: Pressburger, composer Allan Gray, cinematographer Erwin Hillier, and production designer Alfred Junge.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That delayed capitulation would include Powell.  In love with Deborah Kerr when he co-wrote the script with her in mind, it was decades before he realized he’d made a masterpiece with Hiller.  Hiller’s specialty being wonderful in every role she touched.

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

One of the great progressive muckraking films of the mid-‘50s, this B-pic by master of the form Phil Karlson (ironically, best known for his reactionary small town/vigilante-sheriff ‘70s hit WALKING TALL/’73*) looks better than ever.  Not only for how it captures period details of the customs & inbred corruption in small-town segregated South, but because so much of the social/civic culture it uncovers continues today in more sophisticated/less brazen style.  Shot to a considerable extent on the actual locations around Phenix City, AL, the true(ish) story is structured as a rabble-rousing thriller (note film noir scripter Daniel Mainwaring) as returning Army vet Richard Kiley (and family) goes to work in Dad’s law office.  That’s John McIntire as the flinty former State D.A., keeping his nose out of non-legal affairs as the town succumbs to the vice mob in booze, gambling & prostitution.  The whole city run as a Protection Racket by a small, vicious rabble.  But once the old man is drawn back into the fight after his son stands up to them, and a little Black girl is murdered as a warning, the town’s good governance committee of honest businessmen needs a winning candidate to run for D.A.  Far more violent than you imagine for a film of the period, Karlson gets the real flavor of the South (the Slow-Walk response by local police as infuriating as those missed calls by professional wrestling refs on tv), while the blanket racism of the town all the more effective for its casual acceptance on the side of the vice issues. Under Karlson, the film ain’t subtle, but neither is the story.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Even more ironic now after TALL’s ‘heroic’ Sheriff Buford Pusser was posthumously tagged with his wife’s ‘unsolved’ murder, the incident that started his violent clean-up.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Famously a big fan of PHENIX, what a pity Martin Scorsese didn’t re-watch it before starting KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON/’24.  It might have helped.  The films less dissimilar than you’d think.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2026/04/killers-of-flower-moon-2024.html

THE RETURN (2024)

Perhaps you’ve heard, there’s a new version of The Odyssey on screen.  Yet two years ago, this chamber version (just the last act, ‘Return to Ithaca’) flew by with a token theatrical release and nary a ripple on the cultural Zeitgeist.  Pity.  In its own way, it’s very good.  We open as Ralph Fiennes’ Odysseus washes ashore at his old stomping grounds, much worse for twenty-year’s wear and naked as the day he was born.  (Nearly naked & distressed the fashion in Ithaca so he fits right in.)  Rather than announce himself, the former leader, and already legendary victor at Troy, stealthily takes stock of the situation on his island.  Faithful wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche sporting Julia Roberts’ profile & considerably more acting chops) anxiously fending off hunky/premature/avaricious suitors; abandoned son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) having Daddy issues; the island at a standstill.  Situational baggage barely clearing the dramatic bar under inexperienced director Uberto Pasolini.*  But as Odysseus is successively recognized, complications (personal & public) kick in to move things along and cover a host of unforced filmmaking errors.  By climax, Fiennes has bulked up to rather amazing (and believable) action-figure form.  Return of the Trickster?  The film, no mere addendum, but a worthy thing of its own.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Director Uberto Pasolini (more active as producer) is related to a famous Italian director, just not the one you’re thinking of.  He’s Luchino Visconti’s nephew.  Though that other Pasolini’s take on ancient Greek tragedy in MEDEA would make an interesting followup.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/medea-1969.html

THE WHITE REINDEER / VALKOINEN PEURA (1952)

A rare Finnish Art House perennial from the’50s, unjustly forgotten.  Shot, directed & edited by Erik Blomberg who also co-wrote with wife/star Mirjami Kuosmanen, a ringer for Dorothy McGuire.  Here she’s a chaste newlywed hoping to boost her husband’s libido with a visit to the local spell thrower.  (Maybe it’s all those layers of clothes needed even in bed.)  But the groom is only thinking about the reindeer drive, thousands of the beasts needing constant attention thru the snowy landscape.  But if her husband hasn’t taken notice of her charms, other men have.  He does make a mid-drive pit-stop to gift his bride with a small white reindeer, but it can only provide so much satisfaction even as it possesses her.  And worse to come as the spell (or is it simply the witch already within?) unbalances the settlement and the animals.  Only a deadly metal-tipped lance aimed by the husband at the white reindeer can alter this cursed course.  And that shot can still send a shock wave thru any audience willing to accept a folktale.  Shot silent on magnificent locations, with all sound elements added in ‘post’ (including a full bore symphonic score from Einar Englund), what’s more important is that the film is æsthetically silent in technique and narrative logic. So if every turn isn’t laid out on a plate, the tone of the piece makes its effect.  The film, appropriately enough, is bewitching.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Restored a while back, not all available restored editions are equally sharp.  Something even more important with silents than for synch-sound pics.  Sample first.

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1920)

James Fenimore Cooper’s novel has been lucky in its movie adaptations; more than a half dozen so far.  (No eight-part streamer?)  Main contenders out in 1920, 1936 & 1992, all respectable.  Surprisingly, it’s this silent version, at about 75", that sticks closest to the novel, keeping its largely tragic ending and daring racial mix-and-match coupling.  It also lays out the story best: two sisters visiting from Europe, caught in a war between French & British territorial claims while Native Tribes ally with opposing sides.  Since our POV lies with the Brits, their Native allies are the ‘good’ Indians (including that Last Mohican) and Hurons the Baddies.  The main action a journey for the sisters thru a No Man’s Land Forest to reunite with their father.  The small group led by an Indian Scout they, and their British escorts, don’t fully trust.  (Great White Scout Hawkeye more a supporting character here.)  Easy to tell French and Brits apart by their uniforms, while different war paint does the same for Native Peoples.  (Good thing too since the whole cast is White.  That’s Wallace Beery as the film’s Indigenous villain.)  Co-directed by image-oriented Maurice Tourneur (mostly on interiors) and future M-G-M stalwart Clarence Brown* (mostly locations), the film’s much admired visuals hard to judge in the just acceptable available editions.  Good elements are said to exist, but have they ever come out?  Meanwhile, various meh copies on line, some of the best looking accompanied by hopelessly inappropriate canned classical music cues.  But you can still get a pretty good feel for the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Best known sound versions.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-last-of-mohicans-1936.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-last-of-mohicans-1992.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Long overdue bio by Gwenda Young in CLARENCE BROWN - Hollywood’s Forgotten Master.

ORPHÉE / ORPHEUS (1950)

Jack-of-all Arts Jean Cocteau (gadfly dabbler to agnostics) made just a handful of feature films.  BEAUTY AND THE BEAST/’46 the most popular while this update of the Orpheus myth usually considered his best.  That’s debatable.  Better to claim it as the most ‘Cocteau-ean, a Greatest Hits compilation.  You know the basics: Lyric poet Orpheus/Orphée (Jean Marais) loses beloved wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) to Death (here Princess of Death Maria Casares), but wiles his way across the River Styx to bring her back to the living IF he can keep from looking at her till they’ve safely returned.  Usually things don’t end well.  (Here, more have your cake and eat it, too.)  Cocteau has devilish fun updating visual aspects; those motorcyclist Death Aides a leather fetishistic delight.  But too often he settles for vamping before plunging into his simple signature, clear-eyed F/X (mirrors of water to step into; Upside-Down Anti-Gravity tricks, reverse motion to wake the dead) and not one but two of his lovers in the same film.*  The good stuff (those effects) are tight & tidy as ever (even tv’s BATMAN picked up on one), while important themes in ethics, decor, æsthetics, poetry & eternal love sound hollow when tapped.  Philosophical metaphysics 101.  Head- scratching surrealism and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST's sturdy emotionalism were more satisfying as film.  Even George Auric’s score falls back on Gluck’s operatic masterpiece for something memorable.  (The built-in distancing of opera or ballet a better match for this story.)  Still essential, but time has taken its toll.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *In his mid-30s, Jean Marais’s big, square, noble head certainly fit for The Classics, but Roman rather than Greek.   At 25, Edouard Dermithe’s Cégeste is the one to model for a Greek bust.  Cocteau covering all bases.

THE BALLAD of GREGORIO CORTEZ (1982)

Actor/producer Edward James Olmos was the driving force behind this groundbreaking ‘Chicano’ Western, based (pretty accurately) on a simple verbal misunderstanding during an arrest-gone-wrong that snowballs into a manhunt and scores of innocent dead.  A real life ‘failure to communicate’ tragedy from 1901 Texas.  Olmos is Gregorio Cortez, a man on the run after killing that local arresting officer, a sheriff who drew a gun on Cortez, murdered his brother and put Cortez on the run, but doomed to be caught.  The non-linear presentation, along with actions repeated from alternate POVs, lifting this beyond simple suspense.  All while a unit of Texas Rangers blunder into indiscriminate murder of uncomprehending local Mexicans they take for Cortez confederates.  The purposeless killings only stopping when a legit sheriff takes charge, informing the Rangers there’s no gang involved, it’s been a one man job . . . and possibly self-defense.  Once arrested, Cortez is soon being mythologized by the Mexican community in Texas (as he is to this day) though the situation remains complicated.  Something Olmos doesn’t shy away from, hiring Robert M. Young, a superb technician too often pigeon-holed as a one-trick socially-conscious director, who rewrote an overly hagiographic script to admit nuance without softening the basic injustice.  Even more important, making a one million dollar ‘Super 16' budget look fully realized.  (Superb natural-light lensing from Reynaldo Villalobos.)  Only a few bad actors and a synthesizer score giving away the cost factor here and there.  The film doubly important for offering a rare Mex/Tex tilt historically (1901) and currently (1982) in presentation & attitude.  (It plays in English and Spanish without subtitles to emphasize language barriers.)  The film briefly heralding a road across a cultural  border still not taken.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Instead of another film with Chicano orientation, watch the excellent Extras on the Criterion edition, especially Olmos’s talk on how it all came about and, especially, how its distribution was purposefully fucked up by the head of Embassy Pictures.

THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER (1975)

After a Zeitgeist-grabbing two-fer for Paul Newman & Robert Redford (BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID/’69; THE STING/’73), director George Roy Hill soloed with each: this for Redford; SLAP SHOT/’77 with Newman.*  All four hits, the budget-conscious Hill bringing each in for about 5 or 6 mill, but only the first two smashes, earning five times the gross of the last two.  Nowadays, SLAP SHOT holds first critical position (rightfully so - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/slap-shot-1977.html), and it’d be a stretch to say BUTCH or STING has grown in esteem, but odd-man-out WALDO looks considerably better than once thought.  Some of this has to do with a lighthearted ad campaign misrepresenting the film in hopes of STING-like grosses.  Or perhaps the film just looks more interesting than it did in ‘75.  (Original story by Hill/script by BUTCH’s William Goldman.)  Redford, perfectly cast, is an intensely likeable scapegrace, a narcissist who always came on the scene a bit too late to live up to his potential.  A pilot in early aviation days, he missed action in  WWI then ran out the clock on barnstorming and big-time Air Circus shows.  Perpetually in trouble with cash, he’s soon skirting the new laws taming old-school flyboys as aviation matures from daredevil freak-show to big business.  Hill manages to segue from fun adventure to doomed lives in an instant (you can’t miss it), charting a diminishing trajectory from midpoint down, all the way to Hollywood stunt flyer, old scores to settle and no turning away from implications.  Certainly not from Redford who locks onto that now empty heroic grin; and Hill never showing his hand.  No wonder the film sputtered in comparison.  Technically superb, lenser Robert Surtees ditching THE STING’s glossy look of the same time period.  Loaded with real planes, real flying, real pilots offering plenty of pre-CGI thrills.

DOUBLE-BILL:  More daredevil pilots in Douglas Sirk’s too little known THE TARNISHED ANGELS/’57, from William Faulkner’s PYLON, with Rock Hudson, Robert Stack & Dorothy Malone.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Technically, it’s another Redford/Newman pic, not Paul, but with ill-fated son Scott Newman in a small role.

OUR TOWN (1940)

Hitting the screen only two years after its B’way opening in 1938, this film adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic was initially well received.  Later, objections to the revised ending and floods of subfusc home editions (plus maybe a few too many High School  productions) knocked the film’s rep down a peg or two.  Nothing can be done about that :happy' ending (less than a minute long, it’s easy to mentally block), and now, much that might have been done to improve picture quality has, at long last, been done, thanks mostly to The Library of Congress.  (Look for their 2023 restoration.)  And the film’s come up a treat.  Cleverly retrofitted for film by Wilder and actor Frank Craven, who repeats his ‘Stage Manager’ role from B’way, the revolutionary bare/prop-free stage production gets a rethink from legendary Hollywood Art Director William Cameron Menzies, given his head by director Sam Wood to use a stylized realism that heightens every scene.*  The quasi-simplicity of Wilder’s turn-of-the-last-century portrait of a ‘good’ small New England town leaps off the soundstage: daily routine, pleasures & tragedies of home-life: births, young love, weddings, death; laid out by Wilder like a prose poem of details & duties.  Craven is still a welcome surprise as tour guide, brisk, sec, blunt, without nonsense or sentimentality.  The other major holdover from the original production, Martha Scott as young Emily, who marries the boy next door, less successful.  Twenty-eight at the time, a lack of freshness less from being a decade too old than from having already figured out her line readings.*  And playing against a 22-yr-old William Holden only points out the difference.  Holden holds the screen effortlessly, breaking your heart with minimal effort.  A scene where Father Thomas Mitchell takes him to task almost unbearably moving.  With all the Hollywood supporting players at the very top of their game.  So too lenser Bert Glennon, just off John Ford’s STAGE COACH/’39; deftly jumping from Monument Valley to Menzies' carefully worked out stage set perspectives.  All of them memorably cosseted  by Aaron Copland’s perfectly judged score.  (Long a concert piece that’s never gone out of favor.)  The restored film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58O76SinOrQ&t=1027s) now easily besting the many tv versions hanging out online.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Another Wood/Menzies collaboration, KINGS ROW/’42, something of an anti-OUR TOWN.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/kings-row-1940.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Martha Scott’s B’way understudy, Teresa Wright, would have been perfect.

THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE / OCHAZUKE NO AJI (1952)

Sandwiched between EARLY SUMMER/’51 and TOKYO STORY/’53, two Yasujiro Ozu classics that fit expectations on the Ozu oeuvre, this modest marital dramedy gets overlooked.  Doubly so as behind an imposing title that promises utmost Japanese subtlety, lies a small film with a light tone.  Yet the film is all Ozu, and not to be missed, especially if you’ve seen WHAT DID THE LADY FORGET?/’37.  That film something of a trial run for this one fifteen years later; offering a unique opportunity to see Ozu’s response ripen from simple sit-com to emotional resonance.  In both films, a poorly matched, childless couple, rapidly stiffening into incompatible middle-age stasis (wife: snobby, custom-bound, social striver; husband: comfort-loving/low-ambition compartmentalist) are jarred out of their routine when their visiting ‘modern’ niece starts speaking up for herself, skipping arranged marriage meetings, going about the city on her own (she’s a crack pinball player), coming home at all hours and finding her own dates . . . whom she also treats poorly.  (The guy loves it!)  Seeing how much of this is just like LADY;  yet how much Ozu has grown as observant filmmaker (the whole last act becomes thrillingly emotional after a marital crisis clears the air for renewal), is like having a privileged moment alone with Ozu.  What could be more valuable?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  This is more like a whole course on Ozu, but here are the films mentioned above.  (Anyway, is there an Ozu film not worth seeing?)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/early-summer-1951.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/tokyo-story-1953.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2026/07/what-did-lady-forget-shukujo-wa-nani-o.html

LA GRANDE GUERRA / THE GREAT WAR (1959)

In the late ‘50s/early ‘60, the height of the commedia all'italiana movement, it seemed like everyone in Italian cinema knew how to make movies.  (Well, everyone at Cinecittà.)  None more so than Mario Monicelli.  And while this broad-shouldered WWI dramedy feels less distinctive/more corporate than surrounding personal masterpieces like BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET/’58 or THE ORGANIZER/’63, this remains masterly mass-appeal cinema.  A really big show, too, with a cast of thousands in stunning set pieces recreating marches, battles and (this being Italy) retreats, mostly against the Austrians during the first years of the war (1914 - ‘16).  Less comic than advertized, it has the bracing/bitter aftertaste of a strong aperitif, the comedy character driven by supporting stragglers and complainers of the 7th regiment, and in leads Vittorio Gassman (as quick-thinking shirker) and Alberto Sordi (the eternal coward).*  It takes a minute adjusting to the post-dubbing everyone used in Italy at the time, but once done, the film plays beautifully, with an exceptional turn from producer Dino De Laurentiis’s wife Silvana Mangano as the company ‘companion.’  Were these official positions at the time?   (Note all the De Laurentiises littering the credits; though it's Giuseppe Rotunno on camera, and Nino Rota on the score.  No ‘nepo’ hires where it counts.)  And just when you think Monicelli is turning soft and sentimental (after burlesquing that famous Christmas truce between warring French & German soldiers by placing a chicken in No Man’s Land), he pays for any sentimentality with an unwilling ultimate sacrifice.  The film fully deserving its big critical & commercial success.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Instead of a mature Monicelli masterpiece, try COPS AND ROBBERS/’51, a modest, yet hilarious minor work for two aging echt Italiano farceurs in Fabrizi and Totò.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/guardie-e-ladri-cops-and-robbers-1951.html

 SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *A Hollywood remake of the time would have used Tony Curtis & Jack Lemmon; and botched the ending.