IDIOTS AND ANGELS (2008)

Bill Plympton’s distinctive artisanal style of hand-drawn animation is well-suited to this fable on man’s infinite capacity to ignore his own best instincts, his ‘better angels;’ even when they’re as plain as the nose on his face . . . or a set of wings growing out of his back. There’s no dialogue, but grunts & groans tell us all we need to know about the grumpy gun dealer who sells illegal weapons at a dive bar where a small but loyal group of oddball losers congregate. They each have their ‘pipe dreams,’ visualized for us as if Eugene O’Neill had written a pantomime, but then reality brings them back to their drab lives. And that’s when the unwanted wings start to sprout. Fought against, then fought for and fought over (some of the action is pretty grotesque), they annihilate everyone’s plans and turn inertia into ambition before blowing up in everyone’s face. It’s a wild, exhilarating, anarchistic ride. Plympton is especially gifted in clever visual transitions & substitutions, though, on the down side, his storyline & visuals can turn repetitive. But adventurous types won’t want to miss this. At its best, it’s a considerable achievement from an artsy animator best known for one-reel absurdities. NOTE: This feature-length cartoon is not for the kiddies! On the other hand, your teenage son just might flip over it.

BELLS OF ST. MARY’S (1945)

No one has ever been able to explain how Leo McCarey held his loose-limbed pics together, especially the phenomenally popular Bing Crosby/Father O’Malley duo of GOING MY WAY/’44 and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S. With their wise, twinkly priests & benevolent, good-humored nuns, they might be taking place on another planet: roughhousing city kids turn into angelic choirboys; cloying subplots reunite families; and weepy finales get boosted with miraculous displays of generosity in true faith & hard cash. Yet, with only slight indulgence, they remain irresistible. Part of the secret may be McCarey’s background in silent film comedy. Present at creation to Laurel & Hardy, he developed a relaxed feel for the rhythms of comic pacing & the patience to let episodic structures bloom. In this one, Crosby’s padre is sent to give Sister Ingrid Bergman’s rundown parochial school the once over. Will its doors close forever? If anything, we’re less connected to the real world than in the first film. Maybe a good thing. Lesser story materials & less memorable songs hardly matter since these films don’t rise & fall on the usual pluses & minuses. It’s all in the way McCarey riffs on his gags & sentiment, as if he’s playing jazz. It’s also why Ingrid Bergman, given a rapturous close-up from lenser George Barnes, reaches a level of spirituality far beyond anything she achieved when playing Joan of Arc in ‘48.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Instead of GOING MY WAY, try McCarey’s decidedly odd final pic, SATAN NEVER SLEEPS/’62 which manages to relocate GOING MY WAY to ‘Red’ China! William Holden & Clifton Webb get the young priest/old priest roles played in GOING by Crosby & Barry Fitzgerald.

CONTEST:  Listen as this Catholic school recites the Pledge of Allegiance. Notice something missing? Name and explain the gap to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of any NetFlix DVD.

MAN BAIT / (aka) THE LAST PAGE (1952)

Hammer Studios made this tidy sexual-blackmail thriller a few years before they started rebooting horror pics in ultra-saturated color with Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee. And while it only reaches about 60% of its potential, it’s (just) odd enough to warrant a look. George Brent is appropriately gray as an unassuming bookshop manager with an invalid wife and an assistant who’s long pined for this nice unavailable man. But he’s also got a live wire in the shop, the young, sexy (and slightly slutty) accounts girl, Diana Dors. She's being chatted up by a lout who gets her to initiate a blackmail scheme against Brent after a reckless kiss. But when things go too far, people start to die, and Brent becomes the likely suspect. Terence Fisher, Hammer’s house helmer, gets some moody atmosphere out of actual London locations, and the bookshop is a claustrophobic marvel. (Is it a real place?) If only the blackmail scheme and the intimations of psychotic behavior had been fully exploited. With that in mind, note the credit for adaptation. Why it’s Frederick Knott of DIAL M FOR MURDER fame. Too bad they didn’t really let him run with this, the last act shows glimmers of something much stronger. But hold on for a great ‘thrill shot’ during some amateur sleuthing near the end. It’s worth the whole movie.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: The classic read on quaint old London bookshops is 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD by Helene Hanff. You can read it in less time than it takes to watch the so-so movie they made of it in 1987.

THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (1972)

Ray Milland is the terminally ill transplant specialist who needs a fresh body to graft his healthy head on. ‘Rosie’ Grier is the death row inmate who volunteers in the hope of gaining a little extra time to prove his innocence. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, did I mention that the good doctor is a horrible racist? If only the movie were as outrageous as its set up. Alas, this goofball release from Grade B film marketeers American International Pictures has the heart, soul & look of ‘70s a tv Movie-of-the-Week, with a few car & motorcycle chase scenes thrown in. A big fandango with 14 police cars is impressively destructive, but megger Lee Frost hasn’t a clue on how to put cause-and-effect into an action scene, random mayhem is his limit. Still, in its tactless way, the film is not without social/political interest as a blunt bigotry litmus test.. But it does go awfully flat whenever it tries to be funny. If it simply let its absurdist tendencies play out, it might have been nearly entertaining. That is, if someone other than Milland knew how to act.

DOUBLE-BILL: The idea of a white bigot trapped inside the body of a black man had recently appeared in Francis Coppola’s disastrous attempt at FINIAN’S RAINBOW/’68, made twenty years after the stage show opened & twenty years before it might have worked as a period piece. And don’t forget WATERMELON MAN/’70. Still a better pairing might come from another double-headed film fiasco, HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING/’89, the career-cratering follow up pic for helmer Bruce Robinson & Richard E. Grant just off their indispensable WITHNAIL AND I/’87

L’AFFAIRE FAREWELL (2009)

This mesmerizing Cold War endgame pic is a tru-life spy story that might have been written by John Le Carré.* It’s largely about Sergei Gregoriev (well played by Emir Kusturica), a highly placed Russian official who proves his trustworthiness not by leaking Soviet secrets, but by showing how many contacts & how much intelligence has leeched from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R. President Reagan (a delighted Fred Ward) & his staff, especially the CIA (Willem Dafoe), are gobsmacked. Now that he has their attention, Gregoriev hopes to leak enough info to decimate Soviet intelligence operations. Not for money or revenge or a ticket to freedom, but because he believes it can get his beloved, but moribund country out of deadlock; basically, he’s doing it for his son. And he pulls this off, not thru the usual Spy vs Spy channels, but with the terrified assistance of a mid-level French official living in Moscow with his family (Guillaume Canet). It may look like domestic intrigue, but the stakes are as high as they come. Christian Carion, who helmed & co-scripted, does a beautiful job keeping the operations clear and ratcheting up the tension. Even better is how the film incorporates the complicated family lives of these men, and in showing how their heroic actions may have done more in bringing down the Iron Curtain than all the Reagan White House military defense spending could muster. A superb film, and a bit shocking to note that this exciting & important work didn’t rate a theatrical run in the States.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *A barely recognizable David Soul plays an aide to Reagan named Hatton, but he’s made up to look just like Lyn Nofzinger. He gets to sit with the Prez and watch THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE/’62. SPOILER ALERT!: They show who shot him!

DOUBLE-BILL: Why not try John Le Carré’s RUSSIA HOUSE/’90, Fred Schepisi helms Sean Connery & Michelle Pfieffer in a Tom Stoppard script. It’s an underrated film with similarities to this story. How much did Le Carré know?

IERI, OGGI, DOMANI / YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW (1963)

KINO/Lorber’s much-appreciated DVD upgrade restores Vittorio De Sica’s tri-part comedy to its gorgeous, sexy, hilarious self. The tour of Italy starts in Naples where poor women can only keep out of jail by staying pregnant. But even when your wife is Sophia Loren, seven squalling kids are enough to make Marcello Mastroianni too pooped to pop. Then we’re off to Milan where a chic Sophia tries to drive away ennui with a new Rolls-Royce & a new romantic prospect. But can Marcello’s bookish intellectual handle a luxury car & a luxury woman? Now, to Rome where Marcello’s businessman is stopping in town to pay a few bribes and spend some quality time with his favorite call-girl. Guess who. But there’s a distraction on the neighboring terrace, a young seminary student who’s thinking of ditching God for Sophia. (There’s a difference?) De Sica’s broad comic tone is wonderfully assured here, combining smooth film technique with warm-hearted perfs from his irreplaceable stars. It’s not only that he gets the details right, he makes them specific, The film is a tourist's dream, but not a tourist’s trap. A big difference. It’s often forgotten (and bizarrely held against him by film academic types) that De Sica, the great Neo-Realist humanist, was also one film’s greatest entertainers. Working beautifully with Giuseppe Rotunno on magnificent locations (and cunningly matched studio interiors, what editing!), he generates huge laughs just on the camera set ups. The middle segment, an adagio between allegros, is a bit thin, Antonioni & Visconti appear to be the targets, but it shares in the remarkable use of space & composition. Five decades on, the film remains the most civilized of racy entertainments imaginable.

CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (1939)

One of the first straight-ahead anti-Nazi pics, CONFESSIONS is so cleverly pieced together & excitingly paced, you hardly notice how thin this episodic FBI procedural actually is. The first act is all Germans & German-Americans plotting, spying, beer drinking, sneaking in on the S.S. Bismarck & congregating at the local German-American Bund. Finally, the F.B.I. comes into the frame when Edward G. Robinson shows up in the fourth reel, something of a late-entry record for a top-billed star. But Eddie’s always worth the wait, and with his paradoxically calm/staccato professorial manner, he teases out the conspiracy, picking off suspects and playing them against each other. No rough stuff from a country that’s still officially neutral, Eddie finesses confessions out of them. On paper, it doesn’t sound like much, but Anatole Litvak helms with an energy level that moves too fast to feel didactic as we go on a Stateside tour of pro-Nazi rallies for kids; a political riot in a NYC rathskellar & watch Gestapo enforcers operating in midtown. And the film is loaded with clever visual touches like the crisscrossing waiters who the camera follows from one conspirator to another or the florid expository montages (probably from Don Siegel) with swastika ‘wipes’ and just about every ‘optical printer’ trick in the book. The courtroom scenes are a bit of an anticlimax, Henry O’Neill is an underwhelming prosecutor, and the film loses dramatic density when George Sanders’s conflicted Nazi agent goes missing. But Francis Lederer is just right as a thickheaded, overconfident immigrant who buys the Nazi propaganda Paul Lukas spews out in the style of Hitler playing an East-Side Manhattan beer garden.

DOUBLE-BILL: Warners made a comic variant in ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT/’42. It’s pretty lame stuff, even with Bogie, Conrad Veidt & Peter Lorre in the cast. But the change in tone from the jittery pre-Pearl Harbor days to the laughing-in-the-dark atmosphere of early war losses is fascinating.

HAMSUN (1996)

Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell uncovers a family drama right out of August Strindberg in the last act of the life of Norwegian author/Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun, and his wife & family. Max von Sydow & Ghita Norby are simply magnificent as a mutually dependent husband & wife who can’t bear the sight of each other. And, more than just the story of an aging literary lion who terrorizes his family as his talent recedes, there’s extra historical interest in the enthusiastic support they gave to the Nazi occupation. Troell only lets us see the paths that brought them to their appalling (and highly unpopular) positions peripherally. The roots of Hamsun’s long festering hatred of the British apparently dated back to WWI, but are never spelled out. This has the advantage of avoiding simplistic ‘cause-and-effect’ answers on motivation, and lends unusual complexity to the portrait of willful political ignorance so often seen in brilliant, but congenitally stubborn people. Happily, that’s a condition which seems to have bypassed Troell who helms, writes, edits & shoots his work and who took a great risk in letting Sydow act in Swedish, Norby in Danish and everyone else in Norwegian. (Heck, it was Greek to me.) Er, except, that is, for Hitler & his gang who speak German in the devastating meeting Hamsun has with the Fuhrer. One of many highlights in this remarkable, under-seen film.

DEEP IN MY HEART (1954)

Hollywood calculus on Broadway composer bio-pics runs in direct disproportion to their talent. Hence, Jerome Kern, Rodgers & Hart and Cole Porter get ridiculous pics, while George M. Cohan, Kalmar & Ruby & Sigmund Romberg ‘win, place & show.’ Maybe it’s just lower expectations.* Whatever the cause, this film’s a breezy, unexpected charmer for anyone not completely allergic to operetta. Stanley Donen, who couldn’t have been thrilled with the assignment, strips down the usual fusty M-G-M look for speed & forward momentum, while Roger Edens, long-time second to M-G-M master-of-musicals Arthur Freed, called in every favor he had on the lot to stuff his first solo credit with fab specialty numbers. José Ferrer, skewered in THE BAND WAGON/’53 as a credit hog, was always a bit of a cold fish . . . so he’s just right for Romberg, a man who put all his passion into big slurpy melodies. Ferrer’s real life wife, Rosemary Clooney, stops by to share a verse, but José really scores acting out an entire B’way show in an eight minute marathon ‘numbo.’ (The fictitious show, JAZZ-A-DOO, is presumably BOMBO, a big hit for Al Jolson in 1921 which means BLACKFACE ALERT!) Gene Kelly does a nifty duo with brother Fred; Cyd Charisse is incredibly sexy in DESERT SONG and, a bit later, her husband, Tony Martin, incredibly virile on Oscar Hammerstein’s God-given lyric for ‘LOVER COME BACK; Jane Powell & Vic Damone aim for the fences in full operetta mode; Ann Miller looks, for once, like a complete dancer; and producer Edens, in a casting coup, has an Isolde up his sleeve, the great, rather matronly Wagnerian soprano Helen Traubel. She pours out the goods as Romberg’s mentor, then brings it down to a fine thread for a frankly gorgeous ‘SOFTLY, AS IN MORNING SUNRISE.’ Lots of opera stars tried to make the move from The Met to Hollywood, but few took so naturally to it. No wonder Edens immediately worked up a Las Vegas act for her, a surprise smash that led Jerry Lewis & Blake Edwards to cast her in films and to co-starring with Groucho Marx in THE MIKADO on tv.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Naturally, the one song writer the studios really wanted was the one guy they could never get: Irving Berlin. Not only the biggest catalog of hits, he had, by far, the most dramatic life story; Dickens couldn’t have dreamed it up. But Berlin was too smart to sell. A tough & savvy salesman, he preferred quasi-bio-pics which let him dip into his catalog over & over & over.

DOUBLE-BILL: Romberg’s shows were considered old-fashioned even when they were new, but that didn’t stop Hollywood from turning them into hit films, even in the silent days. Ernst Lubitsch’s THE STUDENT PRINCE/’27 is bittersweet perfection, with Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer & a naughty dachshund all giving the performances of their lives. (But it needs a better musical soundtrack then it has on the current DVD.)