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?

COLORADO (1940)

Republic Pictures stalwart Joseph Kane directs this atypically ambitious Roy Rogers programmer.  (Admittedly more aspirational than fully achieved.)  No Western (and with hardly a verse of song), but a Civil War meller about Captain Jerry Burke (Rogers), assigned by no less than General Ulysses S. Grant to break up a Sessionist Conspiracy in Colorado illegally selling guns to the Indians and letting outlaws run wild, all so Union soldiers are needed to keep the peace and patrol the territory and can’t be sent East to fight in the war.  True Southern loyalists and venal public officials joining to help the cause or make a buck.  This complicated by a neat personal story with pretty Pauline Moore joining the stagecoach with Roy and sidekick Gabby Hayes (hey!, it’s still a Roy Rogers’ pic, no?) on her way to meet fiancé Milburn Stone (later Doc in GUNSMOKE), a turncoat Captain who Rogers keeps giving a break to (and vice versa).  Hmm, what’s that about?  Running about an hour, well acted and shot on locations John Ford wouldn’t have sneered at.  If only we could properly see it!  Alas, yet another poorly preserved slice of American cinematic history left to fall into public domain purgatory, but worth the hunt to find a minimally acceptable download amid the subfusc crowd.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Rogers, not yet 30, has yet to acquire that ageless look or Dale Evans.  But did already have Trigger.  (Acquiring the horse not long after Olivia de Havilland rode him in THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD/’38.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *A pair of properly restored Rogers in Republic’s own TruColor system out via KINO.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/sunset-in-west-1950.html

WHEN STRANGERS MARRY / BETRAYED* (1944)

First give thanks for easy-to-find mint prints all over the internet on this tasty film noir from Poverty Row Monogram Pictures.  Decent film elements from this source not something you take for granted.  Second, a tip of the hat to penny-pinching producers The King Bros. who lined up four future Oscar® winners for a Monogram ‘second’ feature: scripter Philip Yordan; actors Kim Hunter & Dean Jagger; composer Dimitri Tiomkin.  Most importantly, the film’s a fun watch, even with schlock director William Castle already jonesing to be a new Alfred Hitchcock.  Not only the plot, a rip-off of SUSPICION/’41 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/suspicion-1941.html), Castle blatantly lifts THE 39 STEPS/’35 shot of a cleaning lady finding a body and her shriek cutting to a train whistle.  (Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE/’42 also gets badly burgled.)  Bumpy going in general (as if shots were missing), but hard to take offense with all the suspenseful/creepy set pieces.  And dig that deep focus hotel room composition.  (Castle certainly does, even repeats it.)  Plus untrustworthy characters to fill the narrative as child-bride Hunter starts to believe Dean Jagger, the traveling salesman she barely knows and impulsively married, may be the Silk Stocking serial killer.  When Jagger doesn’t arrive at the Manhattan hotel he’s booked for them, Hunter’s lucky to bump into past beau Robert Mitchum who’s long held a crush.  Hoping to find him, they see Homicide Detective Neil Hamilton for help.  (Hamilton a deadpan hoot in one of Monogram’s minimally decorated offices.*).   Once Jagger does appear, the couple is soon on the lam, sticking out as the only Whites at a Harlem Jazz Joint before finding overnight refuge in an uptown rooming house.  Fate comes knocking anyway; followed by a neat double-helix twist you may not see coming.  Ending with yet another Hitchcock lift; only this one anticipates the tag in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’52.  Ten bucks says the idea wasn’t Castle’s, but in Yordan’s script.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Good lord, Mitchum was a lean fellow with an amazing V-shaped build at the time.  Check out the broad shoulders/skinny waist in that big double-breasted suit!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Film re-released in ‘49 as BETRAYED with Mitchum jumping from third to first billed.  ALSO:  *Hamilton plays nearly the same role nearly the same way 20 years on in TV's BATMAN.

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.

HIGH ROAD TO CHINA (1983)

How pissed off was Tom Selleck when ‘the powers that be’ at CBS and MAGNUM, P.I. contractually kept him from making RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK in 1981?  First-choice for Indiana Jones, he was enough pissed off for someone (those same powers that be?) to palm off this copycat INDIANA JONES on him two years later.  A similar ‘30s period adventure in serial-style with Selleck as a trouble-prone free-lance pilot stuck with a rich, irritating heiress on a hunt to find missing Dad Wilford Brimley, missing somewhere in the Near-East, before thieving business partner Robert Morley inherits his fortune.  Directed with occasional flair by the unprolific Brian G. Hutton (only nine features in spite of two snappy Clint Eastwood WWII adventures - WHERE EAGLES DARE/’68; KELLY’S HEROES/’70 - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/where-eagles-dare-1970.html ; https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kellys-heroes-1970.html).  Bouncing from one set piece to the next, all depends on chemistry between the bickering romantic leads, with Bess Armstrong’s strong-arm tactics simply too irritating for Selleck to respond to.  He sulks when he should smoulder.  Dwarfed by RAIDERS’ success and leaving unresolved plot lines at every turn of the tale, the film barely gets by; less debacle than forgettable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  An enormous star on tv, Selleck’s film career never got into high gear.  Ironically, ending with THE LOVE LETTER/’99 which was also a last feature (and something of a vanity project) for co-star Kate Capshaw.  Married to Steven Spielberg whom she met when playing the irritating gal pal role against Harrison Ford in INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM/’84, a part that might well have been Selleck’s.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Listen out for John Barry’s fine score.  ONE - because it’s the best thing in here, and TWO - because figuring a grand tune was going to waste, Barry all but reused the Airborne Love Theme in here for OUT OF AFRICA two years later.

THE JAZZ AMBASSADORS (2018)

Originally on PBS, Hugo Berkeley’s Peabody Award-winning documentary does a solid, if unimaginative job on a fascinating sidebar to Cold War history as USA & USSR fought to influence hearts, minds and political philosophies in a post-WWII world.  And solving the permanent stain of Stateside racism (where one picture of police brutality was worth a thousand Party Line editorials) was a real problem for Yankee Influencers.  Enter the United States Information Agency, an unlikely sponsor for what became an eight-year run of Jazz Band Diplomacy as Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman & Duke Ellington led their respective groups to global hot spots, paths paved by the Voice of America.*  Some of the choices (band/countries) look arbitrary, others carefully thought out.  For example, the more traditional Big Band Jazz of Goodman sent to ultra-conservative Russia where not so long before listening to jazz on a shortwave radio could have serious consequences.  This just the type of info the film skates past.  And, other than Armstrong’s  personal reception in Africa*, and Ellington’s ill-timed tour (the Birmingham. AL church bombing; JFK’s assassination), we don’t get much sense of events at home and abroad as they were happening.  But enough gets across via archival footage and smart new interviews to do fresh justice to this adventure in Statecraft.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Very ‘hotspot’ in the case of Armstrong who’d never been to Africa, had no idea he was so popular there, even causing one country to put their deadly Civil War on pause so he could give a concert.  Talk about the power of music.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *In our current environment, maybe we should send a few integrated Jazz Bands Over Here.

MAN’S FAVORITE SPORT? (1964)

Howard Hawks got close to catching a break on his last comedy.  Too bad ‘close’ only counts in horseshoes and drama.  At first, Hawks works the phony expert angle, think Barbara Stanwyck’s clueless cookery columnist in CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT/’45, forced to prove she’s a regular Ina Garten over the holidays.  Here, it’s fishing, competitive fishing at that, with fishing manual author and salesman-of-the-year Rock Hudson having never cast a line in his life.  But Hawks upends expectations, giving away the big incompetence secret before Act One ends to shift into emasculated male territory.  More in the spirit of BRINGING UP BABY/’38 or I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE/’49 where Cary Grant suffers one indignity after another before he can marry Katharine Hepburn or Ann Sheridan.  More opportunities to reel in comic befuddlement than Hawks can get from rods, bait & hooks.  Even favored scripter Leigh Brackett (credits ranging from Hawks’ RIO BRAVO thru early STAR WARS) doing an uncredited rewrite.  So much for breaks.  Elsewise, Cary Grant chose to go with Stanley Donen & Audrey Hepburn on CHARADE; Hawks moved his unit from classy Paramount to Lew Wasserman’s production-line Universal (their ‘house style’ stuck cinematographer Russell Harlan on airless studio lots and processed everything bright enough for the early Drive-In show), a ludicrous 2.5' running time trimmed to a still unhelpful 2'; turgid comic support; and poor hard-working Rock Hudson, game, but no Cary Grant.*  One bright spot: costumer Edith Head’s form-fitting full-body rubberized scuba suits for Paula Prentiss’s* likeable pain-in-the-ass love-interest and for gal pal Maria Perschy.  (Nickname, Easy.  Yep, it's the '60s.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Henry Mancini’s score loaded with the same Hammond Organ he used last year in Hawks’ HATARI/’63.  It worked a lot better there.  ALSO:  *Before casting Prentiss, Hawks saw a pre-release screening of DR. NO/’62 and tried to get Ursala Andress for the part.  Damned if he doesn’t steal that film’s ending for this film!  Hawks usually stole from himself.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Gregory Peck joined the ‘He’s No Cary Grant Club’ in 1966 when Donen followed up CHARADE with ARABESQUE/’66.   ‘Peck confessed he was not always up to meeting the rigorous demands of the picture, be they stunts or comedic delivery.  His ongoing excuse off-camera, ‘But Stanley, their’s only one Cary Grant.’

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 RIP (2026)

Well-received commercial filler from NetFlix (keeping that pipeline loaded), ludicrously tagged as ‘based on true events,’ but really a tricked out caper pic with an All-Star cast.  (Well, Two-Stars; Five Featured Players.)  A prologue details a Miami drug bust gone wrong,  ‘Cartel’ involvement, female Police Captain left dead.  Later, back at Police Headquarters, Feds, Top Brass, Investigating Lieutenant and Detectives in-fighting to beat the band.  Who pulled the trigger?  Who fumbled the ball among the force?  Hardly the best time to receive a CrimeStoppers tip on thousands in illegal drug money stashed in some ‘drop house.’  That’s when the twists start to show up as Lt. Matt Damon and longtime second Ben Affleck take very different approaches in dealing with the discovered cash; not thousands but 20 million.  Tempting, no?  Mob/cartel money?  Connected to the Captain’s murder?  Suddenly, every action has a double meaning.  Someone going rogue?  Innocent renter cuffed as possible accomplice.  Neighborhood gone mysteriously dead.  And is that a getaway vehicle waiting in the garage?  So many questions!  Not only who’s telling the truth, but what is the truth?  Co-writer/director Joe Carnahan is something of an action specialist, not that you’d notice from the staging here.  Lots of stuff playing in the dark.  (To protect his reputation?)  So when the explanations arrive, it’s hard to understand what happened . . . or care.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  With movies like this, it’s easy to see why NetFlix shies from theatrical release.  Going straight to home platform makes this look like a hit.  And, by the numbers, it is.

LOVESICK (1983)

Woody Allen was known to complain (or perhaps puzzle is the word) on why a Dudley Moore rom-com like ARTHUR/’81 commercially buried even his most successful work.  And though we (and Woody) can only guess at the reasons, we can know how Moore would fare in a Woody Allen film by looking at LOVESICK, written and directed by Allen collaborator Marshall Brickman, co-writer of ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN, SLEEPER and MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY.  Loaded with Allen tropes, characters, locations, social milieu, NYC-centric supporting actors, couplings with participants separated by decades, etc.  And, wouldn’t you know it, LOVESICK grossed about a third of next year’s Dudley Moore mid-life crisis pic MICKI + MAUDE/’84, which covered similar territory.  Brickman, who only directed a handful of films, has a great cast and crew on paper, but the comic doings of an indulgent psychiatrist for rich Upper East Side Manhattan neurotics isn’t much more interesting than one of the 45 minute sessions boring Dr. Moore to tears.  And that includes his latest couch sitter, playwright Elizabeth McGovern, whom he barely hears but instantly falls for.*  '80s attitudes & sexual politics being what they are, what once might have been considered charmingly romantic behavior by Moore now looks like stalking.  And the laugh lines that do come off only make the situation feel more uncomfortable.  The one thing that still plays is a sort of corporal ghost of Freud giving sage professional & personal advice, not of the patient but of the good doctor.  Underplayed to perfection by Alec Guinness who doesn’t miss a beat or a laugh, he seems to float above the film, coming off as the only modern (or is it timeless?) character in the movie.  While Brickman, back among the living, cheats by letting everyone off the hook with conflicts resolved by fiat.  Woody would never have let him get away with it.  He’d also have put the kibosh on the bouffant comb-out on Dudley’s hair.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *As mentioned, Blake Edward’s MICKI & MAUDE, every bit as blinkered in passé Freudian methodology and ‘80s sexual attitudes, but playing out (hilariously) as a period piece rather than dated/objectionable.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/micki-maude-1984.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Even a cinematographer as gifted as Gerry Fisher is flummoxed by the McGovern face.  Something about the square jaw and the luminescent blue eyes make her always look disconcertingly out of focus.

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 WRECKING CREW! (2008)

Not the 2026 WRECKING CREW, Dave Bautista/Jason Momoa's action-comedy; not the 1968 spy spoof for Dean Martin’s Matt Helm; not even the 2000 Black Actioner with Ice-T & Ernie Hudson Jr.  This WRECKING CREW! (note exclamation point), is a homey documentary charting the ‘60s heyday of a tight group of about 20 or so West Coast studio session musicians whose careers peaked just as the center of Pop music influence shifted from New York to L.A., from the Brill Building to that stack of 45s known as the Capitol Building.  Sinatra & Co. to the Beach Boys; and everything in-between.  The ‘crew’ played for/with everyone.  (Boomers should stick around for the end credits to hear clips from fifty to sixty hits they’ll recall not included in the main film.)  There’s a bias in the film since it was put together by Denny Tedesco, son of main guitar player Tommy Tedesco (there’s a better film somewhere inside the clips & fresh interviews), but these nostalgic touchstones offer a lot.  Especially if you don’t mind a bit too much of interviewee Dick Clark’s idea of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  You might even be surprised to find out the Wrecking Crew played all the music not only for The Monkees, but also for The Byrds, The Association, even a lot of Beach Boys stuff under Brain Wilson.  Good vibrations, indeed.  On the other hand, imagine the thousand of schlock ‘pop’ they were paid to polish.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Gary Lewis without ‘the Playboys’ a typical interview, speaking on how his band was swapped out for Wrecking Crew musicians at recording sessions.  The Playboys’ names on the album, but not a note.  BTW Gary’s dad, Jerry Lewis set the bar for passive/aggressive parenting naming his first-born not Jerry Jr., but the near sound-alike Gary.  (Later raising the bar by disinheriting him.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Their slow ‘70s decline came two ways.  From new bands who wrote & played their own stuff; and (as told by Plas Johnson, the crew’s saxophonist famous for laying down The Pink Panther solo in two takes, thru the rise of twenty-four track technology which had them record in sections rather than together with the singer as a band.

DOUBLE-BILL:  20 FEET FROM STARDOM/’13, has a somewhat similar take on the great girl backup singers for some of the best known Black Pop vocalists of roughly the same period.

DISCLOSURE DAY (2026)

Steven Spielberg had a ‘New Coke’ moment in 1980, re-releasing his 1977 blockbuster CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND in a Special Edition that slightly trimmed the original cut, then added a final sequence taking us along with Richard Dreyfuss inside the Alien Mothership.  Pretty much everyone hated it.  At best a mistake in intention; at worst something leftover from a  World’s Fair exhibit.commissioned from Disney.  Spielberg took the hint and axed the sequence from subsequent editions.  But he’s a stubborn guy, and, 46 years later, he’s still trying to get it right, now as the climax of this new Aliens Are Real/Aliens Are Here thriller.*  The film and the man treated with kid gloves by critics as something of a last hurrah (print puff pieces downright painful), not that he doesn’t deserve the attention, and not that the film is a dud, but something’s definitely off.  The basic story, and raise your hand when you recognize the idea, is that documented evidence of alien visitors long suppressed by a special military unit led by Colin Firth is heading toward international exposure by a break-off group led by Colman Domingo.  Platonic couple Josh O’Connor (math whiz) and Emily Blunt (inexplicably speaking in Alien tongue) are earthly messengers on the run.  Naturally, the film is well accomplished, perfectly judged pacing and plenty of close calls staged to a technical fare-thee-well.  But about two reels in, it’s hard to miss that everybody involved thinks they’re making a suspense comedy . . . except Spielberg.  Most noticeable when miscast Blunt goes into her speaking-in-alien-tongue routine.  (She does international languages, too.)  You keep expecting to hear a giggle of self-surprise burble out of her at her own unexplained ability after these exchanges.  And not just any giggle.  But the rumbling joyful snort and laugh that were a Goldie Hawn specialty.  (Spielberg’s first leading film lady in THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS/’74 when she would have been just the right age for this.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-sugarland-express-1956.html)  And it wouldn’t have altered the general tone of legit suspense, either.  Think of all the big laughs Spielberg put over as part of the mix in JAWS, RAIDERS, JURASSIC, etc.  Spielberg, always something of a square; it's a large part of his charm.  Now pushing 80, has he become too square to get the joke that over half a century of Alien footage showing hundreds of witnesses hasn’t leaked from any lips in seven decades?  (At 94, composer John Williams seems in on the joke when needed.)  Perhaps Spielberg simply can’t go home again; or can’t without Goldie Hawn’s giggle.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *How stubborn?  Counting GOONIES as a junior-league Indy pic and TINTIN as Indy français, Spielberg went to the Indy well seven times, only bringing up water twice.  Then watched from the sidelines as the recent PADDINGTON BEAR in Peru pic filled the bucket.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note Spielberg pointlessly circling his subject like some kid just out of Film School.  Then turning uselessly old-school Hollywood with fussy matching edits.  Trying too hard?

DOUBLE-BILL:  DISCLOSURE ends with a tease, a message to the world from an interplanetary friend that’s  cut off before we get the translation.  Odds are it’s the same speech Michael Rennie’s Alien gives at the end of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL/’51.

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.

HOPPERS (2026)

The sound you heard coming from PIXAR hometown Emeryville, CA last March was likely a collective sigh of relief.  They’d just released their first original (non-franchise) hit in some time.  (Since the pandemic?*)  No mega-smash, but a solid stand-up double.  In many ways it’s an odd film (a good thing after so much formula PIXAR), HOPPERS' story a variation on the old ‘pave paradise/put up a parking lot’ trope, with nods toward Cinderella’s time-limited transformation, as unlikeable characters & unattractive design choices seem to hint at self-criticism & acknowledged course correction.  This being PIXAR, reset comes with a $150 mill price tag.  (But who stuck those scary sharp teeth in a duck’s bill?  Yikes!)  Our nominal heroine, a self-righteous pain, is 19-yr-old squeaky-wheel Mabel, determined to save her spoiled childhood pond (and the critters who once lived there) in the face of highway development.  Her antagonist a self-infatuated mayor (Jon Hamm, very good) who can’t compromise without losing face.  The gimmick a science project that ‘hops’ personalities from one species to another.  Mabel zapped into a beaver bod.  The script, trying too hard to be fair to all sides, winds up celebrating false equivalency as if it were compromise.  Not quite the same thing.  But that’s politics; we’re here for art, yes?  Good to see PIXAR questioning so much about itself.  Even if it’s yet to find answers.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Dear PIXAR character animation team.  The ‘cartooniness’ of the character animation design is worth pursuing, but this in-between stage is uncomfortable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  They miss an opportunity when the various animals play call-and-response with their distinctive vocalizations.  It plays like a song cue (‘I Bought Me A Cow’ from Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs?), but nothing comes of it.  Pity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *A sure theatrical hit lost to PIXAR when LUCA/’21 turned streamer in early pandemic days.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html

IL CAMMINO DELLA SPERANZA / THE PATH OF HOPE (1950)

A decade before DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE/’61, the most iconic of all commedia all'italiana titles*, writer/director Pietro Germi, like so many others, was still turning to Italian Neo-Realism for guidance.  So even with Federico Fellini co-scripting, this immigration melodrama gets its start firmly planted in the naturalism of Sicily's rocky soil.  Its story remarkably close to what you’d encounter today with the major difference that the borders being illegally crossed all within Italy.  Or are till the very end.  In a small Sicilian town, the closing of the local sulfur mine leaves most of the locals unemployed, willing to give their small savings to a smuggler promising passage and jobs in France.  Naturally, the guy’s a swindler, their money already mailed to an accomplice when a mixup at Rome’s train terminal puts everyone on the run; government agents in pursuit; couples split/lost in the city, the lucky ones reunited in police stations before being ordered back to Sicily . . . or else.  Cutting loose, some grab temp farm labor, unaware they’re scabbing against a labor union, the few now left, clamoring into unmarked trucks, clawing their way to a dangerous mountain-pass border crossing.  Germi pushes the melodrama till things start looking like a ‘well-made’ play.  But the cast (headed by Raf Vallone; with pros in most of the leads) is empathetic as hell (those big-eyed bambini!).  There’s even an operatic climax straight out of CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA.  Effective?  Si.  Neo-realistic?  Non così tanto.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The ironic distancing and dark comic tone that fed commedia all'italiana not yet possible, not before the economic miracle later in the decade, nicknamed ‘Il Boom.’

ACROSS TO SINGAPORE (1928)

Second of three films taken from Ben Ames Williams’ novel ALL THE BROTHERS WERE VALIANT (also 1923, now lost, and 1953 - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/all-brothers-were-valiant-1953.html).  Oddly, only one of its four seafaring brothers turns out to be valiant, the others either lost at sea, lost in the plot or lost in the Mysterious East (from unrequited love or a fortune in stolen pearls).  Only the youngest valiant.  With plot tweaks to match different casts, this one has Ramon Navarro (29, but looking a decade younger) perfectly cast as the teenage kid who’s grown into a young man (delicate, but sturdy) while his older brothers were at sea.  Eager for a first voyage, he’ll miss his girl (22-yr-old Joan Crawford), only to be emotionally waylaid when alpha-male brother Ernest Torrence (50 and looking it) forces an engagement on the terrified girl.  As if that’s not enough, the voyage under stress from storms and a First-Mate who takes advantage of Torrence’s monumental bender, leaving the lovesick man for dead in Singapore (actually he’s leaving him with Anna May Wong!), and commandeering the ship.  Once home, Navarro takes the rap before stealing off with Crawford to find his big brother and clear his name.  Nicely directed by William Nigh (a prestige silent helmer who steadily lost ground when sound came in), though the first two reels of forced roughhousing between the boys before they ship out are a pain.  Thankfully, it’s shot by the great John F. Seitz, a transformative lenser for Rex Ingram, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder.  Serious print deterioration means you’ve got to squint thru a lot, but much remains in pretty good shape.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Torrence’s claim to film immortality came earlier in 1928, playing enormous, disappointed Dad to Buster Keaton in STEAMBOAT BILL, JR./’28.  Then, later in ‘28, repeating the characterization note for note against another son, John Gilbert in THE COSSACKS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/steamboat-bill-jr-1928.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-cossacks-1928.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  1928 was such a phenomenal year for silent cinema.  And Early Talkies generally so stiff.  (In round numbers: 1928 80% siient/20% Talkie; 1929 20% silent/80% Talkie.)  It’s easy to see what was being mourned/what was being lost.

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.

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)

Winning, intensely likeable ‘original’ (adapted, like its near-cousin THE MARTIAN/’15, from an Andy Weir novel), seems to be following the heavily-trod path of one of those Earth Doomed By Approaching Meteor films.  All tropes on-board as an international staff of problem-solving scientists and a mixed-crew of brave astronauts go full-speed-ahead to save the planet from extinction.  Here, with a failing sun going on as understudy in a role usually played by fast-moving space-mountains.  The film a smart, funny version of duds like METEOR/’79 and SUNSHINE/’07, just to name two unhappy attempts.  But what truly sets this one apart from previous good versions is how it shifts in the second act* toward a different main storyline, the one where a single person accidentally finds himself alone on some g-normous (space)ship, stumbling toward competence, confidence & enlightenment by mastering his vessel.  Even finding a partner to accompany him on the journey.  All straight out of Buster Keaton in THE NAVIGATOR/1924.  Admittedly, Buster does it in an hour while directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller take 2½*, but you can’t miss the parallels.  Even if Keaton gets a cute deadweight girl for a mate while Ryan Gosling, in a showstopping turn as a Middle-School teacher/contrarian scientist who’s pulled into heroic orbit, gets a stalwart CGI granite figure who nearly steals the pic.  Oddly, what plays best and sticks with you here are less the big set pieces than quotidian moments simply watching Gosling on routine duty.  Not so for Keaton, perhaps because his set pieces so obviously real things really happening, captured on film at 22fps (give or take) for our amazement.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The general nit being picked against PROJECT is its length.  But the filmmakers use every minute for something necessary and the film earns its 156" running time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Film structure is scrambled between past & present all thru the film so that act divisions crisscross along with time lines.  But architecture very clear from the film’s start which happens to be in the Second Act.