SYNCHRONIC (2019)

ALL SPOILERS!  Skip this if you don’t want to know everything in advance.  Better yet, skip the film.  Anthony Mackie & Jamie Dornan, joined-at-the-hip New Orleans EMT paramedics, currently inundated with ODs from a new, potent designer drug marketed as ‘Synchronic,’ find this powerful hallucinogenic leaving a wake of dead or disappeared users.  Something almost sentient about this pill: its favorite book would have to be A WRINKLE IN TIME; favorite movie BACK TO THE FUTURE.  So when Dornan’s teenage girl goes missing from using the stuff (a runaway from home or lost in a time continuum?), perhaps there’s an explanation.  Going thru a bad personal patch, Mackie & Dornan may be fighting like an old couple, but hey!, family’s family, and a recent diagnosis of brain cancer emboldens Mackie to test the waters on Synchronic’s metaphysical properties and bring the girl back.  Co-directors Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (Benson also scripted) play blind man’s bluff with the audience (a spare one, the film tanked) with spooky lighting, creepy score, inexplicably precise time leaps.  Really nothing you wouldn’t expect here, dumb genre logic, but cross the line with ‘progressive’ racial tropes long past their sell-by date.  From the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, the sacrificial Black Man giving his life to save his White pal* (here the pal's daughter) and, far worse, a revival of the ‘80s/‘90s Magical Negro character.  Benson doubling down by setting the climax at some Civil War battle with Mackie mistaken for a runaway slave.  Yikes!  Pretty good reviews and award action on this one.  Go figure.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT (not that you could find it!):  *On a DANNY THOMAS HOUR anthology show from 1967 (‘The Enemy’), Sammy Davis Jr, who got stuck with a lot of sacrificial Black friend to White ‘brother’ roles, outdoes them all in a little WWII drama when he discovers who the Nazi infiltrator is in his army unit after the undercover German agent mispronounces the ‘N’ word as ‘Neigher.’  Sammy risking all to save the unit yelling back ‘It’s Nigger, you Nazi rat!  Nigger!.’  (Or something like that; it’s been a while!)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One happy surprise is a neat bit of support (about a scene & a half) from Ramiz Monsef as Synchronic’s remorseful developer, now trying to undo some of the damage.

WEAPONS (2025)

This critically & commercially well-received, darkly-comic Body Horror from writer/director Zach Creggar even earned a rare acting Oscar® for the genre.  Good scary fun, if ultimately less than meets the gashed eyeball.  It opens poorly, with needless narration from a wise-for-her-years child giving us too much info, and Creggar defensively covering with a plethora of ‘shock cuts.  But things rapidly improve once Grade School Teacher Julia Garner finds all but one of her kids, Alex, absent.  Make that missing.  As if the Pied Piper had tootled them away in the night.  Angry suspicions fall on the teacher, but no evidence.  No matter, she’s dubbed a witch by locals.  (Another error, make that a cheat, from Creggar removes any serious investigation of the house & parents of Alex, the boy who stayed in town when they ought to be swarming the joint.)  Still, this prologue enough like a classic TWILIGHT ZONE opening to get you interested.  (Actually, it’s more like a ONE STEP BEYOND episode, but who remembers that paranormal knock-off.)  And this is where you wonder how one of those half-hour shows can possibly support a two+ hour film.  (Spoiler Alert!)  Answer, it doesn’t.  Instead, Creggar switches to HANSEL & GRETEL, but without Gretel.  (Hansel & Hansel?)  With spooky Great Aunt (that’s award-winner Amy Madigan in fright wig & makeup) as the witch who’s capturing little boys and girls to fatten up before getting the life’s essence out of them.  (Sustained only by cans & cans of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.)  A few gory visual effects; hop/skip & jump character continuity for some non-linear surprise explanations; and a nifty semi-heroic turn from grieving parent Josh Brolin (head squarer than ever) also helps.  Just be aware: some gory effects nearly as ‘grimm’ as those famous Brothers.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  One unhappy comic-horror throwback sees the return of a trope from the 1970s that saw either the FIRST or the WORST/most realistic gory violence hit the one significant Black in the movie.  Now, this spot goes to the film’s main gay character (and his husband).

THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY (2019)

Back-loaded adapted screenplay from Charles Willeford & Scott B. Smith puts a dark spin on an old standard, the one about the painter who fakes his own death, goes into hiding incognito and watches as his work soars in value now that he can’t produce anymore; suddenly a sellers’ market.  SPOILERS!  Here, it’s not the painter (Donald Sutherland) manipulating his output for profit, but art critic Claes Bang taking advantage of the painter’s age and frailty, especially as he’s famously already lost his old work to fire and only has a small cache of new canvases as his legacy.  The idea: win his trust; destroy all but one of his new canvases, and end up owning the only original painting left intact, now worth millions.  (It's as if Patricia Highsmith were doing an iteration for the Talented Mr. Ripley.)  Ultra-rich art collector Mick Jagger (of all people) might be behind the scheme, while recent pickup Elizabeth Debicki is an unknowing complication who can be used to entice Sutherland into opening his clam shell of a personality and locked up studio.  But once they get inside, they hardly find what they expect.  Without spur-of-the-moment murder and forgery, plans and profit certain to be forfeit.   It’s a clever idea, but director Giuseppe Capotondi can’t invigorate a script that lolls around over its first two acts, then does a poor job cramming in and explaining the caper mechanics toward the end.  He covers (or is it uncovers) with sex (some) and nudity (lots).  Until by the end, characters & events reduced to mere literary devices .

WATCH THS, NOT THAT/LINK: Imagine GAMBIT/’66 with all the fun sucked out of it.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/gambit-1966.html

SOUTHERN COMFORT (1981)

LORD OF THE FLIES meets DELIVERANCE in Walter Hill’s chilling survivor tale about a small platoon of National Guardsman on a training exercise that goes haywire in the swamp-lands of Louisiana Cajun country.  An easy allegory to American interventionist policies, here weekend warriors fire blanks, justify action with patriotic patronizing & arrogance, or cite first-world entitlement with empty phrases of pigheaded stubbornness and feverish religion.  Hill smartly lets parallels to recent foreign entanglements speak for themselves to concentrate on how the men got into deep shit with unseen/unfriendly natives.  (You can’t call Cajuns indigenous people, but that’s the idea.)  No surprise then that the lost men's desperate situation is entirely brought on by the Guards' own actions and willful ignorance; the squad misreading themselves and their attackers.  Peter Coyote and Fred Ward are part of this Ugly American team, but the film belongs to new Texas import Powers Boothe (able to see things plain), and local reservist Keith Carradine, a good ol’ boy of character; no redneck he.  Carradine never did anything finer.  Filmed in hellish swamp locations, Hill is phenomenal with his cast, and with the settings.*   While staging the action, especially a last attack in the middle of a small town food festival, in terrific fashion.  What action chops!  Clear logistics and believable consequences.  Hurrah!  (It really shouldn’t be so rare.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/SPOILER:  *Hill's sole unforced error a major one, yet another example, typical of the time, in tagging the one meaningful Black player with the most gruesome death.

NE ZHA / NEZHA: MO TONG JIANG SHI (2019)

CGI (and a half!) animated origin story of devilishly disruptive child Ne Zha, born under a curse that’s stamped him as a demon (though Spirit Pearl also a possibility) in this retelling of an old (and confusing!) Chinese legend that has blown up at the box-office to make ths film’s sequel, NE ZHA 2, the all-time top animated grosser.  2.2 billion and counting.  Just not Stateside where both films all but flatlined.  This one, coming in without name recognition, no surprise, but the 2025 sequel, after doing modest biz a few months back in the original Mandarin, now out in a mainstream English dub at 2200 screens to a disastrous initial 1.5 mill wknd.  What gives?  In this one, Ne Zha comes across as an out of control, unlovable imp, a nasty piece of work, combining the worst aspects of Stitch & Gollum.  (Also, for some reason, ‘reading’ more as a girl.)  Fighting off flaming creatures (lots of dragons) with flames of his own, while his doting parents try to coax the good out of him.  Off-putting at best, the largely positive reviews focused on the technical aspects of the animation (subpar PIXAR) by which the film hopes to overwhelm, but only overloads.  Good news (SPOILER), the kid dies in the end, along with his gentler fighting companion, but sets up further adventures as living spirits ready to inhabit fresh corporal form (human or beast) to flame up once again.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  In the mood for an animated flaming villain?  Try Disney’s HERCULES/’97.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/hercules-1997.html

HIGH LIFE (2018)

Even the title feels second-hand in this film from longtime critic’s pet writer/director Claire Denis, who comes a cropper in this colonizing space opera.  Once again, Earth withers away while a team of criminal volunteers heads to a rendezvous in space to find a new home for humanity.  You’d think someone on the Denis team might have told her just how played out the idea is without a new angle or visual splash.  Robert Pattinson is last man standing, or rather cleaning, caretaker to his dilapidated ship and a little toddler, four years into a mission gone wrong.  A big flashback brings us up on the internecine fights and sex that led the crew to oblivion before they could resupply by choosing the right Black Hole to shop at like some Outer Space Amazon as they pass thru to the other side.  Seems those Black Holes suck up everything and hold for resale.  If only they offered over-night delivery, the line for pick-up can be deadly.  SPOILER: That trip will be put off till Juliette Binoche, the controlling doctor onboard, uses knockout drops on the crew so she can secretly give a sleepy Pattinson the most pleasurable/productive wet dream of his life.*  Before long, this sole survivor's toddler has become a teenage girl.  The future beckons.  Yep, that kind of ending to go with this kind of film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  Attention paid by Pattinson who didn’t learn his lesson here before commercially bombing again with more Space Colonization in MICKEY 17/’25.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/08/mickey-17-2025.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Rape is Rape, Ms. Denis.  Even when it’s a older woman straddling a drugged guy. (Imagine a gender swap to make it all extra clear.)  For similar discomfort, see ‘family-friendly’ BIG/’88, but imagine a gender swap so that Tom Hanks isn’t the 10-yr-old boy in a man’s body, but a 10-yr-old girl in a woman’s body losing her virginity to a thirty-something co-worker.  Not so charming and innocent, no?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  See what these space soliloquies were like back when the ideas were still fresh and film technology to handle space travel was improving by leaps and bounds in SILENT RUNNING/’72: Bruce Dern; Douglas Trumbull - dir.

BROKEN RAGE (2024)

Iconic Japanese tough guy & comic, actor/writer/director Takeshi Kitano, now in his mid-70s, is old enough to have GAMBIT in mind here.  Not the regrettable Coen Brothers redo of 2012, but the likable Shirley MacLaine/Michael Caine 1966 original, an art caper with the catchy ad copy: Go Ahead, Tell the End; But Please Don’t Tell the Beginning!  It’s referring to the film’s opening two reels where a planned heist is shown being perfectly executed before jumping back to show how it actually plays out with one fuck up after another making hash out of best laid plans.*  That’s the idea Kitano picks up on here, except this is no art caper, but the working life of veteran hit man Kitano, showing how he delivers on two hits and one undercover sting op.  The first three reels as he imagines them, perfectly executed, then as they really play out with everything going disastrously wrong.  Oops, SPOILER ALERT!!  Sorry ‘bout that . . . But not really, because knowing in advance is what makes the first half, the Things Go Right half, far, far funnier than the sporadic laughs generated in the repeated action of the second half.  Something about Kitano, with his stocky frame and impassive face, as he gracefully hits every mark perfectly in his imagination is completely hilarious, especially when you account for the physical limitations of weight & age.  The second half is okay (particularly during the repeat of the second hit job), but it needs more Inspector Clouseau slapstickery than Kitano can deliver.  (Rowan Atkinson?  Bill Hader?  How far away from BARRY are we?)  Still, pretty funny stuff, knowing & amusingly ‘meta’ when Kitano panics over his film’s short running time.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *That GAMBIT ad copy made the fake-out prologue sound fresh & new, though it was much used even then.  Going back, at least, to Preston Sturges’s UNFAITHFULLY YOURS/’48 in a waking dream sequence that sees world-famous conductor Rex Harrison imagining the perfect murder of unfaithful wife Linda Darnell before botching its . . . er . . . execution when he tries to follow thru on the idea.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/gambit-1966.html

PETIT MAMAN (2021)

Justly acclaimed film by writer/director Céline Sciamma opens with deceptive naturalism as an eight-year old granddaughter bids adieu (literally adieu as it’s a French film) to a series of elderly ladies, hall neighbors at the assisted living home/hospice where her grandmother has recently died.  The next few days will see her with her father as he cleans up Grandma’s home while the mother is off . . . somewhere.  But then the little girl chases a lost ball into the forest just behind the house, and we all know what happens when you head into the woods looking for a lost object in a fable.  Hard to say anything else here without major SPOILER ALERTS, but you should be okay if you put the left side of your brain on pause.  The rest of the film is all right side of the brain anyway.  Team Jung rather Team Freud, so to speak.  Because what should we find in the forest but another eight-year-old girl, a dead ringer (pun intended) who will become her new special friend, and invite to her nearby home, so much like the house she and her father are closing down.  (That’s twins Joséphine & Gabrielle Sanz playing the dopplegänger kids.  One of whom is a considerably better actress than the other, though nothing could make me reveal which one!)  It’s a treat to see how simply Sciamma handles this, and to imagine how a Hollywood treatment would ruin things with explanations or psychobabble.  (She’s the anti-M. Night Shyamalan we’ve long hoped for.)  Yet for all its charm, wisdom on childhood connections & fantasy, its refusal to draw thick black lines of demarcation between now & then/here & there/generation divide, the film somehow misses the emotional tug you expect . . . or perhaps are conditioned to expect.  Something that could be the subject for Sciamma’s next project.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Given a more literal edge, similar ideas pop up in a fair number of classic kid lit.  Frances Hodson Burnett's much adapted THE SECRET GARDEN an apt example.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-secret-garden-1949.html

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE (2023)

SPOILER-ALERT!  No, not from us!  This spoiler comes from the SPIDER-VERSE itself, announcing ‘To Be Continued’ right at the end.  2+ hours to set up one more go at SPIDEY: THE ORIGIN STORY (Chapter Five: Dad Dies).  Does anyone imagine they’ll even go thru with it in some putative Part II?  Regretfully, after seeing Spidey masters Phil Lord & Christopher Miller demonstrate that MORE truly is LESS, perhaps it’s time to bid the SPIDER-VERSE goodbye.  A shame too, as the previous entry, INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE/’18 was such a happy surprise.*  Now, 15-yr-old Spidey, the Black High School Spidey with a cop for a father, gets confronted by Anti-Matter ‘Spot’ (slackly voiced by Jason Schwartzman, but conceptually the best thing in here), a Super-Villain powerful enough to need a village (of Spider-Entities) to counter him . . . in the next film.  If too many eggs spoil the pudding, here we have too many Spideys!  And all with parental separation issues.  Too many styles of animation thrown at us.  Too many plotlines & characters (hoping to gain multiple views so you can reach Level Six).  The film’s evanescent look both cool & headache inducing.  So, when the next one opens in a year or three, let us know how they finesse their way out of knocking off Dad so we don’t have to sit thru another 2+ hours.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *And INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE/’18 so promising.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/spider-man-into-spider-verse-2018.html

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (2022)

Handsomely produced, physically impressive, this remake of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel, an early Talkie triumph for Lewis Milestone in 1930, is this year’s prestige disappointment.  It starts well enough as young Paul Bäumer (Remarque’s alter-ego) and friends sign up in their German town for an already stalemated war only to be shocked by the reality of WWI combat, bleak living conditions, and the pointless nature of being used as cannon fodder in a war of attrition.  But somewhere between casting and story emphasis, something goes terribly wrong in what was designed to be a more German-specific look at what had always been a German POV story, anyway.  Key missteps of commission & omission include top brass Armistice conferences and the loss of Paul’s haunted return home on short leave.  (The latter the very heart of Remarque’s novel.)  And worse to come as writer/director Edward Berger goes all Steven Spielberg on us as the Armistice is about to go into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month/1918 when (SPOILER ALERT!) a vainglorious Captain sends hundreds of new recruits and the few vets not fast enough to have taken off, on one final territorial thrust for the honor of the Fatherland.  And only fifteen minutes of war left!  An actual ticking clock adding suspense.  After two years at the front, Paul’s being stabbed in the back; that’s literally stabbed in the back.  (Well, bayoneted.)  Left as a beautified death-mask in plaster dust; eyes & mouth inauthentically shut, posed as if to complete a Pietà.  Remarque’s novel doesn’t end on Armistice Day or even in November, let alone with a huge battle sequence. ‘He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.’  Death coming not with a bang, but a whimper.  An unremarkable death on an unremarkable day.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The 1930 version, if not without Early Talkie awkwardness in its dialogue scenes, remains a stunning achievement.  READ ALL ABOUT IT: Particularly in how Milestone and cinematographer Karl Freund came up with something to visually match the devastating final two lines from the novel.  A fine chapter in Kevin Brownlow’s THE WAR, THE WEST AND THE WILDERNESS.

GOOOD-BYE, MY LADY (1956)

One more Boy and his Dog story, at once effective and inadequate.  Brandon De Wilde, on the cusp of adolescence, living a backwoods bayou life with toothless/illiterate Uncle Walter Brennan, traps and trains a dog like no one’s ever seen before.  No mongrel, the dog turns into an outstanding bird-dog, attracting enough local attention to be found out.  Keep the companion of a lifetime or send it home?  What’s the right thing to do?  (SPOILER title!)  Loaded with lovely unusual things (nicely caught in impressionistic monochrome by William Clothier), if only director William Wellman in a late effort showed some sensitivity in his cinematic DNA, pushing too hard at all the wrong times and unable to keep Brennan and General Store owner Phil Harris from coming off as HUCK FINN Road Company Duke and The Dauphin.  They’re good in their way, but it’s the wrong way.  The project needs tact, and a touch poetry; Wellman can’t even get the dog to sound right.  (The breed ‘laughs’ instead of barks, but the audio is so poorly done it briefly stops the film cold.  And that folksy guitar strumming score also no help.*)  Far better, indeed shockingly fine, is that farming family across the creek.  A Black household who, for a change, get the nicely maintained home while our While leads live in something nearer a shack with a porch than a proper house.  And yes, that’s Sidney Poitier in fine support as the owner (something of a father surrogate to De Wilde), freed from having to play a symbol or be a progressive guide into racial issues.  Not ‘colorblind casting,’ BTW, just a Black neighbor with a solid working life & family.  How long before Poitier got this sort of part again?  Very much worth overlooking problems here, and young De Wilde was some kind of special film kid.

DOUBLE-BILL: See what’s missing here, fresh eyes/poetic tone, in De Wilde’s outstanding debut under Fred Zinnemann in THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING/’52.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/member-of-wedding-1952.html   OR: More Boy(s) and a Dog from novelist James Street, THE BISCUIT EATER/’ 40.  Also boasting pretty advanced race relations for the period. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-biscuit-eater-1940.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Singing the title track, that’s an unmistakable if uncredited Howard Keel.

NO TIME TO DIE (2021)

For Daniel Craig’s last tour of 007 duty, long-standing James Bond handlers Barbara Broccoli & Michael Wilson (still running the family business with one basic product) go back to first in the series DR. NO, released when Ms. Broccoli was but two years old.  And they let us know right from the credit sequence, sticking in the odd undulating dots used for the DR. NO credits, and never again till now.  Later, they’ll rebuild/expand DR. NO’s watery lab (now a chemical weapons factory*), and while stopping short of a YellowFace villain, they do slick down Rami Malek’s hair and give him Dr. No’s halting vocal cadence.  Plus exploding island finale.  There doesn’t seem to be a point to all this, nor to the many other self-referential moments with other films in the long-running series.  Perhaps an attempt to add personal connection to a typically impersonal 007 story that sees Bond not bonding at all to Lady Love Léa Seydoux.  So out of synch, their love-making session is accompanied by an old 78rpm record, the ones that played four minutes, tops.  (Bond’s aging libido winding down like that hand-cranked Victrola.)  Best to get to the over-extended action sequences, state-of-the-art motor vehicle chases to get us thru nearly three hours.  Things do pick up in the middle, mostly in Cuba, when Craig’s Bond finds a worthy partner in fellow spy Ana de Armas (rekindling fun from KNIVES OUT/’19).  But then Christoph Waltz shows up as imprisoned Spectre head Blofeld for a Hannibal Lecter routine.  Time for a change of the guard . . . and not only in the cast.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Said weapon designed for good, but now being used for evil!  Where do they come up with this original stuff?  (And how much are they playing for it?)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: Bloat also part of the James Bond tradition, going all the way back to #4 THUNDERBALL/’65.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/09/thunderball-1965.html

SPOILER: The shock ending less unprecedented than claimed.  Roger Moore ‘died’ in his last three Bonds, it’s just that nobody told him.

WHITE BANNERS (1938)

MARY POPPINS meets STELLA DALLAS in this emotionally effective adaptation of a typically aspirational story from religion-grounded ‘pop’ novelist Lloyd C. Douglas.  Sticky stuff, if less so than his better known titles (MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION/’35 & ‘54; THE ROBE/’53), it’s much less pushy with its philosophy (something about everything turning out for the best if viewed as a long game), and certainly goes down easier thanks to superb work by three of its four leads.  Fay Bainter (double Oscar nominated this year, she won ‘Supporting’ for JEZEBEL, but surely for this, too), an all but homeless door-to-door salesperson, who knocks at the pinch-penny home of school-teacher/inventor Claude Rains & family one wintry day, only to sell herself as budget-conscious housekeeper.*  Rains, with help from bright/bratty student Jackie Cooper, the richest kid in town, finally has his breakthru with an electric ‘icebox’ idea only to see Cooper lose the patent the same night he lets Rains’ daughter catch pneumonia.  That’d be Bonita Granville, a drag on the film with perky overplaying; the rest of the cast all fine under Edmund Goulding's reticent approach (with nicely unforced 1919 period touches) and great portraitist cinematographer Charles Rosher taking just as much care on these unglamourous character actors as he did with big stars.  Extra nice turns from Kay Johnson as a delicate Mom & James Stephenson making a big impression after a late appearance as out-of-town mystery man/investor.  (Stevenson set for a Ronald Colman sort of career only to die three years later, only 52.)  It’s a quiet gem of a picture if you don’t mind the sentiment.  A bit more tough-minded (i.e. killing off a character or two) and this could have been a minor classic.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: Unlike Granville, who never lived up to her debut in William Wyler’s THESE THREE/’36, Cooper was making a go of his teenage transition from A-list child star to Hollywood all-rounder having just jumped from M-G-M to Monogram, from Warners to Universal in his last four films.  Still on or behind the screen for another five decades. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/these-three-1936.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/SPOILER(?): *Though the film holds back on the motivation behind one of the leads, it’s easy to imagine the story playing out in even better fashion if you know the secret from the beginning.  It really dials up the emotion for you weepie heads.  (Hands please.)  No SPOILER here, but should you want to risk knowing all and maximize the emotional content, most plot descriptions, even the cursory one on IMdB, give it away.

SLANDER (1957)

Lasting in its original incarnation from 1952 to 1958, game-changing gossip magazine CONFIDENTIAL found itself belatedly under attack in 1957.  Taken on by libeled stars in court, and on-screen, as in this tepid B-pic, an M-G-M contract closer for Van Johnson, a man with just the sort of closeted gay background CONFIDENTIAL lived to hint at.  And he’s pretty good here as an also-ran puppeteer whose big, long-awaited tv break comes with the threat of public exposure on a youthful felony conviction and four-year jail sentence.  But he can save himself (and family: wife Ann Blyth; son Richard Eyer*), along with his career, if he’ll just inform on another star.  (The best idea in here, one barely pursued in Jerome Weidman’s ultra-tidy script, is that Johnson’s instant tv celebrity suddenly makes him a bigger ‘get’ for sleaze publisher Steve Cochran than the original target.)  Plenty of dramatic possibilities, but with stiff megging from Roy Rowland the film has all the visual appeal of a Poverty Row quickie.  (Below the production standards for episodic ‘50s tv.)  Ann Blyth can’t help her brittle looks (she always seems about to shatter), but Steve Cochran’s heartless magazine publisher and Marjorie Rambeau as his disapproving mother play two sizes too big to survive Rowland’s penchant for finding just the wrong camera position.  (The overlit sets from lenser Harold Marzorati, a given at this price point, also no help.)  Under the circumstances, Johnson & Eyer a pretty good father/son team, but hardly enough to make this collection of missed opportunities worth a detour.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: While better attempts were made at the time, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL/’97 pretty much sweeps the board on this subject.  OR:  *1957 was kid actor Richard Eyer’s busiest year.  See him take on a villainous Robbie the Robot (a rare appearance between his ‘56 FORBIDDEN PLANET debut and the LOST IN SPACE tv days) in THE INVISIBLE BOY/’57.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/11/invisible-boy-1957.html

NEVER STEAL ANYTHING SMALL (1959)

Rarely seen New York Waterfront musical is too odd to ignore.  Written by Charles Lederer as his third & last directing gig, it’s based on an unproduced play by Maxwell Anderson & Rouben Mamoulian.  (And what a shame Mamoulian, fresh off directing SILK STOCKINGS/’57, isn’t calling the shots.)  SPOILERS!  The off-kilter story has James Cagney, in his last song-and-dance turn*, using force to grab the reins of the dockworkers’ union, then using the perks of his new position to woo the pretty young wife of his handsome young house lawyer (Shirley Jones; Roger Smith), even hiring aggressive redhead gal-pal Cara Williams as Smith’s secretary with benefits.  So when Cagney’s caught lifting freight off one of his boats, he’s happy to let Smith take the fall for him . . . if only it didn’t make the guy look like a hero to the union members.  (Ending the film just when things are starting to get interesting.)  Less musical then cockeyed dramedy with a few songs folded in & color-coordinated sets, you can see how this might have worked in a big production number for Cara & Cagney, set in an EastmanColored shiny bright showroom of European sports cars of the day.  If only the songs had pizzazz to match the settings.  In its favor, Cagney is positively gleeful, and the little remembered Ms. Williams very 1950s Va-Va-Voom.  But the sheer weirdness of the thing (like accented Mafia bossman Nehemiah Persoff aping Lee J. Cobb in ON THE WATERFRONT/’54) ain’t enough to bring this mediocrity to life.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: City Hall politics was in the musical comedy air of 1959 with Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick’s FIORELLO! (never filmed) a smash on B’way.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Cagney almost made two more musicals, nearly coming out of retirement when Jack Warner offered him cockney ne’er-do-well Alfred P. Doolittle in MY FAIR LADY/’64; as well as John Ford’s disastrous remake of WHAT PRICE GLORY?/’52, developed as a musical (note Cagney’s partnered with song-and-dance man Dan Dailey), but which wound up losing all but one of it’s songs.

THIS LOVE OF OURS (1945)

WARNING: All Spoilers WriteUp!  Absurd three-hankie soaper supposedly adapted from master Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello.  In brief: Leaving his clinging daughter to her morbid fixation over her late mother, widower doctor Charles Korvin goes to an out-of-town conference where a night on the town brings him face-to-face with his past . . . his very much alive wife (the girl's mother) Merle Oberon, currently working as piano-playing partner to nightclub ‘insult caricaturist’ Claude Rains.  Hours later, our doctor is saving the depressed Oberon from a botched suicide.  Surviving this near miss, Oberon’s now determined to reclaim her role as mother even if it means pretending to be Doc’s new wife and never telling her teenage daughter the biological truth.  Flashback to the happy young couple just getting started as a family when town gossip places Oberon with another man.  Rather then ask about it, Dr. Korvin grabs their little girl and disappears.  Now, fate has brought a second chance.  Back in the present, the girl only resents Step-mom, Doc won’t speak up, ‘new’ Mom hides behind her fake identity and accepts blame for all unfortunate changes at home, and Rains glumly says ‘I told you so.’  Then, a birthday party brings an unexpected guest, the mystery man who broke up the family.  And he doesn’t even recognize Oberon!  Not that he didn’t care, but that he couldn’t see.  Yikes!  Turns out he was a blind man at the time, but now can see and eventually (thru touch) remembers Merle as his former (wait for it) not lover, but piano instructor!  Yes, it was all a most unfortunate mistake.  Now, if only they can get the girl to understand.  Perhaps Claude Rains, in making her wish come true by fashioning from verbal description a caricature portrait of her late mom, can bring resolution.  Sure enough, when he does, it looks just like . . .  guess who.  What a Freudian nightmare of a happy ending.  With director William Dieterle completely at a loss on how to pull this off, you’re left to imagine how John M. Stahl, Frank Borzage or Douglas Sirk might have done it.  Sure enough, Sirk almost did, starting development on a Rock Hudson remake, NEVER SAY GOODBYE/’56, before handing it off to director Jerry Hopper.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: That remake, NEVER SAY GOODBYE (not seen her), sounds pretty clever, setting the whole farrago as a romance split in two by Iron Curtain/Cold War sympathies.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Unlike most Hollywood stars of her generation, Merle Oberon keeps fiddling with her hair style within a single film.  Here with about five different looks.  Exhausting!

THE NEW FRONTIER (1935)

Atypical B-Western from John Wayne’s Poverty Row ‘galley years’* (post Raoul Walsh BIG TRAIL/’30 flop; pre John Ford STAGECOACH/’39 career rescue) holds unlikely interest in the unlikeliest of places: film technique. In most ways, a standard program ‘Oater’: Wayne’s dad murdered in town by crooked saloon owners while Wayne is off working as trail guide. He comes back and cleans things up. Minimal production values offset by good locations, and a rough-and-ready pace that can now be better seen (and appreciated) in a fine Olive Films DVD after decades of subfusc Public Domain copies. (On the other hand, you can hear all those amateurish line-readings even more clearly.) But who was responsible for the sophisticated character shadings of Al Bridges ‘good’ bad guy? (Bridges later a stock player for Preston Sturges.) And who the heck is director Carl Pierson? A vet journeyman film editor, for some unknown reason, he made all his three films as director in 1935 (two Wayne quickies, one Gene Autry), all for Republic, and he seems determined to make something of the opportunity. With surprising camera moves, a daring nightime climax (a holocaust of fire-bearing renegades on horseback), unexpected tracking shots, quick swish-pans in place of regular edits (the sort of thing William K. Howard might have tried), and ultra-screen-filing closer-than-close-ups to prefigure Sergio Leone. None of it quite integrated into a film style, but just the attempt is worth noting. No wonder the execs at Republic pics put a quick stop to his directing; this guy was far too imaginative for their production line.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Pierson’s attempts at style must have been even harder to spot, and easy to ignore, in lousy Public Domain VHS dupe prints.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In a saloon fight, when Wayne gets knocked out by a lead pipe, note the big black ten-gallon hat. Hard to imagine any blow making it thru all that shock-absorbing felt.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Wayne ended his galley years with NEW FRONTIER/’39. Familiar title, no? This one standard doings in his lighthearted ‘Three Mesquiteers’ series.

HA-SHOTER / POLICEMAN (2011)

Currently on something of a roll after KINDERGARTEN TEACHER/’14 and SYNONYMS/’19, this earlier award-winner from Israeli writer/director Nadav Lapid does him few favors. Shot DOGME style, in an unattractive, washed out digital image that offers collateral damage on subtitle legibility, it doggedly follows an elite team of anti-terrorist alpha-types thru various male bonding rituals (even at a backyard BBQ), tiptoeing thru workplace events when not entirely avoiding them. Instead, team player Yiftach Klein worries about a very pregnant wife when not hitting on a 15 yr-old waitress (horny is as horny does!), or tries to get a sick colleague to sign off for full responsibility on a case of excessive force. Hey, the guy’s got a brain tumor. He’s likely to die before the case reaches court, letting his brother warriors off the hook. Then, two-thirds of the way in, we switch P.O.V. to watch the unfolding drama of a small group of arrogant kid anarchists, radicals planning to take some billionaires hostage at a wedding reception so they can grab media attention and read their People’s Manifesto over the air. (Awfully hard to root for the billionaire class these days, but these spoiled brat revolutionaries make it easy.) This action, naturally, brings our elite anti-terrorist unit back into the picture for a reasonably well-executed take-out operation*, but a distinct lack of sympathy in any direction keeps possible complex feelings muted. Or was the missing empathy intended?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Structurally, the film seems much influenced by Kurosawa’s masterly hostage drama HIGH AND LOW/’62. But only structurally.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Slight Spoiler: *On the other hand, how hard can it be to stage a shoot out in the dark?

STAGE FRIGHT (1950)

Mediocre Alfred Hitchcock, yet quite the contentious film. (A problem only explained with SPOILERS; so, consider yourself warned.) As a story, STAGE FRIGHT is like someone’s idea of a Hitchcock film*, just not Hitchcock’s. Think THE PRIZE/’63 rather than NORTH BY NORTHWEST/’59; the ingredients all there, but the measurements off. The basic idea sounds like classic Hitchcock: Innocent Man on the run; Girl Sidekick as helper & love interest; but twisted with the man’s innocence in question and the sidekick’s affections unstable, moving from the panicky suspect & toward the dapper police investigator tracking him. And that polarizing contentious factor? It comes right at the start with a long explanatory flashback as Richard Todd’s man-on-the-run misleads button-nosed Jane Wyman about a murder he’s accused of. In his visualization, inamorata Marlene Dietrich is the guilty party, killing her husband and letting him take the fall. So, is a false flashback a sin against film etiquette? A breach of audience trust? Here it’s the cleverest thing in the pic. (And note how Dietrich's acting goes subtly ‘off’ in these brief scenes.) No, the real problem is sloppy plotting, easy connect-the-dots deduction, and a general lack of suspense. Jane Wyman, a little slow on the uptake, is the acting student who finagles her way into Dietrich’s employ as assistant, hoping to tease out a breakdown or confession. Michael Wilding is amused & amusing as the charming detective, his best scenes with Wyman’s eccentric parents, Sybil Thorndike & Alastair Sim, both fun if hardly passable as Wyman’s parents. Maybe she was adopted. Maybe the film was adopted.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Among mature Hitchcock projects, only TOPAZ /’69 equals this in coming across as somebody else’s idea of echt Hitchcock. That one was largely made as a personal favor by Hitch to Universal honcho Lew Wasserman who’d spent a boodle on the Leon Uris bestseller. And Hitch was in a bad position, hard up for a project after MARNIE thunderously tanked and TORN CURTAIN disappointed. No such explanation for STAGE FRIGHT. Perhaps a simple loss of confidence, with Hitch keeping his head above water after PARADINE CASE, ROPE and UNDER CAPRICORN all underperformed. This made it four in a row.

DOUBLE-BILL: Hitch immediately returned to form (and then some!) in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’51.

THE MATCH KING (1932)

Fascinating fact-inspired fiction (click to enlarge newspaper -with SPOILERS - below) stars Warren William in top Pre-Code form as a ruthless capitalist cad who ‘saves’ his Swedish hometown match factory by raising an unsecured bank loan, then continues rolling over bigger & bigger loans until he’s cornered the world market. 200 matches/a penny a box: worth billions. But if he ever stops growing, it will all catch up to him: Personally from the women he’s used for spying & sexual blackmail to gain state monopolies; Financially since he needs the next loan to cover the last. He can’t go on forever, but what might take him down? Corporate honesty? Unlikely. An eccentric inventor with a reusable match? Suppressible. An affair with an actress that turns into the real thing? Possibly. The economics, vague & simplistic, are enough to get the ideas across; the personal cost believable; and the film seems to turn the corner from Early Talkies to Talkie Maturity halfway along. (Did directing duties pass from Howard Bretherton to William Keighley at some middle point?) Lili Damita (later Mrs Errol Flynn) probably has her best role as William’s romantic Achilles Heel (she’s certainly gorgeous enough), but all the supporting roles are memorably taken with an exceptional turn from Harold Huber as a counterfeiter with fake Italian bonds to sell. Marvelous stuff; suicide by PONZI!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: Robert Maxwell, the newspaper tycoon who compounded one fraud on top of the last to keep his empire going, has much in common with William’s character. And the same might be said of MR. ARKADIN/’55, Orson Welles’ thrilling & maddening film about a secretive tycoon investigating himself which seems to anticipate Maxwell’s end thirty years before the fact.