THE FOUR FEATHERS (1939)

The Korda brothers (producer Alex, director Zoltan & designer Vincent) got just about everything right in this tremendous version of the oft-filmed British Empire tale. John Clements is the seemingly weak scion of a long line of British officers who redeems his valour (Anglophiles, note the spelling) after he resigns his commission and receives four white feathers of cowardice. There’s a late silent version from 1929 that sounds pretty marvelous, but certainly none of the many sound versions comes within shouting distance of this Technicolor gem. Love, honour, derring-do, native disguises, Fuzzy-Wuzzies, a grand score from Miklos Rozsa & stunning studio lensing from Georges Perinal & Jack Cardiff, plus legendary location footage from Osmond Barradaile that was pilfered for years after. Ralph Richardson is a standout as the officer who loses his heart and his sight, and character actor supreme, C. Aubrey Smith is at his most iconic. The story is cleverly designed so that it comes down on all sides of the usual debates on British colonialism & the military, but no one takes sides against this classic telling, yet another 1939 winner.

WATCH ON THE RHINE (1943)

Excepting THE LITTLE FOXES, Lillian Hellman’s plays are largely dismissed today, and WATCH ON THE RHINE is hardly free of her clunky devices: hidden packets of cash; a jimmied briefcase lock; a crumbling marriage to help move the plot; speechifying tots to cover any stray talking points; and that Hellman specialty, the metaphorical blindness of the blindingly rich. The WWII story follows an anti-fascist agent who brings his wife & kids to her family manse in D.C., then must rejoin the fight in Europe on his own. Ah, but not before he takes care of an informer who would, for a price, stop him. Matters are hardly improved by the all-thumbs megging from debuting B'way director Herman Shumlin. (His stiff follow-up, CONFIDENTIAL AGENT/'45 ended his brief Hollywood sojourn). So, why am I always so moved? It's true that Bette Davis. playing demur & looking uncommonly lovely, brings a deep emotional charge to what is essentially a generous supporting role and that Paul Lukas recreates his stage triumph without looking stale or over-rehearsed. (His showstopper, singing a defiant resistance song is riveting stuff.) Hell, even the creepy robotic kids grow on you. Hellman was no artist, but a working playwright (note the spelling) who built dramatic boxes that only held tight when the actors were both bigger-than-life & true-to-life. No wonder it worked so well with Golden Age Hollywood stars.

CONTEST: Name the Hollywood Production Code violation that is strikingly, almost defiantly, flaunted in this film to win our usual prize, a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of any NetFlix pic of your choice.

MEDEA (1988)

That bad boy of Danish cinema, Lars von Trier, based this version of the Euripides play on an unrealized script by his great predecessor, the uncompromising Carl Dreyer. Recently, Trier has emphasized his role as political/cultural provocateur to such an extent that we may have forgotten his great & utterly natural filmmaking talents. This haunting work stands as a daunting corrective. It’s shot in a strange manner with a desaturated color scheme and a pointedly non-Hi-Def, almost distressed, video style,* but Trier's every shot choice perfectly serves the harrowing old tale. Rarely has Medea’s revenge on her unfaithful lover made more sense or come across so directly. *Has the FACETS DVD transfer (from a PAL format) emphasized the degraded visual look or is it intentional?

THE SECOND WOMAN (1951)

It can be fun (and instructive) to see what could be done within the minuscule budgets of Hollywood’s Poverty Row. This one takes place in Daphne du Maurier territory (think REBECCA/’40: flashback structure, burning house & all, even Florence Bates) with Robert Young as a troubled widower architect (he lives in a knock-off of Falling Water!) who comes out of his shell when Betsy Drake moves next door. If only the unresolved 'accidental' death of his first wife wasn’t muddying the romance. Young gives a subtle and affecting perf in classic 'will-he-kiss-me-or-kill-me' mode and there’s a pretty good supporting cast, but Drake clearly shows why her career was so brief. Try to ignore the ludicrous background score assembled from Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Hits and the dreadful Public Domain copies that smear Hal Mohr’s handsome noir lensing.

HARD-BOILED (1992)

After this Hong Kong actioner, helmer John Woo came to Hollywood, even went Hollywood, but never quite lived up to all the hype. You can see both what excited everyone and what was so painfully missing in this empty-headed policier. Chow Yun-Fat is a detective and Tony Leung is an undercover cop who come close to killing each other before they discover they are working for the same team on the same case. You really can’t tell your gangsters without a scorecard here, but Woo smashes on with ever more elaborate gun battles, constantly raising the firepower, as the film moves to its overblown climax. The model for Woo’s pyrotechnics are more like arcade shoot-em-ups than today’s video game aesthetic, which gives a bit of period flavor to all the sound & fury, but you only have to compare this to a dramatic kissing-cousin like INFERNAL AFFAIRS/’02 (also starring Leung & the source of Scorsese’s THE DEPARTED/’06) to see Woo’s limitations.

THE NAMESAKE (2006)

Mira Nair hasn’t been able to maintain her MONSOON WEDDING/’01 mojo. Now, she revisits some of the themes of family ties & Indian heritage, but the magic is gone. Perhaps this story is simply too worn to carry us along: son of immigrant parents falls from the old ways only to return when mortality closes in. What ethnic group hasn’t told this story on film, from THE JAZZ SINGER/’27 on? Perhaps, paradoxically, Nair is too well suited to the material. The well worn tropes need the fresh eyes of an outsider to revivify them. The film does get aloft toward the end when life gives one extra twist to our journeyman hero, but by then it’s too little, too late. Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh. But MONSOON WEDDING was just too good to let Nair off the hook. Her latter projects seem to alternately see her trying to find herself or lose herself in her work when what she needs to do is find herself by losing herself.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Kal Penn, who seems a bit too old as the film’s prodigal son, looks from certain angles like Johnny Mathis. It’s distracting!

THE FABULOUS DORSEYS (1947)

More like THE BARELY WATCHABLE DORSEYS. This expectedly dopey bio-pic about those feudin' big band brothers has just enough musical interludes to keep you from tuning out (Paul Whiteman, Art Tatum, a nifty turn from Helen O'Connell), and it's fun to see the boys play themselves in dramatic situations and not merely fronting their bands (Jimmy can't act a lick, but Tommy's not too bad), but there’s not a lot going on here. Janet Blair co-stars as peacemaker to the boys, saving the romance for the blandly handsome William Lundigan. He’s pianist/composer for the band and wouldn’t you just know he’s got a concerto in his trunk with solo licks just right the brothers. (These things always seem to end in semi-classical garb @ Carnegie Hall.) Will the guys reunite. Will anyone care? Hack megger Alfred Green was just off THE JOLSON STORY/’46, the surprise hit of the year, but surprises are just what you won’t find here.

THEY GOT ME COVERED (1943)

This first-rate wartime comedy was released in '43, but filmed in '42 when the tide of WWII still looked very grim and laughing at the enemy was at a premium. The needs of the country and timing were all but perfect for Bob Hope, then at his peak. Here, he's nicely teamed with his 'Road Pic" co-star Dorothy Lamour as well as regular helmer David Butler who shows surprisingly nice chops working through a sort of slaphappy 39 STEPS story-structure. Bob’s a reporter who lands the scoop of the year when John Abbott sells him all the details on a big Nazi organization, headed by a bewigged Otto Preminger. These Fifth Columnists are operating a sabotage ring right inside the Washington beltway. If a few wisecracks tend to serve Bob the radio comedian rather than the story, most of the film holds up better than you'd expect. It's no TO BE OR NOT TO BE, Hope never was willing to give himself up to a real director, but it retains most of its laughs compared to similar period fare and, largely thanks to Rudolph Mate's exceptionally refined noirish lensing, even gives off a bit of dramatic kick.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Doesn't Otto look oddly like Howard De Silva in that hairpiece?)

SANSHO THE BAILIFF (1954)

Perhaps because it’s based on a well known folk tale (a noble family is destroyed when a commitment to modern humanistic ideas result in a father's exile and virtual slavery for his wife & children), this late work by the great Kenji Mizoguchi keeps its themes and concerns right on the surface, rather than buried in the texture of his narrative. SANSHO comes off as magnificent, but somewhat pre-processed; neat & tidy enough for the international award circuit. (And it deserves every single one; it’s a very great film.) It doesn’t puzzle or linger on your brain and under your skin the way his greatest work does. On the other hand, as a Mizoguchi entry point, it may be easier for a non-Japanese audience to get a handle on.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The restrained camera work and meticulously balanced compositions, which play against the sickening brutality of some the action (a crucial early scene of separation is almost unbearable), is surprisingly similar in style to the clean craft of Hollywood master William Wyler. Sure enough, his working methods, according to some of the interviews included on the disc, were remarkably like Wyler's. No comments, no help, no suggestions about what you were doing wrong or what was missing from the scene; just do it one more time.